One-time Republican hero Kevin Phillips dares to speak up against the Walker-Bush oligarchy that rules the American state through oil, intelligence, big money and the power of the Christian right.
By Joan Walsh
People like Kevin Phillips aren't supposed to exist anymore. In a country that's become "two nations," this time not black and white but Red and Blue, conservatives rarely engage with liberals (unless it's to lampoon or attack them), let alone read their publications, reckon with their arguments, or -- perish the thought! -- even agree with them. But here comes Phillips, the renowned Nixon White House strategist who wrote "The Emerging Republican Majority" in 1969, a Nixon/Reagan/John McCain kind of Republican, with the most damning book to date about the Bush administrations (yes, that's plural), "American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush."
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What's sinister to Phillips is the way the Bush family, using that vast network of business, intelligence and government connections, managed to elect not just one president against all political odds (George H.W. Bush never held elected office before Reagan picked him as his vice president, having lost two Texas Senate races only to be saved by Nixon with appointments as ambassador to China and then CIA director) but an incredible two. Given the size of the first Bush loss to Bill Clinton in 1992, as well as the mediocrity of the son who aspired to succeed him, Phillips finds it astonishing that the family was able to use its vast web of shadowy and sunshiny connections again to "restore" the Bush dynasty in the White House -- "a turn that would have surprised and presumably appalled the founding fathers," he writes.
Now, a surprised and appalled Phillips observes, we have a second George Bush running the country and advancing his family's perverse agenda: serving the rich domestically, increasing the dominance of the energy industry, enlarging the security state, and pursuing a bumbling foreign policy that's clearly made the world less safe, from Afghanistan to Iraq to the Middle East.
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Given how much ink has been spilled lately about "Bush hate," which supposedly afflicts only crazy lefties and their Democratic Party panderers like Screamin' Howard Dean and the reinvented Angry Al Gore, it's fascinating to see a conservative who despises Bush. Phillips admits his dislike for both George Bushes in the book, and in a mostly respectful New York Times review, Michael Oreskes suggested the author should have revealed the personal basis for that dislike. Phillips insists there isn't one, and I believe him. Of course the GOP strategist who preached a conservative populism, a rejection of both Democratic and Republican elites, would be appalled by the rise of Bush Republicanism, a winner-take-all social Darwinism imposed by a mediocre family that rigged the rules of the game to benefit itself. You can tell Phillips particularly loathed the first President Bush, with his Ivy League affect and his pork-rind pretenses; but he's not much higher on the allegedly more down-to-earth son, refusing even to grant the authenticity of his roots: Midland, Texas, as Phillips notes, was overtaken by Easterners during the oil boom of the 1950s and '60s, and its streets were named after Ivy League schools.
more…
http://salon.com/books/feature/2004/01/27/phillips/index.html
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