THE REAL REASON I have not posted here for so long is that my values themselves have been in crisis, a three-pronged upheaval that is equal measures spiritual, aesthetic and political.
But before I say more, let me affirm that, once again, I am honored by the faithfulness and persistence of those readers who have dutifully clicked here day after day in search of new writing, demonstrating their perseverance by repeated returns to a seemingly endless void of blank pages. I thank you all. I will strive to do better for you. However, the constraints on my time and energy are such I will seldom post more than twice or thrice a week, and never more than one “serious” essay per week in those postings – “serious” defined here as substantially more than simply commentary on some specific news-link. The schedule is deliberate – to equal the level of creative-energy consumption that was mine when I wrote a weekly editorial-page column during the early 1980s and the second half of the 1970s – and thereby leave some energy for other (essential) writing projects. For your patience and loyalty, I offer you my most heartfelt thanks.
In the discussion of values that is part of the autobiographical summary I posted when I opened this site, I asserted my political independence: I lean Left – sometimes very far Left – on social and economic issues; I lean Right – sometimes very far Right – on issues of foreign policy and national defense, especially on what I believe should be properly labeled “the War Against Islamic Aggression” rather than called by its present, vapidly euphemistic (and thus ultimately meaningless) designation as “the War on Terror.” I also lean Right on the Second Amendment: nevertheless I believe the phrase “Real Leftists Own Guns” would make a fine bumper-sticker, though “Real Americans Own Guns” would be far more inclusively accurate.
What the total dichotomy of all my leanings makes me in today’s world is an Independent – an Independent with decidedly libertarian (lower-case “l”) inclinations.
But what it made me in yesterday’s world was a “lifelong” (as I then mistakenly believed) Democrat: not a pacifist/radical-feminist/authoritarian-Democrat, but rather a John Fitzgerald Kennedy/Warren Magnuson/libertarian-Democrat, as passionately committed to the defense of my nation and its Constitution “against all enemies foreign and domestic” as I am to the ultimately spiritual conviction that it is the sacred duty of all of us to care for those who cannot care for themselves and to cherish the mother-planet (and the mother-cosmos) from which we are all born.
Alas, the Democratic Party has drifted far from all those principles. It has become as authoritarian as the Papacy in its insistence on absolute ideological conformity, and it has thereby repudiated the Jeffersonian ideals of individuality for which it once stood. It has endorsed a politically “correct” anti-morality of “moral equivalence” within which there is ultimately not one scintilla of difference between an Albert Schweitzer and a Ted Bundy. It has further betrayed its libertarian constituency by its opposition to the First, Second, Fourth and Fifth amendments, whether in the name of matrifascist hysteria, or an obscene lust for the tyrannies of victim-identity politics in general, or some oppressive combination of both. It has betrayed its environmentalists by its endorsement of the earth-raping global economy, and it has betrayed the labor movement by its support of outsourcing and unrestricted illegal immigration. It has moreover betrayed every one of the nation’s poor, this by the extent to which it has fallen captive to malevolently careerist social workers – the same yuppoid gold-diggers who from 1970 to 1990 increased welfare administrative costs by 5,390 percent (not a typo) even as they slashed stipends and services to the poor by nearly two-thirds – history’s most outrageous example of welfare fraud and class-betrayal, its infinitely damning arithmetical truths disclosed by the federal government’s own Statistical Abstract of the United States.
It was in the context of these multiple betrayals that the Republican Party appeared for a time to have become a home – albeit a sometimes uncomfortable home – for both libertarian individualists and strong-national-defense liberals, the latter now renamed “Neoconservatives.” Each group was deliberately purged from the Democratic Party hierarchy (and largely ousted from party’s rank-and-file as well) when the party was taken over by the “down-with-American-liberty” matrifascists and their allies among the “no-more-war” pacifists and the “smash-white-patriarchy” victim-identity cults. The labor movement, the environmentalists and the poor were likewise disenfranchised, but these groups – orphaned by the new hot-tub radical elite that now controls the Democratic Party – chose not to repudiate their Democratic allegiance in the vain hope they would someday be granted manumission from the defacto serfdom to which they had been reduced.
For these reasons and several others I began voting Republican in national elections in 1988. Though officially and actually impoverished, I had two very clear motives. One was avowedly personal: an expression of my infinite bitterness and lingering anger at having been vindictively condemned to permanent disability – this after I protested bureaucratic denial of treatment for an absolutely treatable condition. The treatment-denial (and thus the resultant destruction of my journalism career and the irreversible limitations thereby imposed on my life) was entirely the expression of gender-quotas – specifically anti-Caucasian-male quotas imposed by the maliciously feminist social-service bureaucrats who had been granted near-absolute power by a succession of Democrat administrations in Washington state. Voting Republican was thus my best revenge. But my other motive was purely ideological: the Democrats had become so venomously anti-military and so fanatically opposed to so many freedoms (formerly) guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, I could not possibly have voted for any Democratic presidential candidate after Walter Mondale.
For a while it appeared the libertarian-individualist and “Neoconservative” elements might become the dominant elements in the Republican Party – that it would in fact now be the GOP which embraced and propagated most of the Jeffersonian impulses in American politics. In both the 2000 and 2004 election campaigns, George W. Bush (cunningly) did nothing to discourage that belief save to propose, in 2004, a Constitutional amendment against gay marriage – something I instantly and repeatedly denounced (click here) but nevertheless before the election (stupidly) dismissed as merely a single political thread rather than what it has since proven to be – one of many genuinely terrifying expressions of the whole Bush Administration cloth: specifically its seemingly total commitment to the runaway fascism of the Dominionist Christian agenda and fanatical yearning for the unspeakable tyrannies expressed therein. (Anyone who doubts these tyrannical intentions are real, merely Google “dominionist” or “dominionist theology” and read at will; understandably, the libertarian Right is as terrified as the Left).
But the point is that now it is becoming increasingly obvious libertarian individualists and (at least some) secular/rationalist “Neoconservatives” are as unwelcome in the Republican Party as they were in the Democratic Party. In fact I now believe our apparent welcome into GOP ranks was from the very beginning a deliberate deception – a scam to gain our votes until such time the Dominionist front (about which more later) could be sufficiently mobilized to render our votes irrelevant.
Yes, I was one of the ones who was so scammed. I knew most of George Bush’s domestic policies were appalling, especially in the context of our ever-more-outsourced, ever-more-deteriorating economy – but today’s fern-bar Democrats, in their infinite scorn of the blue-collar class and the poor, could not trouble themselves to offer anything better. Hence I reasoned that neither party would substantially alter the domestic socioeconomic status quo. And I therefore voted for George Bush – for one reason and one reason only: national defense. I believed John Kerry when he pledged he would unilaterally disarm the United States of the only weapon that might neutralize the North Korean and Iranian nuke-builders, and I believed Kerry when he promised he would reduce the present war to a mere law-enforcement operation. In fact I concluded Kerry would sell out America to Islamic aggression much as he sold out America to the North Vietnamese with his anti-war invective c. 1971. (Yes, I am a military veteran – though not of Vietnam – and, yes, I opposed the Vietnam War too, and like many Americans I also feared Nixon’s designs on Constitutional governance. But there is a vast difference between expressing one’s opposition to murderously bad policy and denouncing one’s entire nation as a wellspring of “Genghis Khan” evil.)
The realization that I had been duped – or perhaps that I had duped myself – came upon me early and often after the 2004 election. A December 2004 confession of my error – and of other profoundly embarrassing mistakes as well – is available here. Since I was also wrong about the outcome of this year’s Washington state legislative session – most of the draconian anti-Second Amendment measures I foresaw were indeed proposed, but they were all bottled up in committee by a rare, exceptionally brave pro-Second Amendment Democrat – my recent batting average clearly continues to deserve the same “needs work” judgement with which the parochial school nuns of my boyhood used to evaluate my mathematical ability, my deportment and sometimes even my spelling.
But – though I prayerfully hope it is merely another example of bad judgement – I can no longer avoid asking myself a question that only a few months ago I would have dismissed as an expression of hopeless paranoia: what if every one of the seeming contradictions of Bush Administration policies are each explained by Bush’s clandestine adherence to the Dominionist agenda?
The Dominionist agenda itself is no secret. Again, Google “dominionist”: its goal is dominion – absolute rule (hence “Dominionist”) – to be achieved by a combination of legal means. These include:
– Elections (which remember is precisely how Adolf Hitler achieved power in what was then the best educated, most technologically advanced nation on earth);
– Infiltration (a measure proposed by Hitler in Mein Kampf, specifically allying with or taking over the organs of the state and the institutions of the establishment, primarily the military and academia in Weimar Germany, chiefly local governments and local school boards in the present-day U.S., a phenomenon already well documented);
– Gradual mastery of the judiciary (again a Mein Kampf measure, in the U.S. intended to facilitate subversive re-interpretation of the Constitution so that America becomes a Talibanic state (a Christian theocracy with Old Testament biblical law functioning precisely as Sharia does in Islam).
Though it’s hard to imagine modern America as a place of public executions including witch-burnings and stonings-to-death of adulteresses, homosexuals, blasphemers (and anyone else some Bible-thump court rules is an “abomination”), this is exactly what Dominionists seek to impose. Impossible? Precisely what the Left thought in Weimar Germany (which had a constitution even more libertarian than our own). It’s also what the modernists thought in Iran before the ayatollahs took over and started publicly torturing 14-year-old girls to death – hanging them from steel cables on construction cranes to endlessly kick and choke their lives away – merely for alleged offenses against Islamic morality.
But back to Bush – and more specifically the (possibly revealing) anomalies of Bush’s policies. It is thoroughly documented that Bush and his administration have:
– Defied the will of Congress by methodically obstructing the Armed Pilots Program and hamstringing domestic airline security in general (see Annie Jacobsen’s vital work on this subject, available here);
– Deliberately (ostensibly as an expression of Bush’s own passionate support of the Big Business/Cheap Labor Republican scheme for unrestricted illegal immigration) undermined all efforts to improve border security;
– Repeatedly misrepresented Islam as meaning “peace” rather than “submission,” its true (and implicitly anti-democratic) definition;
– Consistently failed to reduce the potentially violent influence of radical, jihadist Wahabi (Saudi Arabian) Islam in U.S. prisons and U.S. mosques in general;
– Allowed Osama bin Laden to escape from Afghanistan (even as Bush appeared to fulfill American demands to avenge 9/11);
What if these realities and many others like them are the true expressions of the Bush Doctrine? What if, contrary to “conventional wisdom,” they are not the result of bungling or bureaucratic obstructionism but rather accurate manifestations of policy? What if the contrary statements by the president and his advisors are all merely part of a much greater deception?
What if the recent photograph of Bush holding hands with Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Abdullah illustrates a greater semiotic truth than all of last year’s photographs of Bush serving Thanksgiving turkey to U.S. troops in Iraq?
And what if the unifying element in the entire equation is Bush advisor Grover Norquist’s scheme to build a national alliance of Fundamentalist Christians and Moslems? Norquist has made it clear that such a united front would be founded on shared hatreds: hatefulness to women, women’s rights, gays, abortion, the First Amendment, the Bill of Rights in general. (Following are two informative reads on Norquist, one from a Conservative journal, here, and one from a respected Leftist publication, here. For more information, Google “grover norquist” and explore thoroughly.) For a revealing report on the united front itself, go here.
If the effort to build a Dominionist/Muslim coalition is indeed the missing element that explains all the Bush Administration anomalies, what does that suggest about the invasion of Iraq and the ouster of the sadistically tyrannical (but nevertheless avowedly secularist) Saddam Hussein? Focus not on the invasion per se, but rather on the ouster of Hussein, the innumerable “screw-ups” that handed the terrorists local victories (such as the post-conquest looting), and the various astounding mercies granted to the terrorists by what amount to presidential interventions (as, until recently, at Fallujah). Could these again be expressions of the Bush Administration’s true policies – perhaps an under-the-table payoff to Muslims who might help build Norquist’s Dominionist/Muslim alliance? What if the long-range big score of this supposed payoff is an Iran-like Islamic government in Iraq? What if this is a defacto penance for the invasion of Afghanistan? How the Islamic fundamentalists might then love Bush – especially his now-truly iconic hand-holding portrait with Crown Prince Abdullah. And how much money might the cosmos-sized bank accounts of the Arabian oil mullahs come up with for Republicans in the 2006 election?
Apply Occam’s Razor and see what you come up with. Michael Moore and the folks on Democratic Underground may not be nearly as paranoid as I have believed. Then focus on what sort of political effort – whether as an expression of some new third party or a take-back-the-controls campaign within the Democratic Party – might save us from a nightmare future as a theocracy, perhaps as even a Dominionist province within a greater Global Caliphate.
STANLEY KURTZ, WHO GENERALLY writes on secular matters for National Review Online, has assembled a truly terrifying anthology of reports on the tyrannical malevolence of Dominionist Christians and how it may already be the binding ideology of the Bush Administration. Allegedly Kurtz assembled this material to belittle those who are concerned about the Dominionist threat, but for many readers – myself among them – his work will have precisely the opposite effect. Indeed it is the best primer/anthology of anti-Dominionist investigative reports I have seen anywhere.
Kurtz's piece and the links therein, to various exposes detailing the Dominionist conspiracy to overthrow American constitutional governance and impose Bible-based theocracy in its place – a theocracy complete with witch-burnings and stonings-to-death of homosexuals and "fornicators" – are available here.
Ignore the obligatory right-wing rhetoric that begins with Kurtz’s fifth paragraph and go directly to the links Kurtz has enclosed. As you read, you'll probably find yourself wondering – as I did – if Kurtz's real intent is not belittlement at all, but rather to alert NRO 's libertarian and/or secular-conservative readers to the grave internal threat America is now facing. I don't know the answer to that question. But having on several occasions experienced firsthand the Dominionist penchant for tyrannical viciousness – this not only during the parochial-school years of a Southern boyhood but repeatedly during my adulthood as well – I have no doubts whatsoever about the nature of the threat itself. Though please in fairness remember that by no means all Evangelicals and/or Fundamentalists are Dominionists.
(Please note: this is not the promised New Beginning. It is merely material of sufficient urgency I thought it should be posted promptly. Indeed, there may be no New Beginning at all; for reasons I will detail in the next few days, I am increasingly leaning toward shutting this site down forever. Meanwhile, read Kurts’s links and be informed: forewarned is forearmed.)