By Steven Jonas
"If this nation doesn't kill racism, racism will kill this nation." (Steven Jonas, August, 2018)
Introduction
In the light of the publication of Jane
Mayer's very important article, "The Making of the Fox News White House"
in The New Yorker, I thought that it might be useful to revisit a column
that I published on the same subject in the former on-line news-magazine
BuzzFlash. (Founded by my friend Mark
Karlin in 2001, it was one of the earliest journals of its kind.) The column is focused on both the then in-formation
"Tea Party" and the role of what I then called the Fox "News" Channel in making
it a political reality. The Fox"News"
role in promoting the Far Right hasn't changed.
(Actually, with Fox' strong assistance, there is no other "Right" in the
U.S.) In fact, Jane Mayer shows us how Fox'
role has gotten more intense.
Also, Republican politics haven't changed
much. Driven by what I for years have
called the Right-Wing
Imperative, it has just continued to go further in that
direction. For the most part, Trump himself
has just gotten rid of the dog-whistles. That is important to be reminded of as
Trump is confronted and the battle against him and what
he stands for becomes evermore intense. And after all, two of the leaders of the
original "Tea Party" (see just below, now called the buffed up "Freedom Caucus")
occupy key positions (for which they are uniquely unqualified) in the Trump Administration:
Mike Pompeo at State and Mick Mulvaney, Budget Director and also Acting Chief
of Staff.
The original column, entitled "Death and Taxes," was published towards the end of April, 2009. Since some time ago BuzzFlash changed its URL system and I don't have the updated one for my column, I cannot find it on-line. But trust me, it was there. I wrote it in early 2009, as the Republican to-be-unaltering opposition to the Presidency of Barack Obama was beginning to take shape. And the Repubs. now complain about Democratic opposition to Trump. Oh my. How soon so many folks forget. And so, for a reminder, a bit edited here and there, here goes.
Oh
those "tea parties." They just go to show you how much publicity you
can get for a cause that troubles not very many people when you've got a
powerful Privatized Ministry of Propaganda behind you. And boy, was the Fox
"News" Channel there for several weeks running up to the event. They
ran both paid and unpaid ads for it incessantly. The main line? The Republican
mantra that has been tried-and-true since the time it first worked in the
battle over "Prop. 13" in California
in 1977. That was the one that slashed funding for education in California under the
guise of "cutting your taxes."
At the time, no one mentioned what the reductions in state and local revenue would do to education in the state or the fact that the bulk of the cuts would go to businesses, not individuals. But it did solve the problem that the so-called "small government" Republicans had. (Of course, the GOP is for "small government" for anything smacking of national domestic spending, not small government for matters ranging from freedom of religious belief as to when life begins to not supporting a mountainous military-industrial complex.) Barry Goldwater, the Repub. Presidential nominee in 1964 did try running against specific programs. He found that that didn't work. But when his successors discovered running "against taxes," away they went.
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Source: OpEdNews
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