William Norman Grigg
The Manufactured Divide
Thu Nov 18, 2004 14:44
64.140.159.209

The Manufactured Divide
by William Norman Grigg

Rhetoric aside, little of substance separated George W. Bush from John Kerry — and a second Bush term will do nothing to reduce the size, expense, and power of government.
http://www.thenewamerican.com/tna/2004/11-29-2004/divide.htm

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CITY OF SAN DIEGO - MAYOR
From SD Registrar of Voters

Last update: 7:59AM Nov.18
Approx. 13,500 Absentee / Provisional ballots still to be counted.
Write-in 156,158 34.51%
Dick Murphy 156,011 34.48%
Ron Roberts 140,338 31.01%
http://www.donnafryeformayor.com/

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November 18, 2004
Unfiltered 11/18/04

TALKING POINT:

If you heard a loud thud around October 14th, that was the sound of the Bush Administration hitting its head on the multi-trillion dollar debt ceiling..

Now, conveniently *after the election, the Bushies and their conservative cohorts in Congress are doing a little remodeling to add a vaulted ceiling.. but this one doesn’t have a sky light or chandelier..

Instead, the new 8 point 2 trillion dollar ceiling is painted with the faces of our children, children’s children and children’s children’s children..

The U-S Senate raised the ceiling to eight point two trillion dollars in a party-line vote yesterday.. and you can expect the House to do the same tonight..

And even the Republicans admit that we’ll have to raise the limit again within a year.

So heads up America.. our country’s credit card is LONG overdue to countries like China, Japan and the UK.. and the so-called conservatives are liberally mortgaging our future.
http://www.unfilteredradio.com/

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Marc Rich (EX-WIFE OF PARDONEE A BIG GIVER [THE WASHINGTON TIMES]
The former wife of Marc Rich, the fugitive commodities trader and tax evader pardoned by President Clinton in his final hours in office, donated more than $1 million to Democratic causes since 1992, including Bill Clinton's and Al Gore's presidential campaigns.
Mr. Rich fled to Switzerland in 1983 after the U.S. government indicted him on 65 counts of tax fraud, racketeering and tax evasion charges that carry a maximum 325 years in jail.
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/clintons.htm

The narrowness of President Bush’s margin of re-election victory over John Kerry vividly illustrates that little of substance separated the candidates from each other. This is further demonstrated by the fact that many voters in key states, such as Ohio, remained undecided literally up to the moment they cast their votes. It’s difficult to believe that so many voters would have suffered such paralyzing indecision had Bush and Kerry presented starkly defined alternatives.

The Economist of Great Britain tidily summarized the election as a contest between “incompetence” and “incoherence.” The noteworthy differences between the major candidates could be reduced to caricature: one candidate couldn’t carry on a simple conversation in recognizable English without the aid of cue cards; the other couldn’t decide on a dinner entree without commissioning a poll and would then change his mind before the appetizer was served. But each of them was a New England-born product of exclusive prep schools, Harvard and Yale, and the elitist secret society Skull and Bones. And both were surrounded by a retinue of advisers drawn from the Council on Foreign Relations (to which Senator Kerry belongs).

In a very real sense, the only significant distinction between Bush and Kerry is one of marketing: Mr. Bush was packaged as a champion of Middle American values, while Senator Kerry was pitched to the public as the voice of cosmopolitan moderation. As the New York Times noted in a post-election analysis, Bush’s re-election offered “the clearest confirmation yet that this is a center-right country.... [F]ully one-fifth of voters said they cared most about ‘moral values’ — as many as cared about terrorism and the economy — and 8 in 10 of them chose Mr. Bush.”

According to conservative political commentator Robert Novak, the Bush re-election illustrates that the Democratic Party is “out of touch with the country on social issues, the role of government and the war against terrorism.... [T]he anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, socially conservative agenda is ascendant, and the GOP will not abandon it any time soon.” Approaching the matter from a different direction, liberal New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman offered a similar assessment, concluding that Mr. Bush’s re-election resulted from “an outpouring of support … by people who don’t just favor different policies than I do — they favor a whole different kind of America.”

Ironically, Friedman’s lamentation provided the most crucial insight into the most recent election. “It seemed as if people were not voting on [Mr. Bush’s] performance,” observed the Times columnist. “It seemed as if they were voting for what team they were on.”

Friedman’s analogy works, up to a point. Contending teams in sporting events, after all, don’t compete to define the nature and rules of the game; rather, each of them tries to beat the other in achieving the same objective. As has been the case for decades, during the 2004 presidential election, the major party candidates competed for the privilege of implementing an agenda defined by the ruling Establishment — which was itself the true victor in the contest.

Georgetown historian Carroll Quigley, an academic mentor of Bill Clinton, was a key chronicler of the emergence of the Power Elite and an astute student of its methods. He famously described the Establishment’s political game plan in his 1966 book Tragedy and Hope:

The chief problem of American political life for a long time has been how to make the two [major] parties more national and international. The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can “throw the rascals out” at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy.... [E]ither party in office becomes in time corrupt, tired, unenterprising, and vigorless. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of those things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies.
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http://www.thenewamerican.com/tna/2004/11-29-2004/divide.htm