Israel & Manifest Destiny?

Israel & Manifest Destiny?

“I may say at once that if Britain and the United States emerge victorious from the war, the creation of a great Jewish state in Palestine inhabited by millions of Jews will be one of the leading features of the Peace Conference discussions.”  -  Cabinet Notes, Winston Churchill 1941

“On February 1, 1941, several days after Menachem Begin (later, the 6^th Prime Minister of Israel) took over command of IZL, it announced resumption of the struggle against Britain.  The Irgun felt that the war against the Nazis had been decided; London was now the problem.  It immediately began blowing up or attacking government immigration and income tax offices and policy buildings.  The LHI also launched a number of spectacular attacks; on August 8 they even tried to assassinate the high commissioner, MacMichael.” 

“However, the (British Agatha) operation also provoked a desire for revenge, as the IZL (Irgun Z’vai Leumi), rather ironically, took up cudgels for its sometimes enemy, the Hagannah, on July 22, 1946.  Without coordinating with the Hagannah, sappers placed a number of bomb-laden milk containers in the basement of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which served as the British military and administrative headquarters.  The resulting explosion, which demolished an entire wing of the building and killed ninety-one people – Britons, Arabs, and Jews – was the biggest terrorist action in the organizations history.”  -  

The above quotes are from:  Righteous Victims, A History of the Zionist – Arab Conflict, 1881 – 2001, by Benny Morris.

By J.M. Hamilton (4-1-2015)

Heads we write about Israel, tails we write about Mrs. Clinton…. Israel it is.

Israeli Zionist and American Revolutionaries have many things in common, but probably foremost among them is the fact that they both had to throw out British occupation, before achieving independence and statehood.  The Zionist and Americans engaging in acts of sedition against the British Crown were likely viewed as terrorist by the British constitutional monarchy; in both countries, Israel and the United States, the brave men and women who fought for independence against the English are viewed as patriots and heroes.  

Which proves the point…. One man’s freedom fighter is all too often another man’s terrorist, and vice versa.  This is not simple moral relativism, but rather, it’s all a matter of perspective, isn’t it?  That, and as we all know, history is written by winners, in a tightly controlled narrative.

As a writer, one of the great things about growing older, particularly if you are a voracious reader and a student of history, is the wealth of information one has to draw upon.  And while there are many great young writers out there…. Writing about economics and politics without the benefit of experience or knowledge of history, for me anyway, often only tells half the story.

There’s a lot about the human condition that fascinates me, but Israel – along with foreign affairs – has always been high up on the list.  Brought up in a Semi-Evangelical household as a military brat, and with a keen interest in the study of power, Israel always attracted my attention.  As a young child, I can still remember PM Golda Meir and Mr. Moshe Dayan on the television set.  "Who’s the cool dude with the eye patch?," I wondered.  And later I learned, there was Israel’s many wars and a constant quest for survival, post U.N. partition:  The War of Independence; The Suez Crisis; The Six-Day War; The Yom Kippur War; Lebanon; and The Intifada(s), et al.  The back story: centuries of oppression and persecution, pogroms, the Holocaust, and Israel’s fight for the right to exist and for its very survival throughout the 20^th and 21^st Centuries.

I’m certainly no expert, but I read quite a bit, especially about Mr. Arial Sharon:  Blessed is the Nation who has Arial Sharon as a defense minister.  Indeed.

Who were these people…? Back from the brink and against crushing odds prospering in what Mark Twain called a land that “sits in sackcloth and ashes.”  Their backs against the sea….as my mother taught me, “God’s chosen,” winning war after war.  As an American, how could you not admire Israel or their story, Zionism.  The Israeli Jews were underdogs in every sense of the word, surrounded geographically on all sides, by the Arab world.  Economically, Israel’s Marxist- Socialist beginnings (kibbutz farming and industrial output), later steering towards a capitalist and, ultimately, a mixed economy.  As a matter of history, and as a people, Israel has held the world’s attention.  As a child I read about the Jewish exodus out of Egypt, and as a young adult, I read about their 20^th Century European exodus…. For those lucky enough to survive, straight into Palestine.  Military victory after victory, defying time, history, prejudice, and her enemies, Israel and her citizens are now feared and respected (albeit grudgingly by many in the Arab world).  In the warrior nation, Israel’s Jewish children are expected to serve in the military at the age of eighteen, a civic duty that some have argued should be installed in America.

Alas, Israel a modern day Sparta.

But in the last decade or so, something has changed.  Israel is no longer an underdog; in fact, Israel – backed by the U.S. – is a regional, and perhaps global, super-power, and the only country in the Middle East with nuclear weapons. Likud, Israel’s center right political party (not unlike America’s GOP), ruled the country throughout the 80s, was a force to be contended with throughout the 90s and the early 00s, and came back again in 2009, after PM Ariel Sharon split off in 2005 (forming the political party, Kadima).  Likud is now headed up by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who just won his fourth, unprecedented, term.  And something has changed in Israel, and not necessarily for the better.  Some of the change Israel is going through is robbing the country of Western sympathy and support it has long enjoyed, and yes, as reported, even support among American Jewish voters (who tend to vote for the Democratic Party).  Not so ironically, many of these changes are parallel to the American experience within the same time frame, under GOP rule.  Coincidence?

1)   At the same time America’s DoD/MIC/Surveillance State has grown beyond the control of U.S. politicians, Israel’s defense industry has grown exceptionally large, is a major employer, and is one of the largest military equipment exporters in the world.  One can argue, certainly in America, the growth of the MIC has led – just as President Eisenhower had warned – to its unseemly influence over our democracy and a more bellicose foreign policy.  

2)  Israel’s foreign policy under Likud, has gone from being on the defensive to being on the offensive, some would argue even expansionist.  Witness the growth of Israeli settlements on the West bank in occupied Palestinian lands (in violation of the U.N. position that the settlements are illegal), and Israel’s constant lobbying for a more belligerent, and militarily active, U.S. Middle East foreign policy.  Israel’s lobbying recently reached its apogee, with PM Netanyahu’s speech before the U.S. Congress.  At this speech, the Israeli PM, among other things, belittled a sitting President’s foreign policy, and specifically, attacked President Obama’s attempts at reaching a treaty preventing Iranian nuclear proliferation.  The presumed alternative to negotiations, for the GOP and the Likud, you guessed it, WAR.

3)  Israel’s economy has become controlled by oligarchs, and monopolies and oligopolies, leading to economic hardship for its citizens, and the return of the Labor Party in Israel.  The parallels to the American economy, namely too great a concentration of wealth and economic/political power into too few hands, is a threat to economic harmony and social and political stability for both America and Israel.  Indeed, in both countries, economic inequality and wealth concentration is a threat to democracy itself; and both countries suffer from a severe want of economic mobility.  Both countries have become the land of the priviledged, under conservative/right-wing rule.

4)  And speaking of threats to democracy, unprecedented sums of money are flowing into Israeli elections, much of it from outside the country.  The American corollary and U.S. right-wing support for the notion that money equal freedom of speech is obvious.

5)  As in America, Nixon’s Southern strategy immediately comes to mind, race has featured prominently in Israeli elections.  P.M. Netanyahu showed, clearly, that he was not above playing the race card when the electoral chips were down by stating that Arab voters are coming out in “droves.”  The fact that Palestinians in the occupied territories of Gaza and the West bank are disenfranchised, draws obvious comparisons to America’s Jim Crow (which is alive and well in America, thanks to the GOP and its push for voter suppression laws, and the GOP's support of the Criminal Justice Industrial Complex).

6)  The aforementiond obvious comparisons between America and Israel aside, which are harmful to both countries standing in the world and International Community as beacons of “democracy,” Israel’s political leadership, particularly right of center parties, has taking on an attitude towards the indigenous populations within Palestine that, arguably, are not dissimilar to America’s 19^th Century policies towards Native-Americans.  This America attitude culminated in the policy of Manifest Destiny, that is Native-American subjugation and elimination, and the resulting land grab.  Is Israel on the same track?  P.M. Netanyahu’s actions speak louder than words, particularly in his recent incurrisions into Gaza, and the growth of Israeli West Bank settlements; but Mr. Netanyahu finally tipped his hand in last week’s election, when he stated that he no longer believed in a two state solution.  Once the P.M. was safely re-elected, after playing both fear and race cards, he quickly backtracked from both statements – and returned to paying lip service to two states.  But few are buying what the P.M. is selling.

The path Israel and America, under Likud and GOP leadership, seems to be headed down together is not good:  right wing demagoguery, racism, pandering to baser instincts and fear, and allowing a plutocracy to run the economy and the government.  

No wonder the GOP loves King Bibi. 

Worse still the Likud’s abandonment of the two state solution brings into question Israel’s commitment to democracy.  Let’s examine exactly what a one state solution might Iook like for Israel.  

For starters (Option I), if Israel annexes the West Bank and Gaza, the demographic explosion of Palestinian voters will make Israel an Arab State or well on its way to becoming one.  An outcome that Israeli Jews are not likely to desire.  

Another alternative for Israel (Option II) is to annex both Gaza and the West Bank and leave the Palestinian voters disenfranchised (not unlike the GOP’s attempts to marginalize and disenfranchise minority voters, and black citizens for over a century to the present day).  This option is neither a long term solution nor morally legitimate in the eyes of the International Community, nor is it worthy of a great democracy like Israel.

The final option (III) for a single state solution is a war of attrition, not unlike the recent military offensive waged in Gaza…. and a version of Manifest Destiny brought to Israel.  That’s right.  Bulldoze Palestinian homes in the name of fighting terror, and send the Palestinians into diaspora, upon busses with one way tickets, into the surrounding states of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.  

Under the Likud, Options II and III are already tacitly in play, have been for some time, and are not likely to let up anytime soon.  Besides the defense industry loves constant warfare, and some have even argued Gaza and the West Bank are now little more than a testing ground for the Israeli and U.S. Defense and Surveillance industries.

When you stack up the Palestinians against the Israelis, it’s almost laughable to suggest that Hammas and the Palestinian Authority are an existential threat to Israel.  What prevents one from laughing is the loss of life on both sides (particularly children).  And the fact that time and time again, just like U.S. foreign policy under the Bush Administration (W), Israel’s response to rock throwing and feeble rocket attacks launched from Gaza is, arguably, an over-reaction, highly disproportionate, with unintended consequences, and the potential for considerable blowback.  Doubt me on this… just take a look at the body counts.  

Seemingly lost upon today’s Likud leadership is their recent history.  If the Jewish right-wingers could somehow remember their roots, their ancestors own diaspora, their fore-fathers feelings of being marginalized politically and economically, and their own fight for freedom and survival against the Nazis and later, in Israel, as freedom fighters/terrorist against the British Empire…. Perhaps the Likud could find it within themselves to show a little empathy towards the Palestinian people.  After WWII, much of the world (especially the West) reacted to the atrocities committed by the Nazis by giving Israel a seemingly limitless pool of goodwill and political collateral.  But as mentioned above, today’s Israel has tremendous power over events within the Middle East, not to mention exceptional and extraordinary clout and power in Washington D.C., within the Republican Party, and in particular, in the exercise of U.S. foreign policy (the GOP has become captured on Middle East foreign policy matters by Israel and her wealthy supporters); and unfortunately, the Likud does not always exercise America’s foreign policy in the Middle East to enlightened ends, or necessarily in America’s interests (allegations of spying on U.S./Iranian nuclear talks and sharing that information with Republican Congressmen, notwithstanding).

Right-wingers within Israel should not take the seemingly limitless pool of goodwill for granted, particularly when it comes to the mistreatment of minorities, and the abuse of Israeli fear, as a means for the Likud to retain power.  (By the way, both parties, the Likud and the GOP, abuse fear as a means to distract voters from real economic problems that exist in both societies.)  Yes, the Palestinian political leadership has much to answer for; but it’s up to Israel, as the dominant and greater power, to play Statesmen, forgive, and open the door to peace (if for no other reason than for the sake of both Israeli and Palestinian children and grandchildren, and Israel's democractic future).

Israel, with the help of a powerful friend, has arrived as a world power to be admired and respected… shouldn’t it act accordingly?  Only Israel can make the peace in Palestine, or not.  As such, Mr. Netanyahu appears to be at the crossroads.

The P.M. can make a Faustian deal with Oligarchs, the MIC, and the devil, based upon endless warfare and annihilating, or marginalizing, a race of men; or the Israeli P.M. can go down in the history books, by bravely embracing peace and a two state solution.

Copyright JM Hamilton Publishing 2015

Vincible Ignorance

Vincible Ignorance

“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”  - MLK

“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”  - George Orwell

By J.M. Hamilton (3-14-2015)

Debate classes and clubs in high school and college present an excellent opportunity.  Not only does debate teach research and writing skills, but it sharpens oratory skills and critical thinking.  In particular, logic and concise and cogent analysis are imperative to any successful debater.  But perhaps of equal importance, organized debate teaches individuals the ability spot flaws in an opponent’s thinking, logic, or argumentation.  Fallacious reasoning surrounds us, not only within the debater’s arena, but in our daily lives.  And it is our ability to spot faulty logic, fallacious reasoning, and even sophistry, that can help one navigate through this world.

Out of all the fallacies that are out there, one stands alone in exhaustive usage by today’s GOP.  It is the fallacy of invincible ignorance.  Ignorance, of course, envelopes all of us to varying degrees (after all, who is omnipotent… save the Goddess above?); but the GOP has taken the fallacy of invincible ignorance and turned it into an art form.  Nescience, today, is being used as political cover by right-wingers to justify: bigotry, homophobia, denying science, continuing failed economic and bellicose foreign policies, and to rationalize revisionist history. 

Now before we get into enumerating the many ways in which Republicans utilize nescience to justify a multitude of disingenuous and harmful policies for the nation, a quick digression.

If you drill deeper there’s actually a dichotomy or subset of this particular fallacy.  There’s invincible ignorance and vincible ignorance, that is to the say, in the case of the latter, ignorance that is possible to defeat.  And how does one go about defeating vincable ignorance, or culpable nescience?   By picking up a book, by reading the paper, and by visiting that most useful of search engines, Google.  Now, I know there are many critics of the information contained within the internet, but if you run a search on a particular topic, and you’re able to come up with three or more independent and reliable sources, confirming the same set of facts, the odds are high that it’s true.  This dichotomy is important because it will come up again, at the tail end of this piece.  Remember, there’s invincible ignorance, based upon answers that we have yet to, or may never, learn, and vincible ignorance, that is based upon knowledge that some people willfully refuse to learn (often as a matter of political convenience).

With that said, let’s visit the many ways in which today’s GOP uses invincible ignorance to defend their policies:

1) Climate Change:  It’s not enough for the GOP to utilize ignorance to deny man made climate change.  Not only do Republicans say that they are not “scientist,” hence have no way of knowing whether or not climate change exists; but they have taken it a step further, and actually, paid off “academics” to prove their point.  That’s right, the Koch Bros. and Exxon, have contributed significant funding to a scientist to produce reports with an, alleged, desirable outcome (that is, favorable to the interest of carbon producing industries, big oil and big coal).  That a key GOP patron, Exxon, has already admitted that there is man-made climate change, is irrelevant to many within the GOP.  And when it cannot buy off academics, it appears that Florida’s Republican Governor, Rick Scott, is editing academic papers, making sure that words like “climate change” are stricken from academic research and dissertations.  Apparently, per the GOP and SCOTUS, the only persons allowed to practice freedom of speech in America today, are wealthy plutocrats holding vaults full of cash, particularly when it comes to opining about the environment.  After all, everyone understands: Exxon knows best.

2)    A Threat to Higher Education:  Wisconsin Governor, and prospective GOP candidate, Mr. Scott Walker, recently decided to align himself with ignorance, when he advocated and supported substantial cuts to higher education, with budget reductions for the University of Wisconsin.  Bucky Badger must be pi$$ed.  But is Mr. Walker really aligned with ignorance, or is there political calculation in his plans to gut the University of Wisconsin’s funding?  My guess is it is the latter, since it is fairly well established that those with university degrees, and graduate degrees in particular, are far more likely to vote for the Democratic Party.  Heh, if you cut off higher education, you keep people nescient, less educated, more easily exploitable, tuned into Fox News, and more likely to vote Republican.  Is Governor Walker, who does not possess a college degree, practicing invincible ignorance or is it simple cynical political manipulation?

3)    Raptors on the Ark:  The next example is priceless, and it is as scary as it is humorous.  My niece is in grade school and attends a private Christian school in Tejas.  I was home for Christmas and the topic of Noah’s Ark came up.  She told me that she was taught at school that there were dinosaurs on the ark.  The image of carnivores, like T-Rex and raptors, running around on the ark made me pause; but what my niece is being taught also ties into the belief that the world, to some Christians, is only 4,000 to 10,000 years old (much like the world was once flat).  That these religious opinions make their way into children’s textbooks as fact – without an alternative/scientific counterpoint - is disturbing, but it doesn’t stop there.  Some fundamentalist Christians, and Deep South Republicans, are also hijacking early college education textbooks in history, so American history is revised to gloss over less appealing parts of our nation’s past (like slavery and manifest destiny, and how white’s perverted Christianity, in some instances, to rationalize same), not unlike totalitarian nations’ deployment of revisionist history.  Find an inconvenient historical fact, or science that doesn’t agree with one’s literal interpretation of the Bible…. That’s easy, apply invincible ignorance, and discard the facts and rewrite history.  This is very important because evangelical and fundamentalist Christians are the GOP’s core political base; and the GOP has become so unappealing to many Americans that you know they better damn well continue to pander to the religious- right.  Personally, I prefer to think of knowledge, enlightenment, and science as a gift from our Goddess, but too many Christians view them as a threat.

4)    Abdicating Foreign Policy to a Foreign Head of State.  The GOP presumably isn’t smart enough to develop its own foreign policy, so it has abdicated responsibility (just as Mr. Romney said he would back in 2012) to Israeli Prime Minister, Netanyahu.  And while Israel is a great ally, the idea that U.S. foreign policy interests may not be entirely aligned with Israel’s never seems to dawn on the GOP.  Of course, the GOP, like Mr. Netanyahu, has never seen a war that it does not like (especially since Republicans, and their sons and daughters, rarely do any fighting).  So scuttle Obama’s pending nuclear treaty with the Iranians, they must…. All the better to start another war to please the GOP’s true owners, the MIC, Big Oil, and the Wall Street cartel – who will only be too happy to finance the war.  And Israel is the big winner in all this.  P.M. Netanyahu can always depend upon the GOP to land the U.S. in another endless and failed, Middle-East nation building exercise, at American taxpayer expense.  As for the GOP’s base, the evangelicals….?   They eat this up, as it’s just another war that will lead to an “end of days” scenario, and the rebuilding of the Temple Mount.  Another GOP led disaster of a war is on the horizon, if Republicans get their way, despite the U.S. having achieved domestic energy independence many times over.  But the price is too low at the pump… Exxon and the Koch Bros. need another Middle-East war to jump start fuel prices.  There’s a method to the GOP foreign policy ignorance and madness, it’s called answering to their masters.

5)    Banking Deregulation and Trickle-Down Economics:  Banking deregulation directly led to the global financial pandemic in 2008.  Trickle-down economics (aka tax cuts for the rich) has led to deficit spending, wage and wealth concentration, a dearth of aggregate demand, and stagnating wages.  The negative repercussions of both trickle down economics, bank dereg., and the failure of the Congress to govern, are a Federal Reserve produced liquidity trap, and a lost Japanese decade of subpar economic growth brought to America, despite recent improvements in the economy.  Regardless of the economic mayhem banking dereg caused as recently as 2008, the GOP has been successful is sneaking banking dereg language into omnibus spending measures and congressional bills, since taking both houses of Congress in 2014.  Republican governors have also applied trickle-down in state after state, with the same ruinous results:  credit rating downgrades, deficit spending, increased debt, and cuts to social spending.  All of which are born on the backs of Mr. Romney’s parasitic 47%.  Yup, the rich keep getting richer, and the poor – and what remains of the middle-class – keep getting scrod.  And the GOP utilizes invincible ignorance to pretend that their fairy tale laissez faire policies still work.

We could fill another several pages with example after example of where the GOP buries its head in the sand, and deploys invincible ignorance, but we’ll save those for another editorial and another day.  Suffice it to say, the GOP used to be on the cutting edge of ideas and political intellect, and now time, extremism, and repeated failure have left them with little more for defense, than nescience and obstruction. 

As for the dichotomy mentioned earlier in the piece, between invincible ignorance, and vincible, or culpable, ignorance…. Well, that actually goes back to Catholic teaching, in particular Pope Pius IX, and possibly, as far back as Thomas Aquinas. It seems that some Catholics have argued that while invincible ignorance – nescience that we do not have the ability or due diligence to address – is not a mortal sin, that vincible ignorance - or nescience that we do have it within our power to address and throw down…. May in fact be a mortal sin, particularly when it is accompanied by a willful and a stubborn refusal to learn.

But who am I to judge.

Reminds me of Santayana’s remark, with my own personal twist:  Those who cannot learn from history, and science, are destined for extinction.  It also reminds me that ignorance is bliss, particularly for the 1%.

The GOP seems to be practicing, knowingly, vincible ignorance.  Time and time again, in the face of overwhelming and mounting evidence to the contrary, the GOP simply refuses to learn.  Worse still, this malign ignorance all too often appears to be based upon a desire, and deployed, to enrich an elite few at the expense of many.   After all, while the GOP’s ignorance appears to be willful, nobody could possibly be that consistently fatuous.

There’s a lot of good Republicans out there who need real guidance and leadership.  Senator John McCain still shows flashes of leadership and straight talk; and Senator Rand Paul gave me high hopes, up until he joined 47 U.S. Senators in deciding to perform an attempted coup on President Obama’s foreign policy.  Sorry boys and girls, until you can win back the White House, you are not in the driver’s seat on U.S. foreign policy; but to win back the White House, the GOP needs to prove to the nation that they are capable of sailing something more than a ship of fools, like the ship of state.

P.S.   

John Oliver recently did a piece on HBO where he commented on how the citizens of the U.S. territories of Guam and American Samoa are “Americans” in name only, despite serving in the U.S. armed forces in highly disproportionate numbers.  Watch it here.  I bring this up because this seems to be consistent with the type of commercial colonialism that is prevalent in the 20^th and 21^st centuries, and that the U.S., particularly Republicans, likes to beat its collective chest over.  To wit:  The U.S. is the only world power who has not imposed its will upon foreign nations, and sought out territorial conquest and hegemonic control. 

But let’s be clear on this point, the U.S. and multinationals do not do this out of some higher benevolence; but rather, U.S. corporations engage in commercial conquest globally, with the support of the U.S. military and State Department, so that labor, tax, and regulatory arbitrage can be committed by U.S. and global multinational interests.  That’s right.  The name of the game in the latter half of the 20^th and early part of the 21^st centuries is the exploitation of third world and emerging markets, w/out taking on the expense and responsibility of governing these countries.  (Besides, if you give U.S. territories and third world countries the vote, that just might upset the U.S. balance of power, away from our two party system and the White race.  Israel faces a similar challenge with the Palestinian question – demographics and birth rates favor the Palestinians.)  Make no mistake about it, American multinational corporations – much like London’s 18^th Century, East India Company before it – are engaged in a profitable game of commercial conquest. Unlike the East India Company however, today’s multinationals have no interest, neither does the U.S. government, in physically taking over these countries; and multinationals certainly have no interest in providing social services, establishing the rule of law, mandating human rights, or getting involved politically (and in so much as territorial, and third world, politics and politicians’ ambitions and goals do not conflict with U.S. multinational business interests and profits, that’s all the better). 

There's a reason why there are only fifty stars on the American flag, that goes beyond aesthetics, and that number is highly unlikely to grow any time soon.  

Selah.

Copyright JM Hamilton Publishing 2015

American Exceptionalism

American Exceptionalism

“You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they have tried everything else.”
- Winston Churchill

By J.M. Hamilton  (3-1-15)

The GOP, minions of the plutocracy, has had a lock on U.S. politics for the last thirty-five years.  Its domestic and foreign policy of trickle-down economics and endless war, respectively, aside from enriching the plutocracy to the near exclusion of everyone else, have been abject failures.  The Republican Party holds the majority of state legislative bodies and governor’s mansions, and in state after state, we see deficit spending, broken state budgets, failing infrastructure, credit rating cuts, and social services cut to the bone.  If Demos are tax and spend, Republicans are borrow and spend, and the latter – to this fiscal conservative – is considerably worse.  There are many apologist for debt, but all one has to do is look to the Southern periphery nations of Europe to realize that not only does debt rob our children of their futurity, but it makes nation states slaves to unsavory masters, such as the international banking cartel, the ECB, the IMF, and/or in this country, the Fed’s printing press (and politicians owned by same).

The Republican Party is the bastion of the angry white male, and while I am on very rare occasion “angry,” and inescapably both white and male, like the majority of Americans, I recognize the GOP as a political party in decline.  This party has no solutions, cannot govern, is retrograde, racist, and about as far removed from Christian values as Satan.  It is fighting a rearguard action against the future and history.  Even The Party recognizes its future in President Obama’s rising poll numbers; and barring significant change, led by tolerant/libertarian leaders like Rand Paul, the GOP finds itself staring into the abyss. 

Aside from the ideology of freedom espoused by Mr. Paul, the only thing the GOP can count on these days is the Democratic Party’s inexplicable ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, when Dems do not hold true to protecting the middle-class from the, all too often, predatory 1%.

What do the angry and the daunted do when cornered, and exposed for who they are?  They lash out, and fear-monger; they are prone to misdirection and obfuscation, and ultimately, resort to demagoguery.  Who falls for such tactics (?): The fearful, the angry and the nescient.  After all, nobody really likes change, particularly the rich and the powerful (who benefit most from the status quo); and the wealthy and the powerful have had their way with Lady Liberty, at the expense of the 99%, for a very long time. 

The remedy for such tactics is: activism, education, enlightenment, and exposing the fear peddlers and the exploiters to the sanitizing light of day.

Two recent examples of the Party of Fear, and the Party of Dumbed Down Madness, were on full display in the last couple of weeks, in the forms of former NY Mayor, Mr. Rudy Giuliani, and current Wisconsin Governor, Mr. Scott Walker.  The former embracing fear, and the latter endorsing ignorance.

American exceptionalism, like many things politic, is subject to a duality:  On one side of the coin, we have the light, brilliance, and the promise/gift of our founding father’s legacy, the Declaration of Independence and The Constitution (these documents state that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are sacrosanct); the dark side or the flip side of that same American exceptionalism coin is the reality, or practice, that our founder’s promise and gift has been withheld from many folks, who are not “lily white,” wealthy, or part of America’s aristocracy.

The dark side of American exceptionalism (the betrayal of the American dream for many persons of color) has been used to justify all manner of atrocities:  from slavery, which was with us from the nation’s founding through the civil war; to manifest destiny, which was the doctrine of nationalist expansion, and racial purity – made manifest in Native-American subjugation and slaughter (Some have even argued that Germany’s National Socialist, or Nazi Party, gained it’s expansionist aims and racial purity laws directly from America’s policy of manifest destiny.  In Germany this policy was called: Lebensraum ).  The dark side of American exceptionalism includes 150-plus years of Jim Crow, the vestiges of which are with us to this very day, in our overcrowded jails, prisons and the criminal justice industrial complex.  U.S. exceptionalism took our founder’s benign mercantilist and agrarian economy and perverted them – in the name of untrammeled greed -  into monstrosities like:  The Wall Street banking cartel, which in 2008, nearly destroyed the American economy; monopolies and cartels, like Booze Allen, which runs the ubiquitous and uber-powerful spy network, The N.S.A.; Archer Daniels Midland and Monsanto, who hold incredible sway over the nation’s food supply and who have crushed the Jeffersonian dream; and of course, a bellicose and belligerent foreign policy, represented by the military industrial complex and the private contractors, who own, operate, and make up same.

For the last 35 years, the GOP has turned President Kennedy’s pledge on its head, from:  “… we shall pay any price, bear any burden, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty,” and converted it to:

… we shall pay any price, bear any burden, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of multi-national and commercial profits, globally.

This is the version of American exceptionalism that Mr. Giuliani recently defended, when he accused President Obama of not loving present day, America.  (To be sure, not all of America’s historical atrocities can be laid at the GOP's doorstep, but unfortunately, the Republican Party has become the standard barrier of many this nation’s past, explicit and tacit, racial and racist policies, from Nixon’s Southern Strategy to Mr. Romney’s comments on the parasitic 47%.)

Mr. Giuliani's America is perennially at war with the world, with the goal of unlimited commercial conquest.  Mr. Giuliani’s America is far, far removed from our founding fathers' intent and promise: that all men are created equal.  We get the following quotes from Mr. Giuliani from the Washington Post:

“He (President Obama) doesn’t love you.  And he doesn’t love me.  He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up though love of this country.”

“… with all the flaws we’re the most exceptional country in the world.  I’m looking for a presidential candidate who can express that, do that and carry it out.”

“And if that’s you Scott (Walker), I’ll endorse you.”

“(Obama) sees our weakness as footnotes to the great things we’ve done.”

“I’m not sure how wrong the (Christian) crusades were.”

Then last week, Giuliani compared Obama to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying “that is a patriot, that’s a man who loves his people, that’s a man who protects his people, that’s a man who fights for his people, unlike our President.”

Unfortunately, for Mr. Giuliani and the neo-conmen, who make up the Republican Party, their time is very short.  They believe in a version of America that will be gone in the next twenty to thirty years, and not a moment too soon.  Demographic trends are such that the GOP will be forced to change, or they will simply vanish.   With the advent of Elizabeth’s Warren’s message of economic enfranchisement for all classes and economic pluralism, and Mr. Paul’s message of a less adventurist foreign policy, the GOP establishment is being threatened like never before.  Hence, lashing out like a wounded plutocrat…. Mr. Giuliani, undoubtedly, had the audacity to say what many Republicans have been thinking, and saying behind closed doors, for some time.  The GOP has had a good run for the last 35 years, but their policies have ruined this country.  President Reagan’s quip immediately comes to mind: “Ask yourself, are you better off today than you were four years ago?”  Now, apply the Reagan maxim to 35 years of Republican rule, which includes an ever shrinking middleclass, the off-shoring and globalization of labor markets, stagnating U.S. wages, war without end, and the answer is the GOP has taken a wrecking ball to everything that made this country great….all for personal enrichment.

 It’s only natural that The Party, and King Giuliani, and the people who benefited most from the dark side of American exceptionalism, cry out for its continuance.

Winston Churchill, his mother was American, once said: “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they have tried everything else.”

American exceptionalism is not Mr. Guiliani’s version of America; American exceptionalism is taking our founding father’s promise and advancing it up the field, so that it applies to all persons in this country, regardless of race, color, creed, faith, sex, sexual orientation, or age.  American exceptionalism is an evolutionary process, where we learn from past mistakes, and slay our demons: whether it be slavery and Jim Crow, or economically and politically enfranchising women.  The evolutionary process is slow, but it is steady (despite the GOP's best efforts to contain it); it is inexorable, and forever on the march.  We can see it in Apple CEO, Tim Cook speaking out for internet privacy rights.  We can see it in the national acceptance of LBGTQ rights; we see it in President Obama obtaining the highest office in the land, and in his rising poll numbers.  But we have, indeed, a long way to go.  America and Americans should settle for nothing less, than steady continuous progress for a more culturally, socially, politically and economically tolerant and just society.

Applying whitewash to the past is not the answer…. The greatness of America is in embracing our history, and the truth, and learning from past mistakes, so that the nation can continue to evolve, to better achieve our founder’s ideals for everyone.  While we can question our past, we should all celebrate the progress America has made and will continue to make, with or without the GOP.

Copyright JM Hamilton Publishing 2015