Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

It was politically befitting that Nixon would join forces with Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who won a surprising re-election by playing the same "red card" beginning with a speech to a Republican group of women in Wheeling, West Virginia in 1950 and declaring that there were numerous Communists working in the U.S. State Department.

As for the actual number, that varied.  Astute journalists like Jack Anderson could not pin McCarthy down.  The number of traitors might have been as high as 350.  Often 300 provided a good round number.  

As for the number that McCarthy and his forces, deemed necessary by so many in the mainstream media for the preservation of the American way of life, actually outed, they ended up with a round figure of zero, a goose egg, but protested every inch of the way that forces bitterly fighting our way of life were preventing good Americans such as himself and his allies from properly doing their job.

The low point of these demagogic exhibitions came when Senator Albert Jenner of Indiana questioned the patriotism of America's most heroic living soldier, General George C. Marshall, who served with great distinction in both world wars and served the Truman administration at different times as secretary of state and secretary of defense.

In those days there was a sane and principled Eastern wing of the Republican Party and jumping to General Marshall's defense by revealing a glowing record of service to America were Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, who would later help bring down McCarthy through a U.S. Senate censure vote, and Senator Leverett Saltonstoll of Massachusetts.  

Even Nixon stepped away from his old friend when he became a liability as censure became political reality for McCarthy, who ultimately died in the hospital after drinking himself to death in a state of paranoia and deep depression, insisting that he was correct and had the Communists' number all along.  Before he died he included Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower on his long and ever expanding list of fantasized traitors.

After the comprehensive Civil Rights Act of 1964 and historic Voting Rights Act of 1965 were passed, President Lyndon Johnson of Texas, who spirited both bills through Congress and signed them into law, correctly predicted that the South would be lost for decades and that Republicans would vigorously seek to exploit the historic change evoked on behalf of African Americans.

Nixon scored a narrow victory over Vice President Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 presidential race by using Henry Kissinger and Anna Chenault as emissaries to destroy a prospective peace treaty with North Vietnam that would have been accorded on the same basic terms as that which would be passed under his stewardship after another 25,000 lives were lost.  

Kissinger admitted at one point that he knew the Vietnam War would never be successful but that it was important to placate the Republican right, and so he felt apprehensive about ending the war.            

The sixties marked the emergence into national politics of Ronald Reagan, who exploited the race card from the beginning.  

Apart from giving speeches to right wing groups arguing against the dangers of Social Security and keeping his anti-Communist credentials active by speaking before Dr. Fred Schwarz's Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, Reagan always saw that he was on the correct side of the divide where race and the Republican right were concerned.

Apart from giving speeches to right wing groups arguing against the dangers of Social Security and keeping his anti-Communist credentials active by speaking before Dr. Fred Schwarz's Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, Reagan always saw that he was on the correct side of the divide where race and the Republican right were concerned.

While revving up in anticipation of his first successful campaign for California Governor in 1966, Reagan took dead aim on the Rumford Fair Housing Act of 1964, which had been passed by the California Legislature.  A citizens group had been quickly formed to repeal the Rumford Act by collecting signatures and putting the measure on the ballot.

Reagan and other supporters of repeal explained, "While it is wrong to discriminate, Americans have the right to discriminate if they wish to do so."

As numerous legal experts predicted, the ballot initiative would pass but the federal courts would declare it unconstitutional in violating laws of Congress deemed constitutional.  The initiative was struck down but Reagan had made an important point when it came to insuring votes from the far right, especially those who believed in discrimination as opposed to those who sought denial of minority rights.  

In the 1964 presidential race forces of Senator Barry Goldwater initiated "Operation Eagle Eye," a direct effort to suppress the votes of African Americans and Hispanics.  

A Democratic polling precinct leader working for President Johnson stated under oath at a hearing prior to voting on William Rehnquist to move from Associate Justice to Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court that the future justice was part of "Operation Eagle Eye" in his then hometown of Phoenix, Arizona and that he had a brief physical confrontation with Rehnquist over his effort in the vote intimidation controversy.

After two terms as governor and one near miss effort to obtain the Republican presidential nomination in 1976, Ronald Reagan was back as his party's nominee in 1980.  When he began his campaign to unseat President Jimmy Carter an interesting choice was made.

Rather than to launch his campaign in a large city of a state with a sizable number of electoral votes, Reagan chose rural Mississippi and the small town of Philadelphia.  While the choice might have seemed obscure to some, Reagan and the strategists that decided to select it knew its significance.  

Philadelphia was the site where some northern civil rights leaders seeking to obtain the vote for African American citizens were brutally slain.  Naturally Reagan chose as his topic "law and order" and mentioned that key phrase many times.

The term "law and order" was, as Republican strategist Lee Atwater later admitted, a code term indicating an ongoing effort to suppress the rights of African Americans.  

Before Nixon resigned in disgrace rather than face a U.S. Senate impeachment trial and removal from office.  In the sixties Nixon used what was termed a "Southern Strategy" in which his political alter ego, Vice President Spiro Agnew, visited that region.  

After "Dixie" was played, Agnew would attack "draft dodgers" going to Canada rather than fight in Vietnam, aim plenty of barbs at the irresponsible left wingers of the northeast, and liberally sprinkle his attack speeches with that famous refrain:  "law and order."

Lee Atwater performed yeoman duty in the 1988 presidential campaign for George H. W. Bush by resorting to fear and loathing of anything Democratic and progressive.

The victim was Bush's opponent, Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts.  The divisive campaign that disgusted millions of voters so much they stayed home featured  attacks regarding African American rapist Willie Horton and regarding the following of 1 1943 U.S. Supreme Court decision affirming that students were protected should they decline saluting the U.S. flag for religious reasons.

Something else that was very ugly also surfaced in that campaign.  A race card was subtly used in which aspersions were cast against "dark people" who seemed outside the Anglo-Saxon American tradition, a deliberate swipe at Michael Dukakis's Greek American heritage and others like them.

While Lee Atwater was dead before the 2000 presidential campaign was launched, Karl Rove, who proclaimed that his political idol was Richard Nixon, directed traffic as a destroy mission was launched against John McCain when it appeared that he might be nominated by Republicans instead of the neoconservatives' presidential favorite, Governor George W. Bush of Texas.

Bush spoke with proud defiance at racist Bob Jones University, talked nostalgically about the confederate flag, while standing by and shrugging as McCain was smeared as someone who had a "black daughter" meaning an adopted daughter from Bangladesh.

McCain was also referred to as insane, and was at one point denounced as a heterosexual libertine and another as a homosexual satyr.  

The strategy worked as Bush won in South Carolina.  

The dynamics of the campaign were dramatically changed, and Bush was ultimately selected chief executive in 2000 by a 1-vote U.S. Supreme Court majority after Bush's brother Jeb and Secretary of State Katherine Harris engaged in a successful effort to suppress African American voters in Florida, which proved to be the key state for George W. Bush in providing for his "victory."

After 9/11 occurred a New McCarthyism was in vogue as Bush and his compatriot Vice President Cheney suppressed Americans from exercising liberties previously assured under the Bill of Rights, never suppressed with mounting evidence developing that they led efforts to torture victims by calling their victims "enemy combatants", clear violations of international law.  

Then, in direct violation of international law, Bush and Cheney launched an aggressive war against Iraq by lying about that nation's possession of "weapons of mass destruction" and falsely asserting that attacking Iraq was part of an effort to engage the terrorists responsible for the 9/11 assaults, when no such evidence has been uncovered.

Meanwhile, if anyone dared ask for an independent investigation of 9/11 to discover what really happened that tragic day or took on an increasingly lawless, fascistic administration over its war and torture policies the response from Bush was clear:

"You are either with us or against us!"

In a showdown Bush uses the same kind of language employed by dictators.  Do not question what I do.  Follow blindly what I do.  If you fail to do this then you are a traitor since you are either with me or against me and there is no ideological terrain lying between the crucial divide.

Now in 2008 we are down to references to "Saddam Hussein Obama" in a neo-McCarthyite effort at triumphing through Islamophobia despite the fact that Obama is not even a Muslim, questioning Obama's patriotism for not placing a flag on his lapel and not putting his hand over his heart while the national anthem is played.

Latterly there was the reference that by saying that you talk with your enemies as well as your friends, which Bush administration operatives did for instance with North Korea, you fall into the category of being an appeaser of terrorism, a modern day version of Neville Chamberlin vis-à-vis Adolf Hitler.

Can anyone be surprised over the latest gutter level attacks, the latest swim in the slime pit?  

The Republican right has spent much, perhaps most, of its time in the past six decades swimming in the slime pit and seeking to hurl that same foul debris at others throughout America to gain and perpetuate political office in the most nauseating way.