Posted inPolitics: National

Who to blame

So Alan Greenspan is shocked, shocked that gambling was going on in the casino that he and his fellow radicals made of the capital markets. In his testimony before Congress Thursday, he talked about how stunned he was that the markets weren’t self-regulating, that speculation and greed led to this disaster, which he likened to a “once in a century” financial tsunami.

But this is no act of God. The ongoing financial collapse is the direct result of the deregulation, trade, privatization and tax policies enacted by Alan Greenspan and the other rigid ideologues of the Republican Party over the past quarter of a century. The longtime Fed chairman is a disciple of the author Ayn Rand, whose advocacy of a brutal individualism has been turned into a devil-take-the-hindmost reality that would make Atlas blush.

It’s important for the American voter to understand this. The collapse of their savings, the deferment of their retirement dreams, the loss of their homes, the decline in their earnings, the elimination of their jobs – all has been the result of very conscious policies. They were promised an "ownership society," but, as Barack Obama said, the reality is that most Americans are on their own.

If Americans understand this, the election will not be in doubt. And, God willing, the calamity will discredit this extremist philosophy, just as happened in 1932, for decades to come. For this orthodox ideological extremism is every bit as bankrupt and failed as all its false prophet predecessors. Alan Greenspan and company, including former Sen. Phil Gramm, the great – and greatly compensated by the banking industry – deregulator and economic guru to wealthy Republican John Sidney McCain III, are the most dangerous of men: true believers.

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Posted inPolitics: National

A referendum on conservatism and ‘conservatism’

Part of me wants to nap until election day — and I’m a political junkie. The campaign coverage has descended to such a level of distraction and foolishness, especially in the electronic media, that it’s difficult to bear. Unfortunately, most people will be sufficiently indoctrinated by this sideshow, and I give you President-elect McCain. Where he is the truly risky choice, the media must have Obama in that box. Where the election should be a referendum on the now incontestable consequences of the Republican policies McCain will continue, it will be a referendum on Obama. I give you: President-elect McCain.

And he’s the "conservative." Yet he is no impostor. He is the same kind of "conservative" that has run the country for years.

This perhaps is the biggest irony in the room. A quarter century of "conservative" rule — including Bill Clinton and the Gingrich Congress — have given us a larger government, huge deficits, a crippling debt, debased culture, overseas adventures and imperial presidential power (We’re Americans: we torture) that would make Calvin Coolidge, Robert Taft and Barry Goldwater cringe. It is even counter to the ideas of Ronald Reagan as a political thinker (and, yes, he was a formidable one). By way of context, Ike, Nixon and George H.W. Bush were right-of-center pragmatists, not conservatives.

The heirs of Buckley bravely carry water for today’s "conservatives," but Buckley couldn’t have died a happy man, to see where his counter-revolution led (he became a vocal critic of the Iraq adventure). Burke and Russell Kirk are spinning so fast in their graves as to provide new data to particle physicists.

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