Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

Such activity might well induce a fatal dose of Oxycontin with Rush Limbaugh and ultimately send the already overwrought Bill O'Reilly over the edge with a deadly stroke.  Meanwhile the word "traitor" would abound in right wing circles with the vicious relentlessness of a team of enraged pit bulls.

All we need to do is reverse the party label to the self-professed anti-Communist right and we see that the above-rendered hypothetical has achieved ultimate reality.  

It was Nixon, who launched his political career in the House and Senate by tarnishing his opponents with the "red" label and, with smear artist senatorial cohorts McCarthy of Wisconsin and Albert Jenner of Indiana, questioned the loyalty of General George W. Marshall, a major architect for the Allied victory of World War Two, for "the surrender of China".

Nixon carried right wing paranoia to the ultimate extreme while viciously bombing North Vietnam and Cambodia with arsenals that exceeded the tonnage dropped on America's enemies during World War Two, because it was essential to spare Americans from an invasion by the forces of Asian Communism.

Meanwhile, as the vicious bombing of Vietnam and Cambodia continued after Nixon as a Republican presidential nominee in 1968 along with Henry Kissinger sabotaged peace talks President Lyndon Johnson was holding with North Vietnam, a contradictory strategy was unfolding.

Nixon along with Secretary of State Kissinger ballyhooed as essential and a great step toward progress a trip to Communist China achieved through virtually going to its leaders, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, on bended knee.  

While this assessment might sound harsh, consider that the Communist Chinese, after providing no fanfare or publicity for the meetings, which the U.S. media advertised heavily, gained a major concession from the United States.

While China sent some panda bears to Washington that could frolic on the White House lawn the team of Mao and Zhou insisted that the U.S. terminate favored nation trading status with Taiwan.

This was the same regime that, as Nationalist China, had ruled the nation during the period when Nixon, McCarthy and others on the Republican right proclaimed that the Nationalists had been "betrayed" by then Secretary of State Marshall and the Truman Administration.

The meetings and agreements it produced occurred while Nixon continued pummeling a smaller Communist nation amid the frantic cry that America's way of life was threatened by the aggressive designs of North Vietnam.  

It was clear that the team of Mao and Zhou was in charge as Nixon's motorcade was photographed on Communist China television sharing space with bike riders trekking home at the conclusion of their work day.

What Nixon and Kissinger were not telling their country folk was that with China's billion plus population there were all kinds of consumer business to be transacted.  

In fact, a leading personage directing Nixon toward establishing relations with Communism's largest regime was his former law school friend at Duke University, Donald Kendall, then head of Pepsi Cola.

Nixon on a later trip joined Mao Zedong's widow at a ballet where the Communist Chinese song "Liberate Taiwan" was played.  What would have happened had this occurred with a liberal Democrat in office?

The Red Chinese fared so well with Nixon that he made periodic forays there extending to shortly before his 1994 death.  Despite the widely heralded student protests against the regime, Nixon offered a "stay the course" position of doing business as usual.  

The pattern of right wing Republican hypocrisy continues to the present, and has been pushed into high gear by the neocons of the Bush-Cheney administration.  

The administration that has virtually bankrupted America by mixing tax cuts for the rich with a New World Order rush to empire war in Iraq and a resulting $9 trillion plus debt has received economic assistance in large doses from Communist China.

Wasn't it Ronald Reagan who denounced World Communism as the Empire of Evil?  

On the Sunday, April 6 edition of CBS' 60 Minutes, Lesley Stahl interviewed Gao Xiging of China Investment Corporation.

Gao came to the U.S. from Communist China to attend Duke Law School, where Nixon had earlier attended, then went to work for Nixon's law firm in New York.  When Stahl asked Gao how much he had to invest with China Investment's fund he replied coolly, "$200 billion."

Last year Geo decided to pour some of those billions into investment houses on Wall Street.  His latest economic foray has been to buy over $100 million of shares in Visa.  

While China has purchased bonds to help push the U.S. through its advancing economic crisis under the ostensibly anti-Communist right wing neoconservative regime of Bush and Cheney, understandable skeptics such as economist Peter Navarro have emerged.

Navarro told Lesley Stahl "that China has over $1.5 trillion in reserves, the world's largest currency surplus: and it's growing by $1 billion a day."

Economist Navarro then revealed a grim warning:

"China has so much money that they can spend buying U.S. companies that the danger is that they can strip these companies.  They can strip the companies of jobs, research and development, technology."

Navarro explains the perceived threat as "not a clear and present danger" but "a clear and future danger."

Tell us, loyal followers of Ronald Reagan, anti-Communists all!  

Do you think that if Communist China holds sufficient economic control over the U.S. that it might go for "Capitalist America's" jugular?

Remember, you are the ones who shouted from the rooftops that Communists could not be trusted under any circumstances!  It was your great hero who coined the term Empire of Evil!

Remember?