They Are Not Serious People

People of a certain age may remember the organization that got us into a war with Saddam Hussein and Iraq: The Project for the New American Century, “PNAC‚” for short. It was a neoconservative think tank in Washington, D.C. that envisioned the coming 21^st century to be a new era controlled and directed on a global scale by the U.S. of A.

They didn’t try to mask it in any cryptic lingo, they just came right out and said, “… to promote American global leadership.” And “American leadership is good both for America and for the world,”

PNAC was founded by famous — or infamous — columnist and TV talking head William Kristol and administrative consultant, for both sides of the political aisle, Robert Kagan, who is a poster child for Ivy League elites. He graduated from Yale, Harvard and American universities. In 2016 Kagan actually left the GOP when Donald Trump was chosen as the party’s presidential nominee. He voted for Hillary Clinton.

At any rate Kristol, himself a Harvard grad, and Kagan founded PNAC and began organizing to take control of the U.S. government and, among other things, wait for a catastrophic event as an excuse to start a war with Iraq and move Hussein out and have a puppet of their choosing installed as the new Iraqi leader.

It didn’t quite turn out the way they had envisioned.

There were 25 signers of the new organization, 10 of whom found their way into the Bush (43) Administration. Dick Cheney as V.P., Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense — the administration’s fall guy when the Iraq War, which “Rummy” said would not last more than six months but was still going by the 2006 midterm elections. Still going, but bloodier and filled with many scandals, including the Abu Ghraib torture scandal that was splattered all of the TV, newspapers and websites — around the world — with gruesome photos  of Iraqi prisoners being abused by men and women guards alike.

There was a fall guy in the Abu Ghraib scandal too, a woman, Brigadier General Janis Karpinksi, who was the commander at Abu Ghraib.

The real masterminds of the Abu Ghraib criminality, beginning with President George W. Bush and V.P. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and the guy who wrote the so-called “torture memo,” John Yoo, who was the Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Bush Administration, the stink of Abu Ghraib didn’t sully their shoes, hell no. The people in the CIA who over saw the torture at Abu Ghraib didn’t suffer any consequences either. Just Brig. Gen Karpinski and the men and women who actually participated in the physical, mental, sexual and emotional torture were court martialed and spent time in prison.

All of those people deserved what they got, but so many other guilty parties suffered no consequences.

Just like I wrote in my last post, this is a sweater with loose threads: you pull one and a half dozen more appear.

PNAC dissolved in 2007, having failed in their goals, stated in 1997 when the group started, with catastrophic consequences for the entire Middle East as well as the U.S. and Great Britain and really, on a global scale.

Jumping ahead to the present day …

One of the many so-called conservative groups I subscribe to is the Heritage Foundation. They send at least one email every day. The foundation was created in February 1973 and played a very influential role in the Ronald Reagan Administration. It has been a big influence on the GOP ever since. It should be no surprise Heritage is anti-everything good about life. Anti-trans, anti-critical race theory, anti-Ukraine and claims Black Lives Matter is a Marxist group.

They also promoted the Big Lie about the 2020 general election, that it has been stolen from Trump. One name that we should take note of in that regard is Hans von Spakovsky. He heads the foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative, which basically looks for ways to stop otherwise eligible voters from exercising their franchise.

In 2021 they set out to restrict voting even more than it already was in eight critical swing states, based on the lies that there was wide spread voter fraud in the 2020 election. Even though the lies have been thoroughly discredited by legitimate watchdog groups and the courts, 60 of whom rejected in one fashion or another the big lies perpetrated by Trump and his lackeys in the GOP.

The Heritage Foundation — promoting everything that makes “conservatives” and the Grand Old Party racist and anti-Semitic — and misogynist and xenophobic and anti-science and pro-autocratic and tyrannical government — with Trump leading the dictatorship.

That is the state of the Republican Party today. If Abraham Lincoln were still alive and in the GOP, a majority of the party would label him a RINO … or worse.

The Heritage Foundation and other MAGA Cult-related groups appear to be having success spreading some influence among U.S. voters. So far they have been able to create a false equivalency between Hunter Biden’s legal issues and all 91 charges against the ex-president and his confederates who have now been indicted.

The Mac Book Pro (laptop) that is alleged to have belonged to Hunter Biden has not proven to be a source of legal concern, but the persistence of right wing nut bars in Congress and in the right wing media makes it appear what is on that laptop will bring down the Joe Biden Administration. Of course that’s bullshit.

The crimes H. Biden is alleged to have committed include owning a firearm while an active drug addict and two counts of tax evasion. Obviously they don’t measure up to Seditious Conspiracy, or physically attacking law enforcement or Obstruction of Congress — all of which have been charged on participants of the mob that invaded the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. And many of the people indicted on those crimes were convicted. Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was given 22 years for his crimes related to the January 6, 2021 crimes. The leader of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, got 18 years.

It’s troubling to see so many Americans who are either undecided or leaning to — or positively supporting — the ex-president. That could be a topic for another post.

What got me started on this a few days ago was an email from the Heritage Foundation promoting their latest project, with coalition partners, the 2025 Project. The first three paragraphs of the message:

“Did you hear some of the republican candidates pledge to dismantle the administrative state on Wednesday? Luckily, Heritage has a plan for how to do it.
Over the past few weeks, 27 different media outlets published articles on Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led initiative together with 70 other coalition partners to prepare the next conservative administration for success.
This is important because even if a conservative occupies the White House in 2025, you and I still face an uphill battle against the administrative state.”

So I clicked on the link to read more. Dear God, these people are going full on anti-Constitution, pushing Christian Nationalism, and replacing up to 50,000 federal government employees with Trump-loving MAGA Cult members. It took just a couple seconds for me to understand, the term “administrative state” is just another way of saying “deep state,” and “Christian Nationalism” is “White Nationalism.”

The first revelation that is shockingly out in the open: The Heritage Foundation has embraced and is now promoting outlandish conspiracy theories. It is their belief that Donald Trump’s agenda — the Heritage Foundation agenda — was thwarted by career bureaucrats, aka the “deep state,” intent on creating the New World Order former president George H.W. Bush talked about in his 1991 State of the Union Address.

The second revelation that is shockingly out in the open: They want to dump our democracy in favor of an autocracy, and quite possibly a mix between the autocracy and a theocracy. They want to ban abortion completely, stop the so-called “woke” policies in the military, end diversity, equity and inclusion policies,

The Heritage Foundation and their confederates want to make it easier to fire federal employees and of course they want a complete overhaul of the Justice Department and the FBI.

In short the so-called conservatives want to do what authoritarian regimes have been doing for hundreds of years: purge everyone from government they suspect of being against them, in this case Democrats and progressives, and replace them with people that are loyal to their leader and party, not the Constitution.

The information is out there, in public view, but many Americans are notoriously uninterested in the mind-numbing details of our government. We fall prey to idiotic sound bites that are false notions about patriotism, and the American Way.

One of the most insidious customs we have is the playing of the National Anthem before every sporting event and the unwritten rule that we must all stand and put our hands over our hearts, the civilian salute, and pay homage to the military-industrial complex. Don’t be fooled. We are not paying homage to the men and women that are on the frontlines of all our armed conflicts, we are saluting the war machine that employs them.

It made me think of the Black Sabbath classic, “War Pigs.”
Generals gathered in their masses
just like witches at black masses
Evil minds that plot destruction
Sorcerer of death’s construction
In the fields, the bodies burning
As the war machine keeps turning
Death and hatred to mankind
Poisoning their brainwashed minds
Oh lord, yeah!”

I’ve always been of the mind that the moral center of our nation is freedom. Freedom to either stand for the National Anthem, or sit, or go get a beer and hot dog. If we are required to do one or the other, that’s chipping away at our freedom. Taking away women’s bodily autonomy is chipping away at their freedom — and everyone else’s freedom.

One of Project 2025 core tenets is making the U.S. a Christian theocracy. The Heritage Foundation wants to protect our God-given rights from what they call the “woke” threat. No one explains what the term “woke” means, but the right wants to make sure it sounds sinister.

They also want to do away with D.E.I. — Diversity, Equity and Inclusiveness. What is wrong with diversity, equity or inclusiveness? If there was one policy of the U.S. that made this nation stand out from the rest it is, collectively, diversity, equity and inclusiveness. We have never been perfect regarding those ideals, but over the years we have made progress to become fully diverse, with equality and inclusiveness for all Americans.

The people represented by the Project 2025 cabal, far right extremists, do not want equality, inclusion or diversity. They want to be a white Christian version of Iran and Afghanistan.

One of the news programs just showed a poll about the 2024 presidential race in which President Joe Biden and Trump are in a dead heat. Even more crazy is that a number of people in the GOP primaries poll better than Biden, based primarily on Biden’s age.

Americans often vote in reaction to meaningless sound bites and the kvetching of loud and misleading talking heads. The Democrat-supporting talking heads talk to each other about the successes of the Democrats and President Biden, but they fail to direct that commentary towards voters, in particular the ever-shrinking group of moderate voters who will most likely be the deciding factor in the 2024 elections.

The Inflation Reduction Act, which has helped lower inflation, is an infrastructure bill that pumps money into green energy projects to help combat climate change. This was after Biden’s Build Back Better Act, which is an infrastructure bill. Bridges, roads and other infrastructure is getting repaired or built.

We could all go on a rant about what hasn’t been accomplished yet, but we are about 14 months away from the 2024 general election. This bugs me: the lefties are not going after the realities of the contestants in the 2024 GOP primaries, almost all of whom say they would pardon Donald J. Trump if they were elected. And all but two of them are hostile to law enforcement and the military.

One good sign: progressive Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has endorsed the Biden/Harris ticket and as we get closer to that election we can expect more Democrats will come out and do the same.

Dr. Cornell West was cool when he showed up in two of the Matrix films, but now he has decided to run for president as the Green Party candidate. That’s uncool. Most Democrat voters agree with West’s policy ideas, but the vast majority of Democrats will not vote for him. All he can accomplish as a candidate is weaken Biden’s support.

From PNAC, to the Tea Party to the Freedom Caucus mixed with the Heritage Foundation, the extremists on the right have been cultivating the support of gullible voters who consistently vote against their best interest, motivated by meaningless culture war ideas, the politics of grievance and fear.

Donald J. Trump is their personal Jesus, in a collective sense, buoyed by the all too real endorsement of very vocal, out in the open, unrepentant bigotry — racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, anti-trans, anti-science, and now anti-law enforcement and anti-military …

There was a time I would cringe when Republicans would claim to be the party supporting the military, mainly because the Democrats did little to refute the claims. Now, the GOP supports Senator Tommy Tuberville, the former football coach who hasn’t a clue about national security or defense, in his blocking of more than 300 senior military promotions is putting the country at risk.

So, the GOP is anti-military. It took Trump’s Big Lie, the ongoing whitewash of January 6, 2021 to prove to us the GOP is anti-law enforcement. How will we remember the horror that is Project 2025? If it follows the example of PNAC it will fade from memory, forgotten by most people. There will be distractions upon distractions, like the House GOP trying to impeach Joe Biden for winning the presidential election of 2020.

Reminding me, once again, the words of Logan Roy, played by Brian Cox, from the HBO series Succession, “You are not serious people.” I think a majority of voters are beginning to agree.