REPUBLICAN
"COMPASSION" – STARVE IRAQI CHILDREN
On
the international front, the old cold war belligerence is,
if anything, accentuated: according to the GOP
platform, the world is bristling with enemies,
from the Middle East to the Far East and all points in between.
Never mind the end of communism – our foreign policy
must remain unchanged. The rapprochement of the two Koreas
is not even acknowledged (although the victory of Vicente
Fox is). While skeptical of "humanitarian" intervention, the
platform endorses virtually every Clintonian military intervention
after the fact on "national security" grounds. Instead of
being retired to the museum of cold war relics, NATO is to
be "revitalized" and expanded – with the US taxpayers
footing the bill and US arms manufacturers reaping the profits.
We are told that the only problem with Clinton's 1998 assault
on Iraq was that "when the administration decided to take
military action, it did too little, too late." Note to my
Iraqi readers: take cover. As for the murderous economic
sanctions, they will stay: "We will maintain the sanctions
on the Iraqi regime while seeking to alleviate the suffering
of innocent Iraqi people." But how do you alleviate a people's
suffering – by denying them the basic necessities of
life and killing 5,000 of their children every month? How
"compassionate" can you get? And things don't get much better
on the domestic policy front. . . .
GOP
IMMIGRATION POLICY:
COME ONE, COME ALL
The
Bushification of the GOP platform also meant dropping the
"harsh" language of the 1996 version, which rightly averred
that "we must set immigration at manageable levels" and deplored
public benefits to illegals. The new Republican doctrine of
"inclusiveness" is stated plainly: "To all Americans, particularly
immigrants and minorities, we send a clear message: this is
the party of freedom and progress, and it is your home." To
the peoples of the world, never mind about that pesky border:
this is your home. Come one, come all, and the more the merrier:
this means, in effect, open borders. The Republican platform
stance calling for action against illegal immigration and
caps on the legal variety is completely gutted in favor of
a touchy-feely we-are-the-world open borders position –
just as the
news breaks that Al Gore's political operatives put heavy
pressure on the Justice Department to approve the acceleration
of citizenship applications without proper review. According
to the Justice Department, this was done for "possible political
advantage" – in the hope that these hurriedly-minted
new citizens could be herded to the polls to vote Democratic
in droves. One study estimates 18 percent of applications
went completely unreviewed, with as many as 6,000 criminals
now eligible to vote Republican. Isn't "diversity" wonderful?
NO
ENGLISH – WE'RE REPUBLICANS
The
plank calling for the official recognition of English as "the
common language" is retained – minus the word "official."
This abandonment of the "English Only" movement was to be
expected, given Dubya's well-known difficulty with the English
language. New York Times columnist Gail Collins notes
the following Bush-ism, as he spoke in Kentucky about education:
"If you don't know what you're supposed to know, we'll make
sure you do early before it's too late." No wonder he speaks
in Spanish whenever he can.
A
TUESDAY NIGHT ORGY
Tonight
is "national security" night at the GOP convention, with an
all-star cast of warmongers including Liddy Dole, of the Albania
Lobby, Condolezza Rice, of the Hoover Institution for the
Perpetuation of War in the Name of Peace, and Mad John McCain
– whose nickname speaks for itself. Oh what an orgy of
bloodcurdling war cries and McCainiac posturing that is going
to be! Unfortunately, all the foreign policy action took place
well past my deadline, and so my take on the festivities will
have to wait until Friday. But enough of the Republicans,
already – just watching their convention for any period
of time longer than five minutes is likely to induce a state
of torpor unknown since the virtual disappearance of Qualludes
from the black market. If you have trouble going to sleep
in the next couple of days, just tune in to CSPAN or CNN,
and you'll be in dreamland within minutes if not seconds.
The real convention fever, this year, is going to reach
the boiling point – and, perhaps, beyond – at neither
of the major party conventions. No, the real action is going
to be in Long Beach, California, where the Reform Party is
scheduled to meet and choose its presidential standard-bearer
– and that's where I'll be, from August 9th
to the 12th, reporting from the convention floor,
with my trusty sidekick and photographer Yoshi snapping the
first pictures of Russell Verney, Jim Mangia, and Lenora Fulani
as they exit the convention in a fine lather, idiotically
claiming to be the "real" Reform Party. Speaking of La Lenora
. . . .
FOOLANI
AND THE WRECKING CREW – NOT A ROCK BAND
Since
throwing her lot in with the Anti-Buchanan Brigades, and allying
with Reform Party boss Russell Verney and what we brigadiers
and many longtime Reformers call the "Wrecking Crew," Lenora
Fulani has devoted her WorldNetDaily column to excoriating
not only Buchanan but also me. These epistles are models of
the principle that the best humor is unintentional. Here,
after all, is a woman who betrayed every political ally she
ever had: the left, by allying with the right – the Perotistas,
whom she once battled for control of the party – Jesse
Ventura and his friends in Reform, whom she alternately courted
and denounced – and now she turns on Buchanan. According
to her, "Pat Buchanan and his friends can't be trusted."!
This from Lenora Fulani, the Judas Iscariot of third-party
politics! Once touted by her as the savior of the party and
the leader of a new populist coalition, Buchanan is now denounced
in language that echoes the very charges leveled by the Anti-Buchanan
Brigades against Fulani and her "New Alliance" organization:
according to her, Pat is "intolerant." This from someone
who defends the thesis of her mentor, Fred Newman, that the
Jews are "the stormtroopers of decadent capitalism"! Pardon
the excessive exclamatory mode, but the writer (in English)
is forced to take extraordinary measures to describe the opportunism
sui generis of Fulani & Company. Fulani objects
to my calling her followers "robotic minions" – but how
else to describe such an obedient group? Here is a tightly-controlled
classic Leninist organization that passively accepts the veering
from left to right, from tailing Jesse Jackson (and Fidel
Castro) to hitching a ride on the Buchananite bandwagon, and
does not complain at the frenzied factional maneuvering, from
opposing the Perotistas within the Reform Party to allying
with them in their quest to rule or ruin. A robot can turn
on a dime, and what else are these but political robots? Are
they any better than those mindless Republican stalwarts in
Philadelphia, cheering anything and everything that comes
out of their leaders' mouths?
FULANI-ISM:
A CLINICAL DISORDER
The
sheer strangeness of Fulani, the clinical aura of her
particular brand of weirdness is in her perfectly straightforward
hypocrisy. Here is a writer whose every other word is "democracy"
or "populist" and whose political ideology (the public version
of it, at any rate) is predicated on defeating the "elites"
and "reforming" the system – proclaiming that there should
be only one candidate in the Reform Party presidential
primary! There goes another exclamation point, but
what is one to do in the face of such overwhelming chutzpah?
Being a Marxist, Lenora naturally has no problem with an election
in which there is only a single candidate on the ballot –
but the rest of the Reform Party, not to mention the American
people, may have some questions about that. Fulani wants to
kick Buchanan out of the primary – but it is he
who is guilty of trying to "strongarm" his way to the nomination!
No doubt this is true according to some measure of "dialectical"
logic familiar to the Marxist Fulani, but the rest of us can
only marvel at this astounding inversion of the truth.
THE
WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN
This,
in its essence, is the peculiar Fulanian method, which we
might call reality inversion. If you lie, call your
enemy a liar. If you betray, say your adversaries can't be
trusted. Uphold "democracy" – by upholding the 'right"
of Russell Verney and his five or six "Executive Committee"
allies to prevail over 10,000 bellowing Buchananites. Oh,
and don't forget: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance
is Strength. Got that?
GARBAGE
DISPOSAL
That
I am forced to take someone like Fulani seriously, by discussing
her ditzy views at all, is one of the reasons I am going to
be appointed Secretary of State in a Buchanan administration
(kidding!) – but let's dispose of this matter once and
for all. I praised Fulani for endorsing Buchanan, and defended
her against the worst of the rather overblown smears directed
at her group by The New Republic and others. I have
never, however, endorsed her ideology – which is, indeed,
a curious mixture of psychobabble and warmed-over (and watered-down)
Marxism. I merely stated the obvious: that a dedicated cadre
of hardworking activists on Pat's side was "an invaluable
asset." The Fulani faction has been fighting to liberalize
ballot access laws in this country, and their knowledge of
the arcane rules and regulations that govern this process
was indeed an invaluable tactical advantage: it also doesn't
hurt to have a small herd of robotic minions at your beck
and call, ready to carry out the orders of the leadership
without question and at a moment's notice, working long hours
without pay and without complaining. In politics, robotic
minions are an absolute necessity – I'll take them over
a roomful of squabbling libertarians any day of the week.
THE
FUTURE ACCORDING TO FULANI
I'll
tell you what Lenora Fulani reminds me of: the great would-be
leader of the Reform Party (and its would-be chairwoman) writes
in one of her columns about the future of the Reform Party,
and after boring the poor put-upon readers of WorldNetDaily
with the exciting details of the upcoming Executive Committee
elections in Long Beach (do they know or care?), Fulani has
the following to say:
"High
on the list of issues that the Reform Party's democracy coalition
must tackle is the composition of a new Executive Committee,
to be elected at Long Beach, Calif., that distributes power
– once again – among diverse factions and state parties,
hopefully this time with a recognition that a refusal to do
so will spell the end of a viable Reform Party, even if Buchanan
is driven out."
BOSS
LENORA
This
is the prototypical political boss speaking, in a style reminiscent
of Boss Tweed and the heyday of Tammany Hall. Instead of a
party united around a coherent set of issues and ideas, Fulani's
Reform Party will exist on a national level only to hand out
perks and privileges to local party bosses and "factions."
What kind of "reform" is this? Far from being the leader of
a "reform" movement, Fulani aspires to become the Boss Tweed
of the new millennium, doling out organizational goodies and
"driving out" her enemies. Some "reformer"! That Fulani and
her followers can say all this with a straight face has got
to be a signal achievement in the science of mind control.
This is Fulani's "inversion therapy" at work, in which
her followers are brainwashed into believing that up is down,
black is white, and Lenora Fulani never lies. The great problem
yet to be faced by Fulani and friends is that it won't work
on the rest of us. But they will have to face it, sooner or
later, because the day of reckoning is almost upon us: Long
Beach looms, where the Wrecking Crew will have a hard time
maintaining their fictional stance as the champions of "democracy."
Then we will see who is driving whom out of
the Reform Party. See you in Long Beach, Lenora. . . .
ABOVE
AND BEYOND
Yes,
we'll be submitting daily reports from the floor of the Reform
Party convention, and this is going to be fun –
or, at least, that's what I keep telling myself. After all,
what could be more pleasant than facing down the strutting
martinet Boss Verney, and fending off the Byzantine machinations
of Fulani's Robotic Minions? Not to mention being "outed"
again by our sex-starved media! Oh boy, maybe I'll even ask
Jim Mangia for a date – anything to keep him off the
convention floor! On second thought, however, maybe not –
there are some things I'm just not willing to do, not
even for the Cause. Would
you?
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