trying to fathom how this came to pass...

[frogcycle]

These thirty-something "true bushies" seem to be turning up under every rock all of a sudden. Cadres of graduates of Regent's University, various other Stepford-wife "true believers"

My daughters are both in their thirties; I have been trying to think back to their formative years and understand what crucible produced all these brainless brownshirts.

Reagan was president from '81 to '89. Someone now 35 was nine years old when he came in, seventeen when he was replaced by GHWB.

Those are crucial years in a person's development of personality and attitudes. They go from following parent's directives to peer pressure and expand to finding other role models.

Reagan was set up as this likable grandfatherly character who saved the world from the red threat. So his draconian destruction of New Deal programs, his deficit spending, his tax cuts for the rich, all are perceived as good things by these people because they were programmed that way by his goofy smile and his "there you go again" remarks.

You don't influence kids by preaching at them and lecturing. They gravitate toward "role models." I have always felt that our most effective conversations with our daughters on topics like sex and drugs and smoking were when we'd have a front-seat conversation on a car trip. They'd listen in, and we knew it (they were the intended audience) but we never addressed them. They formed opinions "on their own" based on knowledge and understanding they had gathered themselves.

THAT is probably the single most brilliant move the rightwing cabal has made ever. The brainwashing was incredibly successful. They created an army of "true bushies" whom they systematically installed in every place they could over the past six years, and are frantically trying to complete the process.

Fortunately, we had front-seat conversations about Reagan, too, and they didn't buy anything he said or did.

[Vexatious Ape]

1. Maybe the brown shirts simply appeal to their

fears, prejudices, and greed.

[TomInTib]

2. Well put

I was just watching an interview with the latest wacko (whatever her name is) and wondering at just what point this poor young thing had walked through the mirror.

I was thinking that this goes far beyond mere empowerment and addresses something much deeper.

You pretty much layed it out.

[librechik]

3. ny theory is that "conservatism" is a common mental illness, not a political persuasion

and kids get it too. It's often passed from parent to child. They need therapy along with the truth.

Then guys like the used car salesman talking to college kids right now on c-span 2 about being conservative activists and "changing their colleges" take advantage of their weaknesses, propagandize them, and put them to work--for the fascists.

[patrice]

4. Each and everyone of those Bushies is absolutely convinced of

their own rectitude, because they are the political products of the Reagan/Republican brainwashting model which is not in the least an exaggeration; it's recognized as "focus grouping" and is deeply rooted in the organic psychology and subsequent behavior of its individual targets. Google Behaviorism.

[pscot]

6. That's what frees them up to do the most gawdawful

thing. They are absolved in advance by virtue of their moral perfection.

[patrice]

8. Exactly!!!

And even then, their current MO is deconstruction, i.e. attacking any knowledge on the grounds that all knowledge is relative. They are thus absolute relativists, a fundamental contradiction that they refuse to recognize, because it does not fit their hidden agendas.

[OnyxCollie]

5. I remember my elementary school teacher talking about the Carter/Reagan election.

I was for Reagan. I thought he was a nice, old man. What the hell did I know? Sad that some chose to believe the illusion.

[PADemD]

7. Have you read "Generations, The History of America's Future" by William Strauss & Neil Howe?

History repeating itself.

[frogcycle]

10. no, but I'll make a note of it

[bridgit]

9. i suppose, still, i've never seen this world lacking for want of mean, vacuous...

insufferably pissy assholes; imo they do seem to gravitate to the republican party i.e. i'll bet Nixon was a real hoot! Donald Segreti, Rove (can you imagine), and who's that guy that worked for g.h.w. bush? forget his name, but he died of a brain tumor...anyway, and i'm sad to report...

i think it somehow less than good that these 'religious universities' i.e. Falwell, Roberts, etc., are offering a legal product in the forms of young lawyers with little respect for jurisprudence but that they know very well how to manipulate it, they seem to over & over again reaffirm their belief that the laws of men are worthless and it all serves to just chip away at the foundation of America imo

[BulletproofLandshark]

12. The guy you're thinking of who died was Lee Atwater

Hatchet man extraordinaire

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater

[bridgit]

17. yep, that's the guy...

[juno jones]

11. We need to strip religion of its tax-exempt status. n/t

[patrice]

20. I completely agree. I wonder why we don't hear this more often.What other career field can you

go into with the perks that being an ordained minister offers? Do you suppose those perks have anything to do with people's decisions that they are "called"? And on top of it all, it's all tax exempt!!! This is just crazy.

[frogcycle]

13. this was the era when Michael J Fox

was playing Alex P. Keeton - the "Young Republican" rebelling against his former-hippy parents

He probably influenced more than he could imagine

and then the 90's became the "me" generation - as these characters went on to college the whole world stressed "make a buck" as the true goal - the whole dot-com boom was all about get-rich-quick schemes with no real substance - encouraged by media, colleges...

Even though the dot-com bubble burst, there is an entire generation tilted toward that thinking - they are wistfully awaiting the day they too can drive a maserati - maybe they missed out on getting it at 22, like their idol in greedandavarice.com, but they are hoping still to get one by the time they reach 40

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

14. Well the 80s were also the "me" generation, believe me. I don't think you can

blame any one thing like this.

You can certainly make the argument that the power, influence, and "acceptedness" of the radical religious right increased greatly during and since the Reagan era, and this led to the creation of the insular RW cultural cocoons that the Goodlings were raised in, schools like Liberty, Messiah, Regents etc.

Limbaugh/FOX etc. are a big part of the "cocoon" too, since you can live in a school/broadcast media bubble where non RW thought can never enter.

I'm really hoping that the collapse of the Bush regime, particularly if the Republicans lose the WH and become a below veto threshold minority in the Senate, will break the influence of the religious right in this country.

[EST]

15. This article, by John Dean for Findlaw, should shed some

light on how the mind works and the specific disease of authoritarianism as it afflicts Tom DeLay.
Although he is specifically talking about DeLay, his conclusions and observations apply to all authoritarians.
Enjoy:http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20070406.html



edit to add-a taste:
"Q: How about other authoritarian characteristics?

A: Many. There is forceful, unmistakable evidence that DeLay is incredibly ethnocentric. He divides the world into an in-group (conservatives) and a despised out-group (liberals). He really does hate liberals, and often associates them with communism, going so far as to say. "They are much like communists," and "Like good communists, they..." He also says Clinton's "brand of liberalism had an almost anti-American feel to it." This struck me as Born-Again McCarthyism. His view is so intensely focused on the battle he sees constantly raging between good conservatives and evil liberals that those are apparently the only actors he sees on the political scene. I don't recall him talking about "moderates" once in the whole book.

Q: Authoritarian leaders crave power, and DeLay certainly sought power as a member of Congress. What did you think of his explanation of that?

A: He aggressively pursued power and he argues, quite reasonably, that if you're in Congress you have to attain power to serve your principles. That's what drove him, he says, not some base grab for personal power, such as he thinks existed in former House Majority Leader Dick Armey. Armey was "a gifted man, but a man so blinded by ambition as to be useless to the cause." True, DeLay also was ambitious, and he describes how he maneuvered and positioned himself to rise rapidly within the Republican ranks. But only because he wanted to serve his ideals and Jesus, he says. I'm not sure it was all that selfless and noble."

[frogcycle]

19. all quite true, but

I was marveling not at the 50/60-something like Delay, Haster, and of course the whole neocon crowd, but in particular these young "true bushies." The point I may not have made well was that my daughters, raised in the same era, in an extremely Republican and extremely religious community didn't catch whatever the disease is. My wife and I can take some credit, I suppose. Their extremely high IQs are probably also a factor. But HOARDS of kids from that generation seem to have bought it, hook, line, and sinker.

Maybe its that the progressive/liberal/Democratic-leaning ones were turned off by the idea of participating in government, and found other pursuits. That is true of my two. I suggested to one of them recently, after my brief foray into actual active politics during John Laesch's run against Hastert that she could be very successful in that field - not necessarily as candidate, but as "strategist" as they seem to call them all. She looked at me with a rather stunned expression, then said in her best Artie Johnson imitation veerrrry interesting! I'll make another run at her some time. She'd be damned good.

Rachel Maddow, Laura Flanders, and of course <voiceover>Stephanie Miller</voiceover> are all roughly her peers age-wise, and THEY seem to have their heads on straight. Stephanie was even raised by Republicans (big time!)

So yeah, the greed thing may be a factor. Those who see joining the right wing as a gravy train do so; but nobody thinks progressive/liberal politics is a gravy train. Maybe there AREN'T all that many of them; they're just very visible. And the bush administration used a lot of them because they are so stupid and compliant.

[rasputin1952]

16. This thread is an interesting Sociological experiment...

reading through is, I see excellent answers as to the problems we face as a nation.

As for my own 2 cents, I agree w/many posts above, and it does come down to the "Me" like people that show off that greed and avarice "pay-off". I can recall when the whole "Greed Is Good" crowd destroyed the S&L industry, one of the bases of our financial system, in the chase for another dollar. Those who were actually in the trenches doing the real work of the nation saw that being a "spoiled rich jerk" isn't all that bad from their perspective; it is all about personal gain, and that is what some of these "colleges" are pushing. The real "religion" of these people is power 'earned' by greed, under the guise of being "blessed" therefore immune to societie's mores and values.

I am 55, I am back in school to get my RN, I'm winning a battle w/a small brain tumor, I work part-time to keep a roof over my son's and my head...Hell, at the end of the month I may be homeless or w/o electricity, depends on who I can hold off longer; I'm not gonna complain though, just dishing out some facts these people never thought of. When these kids were going home after school, to nice warm meals and comfortable beds, I was freezing my butt off at Ft. Wainwright AK. Before these kids were born, I was sweating and trying to keep my butt alive. I did my military service because of the future they would have, precisely why my dad, step-dad, several uncles, an aunt and my brother had done before. These people got off easy...thoughts of an "Andy Griffith Mayberry World" were drilled into their heads as how the world "should" be, but never was. Skipped over in the history they "learned", were the ghettos of large cities, the horror that some of the Founders and their predecessors had seen by church/state marriage, they never learned that early Americans were a rough and tumble mish-mash of some pretty damned tough men and women.

No, what they see today is a dreamworld, based on some ideological lie that if the church/state separation were somehow removed, we would become a nation blessed w/peace and great wealth. It doesn't work that way; hell, even the denominations of Protestants can't agree on anything, right down to the point of what to bring to the church breakfast. It would be Baptist against Evangelical; Lutheran against Church of God, all of them against the Catholics, with the Jews and the Muslims finally being blamed. It has happened so many times before, but they have no knowledge of this, no understanding that Freedom of the Mind, is equally as important as Freedom of the Person.

I'm sorry, I rambled on far too long and have probably bored to death anyone who took the time to read this post. I'll end this little tirade w/the thought that if these people, who have never seen or been to where life is a hard lesson in reality, I just hope they get to know what it is to have to fix a car with basic tools under a hot sun on a lonely highway. I hope they know what it feels like to go hungry for a couple of days, not just between snacks and quick brushing of pearly white teeth. Or what it feels like for a young, scared, single mother to make a choice between formula or diapers or medicine for her child...the same one these people insisted on bringing into this world, and then abandoning the child and it's mother to the lonely dangerous road they will have in this life.

[JeffR]

18. Fascinating post

and I can't believe this hasn't been rec'd. So I'm recin'.

[DeepModem Mom]

21. K&R