The Big Conservative Lie

After George W. Bush won in 2004, I was dumbfounded. Literally, I was unable to express my anger, disbelief and frustration with the voting public. I wasn’t sure if I was more concerned about living through another four years of this disastrous administration, or having to live among a population that was short-sighted enough to elect this man again. I believe I would have voted for just about anyone other than Bush and Cheney. Actually, I might have voted for a chimp. By the law of averages, the chimp would have made the right decision at least 40% of the time. Furthermore, everyone I knew felt just about the same way.

I had just gotten back from a little over a year in Iraq, and I knew perhaps better than others about the great lies that led us there. I was the Public Affairs Officer for a major command in charge of a large portion of Iraq, which included the better part of the “Sunni Triangle”. I sat in on meetings with most of the major players of both the American forces and the Iraqi peoples. I knew, for instance, that nobody, and I mean nobody, took seriously the “search” for weapons of mass destruction. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, our command didn’t search at all for WMD. Tips we got from Iraqis about the possible location of such weapons went largely ignored. Command meetings discussing the day to day activities and progress of the command, never included discussions about WMD. Ah, good times.

By the time I returned home, bitter and dejected, it seemed the rest of the country was also beginning to demand answers for why we had yet to uncover any WMD, any evidence, in fact, that the Hussein regime even had a WMD program. And so the election results of 2004 came as a great, disheartening and unpleasant surprise.

After an appropriate mourning period, I began to ask how this atrocity had occurred. How the American people had been duped a second time by this snake oil salesman from Texas? How could so many people still believe that Iraq had something to do with the terror attacks of September 11, 2001? How could so many people not understand that giving every American $800 during the worst budget deficit in American history was simply buying votes, with your own money no less? How could so many middle and lower economic class Americans vote against their own interests? How could anyone believe a multi-billionaire oil man was deregulating and “detaxing” huge corporations in the best interests of the working class?

And despite historical evidence screaming against it, we voted Reagan into office twice and the same with G.W. To me it defied logic and common sense. What the hell is wrong with the American population?

I asked. I asked a lot. I asked everyone I knew and many people I didn’t know. The answer that I got most often that made any amount of sense was moral and social issues such as abortion and gun control.

Sure, a lot of dupes gave economic reasons, but that could only be because they were in fact dupes and had no notion of the history of the Republican and conservative historic romance with big business, which has NEVER helped middle class America. I don’t just say these things; they are facts – all there to be discovered by anyone smart enough to read.

So, I’m left with pro-life, pro-gun, anti-evolution, pro-school prayer issues. Oh yeah, and one HUGE LIE.

I began to look into this. Despite having won 5 of the last 7 presidential elections (excluding the current Obama administration), the conservatives that working class America have put into office haven’t really done a damn thing about the issues they claim to care so much about. G.W. had the House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court in his back pocket, and still made no changes to Roe v. Wade, gun control laws, or reintroduced prayer in public schools. And this does not take into account the fact that, while the Clinton White House was liberal on these social issues, it was more fiscally conservative than Reagan or either of the Bushes.

What they have done, however, is deregulate big business, cut the taxes of the richest Americans, pull the carpet out from under organized labor, castrated government agencies that protect workers and the poor and run the economies of the nation and many hard working families into the ground. And while they have been pissing on our collective leg, we are being told over and over and over again that it’s the rain of free market capitalism we feel. That these warm nourishing drops of golden nectar are fertilizing the soil of our economy by allowing big business to be free of regulation, free to earn more money which will allow them to be free to create more jobs. Really? I mean REALLY? Well, where are they? Wages have been dropping in real dollars for years. Job creation, (which by the way, GW was the first president in history to have a NEGATIVE job growth statistic) when there has been any, has been mostly in the service area (There are only so many McDonalds our country can support).

I saw a glimmer of hope when President Obama rolled over the Republican Party. But only a year later, most voters have lost the faith. Partly because he hasn’t yet miraculously put to right the financial mess that George W. took eight years to create (to be fair, conservatives had been bringing it to a boil for years before “The Decider” took the oath). But beyond not being able to perform miracles, and I believe more to the point, conservatives continue to lie! And many many Americans continue to believe it.

Every week I’m going to address those lies. Not the nitpicky little lies that politicians tell every day (though I’ll do that too, because it’s fun), but the ones that really have so many people voting their own families into foreclosures and community pantries at the local churches. I’m also going to suggest some books, movies and other media, along with my honest review of each. And some other fun stuff.

Like it? Good, give me some feedback and suggestions. Hate it? Bugger off! No, really. But maybe before you go, do some honest research about the topics I broach. You might be surprised. By the way, honest research does not include asking Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Fred Thompson or Glenn Beck how they feel about it.

In the mean time, check out this book:

“What’s the Matter with Kansas?” by Thomas Frank. Mr. Frank does a thorough job of examining just the lies I’ve been talking about today, which makes it an excellent recommendation for this week. The book can be a little dry, but that lends it a more credible voice. The research for the book was extensive and the author attributes all the facts and claims to unquestionable sources.

[Via http://theconservativelie.wordpress.com]