The Apparat: George W. Bush's Back-Door Political Machine

The Apparat

George W. Bush's back-door
political machine

It's anti-democratic, anti-Constitutional, and is working to create a one-party America

© 2004 by Jerry M. Landay
for Mediatransparency.org

POSTED MARCH 18, 2004 --

<snip>

From his perch at the Free Congress Foundation, Paul Weyrich, a Glassman ally and senior member of the radical right's influence machine, was warning followers against the "little-known" anti-Bush coalition aided by Soros. The website GOPUSA.com, was swiveling its polemical sights from a faltering Howard Dean to Soros, describing him, a Jew, as "a descendant of Shylock."

Soros and his recipients -- including Americans Coming Together, MoveOn.org, and the newly established liberal think tank, the Center for American Progress -- are no match, in terms of dollars or mass, for the vast alliance spearheaded by the cohort.

Americans are familiar with some of the names, if not the background, of the cohort's leading members -- the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Manhattan Institute, the Hudson Institute, the Hoover Institution, the Federalist Society, the Reason Foundation, Citizens for a Sound Economy, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and the National Association of Scholars, to name just a few.

According to columnist/broadcaster Laura Flanders, right-wing ideologues have been setting up their own, extensive, tax-exempt front groups for years. Their purpose is to influence public opinion to aggressively push GOP rhetoric, candidates and issues.

This network labored to defeat President Clinton's health plan, and later worked to impeach and remove him from office. They "stirred the scandal pot," says Flanders, "to turn the public against policies and social trends they opposed." With the onset of the 2004 presidential campaign, this machine is back in the scandal business on behalf of the Republican nominee.

Source: Media Transparency

It is a complete roadmap of our enemies and their dirty ways.

A MUST READ.

I'll give it a read.


:toast:

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20 minutes doesn't even do it justice, but it is very informative.

I am surprised to see no mention of WHIG, the group created as sort of a "sales team" to sell the Iraq war. The White House Iraq Group seems to have slipped under the radar of most media - I have no idea how I stumbled across it.

Educating the Public

Systematic coordination began in August, when Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. formed the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, to set strategy for each stage of the confrontation with Baghdad. A senior official who participated in its work called it "an internal working group, like many formed for priority issues, to make sure each part of the White House was fulfilling its responsibilities."

In an interview with the New York Times published Sept. 6, Card did not mention the WHIG but hinted at its mission. "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August," he said.

The group met weekly in the Situation Room. Among the regular participants were Karl Rove, the president's senior political adviser; communications strategists Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin and James R. Wilkinson; legislative liaison Nicholas E. Calio; and policy advisers led by Rice and her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, along with I. Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff.

The first days of September would bring some of the most important decisions of the prewar period: what to demand of the United Nations in the president's Sept. 12 address to the General Assembly, when to take the issue to Congress, and how to frame the conflict with Iraq in the midterm election campaign that began in earnest after Labor Day.

A "strategic communications" task force under the WHIG began to plan speeches and white papers. There were many themes in the coming weeks, but Iraq's nuclear menace was among the most prominent.

/snip/


I would post more, but there are restrictions here I try to stay inside of. it really DOES piss me off though when "paragraphs " contain only one sentence - oh well

OH, and the inferences of that particular name for the "group" creating the acronym "whig" didn't escape me

BUT, I don't think that they checked the dictionary for the definition before they did so. I did, and one of the definitions is dead-on accurate in describing the Republican Party as it exists today, especially the last 5 words.

WHIG: A 19th-century American political party formed to oppose the Democratic Party and favoring high tariffs and a loose interpretation of the Constitution.

I'm not as polite as the dictionary.

The US Administration is blatantly twisting, ignoring, and raping the Constitution whenever they feel like it. And that appears to be 24/7.

Political commentator David Gergen has noted that the integrated propaganda organs of the far right have created "a new politics in America," with its "ability to mobilize and interact with core constituencies on issues ranging from immigration to tax policy to welfare reform."

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=1254363&mesg_id=1254363

must say I'm amazed at the seeming lack of interest in either of these threads . . . maybe it's the length of the article, and folks just haven't had time to read it yet . . . but this is really important information to know and to pass on to others . . . hope the discussions pick up over the weekend . . .

sounds like a great Sunday morning coffee read. :thumbsup:

like me?

The article seems to go over the edge when it says:

Many of these intellectuals were defectors from Communism, disillusioned by the excesses of the system, their personal quest for status and power unrequited. They were joined by disaffected liberals, ambitious operatives hungry for the power to make things happen. Both were familiar with the byzantine state machinery that ran the former Soviet Union.

The author doesn't name anyone that was a defector from communism. :wtf: It destroys the credibility of the whole article right there.

I would have liked it if the focus stayed on the various political organizations and the money and then talked about their exact tax status/FEC status. Right now we need to refute this attack on Moveon.org and this article started that way and then went into :tinfoilhat: land.

do a Google and find out the countries they or their parents came from.

Then you will see the communist ties. Seriously. Communism was very popular with the left here in the 1930's. Many intellectuals were involved with it in the University and Intellectual circles. Most of the people he mentions in the think tanks and the newpaper world had parents who were part of that group. Many like Kissinger had lived under Communism. Some under Nazism. (different political philosophies, but you can see the effects in the way they operate.)

It's an excellent article. A must read for anyone who can't understand how we got this way after a stolen election.

http://www.socialdemocrats.org/

Neither Socialist nor Democratic, this was the think tank that gravitated towards the late Scoop Jackson. It was chaired by that notorious Nazi Jeanne Kirkpatrick in the 80s. Look at the site and you will see the usual suspects who are busy plotting to overthrow the Constitution along with their Nazi Republican allies!

But it is true that many neo-cons have their roots in communist/socialist movements of earlier times. I don't believe this is classic red-baiting, because this is an element of the left that has moved closer and closer to the right, not the progressive left we associate with Democrats. I do understand this is a disconcerting angle of view for Americans, but the comparison between the neo-con/far right combo structure being similar to the Soviet apparat plays for me. This is Hillary's vast right wing conspiracy. This is what we are fighting. There are people on the left or who were on the left that are collaborators in this travesty.

I would have liked to see the article justify that like you both have. But it depends on who the article was meant for too, consider my criticism lessened. I am only somewhat familiar with the history of Kristol, and not familiar with Kissinger's family history at all.


:toast:

http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/News/Trifkovic/NewsST072303.html

"The neoconservatives are often depicted as former Trotskyites who have morphed into a new, closely related life form. It is pointed out that many early neocons—including The Public Interest founder Irving Kristol and coeditor Nathan Glazer, Sidney Hook, and Albert Wohlstetter—belonged to the anti-Stalinist far left in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and that their successors, including Joshua Muravchik, and Carl Gershman, came to neoconservatism through the Socialist Party at a time when it was Trotskyite in outlook and politics. As early as 1963 Richard Hofstadter commented on the progression of many ex-Communists from the paranoid left to the paranoid right, clinging all the while to the fundamentally Manichean psychology that underlies both."

Although long, it is brilliantly done piece on how the vast right wing conspiracy operates.

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Whether government runs business (far left) or business runs government(far right) is irrelevant when the same people run them both.
This is why extremists seem to switch 'sides' so easily.