“Red County” Republicans vs. Greenhut

Nowadays we shouldn’t expect much from Republicans but amusement. At least they’re not running the central government, still ruining everything, having left that task to Democrats.

A post on the Red County blog doesn’t disappoint. It’s by Chip Hanlon, a local GOP activist. “Red County” gets its name because in the 2004 election Orange County had the biggest margin of victory for the Republican candidate for president, although it didn’t in 2008.

Chip critiques a column over the Independence Day weekend by Steven Greenhut, my former O.C. Register colleague, “Declarations on Independence,” about how America isn’t exactly the land of the free the Founders fought and died for way back in 1776. Greenhut’s subhead: “Try to relax and enjoy the holiday devoted to America’s revolt against oppression, at least as much as the government lets you enjoy it.”

Greenhut’s responses are here and here.

Hanlon writes:

Here, Greenhut shows how, like many Libertarians, he has become a prisoner of his own supposed philosophy.

Why “supposed philosophy”? Anyone who has read Greenhut’s articles over the years knows that, agree or disagree with it, he has an actual philosophy that’s well thought out.

Military supremacy

Hanlon writes:

However, one passage in particular gives a valuable glimpse into the mind of the extreme Libertarian:

Fourth, try attending one of the many military displays, where you can honor those agencies that have protected your freedoms by invading countries that you previously had never heard of. While you’re at it, try appreciating every one of the $500 billion-plus spent by the Pentagon this year, along with the additional billions spent by the nation’s intelligence officials to protect your freedoms in ways so important that they must be kept secret from you.

One of the few functions of government someone like Greenhut would acknowledge as appropriate is its duty to protect its citizens– via both the military for national defense and via a law enforcement/court system. Apparently, though, according to Steve those intelligence agencies and their “secrecy” have no place in a national defense scheme. And you can just hear the disdain he holds for those in our military in the very first line in that paragraph.

It’s funny, but I attended military parades in the 1960s and 1970s  that weren’t nearly as martial as those today, even though veterans marched from World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, which combined had 100 times as many war dead as have the Iraq and Afghan Wars. They were just parades honoring our friends and relatives who had served, and in some cases died, not displays of war whooping like modern parades.

A free Republic, which America is supposed to be, is modest about its military. Only empires act as if the military were the paramount element in society.

Hanlon:

One of the few functions of government someone like Greenhut would acknowledge as appropriate is its duty to protect its citizens — via both the military for national defense and via a law enforcement/court system.

“Protect,” yes — but we’re way beyond that into total government domination of our lives.

“PATRIOT Act” Tyranny

Hanlon writes:

Is it legitimate to question laws like the Patriot Act or the size and scope of our military spending and engagements? Undoubtedly, but Libertarians don’t stop on any reasonable ground in these areas.

Actually, any real American patriot is outraged by the misnamed “USA PATRIOT” Act, which should be called the USSR Traitors’ Act. As 9/11 was America’s Reichstag Fire, so the “PATRIOT” Act is America’s Enabling Act, in each case — 1933 or 2001 — giving a central tyranny the authority to destroy our liberties on the excuse of “protecting” us.

Hanlon is a smart fellow. But he needs to wake up to what’s really happening. He, like so many Republicans, didn’t heed the warning of the late Paul Weyrich, who said, “Never give your friend a weapon your enemy, once he’s back in power, could use against you.”

How does it feel now, Chip, that Homeland Security Gauleiter Janet Napolitano has a conservative enemies list?

As the song asks, “What ya gonna do when they come for you?”

Intrusions and “conspiracies”

Hanlon writes:

And it’s why a guy like Steve will take inane examples of government “intrusions” and turn them into full-blown conspiracies.

It’s not a conspiracy, but a law! It’s the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. According to the Wikipedia article the law, among other things:

• Permits the government not to keep records of searches, and destroy existing records (it requires them to keep the records for a period of 10 years).
• Protects telecommunications companies from lawsuits for “‘past or future cooperation’ with federal law enforcement authorities and will assist the intelligence community in determining the plans of terrorists.”
• Removes requirements for detailed descriptions of the nature of information or property targeted by the surveillance.
• Increased the time allowed for warrantless surveillance to continue from 48 hours to 7 days.

Then there’s the REAL ID Act, a national ID card, that Republicans have tried to foist on us, and Obama now is reviving.

Your paperz pleasze?

If it looks like the KGB and quacks like the KGB, it is the KGB.

Police riots

Hanlon brings up Greenhut’s reference to “a rare instance of excessive police force.” Actually, these instances are getting not only common, but routine, as detalied on William Norman Grigg’s blog.

And let’s not forget an example right here Red County, involving one of the top Republicans.  Corrupt Orange County Republican Sheriff Mike Carona, now a felon in prison, allowed conditions in his jail so bad that an inmate was killed. Greenhut wrote in May:

the Carona jail system gained the reputation as something of a torture chamber. The beating death of inmate John Chamberlain (deputies regularly watched TV, slept and played videogames) was the epitome of the Carona management system. A grand jury report revealed various departmental cover-ups of that brutal event, as deputies perjured themselves, tampered with witnesses (see a pattern here?) and abused the inmates under their care.

No “conspiracy” there. Just the facts, ma’am, as Sgt. Joe Friday used to say.

And Carona’s replacement as sheriff, appointed by the GOP-dominated board of supervisors, is an anti-gun fanatic.

An Empire, Not a Republic

Hanlon:

In their bizarre [libertarian] ideology, it is better to passively watch all the events of the world and take literally no hand in shaping it to meet our American interests nor the those of individual liberty around the globe. Some belief system.

Actually, America’s Founders favored an America First foreign policy, and opposed foreign adventurism. President Washington laid it out for us in his Farewell Address of 1786:

The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible….The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.

Moreover, the Constitution, whose drafting Washington presided over, included nothing about taking a hand in shaping the world “to meet our American interests” and those “of individual liberty around the globe.”

We were to shape the world only by our example as a free country, something we no longer do because we’re no longer free.

For one thing, we’re learning what the Founders knew from their study of the Athenian Empire and the Roman Empire: that global engagement means the end of a free republic and the imposition of a tyrannical empire.

For another, the Constitution grants the power to declare war only to the U.S. Congress, yet our last declared war was World War II. All the rest of the wars since then, including the Iraq and Afghan and Pakistan wars, have been unconstitutional. The presidents who began them should have been impeached and removed from office.

Fiscal Follies

Hanlon:

Sadly, because the GOP failed so miserably on fiscal responsibility while in the majority, many on the right are being enticed by the little they know about Libertarians — their commitment to fiscal restraint.

And why did they “fail so miserably on fiscal responsibility”? It was mainly because of the unconstitutional  wars. The Iraq War alone is going to cost us up to $5 trillion. That’s $5,000,000,000,000.00.

Not only that, but to run a war, you need to bribe domestic constituencies with porkbarrel spending — guns and butter, just like LBJ, another spendthrift warmonger Texan, did in the 1960s. As former Reagan Treasury official Paul Craig Roberts wrote:

President Lyndon B. Johnson’s policy of Great Society spending and Vietnam War is credited with the rising American inflation that persisted until checked by President Reagan’s supply-side policy.

In Johnson’s time the American economy and the US dollar were strong, and there was no current account deficit. Yet, LBJ’s policy of guns and butter did long-term harm.

The Bush/Obama 21st century policy of guns and butter makes LBJ look like a piker. The 2009 and 2010 federal budget deficits will be monstrous even without guns.  But Obama is exiting (apparently) the Iraq War in order to start two, possibly three, more wars.

Inflation, debt, depression

And it was Republican President Bush and Republican Fed Chairman Greenspan who, after 9/11, panicked and inflated the dollar, thus tripling the gold price, even as they lowered interest rates — the combined effect being the real estate bubble that crashed later in the decade.

Another way Bush panicked after 9/11 was that, instead of going just after bin Laden and the other terrorists who perpetrated the 9/11 attack, he tried to turn both Afghanistan and Iraq into model “democracies” — an impossible task given the tribal nature of both societies. The result was the endless quagmires in which we’re now stuck, and all the woes of empire for America.

Wild spending on war, wild domestic spending, inflation, artificially low interest rates, record deficits, record debt — no wonder in September 2008 the economy careened into the Bush Depression. Republicans — including the GOP Congress in power until 2006 — bear most of the blame, although Democrats bear much of the blame, too. For one thing, both the Democratic Congress of 2006 and Obama in 2008 were elected to end the Iraq War, yet they have not done so. Obama is making everything worse, not better.

But let’s never cease blaming Republicans as the primary culprits in our economic misery. They should have known better.

Reagan, after all, whatever his faults, presided over the correct formula: no foreign quagmires (he pulled out of Lebanon after the Marines were blown up in 1983), a stable currency, sensible interest rates, and tax cuts that lasted (instead of Bush’s, which expire next year).

Jumped the shark?

Finally, and maybe most hilariously, Hanlon jumbles the “jump the shark” analogy. He writes:

Just like when Fonzie jumped the shark, marking the moment when Happy Days lost its relevance as a show, Steven Greenhut just had one of those moments, giving all of us a glimpse into the extremist he seems to have become due to his frustration with the Republican party.

Actually, “jump the shark” doesn’t mean when something “lost its relevance,” but as Wikipedia explains, has “passed [its] peak.” And in fact, “Happy Days” lasted another seven of its 11 seasons, or about 2/3 of the show’s run, after it “jumped the shark.”

So, given that Steven has been at the Register since 1998, he’ll be there another 22 years, by this analogy. Although I should add that he hasn’t “passed his peak” but has just begun it.

It’s also ironic that Hanlon brands Greenhut an “extremist,” given that’s usually the label leftists use against sensible conservatives and libertarians — which, of course, is what Steven really is.

Update, July 14, 2009, 8:35 p.m. PST. Steven Greenhut has another reply to the Red County Republicans:

The good Republican folks at Red County have published a post accusing libertarians of being extremists and suggesting that we hate America, believe Lincoln to have been one of the world’s biggest war criminals and other such nonsense based on the unidentified statements. Yet one prominent writer at the blog, and someone who has zealously joined in the “libertarians are extremists” commenting has long ties to Christian Reconstructionism, a form of fundamentalist Christianity that seeks to impose Old Testament law on society. Would it be fair, then, to suggest that Red County is in league with those views, which I believe are somewhat outside the mainstream?

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