It is my sincere hope, granted its a very faint one, that from the ashes a more classic conservative/libertarian Republican party (as in Ron Paul) will emerge.
It would include many platforms with which the left could agree;
1) Commitment to personal liberty and constitutional rights.
2) Anti-interventionism and th dismantling of global empire.
3) An end to corporatism and “partnerships between government and business.
Of course, some that it can’t;
4) steep reduction in the size of government and its programs including social security and medicare
5) minimization of taxes
But most importantly;
6) An end to central banking and the Federal Reserve system and a return to gold backed currency.
This is difficult to come about. The powers that be would oppose it tooth and nail from both the left and the right. Their first step to stop it would be to assign a false scapegoat (poor people, black and white) in order to misdirect from the real culprit. Federal Reserve fiat money and Corporatism.
P.S. The John Birch society could be an ally rather than an enemy, as Billmon suggests.

Posted by: Lysander | Oct 19 2008 8:08 utc | 4

A little OT but, Sarah Palins appearance on SNL had me a little worried, in that such an appearance might manifest a disconnect in the ongoing mockery by non-mockery of Tina Fey’s rendition of herself. Usually, like McCains re-appearance (after relentless mockery) on the Letterman show, is an attempt to normalize the attacks by contextualizing the humor in order to de-fang it. I figured her appearance would follow that logic as it did when Hillary appeared in tandem with Amy Poehler thereby neutralizing the critique. What happened instead was an amazing further mockery, in that Palin was not given any platform whatsoever to normalize her position, and was reduced even further by seeming to go along with the mockery as a mute cheerleader. While both major female cast members Fey and Poehler walked behind her back without even of a hint of eye contact or acknowledgement. Joe the plumber must be weeping in his bed tonight. At this point I have to wonder, whether Billmons subject of scapegoats might extend to Palin herself. Someone put her up to this, negotiated the parameters of her appearance, and put it into motion. Fools leading fools in a breathtaking sort of way.

Posted by: anna missed | Oct 19 2008 9:26 utc | 6

anna missed assessment of Palin on SNL is very perceptive imo. She does kinda look like the dweeb the cool kids have brought attention to. She goes along with show but I think rather reluctantly as she knows she is being made a fool of.
If she had done the rap Amy Poehler did, she would have brought down the house. was that intentional too?

Posted by: dan of steele | Oct 19 2008 13:06 utc | 8

Lysander @4
Yes, it’s a faint hope but it still can happen. The neocons should have been driven out of the Republican Party long ago, along with their allies in the media. They have done immeasurable harm to the United States and the world. But part of that fault is also the overwhelming ignorance, apathy and noncritical thinking of the average citizen nowadays, and for that reason my hope remains faint.

Posted by: Ensley | Oct 19 2008 13:46 utc | 10

I’m not really into the Sarah Palin debate but something said by Tangerine @9 gave me the heads up. Sarah Palin seems almost too good to be true as a representative of that deeply seated sense of inferiority that many of life’s loser seem to have. George W. Bush may have been a moron to the Eastern Establishment but to the redneck it was: “So, hey, he’s stupid. So, what’s wrong with being stupid. We’re stupid.”
I can recall an American journalist friend telling me that during the Great Depression and right into the Second World War his parents—poor, hard working, honest people—who should have been voting for FDR relentlessly voted Republican because: “Only foreigners and niggers vote Democrat.” Does this ring any bells: people voting in opposition to their own best interests?

Posted by: Spyware | Oct 19 2008 14:25 utc | 12

billmon:
It’s hard to tell to what degree the GOP high command fully understands or is trying to feed these dynamics (indeed, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to even tell who the GOP high command is these days).
The people behind this lunacy do not want to be identified any more than the cowardly doctors, sheriffs, teachers, lawyers, judges … who would don Klan hoods after dark. Its been 40 years & we still do’nt know much of anything about who the key actors were & are behind the “Southern Strategy”. Probably the same group of cowards in each case.
one peculiar feature of the KKK’s history is how they escaped being identified as cowards by their peers in the community. They were identified as racists, evil, white-supremacists … but very rarely as cowards. The Blacks knew they were cowards though and that very few of them had the guts to ride without their hoods.
And this is also to a large part about them trying to get a head-count.

Posted by: jony_b_cool | Oct 19 2008 14:53 utc | 14

An American I met through work in the States back in the 1970’s, had come to know well and so established a close friendship with remained one of my firmest U.S. contacts for years. He was from the state of Maine, had served in the military, went on to take a law degree and then a further qualification as a tax lawyer working for one of the largest firms in Newark, New Jersey. He was an uncompromising Republican and though I an unapologetic Socialist Labour supporter we never fell out on the issue of politics. Back about the time of the lead up to the invasion of Iraq when prime minister Tony Blair made a visit to the U.S. to receive a congressional medal of some sort, he (my friend) ‘phoned me and conveyed his heartfelt gratitude that we in Britain had so courageous and outspoken a leader. I, never being able to resist a jibe, made one or two indiscreet remarks about the moron in the White House. In due course my friend responded by email. The message was just one line. Simple, direct and to the point. It read: “Go f**k yourself.” I never heard from him again.
I think, apart from my friend’s “personality disorder”, this tells me something about the present Republican mentality in the U.S.. Moreover, I think it tells me something about how the present Republican mentality has evolved away from that of Wendell Wilkie, Thomas E. Dewey, Bob Taft and Dwight D. Eisenhower into the vicious, atavistic moral majority of today. But, is there any going back?

Posted by: Spyware | Oct 19 2008 15:29 utc | 16

is neo liberal a so-called liberal?

Posted by: annie | Oct 19 2008 16:53 utc | 18

Spyware: your story rings true with me here in Texas. I lost several friends over the corrupt frat boy in the White House before I finally stopped talking politics with my remaining conservative friends and neighbors.
The thing I don’t get is this: the Germans of 1918 were a martial culture who had lost a war they expected to win, and had suffered great losses not only in terms of material and economic damage but also dead family members and friends and fellow countrymen. So it’s sort of understandable that they would look for scapegoats and come up with a myth to explain why they suffered those losses and didn’t get the expected (entitled? preordained?) outcome.
What have US conservatives suffered? What losses compared to post-WWI Germany? Are their skins so thin, their egos so fragile that a loss at the polls will turn them to fear, hatred and violence? What could possibly justify that? Are they such spoiled, vindictive children that a lost election means that thier fellow Americans are traitors and worse, and justifies anything they say and do to them?
People I’ve known for a decade or more, people I’ve worked side-by-side with through long hours on tough projects, attended their birthday parties, helped them renovate their homes, celebrated their childen’s weddings, invited to barbecues in my back porch, held their hands while they went through divorces, hugged them when their parents died, now won’t speak to me, won’t return calls or emails, won’t wave to me when I see them across the street, because I have an Obama/Biden sign in my front yard. I fear for the next four years.

Posted by: EGrise | Oct 19 2008 17:09 utc | 20

HRC could probably write a book on this stuff. After all she was raised in a conservative Illinois background and her first job was working for Nixon. And she probably gave Bill (JFK-wannabe & likely clueless at the time) the 411 he needed on the “vast right-wing conspiracy” & how it works. Without which he might never have become president. Which is probably why they hate her with such a vengeance for having been the “ultimate traitor”.
interestingly, Obama (another Kennedy groupie) might have gotten a little input on this matter too, not from Michelle, but from his Ma (Phd) & Grandma.

Posted by: jony_b_cool | Oct 19 2008 17:45 utc | 22

Bagnews on the Palin (non) performance on SNL.

Posted by: anna missed | Oct 19 2008 20:01 utc | 24

Johnny B Cool in #14 –
Perhaps the hoods worn by the KKK functioned to protect the identity of the wearers from themselves . There is a certain knowledge that there are things best done not only anonymously from others, but in a type of secrecy from one’s own self.

Posted by: Elie | Oct 19 2008 21:29 utc | 26

The present temperment of our current crop of strange republican neanderthals, can be understood as something like the political hysteria of Southern slaveholders in the years preceeding the Civil War.
I think the underlying cause behind the deeply reactionary reflex of Americans who suddenly disown friends (friends who happen to have put up an Obama banner in the front yard), is similar to the reaction of Southern slave owners of 19th Century America to any political compromise affecting their way of life and worldview. To even admit legitimacy in the worldview of those in the other political camp, is seen as utterly demolishing their own beliefs. Everything they had believed is exposed as bullshit, their cherished beliefs revealed as pure bunk.
Contemporaneous to the political hysteria just prior to the Civil War, was a wave of hysterical religious revivals that swept the South. Later came the Emancipation Proclaimation for the slaves; but the Divine Sanction lived on as Manifest Destiny, America’s Gott Mit Uns.
The exceptionalism with racial overtones and the idea of God’s sanction, and the infantilism that entitles a nation to economic entitlements across the planet, through military violence, is at the root of the present political/religious hysteria.
I wish I could accurately quote Abraham Lincoln on the reactionary attitude of the slaveholding class of his time; but to paraphrase, he said that they were incapable of tolerating a live-and-let-live sort of compromise or polituical accomodation, but rather insisted that one had to surrender, in effect, to the rightness that they beheld in their own conduct.

Posted by: Copeland | Oct 20 2008 0:41 utc | 28

Annie @ 27
I don’t understand this at all. Just because someone says they’re Jewish doesn’t mean they need a rant about AIPAC. Whether you meant to or not, you sound like the kind of person this thread is about when you couch stuff in those terms.

Posted by: Tantalus | Oct 20 2008 11:15 utc | 30

I didn’t find Annie’s post at 27 even marginally off or gasp ‘anti-semitic’?, though i did not capt the refs. to speeches or whatever (the usual BS I suppose.) Maybe I’m not too sensitive to that dimension?
The US elites co-opted the fundie Xtians and fed them stuff about plucky democratic Israel – US hegemony melding with disfigured and misrepresented Zionism watered down to primitive ideological religious terms, bastardized, turned into myth and fairy tale.
Israelis (ppl living in Israel, or in the territories, Jew, or Arab with papers or ‘Palestinian’ or foreign migrant worker, etc.) are of course of no account at all.
The common enemy is labelled in popular discourse as ‘the Arabs’, evil monsters, terrorists, etc. feeding the paranoia of blinded Americans, rendering Zionists gleeful and cheering about how easy it is fool and co-opt Americans and use them, etc.
It is an ugly, vicious, symbiosis, a mutual exploitation and use that is viewed by both parties cynically. (Not the fundie Xtians..) Not favorable, in the long run, either to Americans or Israelis. But then…who is sitting on the resources and controls them? Arabs! (the Iranians are Persians but never mind all that.)
When talk of control arises, it is Americans who rail and mention AIPAC etc. but they never take action. The weaker partner, Israel, is allowed to enjoy delusions of manipulations and control, and to assume the role of righteous innocent in public. It works for both parties.

Posted by: Tangerine | Oct 20 2008 19:06 utc | 32

mandela & carter were clear as day. they have called the state of israel out – unfortunately -their clear exposition was muddied intentionally
tangerine, i never suggested annie was anti semitic – we have known each other for some time now. i remember some time ago trying to write about russia dureing the yeltsin years & the times of the oligarchs & of the russian mafia. the truth being that the oligarchs were almost without exception jewish & who almost without exception live in israel, today. that is also largely too of the russian mafia though there are other ethnicities too. & there are historical reasons for that – of the marginality during soviet times, the place of criminal culture in the soviet union, the myth of th ‘vor’. the principal writer on this khlebnikov was assassinated but he was jewish & made no bones about it. his analysis of berezovsky was magisterial & no one reading that book could ever doubt the criminality of berezovsky & of the other oligarchs. but in the end, how do you write about that without it appearing as anti semitic especially in a culture where anti-semitism has always been a useful political tool
the violence being done to the palestinian people is so unjust, so disproportionate so elementally learnt from nazis that it is almost impossible that the fury against that injustice is not a little poisoned by anti-semitism
but then in france – the israel lobby is very strong too – & any & i mean any criticism of israel is read as anti-semitic & because anti-semitism has deep roots in french culture at every level but especially of the elites- all that the lobby has to do is remind france of its shameful history in this regard
ironically given as celan sd that – death is a german – the most substantive critiques of israel in europe come from germany – critiques that do not have even a hint of anti semitism
what i am saying is that the reality is not complex. what is happening to the palestinian people is wholly unjust. the state of israel’s right to existence is diminished every day that state uses terror against the palestinians. a state that defines itself by its racial character & uses racism as its public & armed policy – questions fundamentally its own right to exist
i have sd it here before but i will say it again – the state of israel desecrates jewish history, it is destroying the present & demolishing any possibility of a hopeful future. much as apartheid south africa was doomed to die – israel, if it does not seek a real peace, a just peace is doomed to go the same way

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Oct 20 2008 21:00 utc | 34

tantalus Just because someone says they’re Jewish doesn’t mean they need a rant about AIPAC.
actually, my rant wasn’t directed at spyware saying he was jewish. it was directed towards his friend’s wife’s relatives comment which i copy/pasted, and his ‘shock’. i must say i don’t have patience for anyone using the term ‘the jews’, and the ridiculousness of the statement the Jews were taking over the world. is to me, completely absurd and anti semite. so maybe i should have made that clearer in my very first comment/question in that post.
to me, it isn’t shocking at all because this is where racism and anti semitism comes from. from ignorant people who take the crimes (or extremism) of a few and try to color an entire group of people w/this wide brush.
r’giap, it is also true that the jewish people have largely taken a central role in resistance movements everywhere
of course, this is why i specifically pointed out jewish voices for peace, a local group who hosts the site muzzlewatch which i have linked to numerous times (also jstreet). one hardly has to dig deep to find multiple references of progressive jews at the forefront of the resistance movement both here and in israel. nor do you have to look far to find jews (many prominent)who are keenly interested in finding political solutions for a palestinian state.
for me i can’t let a statement like that pass unnoticed for the thread, and the very post spyware wrote about the billmons topic authoritarian movements needs scapegoats the way fecal coliform bacteria need a steady supply of raw sewage…..The best scapegoat is one that is both blameless and weak. so who have those scapegoats been in this election? acorn, muslim americans..and spyware suggests ‘the jews’ as part of this fallout . logically it stand to reason in a world w/ ignorant people who paint collective brushstrokes ‘the jews’ aren’t ammune to this in light of current events. yet they are not in the same grouping as the scapegoats we’ve heard about in this campaign, and if they are i have not heard about it.
is it justified, this ‘the jews’ stuff? no, of course not. is it to be expected, does the actions of aipac lead to anti semitism? of course. i think we have all heard the muslim=terrorist meme repeatedly during this election cycle. we’ve certainly been bombarded by the anti acorn anti american stuff. if there has been an equivalency of demonizing ‘the jews’ maybe i have not been paying attention. i would invite anyone to point me in a direction of any mainstream news source or popular blog on the right or the left making the same case against ‘the jews’ during this election by either side.
so i’m sorry if this sounds like a rant to anyone. the idea i mentioned it because spyware said he was jewish is kinda nuts, because anyone reading this site knows i’ve gone off on the neocons and the lobby repeatedly. i suppose we could just leave the topic alone since it’s been covered here before often enough. we could have a ‘don’t go there’ policy regarding aipac. especially in a thread on scapegoating.. i mean how could it be relevant right?

Posted by: annie | Oct 20 2008 21:27 utc | 36

r’giap if she had called him a jew
let’s recall gore’s VP. does anyone recall the hatemongering sprewing from the freepers site going apeshit over him being jewish?
me neither.
when gore ‘lost’ florida does anyone recall ‘that jew’ being blamed?
me neither.
frankly i have no recollection in my political lifetime of ‘the jews’ being singled out in a discriminating fashion and demonized by either of the major political parties (a good thing).
can you imagine the uproar if the bailout vote had been postponed due to ramadan? hellllo. this does not mean anti semitism doesn’t exist in the US. it means, as pertaining to this thread (‘The New Stabbed In the Back Myth’), anti semitism hasn’t been promoted via fear mongering by either campaigns re what does and does not qualify as being american or anti american. in fact, quite the opposite tendency. both parties swear their devotion to israel, with no one being held accountable.

Posted by: annie | Oct 21 2008 1:15 utc | 38

@ rgiap 34
You write

… the myth of th ‘vor’. the principal writer on this khlebnikov was assassinated but he was jewish & made no bones about it. his analysis of berezovsky was magisterial & no one reading that book could ever doubt the criminality of berezovsky & of the other oligarchs. but in the end, how do you write about that without it appearing as anti semitic especially in a culture where anti-semitism has always been a useful political tool

Can you give a reference to the book you cite? (If there is a translation into French or English that would be even better.) At Amazon I find mostly works of Velmir Khlebnikov who is surely not your source, and one by Pyotor Klebnikov, but not regarding the oligarchs.

Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Oct 21 2008 6:47 utc | 40