In Louisiana the dictatorship already is absolute; Huey controls all three functions of government, executive, legislative, and judicial. Is he resented? Certainly, by some people, just as Hitler and Mussolini are resented by some people in Germany and Italy. But not by all the people one might expect. This was brought home to me here, in a conversation with a young instructor at Louisiana State University. “I am troubled, too,” he admitted. “There are many things he Huey does that I don’t approve of. But on the whole he has done a great deal of good. And if I had to choose between him without democracy and getting back to the old crowd without the good he has done, I should choose Huey. Aftar all, democracy isn’t good if it doesn’t work. Do you really think freedom is so important?”

This was not a German talking to me about Hitler, or an Italian about Mussolini. The argument was the same, the conclusion the same. I have heard scores of such confessons from equally intelligent Germans and Italians. The only new fact was the geography of the conversation. I was walking across the campus of an American university. And here it was I came face to face with the full menace of Huey Long. The man is waiting who is ruthless, ambitious, and indeed plausible enough to Hitlerize America.
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On the other hand, the results of Huey Long’s and Father Coughlin’s electoral venture for 1936 was pretty meager.. So my question of “Why did we not just become like Germany?” remains.

I confess to be utterly fascinated by this book. There’s a degree to which I simply accept the premise: if Fascism were to come to 1930s America, it would come through the political figures profiled. The startling realization is the suggestion that for 1934 and 1935 that the “New Deal has failed”, and now America will turn elsewhere for its salvation. Yes? No?

I can’t say there are any real implications for American politics as of this precise moment. But I have to add, seeing as how I just received a response to this post from December of 2004, and seeing as how the first response takes the suggestion of “assassination” in this thought experiment and goes from Hitler to Bush…

The opinions expressed by people who are not me do not necessary reflect the opinions expressed by people who are me.

I do have the answer to the question I was wondering of why someone asked me for my age. My frame of reference for an example of the “Good Samaritan Law” was the series finale Seinfeld. That doesn’t necessarily explain the second questioning, to a more recent post, asking for my age — though I cannot ascertain whether it is the same person asking. There was this odd moment on, probably a message board, where I mentioned Herbert A Armstrong and the World Church of God, and got a response from someone who was of age in the 1950s, aware enough of my age, asking “Why would you even know this?” The answer was esoteric enough: “through Basil Wolverton”. In the game of Trivial Pursuit — none of the categories stand out as weaker or stronger for me than any other category, I know things that it doesn’t seem I should know, and I don’t know some things that it seems that I should know.

ANYWAY…

I stumbled on — um — Christian(???) — radio yesterday afternoon. It was the end of what was evidentally an — um — enlightening(???) — program.

“If you were to walk up to an average person on the street — say a typical secularist – type, and ask them if they’d like a Demon to possess their body, they would, without fail, say that you’re crazy and give an emphatic ‘no’. (((This makes me wonder if the broadcaster has ever tried this experiment))) But if you asked people if they’d like an Alien to co-habitate their body, you would get more than a few ‘yes’ answers. Not if they knew their bible.”

Because, you see, (and I have heard this before from some fundamentalist Christians of a certain stripe), there are no extraterrestrial aliens, and when they come claiming to be so, they will in fact be demons pretending to be aliens. The suggestion than came on this radio program that the demons are already inhabitating some people’s bodies in the guise of alien co-habitation.

I wish I had had a pen and pad for the next few minutes, to jot down the basic thrust of the individual commercial messages. They made Art Bell’s advertisers look like Life Insurance and Post Cereal ads. Something about exposing the Illuminati. Defeating the Satanic Spirits, who are everywhere. Stuff like that. Oh, and the obligatory “Buy Gold” commercial — melded for the particular programming.

I’m sorry to say the next program was a dullard. I just don’t think local programs connected with local churches have the same fire in the belly.

So, the Capitol Hill Security is trained to recognize all the members of Congress. A member of Congress is allowed to step astride the metal detector, though presumably is required to be wearing this flag-lapel pin that says their name, which presumably was where Cynthia McKinney stepped into it when she opted to bypass the metal detector. What followed was the me-lee, which the security cameras will either exonerate her side of the story– (he hit her?) — or not (unprovoked, she slapped a cell-phone at him) or will be inconclusive.

Honestly, now. She changed her hair-style. She had hairstyle #1 for as long as she’s been in Congress. She switched to hair-style #2. Do those two images look like the same person, conclusively — and keep in mind how many people the security guard has to recognize?

Does race figure into the equation? I don’t know. Theoretically, the security guard sees her and mentally processes his case-load: black — that’s 45 (I think the number is) … women … I don’t know how many black women are in Congress, but however many… And then we hit hair-style: Does… not… compute. What are you supposed to do? We’ll have to get Trent Lott into the equation to figure this out. Have him take off his hair-piece, and by-pass the metal detector. Does he still look like Trent Lott if he doesn’t have that godawful trademark hairpiece?

Additional Note: Notwithstanding McKinney’s noxious grandstanding in the face of having changed her goddamned hair, the Republican-backed resolution “commending Capitol police for professionalism” is deplorable and obnoxious.

Delay Jesus Christ A Star at ‘War on Christians’ conference”

“This is a man that I believe God has appointed,” Scarborough said, a view that might surprise the voters of the 22nd District of Texas. Scarborough, in his introduction, said DeLay Jesus Christ has been “virtually destroyed in the press,” and he urged the crowd to campaign for DeLay Jesus Christ — although he said nonprofit tax rules prevented him from actually “endorsing” DeLay Jesus.
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DeLay Jesus to leave Congress, drop re-election bid

“I did a poll after the primary and it showed I had a 50-50 chance of winning,” DeLay Christ said in a radio interview with Fox News. “I just decided my district deserves better. It would be a very expensive, nasty race … and no guarantee of me winning.”

In an interview on Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson’s 700 Club, DeLay Christ said he had “spent a lot of time praying and fasting” in reaching the decision, which he said would free him to rally support for conservative causes and candidates from outside the House.

“I feel totally at peace. I have a sense of joy about it,” DeLay Christ, dubbed “The Hammer” because of his brass-knuckled political skills, told Robertson. “I’m kind of excited about my future.”
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“Look I’ve had, I’ve hired lawyers to investigate me as if they were prosecuting me,” said DeLay Jesus Christ who will turn 59 on Saturday. “They spent all fall, four months looking at everything I had done over the last 21 years and they have found nothing. We have always tried to be honorable in our service, ethical in our service, and we’ve been passionate about what we believe in, but we’ve never done anything wrong.” […]

“It shows you that the politics of personal destruction and character assassination takes its toll,” he said to ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos. “I’ve been going through this for 10 years, and after 10 years, particularly … being indicted on laws that don’t exist. It takes its toll.”
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It is rather depressing that our political system is set up such that partisan smears can swallow up and spit out upstanding men such as Jesus Christ from serving in public service for our country.

It was previously the case that in order to be considered liberal or “of the Left” one had to subscribe to liberal views. Now, in order to be considered a “liberal”, only one thing is required: a failure to maintain loyalty to George W Bush and/or the Republican Party.

That’s from an article in the latest issue of The American Conservative, a magazine that spends a great deal of its space pondering its role as on the “outs” of the Conservative Movement. There’s a lesson in something, though I do not know what, that the magazine saw fit to run a sympathetic article on George McGovern a few issues back, only three quarters of the way through getting around to sniping a bit at what would be obvious differences in opinion between a Conservative of any stripe and, to paraphrase someone completely different and out of our picture, the “closest thing any major party got to nominating a socialist”. The letters column features a letter from a liberal democrat saying that the magazine can not have it both ways with regard to Hillary Clinton, on one hand being “rightist” and Hawkish, and on the other hand being a left-wing wacko. I think it was inserted there as much as an object lesson in this:

The mindset creates a tribalistic view of politics that leads partisans to advocate contradictory principles depending on what argument happens to best serve their party’s interests at the moment. Republicans maintained that perjury was a grave criminal offense during Bill Clinton’s impeachment proceedings, but following Lewis Libby’s indictment were willing to waive it off. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson called it “some perjury technicality.” Conversely, Democrats who relentlessly argued during the Clinton scandals that perjury was an irrelevant infraction when there is no underlying crime are flamboyantly parading around as crusaders for the rule of law while they call for Libby’s and Karl Rove’s imprisonment.

It is here that I roll my eyes and utter “Give me a break!”, as I do again when the article suggests that liberals get their news from CNN and Conservatives get their news from Fox News — a false comparison that I have seen Bill O’Reilly use to suggest that “we’re all even”. Let me know if you want me to explain the difference between the Clinton case and the case of Libby and Rove. To tell you the truth, though, I sputter Clinton into the past and don’t have the heart to defend him right now… I’m more interested in this paragraph’s implications:

Throughout the Plame investigation, Democrats insisted this investigation was of the utmost seriousness becuase the disclosure of classified information is intolerable — only to decry the Justice Departement’s investigation into the leakers of the classified NSA eavesdropping program. Meanwhile, Republicans demand that the NSA leakers be found and imprisoned while defending Libby’s disclosure of classified information as insignificant and understandable.

The articles’s essential premise is one worth exploring: the tendency of partisans in a two-party system to cling end up with flexible principles in service to the party. But these examples are poor ones. You honor whistleblowers letting out the ugliness of Abuses in Government that are hidden only to increase political power. You do not honor astro-turf whistleblowers– Administration officials letting out information to punish its enemies.

Never mind. It manages to recuse itself a bit thereafter. And, thematically similar, we see a book review of Fred Barnes’s Bush adoration book Rebel in Chief:

The audience for books like Rebel-in-Chief doesn’t hear such news as Zalmay Khalilzad is commenting on. It blocks it out, as it would news emanating from some foreign and ignoble land. That may not matter much — not every citizen needs to be well informed about everything. [[[editorial note: I sort of disagree — but would have to redefine “well – informed” down a bit as well as “everything” down a bit.]]] But Barnes, despite his protestations, is himself a member of the Beltway elite, a top editor at a leading conservative magazine, a veteran TV performer, from a distance at least a sane and likable individual. What does it say about contemporary American politics if he believes basically in the bulk of what he has written here? What does it say if he doesn’t believe it? Neither alternative is especially reassuring.

Very well then.

So the condition in this country today is that the New Deal is not doing what it needed to do, and the fighting spirit is not in it. And in this country there is the rise of great popular unrest and dissatisfactaion. As the New Deal settles down to be nothing but the Old Deal under a new leader, this dissatisfaction will continue to rise. And as it rises, the demagogues rise with it. And as they gain momentum , and their following increases, they will be recognized as the coming force in politics. And the holders of economic power will begin to pay attention to them. And then we may expect to see repeated here the pattern of Germany and Italy, the coalition between the radicals and conservatives in the name of National Unity. Then we shall be told that the trouble in America is that we have too much liberty, too much individualism, too much of everybody trying to outdo everybody else, and that our salvation lies in all pulling together, and particularly in bending our wills to the will of the leader. And a good many people will be ready to throw away their liberties as they toss up their hats. We shall be told then that it is un-American to oppose and to criticize. We shall be told that thte unequal distribution of economic power is part of the American Tradition, just as we already are told that it is against the spirit of the Constitution to advocate economic democracy.

[…] […] […] […] […] […] […] […] […] […] […] […] […] […] […]

The Vatican, one can imagine, is piqued and interesed, and greatly puzzled too [by Father Coughlin.]. The church looks far back in history and can see far ahead into the future. Does it speculate on what will happen if Roosevelt fails? Does it forsee dictatorship in America, and recall the spirit of the Ku Klux Klan and appraise the latent intolerance of the American mob? It may argure that there is something to be said for a priest who would save Catholicism from persecution in a fascist era.

Fascism, then, begins as a radical movement. If one wishes to find evidence of growing fascism in America, one must look first among radical movements, compare their demagouges and their doctrines with the demaguges and doctrines of pre-fascist Europe. That at once rules out, as a real sign of growing fascism, the fascist conspiracy revealed by General Smedley Butler. That conspiracy is diverting, but it is of no great sociological significance. All it proves is what everyone has known all the time, that Wall Street is the asylum of many men utterly ignorant of popular movements, who believe they can organize people as easily as they can a monopoly or a pool. The Wall Street plot was a kind of Hollywood fascism, which was to culminate in a march on Washington, a general at the head of ex-servicemen and a happy Wall Street dictatorship ever after, all of it bought with money. Its authors are to be condoned only insofar as the dramatization of a similar scenario with Thyssen and other German industrialists pulling the strings and paying for the services of Hitler and his storm troopers. What they, and the fabricationsof the Hitler — Thyssen legend, fail to appreciate is that passions and prejudices are essential to revolutions, and passions and prejudices are not attributes to bought as commodities.
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I really can’t quite figure out who wrote this. As far as I can tell, Raymond Gram Swing — but what is this “Julian Messner” references I see — up to and including the copyright to “Julian Messner Inc.” Anyway, it comes from the book Forerunners of American Fascism, published in 1933 and re-published in 1936, and the indica suggests that it’s a reworking and expansion of several articles from The Nation, that venerable institutional magazine of the Left. I was looking for a biography of Father Coughlin. This popped up, it being mostly a selection of profiles of Father Coughlin, Huey Long, Theodore Gilmo Bilbo, Dr. Townsend, and William Hearst — ie: the figures in 1930s America that Left-wing America believed might carry our nation to Fascism… even though the general public, as Norman Thomas puts it:

The average American can’t and won’t at the same time believe that fascism is a capitalist plot, that Smedley Butler turned down a Wall Street invitation to assume a fascist crown, and that Huey Long and Father Coughlin are actual or potential fascists.

Swing’s biases are fairly clear… somewhere in the rise of the proleteriat that is a good thing when it comes, the Fascists will come in and move the proleteriat to a different direction, striking while the iron is hot in siezing control. In consideration of the supposed cluelessness of the Wall Street Bankers in keeping control of the masses, I look around and figure either things have changed mightily, or he’s underestimating the Captains of Industry in shaping American attitudes. I will say that in ascertaining the top-down or bottom-up nature of the rise of fascism… (1) All politicians (and probably all people, come to think of it) are demogogues at some point or other. For instance, Jimmy Carter won his first Gubernatorial race — a primary run-off — by suggesting that his opponent had won the unsavory Black Vote, and by insisting that he would conference with George Wallace (“In Birmingham we have a governor” as the song goes). He has since said that was his great regret in his early political career, but if told that he would either take the principled stand and lose or win as he did, I’m guessing Jimmy Carter would take the latter. (2) Harry Truman attacked the Thomas Dewey campaign with the “Thyssen — Hitler myth” in mind. Hoover’s attack on FDR suggests nothing to do with the masses. (3) In the very next paragraph of this book/essay, Smith seems to say that the New Deal would be Fascist if FDR were fascist. (“I’ve often argured that the New Deal has fascist tendencies in it.”)

I am going to have to check into the New York Times Archives and see precisely how they wrote up Smedley Butler’s (and his foe’s) Congressional Testimony on this supposed coup attempt.