Calculating Conservatives

Friends,
This is a damning look at the conservative movement.
"Thomas Frank, the author of "What's the Matter with Kansas?," is the founding editor of the Baffler, a contributing editor at Harper's, and, most recently, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal. His WSJ columns can be read at his Web site. He lives, of course, in Washington D.C., and this essay has been adapted from his new book, "The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule.""

Peace and Love,
Rev O

How conservative greed and corruption destroyed American politics Salon.com

"But the onrushing flow swamps all taxonomies. Mass firing of federal prosecutors; bribing of newspaper columnists; pallets of shrink-wrapped cash "misplaced" in Iraq; inexperienced kids running the Baghdad stock exchange; the discovery that many of Alaska's leading politicians are apparently on the take -- our heads swim. We climb to the rooftop, but we cannot find the heights of irony from which we might laugh off the blend of thug and Pharisee that was Tom DeLay -- or dispel the nauseating suspicion, quickly becoming a certainty, that the government of our nation deliberately fibbed (lied) us into a pointless, catastrophic war."

"But put conservatism in charge of the state, and it behaves very differently. Now the "values" that rightist politicians eulogize on the stump disappear, and in their place we can discern an entirely different set of priorities -- priorities that reveal more about the unchanging historical essence of American conservatism than do its fleeting campaigns against gay marriage or secular humanism. The conservatism that speaks to us through its actions in Washington is institutionally opposed to those baseline good intentions we learned about in elementary school.

Its leaders laugh off the idea of the public interest as airy-fairy nonsense; they caution against bringing top-notch talent into government service; they declare war on public workers. They have made a cult of outsourcing and privatizing, they have wrecked established federal operations because they disagree with them, and they have deliberately piled up an Everest of debt in order to force the government into crisis. The ruination they have wrought has been thorough; it has been a professional job. Repairing it will require years of political action. "

"But this is only the beginning of the story. As we make our rounds of conservative Washington, we glimpse something much greater than single acts of incompetence or obstruction. We see a vast machinery built for our protection reengineered into a device for our exploitation. We behold the majestic workings of the free market itself, boring ever deeper into the tissues of the state. Ultimately, we gaze upon one of the true marvels of history: democracy buried beneath an avalanche of money."

How conservative greed and corruption destroyed American politics Abramoff, DeLay, Norquist, oh my! The spectacular misrule of the GOP was not an accident.By Thomas Frank Salon.com