Thursday, February 04, 2010

Newest Senator From America’s Modern Nazi Party Sworn in Today

Has anyone read The Plot Against America by Philip Roth? It’s a terrific “what if” novel that imagines what this country would be like had America’s hero, Charles A. Lindbergh, run against and defeated FDR for the presidency in 1940. Lindbergh captured the public’s imagination with his solo transatlantic flight and had the country’s sympathy with the tragic kidnapping and murder of his infant son. Lindbergh was America’s John McCain (heroic aviator) and Sarah Palin (attractive, charismatic vehicle for simplistic nativist emotions) all rolled into one. He was also “a rabid isolationist, Nazi sympathizer, and crypto-fascist.”


Lindbergh ran under the Republican Party banner. To find out what happens you’ll have to read the book. The point is, this same Republican Party which has a dark history of close association with real German Nazis is, similarly, teeming with crypto-fascists –- who harbor hidden, and not-so-hidden, sympathies for an authoritarian ideology that
  • subverts civil liberties in the name of national security (Patriot Act, domestic surveillance, terrorist fearmongering, torture, military trials);
  • promotes U.S. hegemonism through military might and wars (PNAC/Heritage neoCon/Fascist think tanks, Iraq/Af-Pak wars);
  • incites hatred and racism in its base to intimidate the “ruling” party into rejecting the program on which it campaigned, with lies (corporate attack ads) and propaganda talking points from its contemporary Joseph Goebbels (Frank Luntz);
  • employs right wing hate radio (Limbaugh and acolytes) and Fox broadcasting network (Roger – I’m into ratings, not news – Ailes, Beck/O’Reilly/Hannity et al) as its communications arm, to mobilize the Teabagger storm troops/including corporate agitators to disseminate the fascist agenda, and
  • embraces the right wing Judiciary’s putsch against government of, for, and by the people, legalizing the total corporate takeover of our government, resulting in the creation of a ruling oligarchy and permanent underclass.
Kiss the political parties goodbye –- good thing? Consider this: Henceforth elections in this country will be, e.g., between corporate factions representing oil, coal, and gas industries vs. Wall Street bankers, with the green energy folks standing in for the old Green Party. But wait, unlike more civilized countries, we don’t have campaign finance laws that restrict corporations . . . It’s already happening; only now the corporations can be open and out front about it. Hmmm. A boon for Frank Luntz and the so-called “optics” consultants trafficking in political propaganda. The people lose.

How’s that for the America of your dreams, right wing/Tea Party tools? It's always amusing to see multimillionaire sophist tycoons such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh liken Democrats to Nazis. The charges are so absurd that only morons in the so-called Tea Party movement take them seriously. But that’s enough, for purposes of the corporate owners in their ivory towers manipulating the street agitators with those crude racist signs. Nazi Germany had its Brown Shirts, a paramilitary mob whose charge was to intimidate the political parties and identified enemies of their (“minority”) state. Eventually the Brown Shirts were purged after they had exhausted their usefulness to the Nazi Party.

Such purging is already underway in the internal sniping among Tea Party factions and in the confiscatory price of admission to the so-called “Tea Party Convention” just to catch a glimpse of their very own Sarah “Lindy” Palin. She is pocketing $100,000 of the Teabaggers' hard-earned cash for her (no doubt) “inspirational” keynote speech. At this moment, the corporate elites are trying to harness and bottle the Teabaggers' diffuse energy to serve their aims. Can you spell “patsies” and “tools,” Teabaggers? Write it out in big kindergarten block letters across your T(ea)-shirts.

Today the Massachusetts everyman elected by the people, in its infinite wisdom, was sworn in to occupy the Senate seat formerly held by Ted Kennedy. To be sure, Scott Brown is no Charles Lindbergh. He has distanced himself from the Teabaggers, denying any knowledge of Palin’s congratulatory call. Although Brown ran to the right in Massachusetts to attract the Teabagger vote, he is on record as having voted for Massachusetts’ comprehensive healthcare coverage, is pro-choice and has earned a top rating from the environmentalist Audubon Society.

But that hasn’t stopped the right from claiming Brown as one of their own. Scott Brown is the empty vessel into which people’s aspirations and frustrations will be poured. He is the model stealth candidate, who purged any mention of the Republican Party from his literature, used the blue Democratic colors in his website, and falsely, outrageously, wrapped himself around one of the Democratic Party’s and Massachusetts’ iconic figures: JFK.

Now that Brown is a working member of America’s national fascist party, the question of his political independence is most relevant. As long as he makes no waves, he will fit right in. What’s more, Brown’s moderate image will help the GOP immeasurably in masking its hard-right agenda. Since Brown has self-identified as “Brown 41” -– the 41st vote necessary to sustain a filibuster –- the expectation is he will be a loyal GOP soldier, cementing the party’s obstructionism of Democratic governance and paving the way for a fascist corporate takeover of America.

This isn’t Glenn Beck tinfoil hattery; it’s simply an observation. When it comes to seducing the public with imagery and volks-messaging, few do it as well as Republicans, who have learned and internalized the lessons of Nazi propaganda better than most.

Consider these images from Scott Brown’s campaign compared to Hitler's. The first is a poster of Hitler wrapping himself around Hindenburg, one of the few iconic hero-figures in Germany at the time; the little-known Hitler needed the legitimacy with the German people that Hindenburg provided. Next to it is Scott Brown’s notorious JFK-Scott Brown morphing ad, in antique black-and-white with identical details. Just like JFK’s New Frontier evokes memories of a mythical last century Camelot, so had Nazi ideology appealed to romantic notions of a lost 19th century German greatness and the myth of Nietzsche’s “superman.”


The next image is Scott Brown, regular guy, in his black pickup truck contrasted to Hitler in a Volkswagen, which means, literally, “people’s car.” These are strikingly similar images, right down to the vehicles’ color.


Coincidence? Perhaps. Certainly, this is not meant to equate the Republican Party with the Nazi Party’s most heinous crimes; only to point out the similarities and effective use of its propaganda messaging techniques by the GOP. And one thing is clear: Once Scott Brown looked like he had a shot to win, the RNC sent some of its top operatives to Massachusetts, while the U.S. Chamber of Commerce dumped a ton of cash into Brown’s campaign, effectively nationalizing it. Heil Brown?

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