The latest issue of Reason Magazine has a book review of a book that explores the role racism played in the Progressive Movement. I have not seen the book, nor do I even remember its name. For its part, the Reason Magazine article sweeps the Populists in with the Progressives, which is fair enough as they are sort of ideological cousins. I note that William Jennings Bryan’s “q” rating has risen, and I can quote various articles I’ve read referring to the book (A Godly Hero) by Michael Kazin that has pushed him in profile. The sentence that strikes me from some article or other for purposes here is that “Populism may have started as multi-racial, but distilled through the politics of the Democratic Party…” … well, that’s another story. Progressivism I guess is the elitist version of Populism, and…

Such thinking, which emphasized “expert” opinion and advocated sweeping governmental power, fit perfectly within the Progressive worldview, which favored a large, active government that engaged in technocratic, paternalistic planning. As for reconciling white supremacy with egalatarian democracy, keep in mind that when a racist Progressive championed “the working man”, “the common man” or “the people”, he typically prefixed the silent adjective “white”.

It’s probably a bit easier to extricate the problem with “Progressivism” (Um… simply drop the silent “white” away) than with “Populism”. Whether we like to admit it or not, Pat Buchanan is an heir to William Jennings Bryan. (I’m pretty sure he’d be against NAFTA).

I know I should engage the article in full, but I’m not being graded here. Skip to the last paragraph… and the Libertarian worldview becomes stark:

Despite these significant shortcomings [in reference to the “Buchanan v Warley” Supreme Court decision, as victory for Black Americans], The Progressive Era and Race deserves careful attention. The Progressive movement unleashed and aided some of the most destructive forces in 20th Century America. The better we understand this history the less likely we are to repeat it.

You do realize that by “most destructive forces in the 20th Century”, he is not referring to anything tied with Racism (Eugenics, perhaps?) but is referencing… the checks and balances put in place against the excesses of Industrial Society. That is to say:

Minimum Wage, Maximum Hour Laws, Antitrust statutes, Appropriations for hundreds of miles of roads and highways, Assistance to New Immigrants and the Poor (okay. As distilled through Corrupt big city political bosses. Fine.), the Popular Vote for Senators, and on and on.

Slant your head askew.

“I read the articles in the newspapers this weekend. It was just wild speculation,” Bush said.

Wait. I thought Bush DID NOT READ the newspapers.

BUSH: I get briefed by Andy Card and Condi in the morning. They come in and tell me. In all due respect, you’ve got a beautiful face and everything.

I glance at the headlines just to kind of a flavor for what’s moving. I rarely read the stories, and get briefed by people who are probably read the news themselves. But like Condoleezza, in her case, the national security adviser is getting her news directly from the participants on the world stage.

blah blah blah… Use the word “Objective Sources” with a straight face. Then again, this does qualify his lack of newspaper reading with “rarely.”

But I’m struck by the question. Why would Bush even know whether this is “wild speculation” or not? Apparently, his management style of “delegation” makes it so that he doesn’t really need to know quite a number of things. Such as…

Q Thank you, Mr. President. It’s an honor to have you here. I’m a first-year student in South Asia studies. My question is in regards to private military contractors. Uniform Code of Military Justice does not apply to these contractors in Iraq. I asked your Secretary of Defense a couple months ago what law governs their actions.

THE PRESIDENT: I appreciate that very much. I wasn’t kidding — (laughter.) I was going to — I pick up the phone and say, Mr. Secretary, I’ve got an interesting question. (Laughter.) This is what delegation — I don’t mean to be dodging the question, although it’s kind of convenient in this case, but never — (laughter.) I really will — I’m going to call the Secretary and say you brought up a very valid question, and what are we doing about it? That’s how I work. I’m — thanks. (Laughter.)

If you watched Bill Maher on Friday, you saw his interview with Kevin Phillips, via satellite feed. If you want to know where Kevin Phillips was, he was in the rare books room at Powells in Portland.

That was a chaotic appearance of sorts. First, there was a medical emergency that delayed his talk a bit. Someone fainted, and had to be rushed out to an ambulance, parting the red sea of a crowd. Next, we had word that he would be interrupted by his Bill Maher interview. We would get to see his interview… or rather, his side of the interview. When he went back to prepare for the appearance, we got word that his appearance would not be at the :15 minute mark, but the :45 minute mark, meaning he would not come back for Questions. At this point, half the crowd dispersed. But, then, suddenly “Wow. Television is crazy. Um. They scheduled him back to :15.” At which point, half the half the dispersed crowd returned. By which point I had managed to grab a seat, which was good because I was sick of standing, and standing any longer would have made what was a split-decision to attend this appearance by Kevin Phillips anyway a little too cumbersome to make it worthwhile.

The crowd was instructed not to make any noises during his Bill Maher interview. I do not know if any laughter could be heard on the show. I guess the bullet is dodged in that the biggest bursts of laughter came with Kevin Phillips talking to the prep-staff before his interview. He found something Joe Biden said amusing, and said “I find anything said about Bush funny except when it’s positive.” — or something to that effect.

So what pearls of wisdom did he depart on the crowd? “I left Washington in 1997 because I just couldn’t take it anymore. I had no use for Clinton or Gingrich.” “I assume about 80% of the crowd here are Democrats, or Democrat-leaning. I have to say the Democrats have been the most inept Opposition Party I’ve ever seen. My advice to you is that when you run into local elected Democrats, to push their on buttons.” “I know voting patterns well enough to say that Bush did not ‘steal’ Ohio. He won Kentucky and West Virginia much too easily such that a Kerry victory in Ohio would be skewered a little too much to be plausible.”

Skimming through his book, a few items stick out of interest, but if I get to them I’ll have to get to them on some later moment of my convenience.

His career apparently stalled after superiors chided him for casting the war on terrorism in religious terms , Army Lt. Gen. William G. “Jerry” Boykin on Tuesday was caught up in a campaign for the U.S. Senate and a budding contest for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination.

A letter from U.S. Sen. George Allen, R-Va., urging Boykin’s promotion and transfer to a high-profile assignment drew howls of outrage from a potential Democratic challenger to Allen. […]

A veteran Virginia political analyst, meanwhile, saw the letter as a sign that Allen continues to look beyond this year’s Virginia campaign and is bolstering his support among Christian conservatives for the 2008 presidential race.

Allen “needs to depend on that group” if he is serious about gaining the nomination, he said. […]

Referring to a Somali warlord, who had said God would shield him from American troops, Boykin told congregants that “I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol.”

Boykin later insisted that his references to an idol referred to the warlord’s corruption. He is not “anti-Islam,” he insisted.

I’ve long had Boykin’s quote on the sidebar over

And then Hearst saw Hitler. He at once told him (by his own account) that he did not approve of dictatorships. Hitler thereupon explained that his dictatorship had arisen from democracy, first by a narrow victory, than a three fourths majority, then a four fifths majority, so that he “must not allow a small minority to interfere with the will of the majority.” Even so, Hearst repeated he was opposed to autocracy. So he did not, so far as we know, explain the new Americanism and tell how the San Francisco strike had been smashed. But he came away from Hitler and Hitler’s Germany with a clear idea which he expouned in an interview on landing, 9-28-34:

“The fascist party of Italy was organized to quell the disturbances and disorders of Communism. The fascist party of Germany was organized for the same purpose. It was intended to and very likely did prevent Germany from going Communist and cooperating with Soviet Russia. This is the great policy, the great achievement which makes the Hitler regime popular with the German people, and which enables it to survive very obvious and very serious mistakes.” […] […] […]

Having established this basis for fascism, Mr. Hearst launched his winter campaign against academic freedom and the Communist meanace. […] This was just the time when the suppression of crime was a national theme. Agents of the Department of Justice were shooting down “public enemies.” Hearst was shooting them down intellectually, sending spies to college professors trying to trap them into sympathetic statements about Russia. The story of this espionage in the universities has been adequately told. It is noteworthy that for all his campaign for more money for elementary education, he has no use for academic freedom. “Academic freedom is a phrase taken over by the radical groups as a new camouflage for the teaching of alien doctrines.” […]

Ostensibly he was still fighting fot he old democracy, but he was not thinking about it. The most revealing flash into his real mind came in an interview he gave a French correspondent about the Phillipines. (12-17-34) “If we had a system of government of the date of the aeroplane, or even the automobile, we never should have abondoned the Phillippines.” Now what system of government dates with the aeroplane? At any rate not democracy. “Our nation for the first time begins to shrink,” he grieved, “and when a nation begins shrinking there is no knowing when it will stop. Only decadent nations contract; vigoroug nations expand. Japan is expanding.”

Japan’s government is near fascism. Hitler would never abandon the Philippines. Hitler’s Germany is expanding, not contracting. But America, which expanded under the democracy of Hearst’s youth, now is “decadent.” That is, unless it can be rejuvenated, like Germany and Italy.

Tom DeLay has now departed the House of Representatives — presumably into the Shadow Government of Lobbyists after his detour through the Court System with the money he raised obstensibly for the purposes of a campaign he never intended on running but now diverted to his attorney fees. Maybe it’s a victory for Libertarians — as per his famous assertion that “I am the federal government”.

But now that he is leaving, it make sense to go ahead and take down certain ornaments he left behind. In this case, um… Washington State’s Fourth Congressional District Representative Richard “Doc” Hastings‘s place as chairmanship on the Ethics Committee, a farce if there ever was one.

Actually, Doc Hastings and the Ethics Committee has a full caseload on the docket. He’s looking into the improprieties of… um… Jim McDermott. Granted, I’m not fully cognicient of Jim McDermott’s case, but in partisan terms at its worse the biblical standard is at play of “Take The Log Out Of Your Own Eye Before You Complain About The Mote In Someone Else’s Eye”. And a mighty lame mote that is.

In addition to Jim McDermott, we have this curiosity:

This week, DeLay told conservative publication Human Events that he is considering filing an ethics complaint against Rep. Cynthia McKinney, D-Ga., for striking a Capitol Police officer.

A mighty kidder, that Tom DeLay. See — it was an ethics complaint by an outgoing Congressman, breaking the unspoken agreement among the parties to not use the Ethics Committee, that brought the John Hefley – chaired committee to admonish DeLay in the first plac e– at which point Hefley was summarily dismissed by DeLay and replaced by … Doc Hastings.

While I cannot condone what Cynthia McKinney did — assuming the worst for her, her case does not fall under the umbrella of Congressional Ethics. Ethics of a sort, I suppose, and the channels that are dealing with her meelee are through the Capitol Hill Police. Congressional Ethics involves the, quote-in-quote “People’s Business”, which is to say Corruption. The tradtional definition of which is, and you only modify it slightly, “use of public means for private gains.” Tom DeLay’s McKinney venture is a portal into his vindictive mind.

I guess there are some 200 other Democrats with trivial infractions that the Ethics Committee can investigate. That Representative Delegate from the Virgin Islands, who is not allowed to vote… maybe someone bribed her to make one of her unlistened to and ignored pitches on behalf of Virgin Island’s Freedom?