It was the devil himself who said that the “future is not what it used to be.” Lucifer, played by Robert DeNiro, was disguised as Louis Cyphre (get it?) in the edgy and disturbing film Angel Heart, starring Mickey Rourke before he lost his looks. This was 1987, before the election of Barack Obama and the beginning of the end of America as we knew it. Today, the future isn’t just what it used to be; it’s now a menacing and gloomy reality that a new Congress may not be able to alter.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE

posted by Bernie Reeves, editor and publisher, Raleigh Metro Magazine

My first look at a room full of 200 far right zealots gathered in one room brought to mind my mother’s comment in the late 70s when asked if she knew Jimmy Carter: “They are people we wouldn’t know,” she replied.  I realized what she was talking about as I surveyed the motley mob lying in wait to jeer me in my debate with their chosen candidate for the Republican nomination for Congress in the 13^th District of North Carolina.

I’ve lived in Raleigh my entire life,  the centerpiece city of the Research Triangle region –rated as one of the top five tech, bio-tech and medical research enclaves in the world, and a regular winner of every best place to live, work and play list in the US. I am close to the conservative revolution led by Raleigh’s Tom Ellis, the kingmaker behind Jesse Helms and the man responsible for salvaging the presidential run by Ronald Reagan in 1976.

Reagan lost to Ford in the end, but Ellis engineered a win in the North Carolina primary after Reagan’s advisors decamped, billowing wind in Reagan’s sails for 1980. The rest is, well, history. I knew Helms, know Ellis well, and hired his former right hand man Carter Wrenn to run my campaign. Add in 30 years of newspaper and magazine publishing in the region, and my role as the author of a regular conservative column, a rational Republican voter would say I’m their guy. But I wasn’t.

Who They?

I sensed a problem when these fellow citizens I encountered in that crowded room did not register   even compositely. They weren’t faces from towns around the state I am used to seeing. They weren’t just “Yankees” either. Who in the hell are these people, I pondered?

The object of their adoration was a black far-right conservative who moved to town 18 months ago. To label him an opportunist is an understatement: just off the boat, so to speak, and before announcing for Congress, he ran for chairman of the statewide GOP and lost. He is a retired Navy chief petty officer no one knew, except for the dozens of Tea Party devotees he visited personally for over a year, singing from their hymn book and delivering sermons peppered with  one-line sound bites that mimed the tea bag line. Are you kidding me, I asked myself? They can’t be taking this guy seriously. He has no knowledge of the community’s history, culture, commerce or politics.

And who are these Tea Party people anyway? The phenomenon is too broad and disorganized to supply executives, operatives and vetting for candidates. So who runs it is revealing: While the true Tea Party movement is an authentic  grass roots reaction to run-away sending by the  Obama White House  and the Democrat-dominated Congress, the movement is  controlled by far-right anti-abortion religious activists  dedicated to anarchy.

Disguised as normal people you see on TV attending Tea Party rallies, their goal ironically apes the 60s and 70s student agitators occupying the Dean’s office and blowing up the chemistry lab to get attention. They would rather toss Molotov cocktails for the thrill of the conflagration than implement sane policy – or nominate a candidate who could actually win an election against Democrats.

Consequently, religion was inserted in the movement, with abortion leading the way – a dimension never observed in big tent Tea Party rallies. Lurking in the engine room, Libertarians saw their opportunity, too. On the surface, this did not appear toxic, but Libertarians have changed over the years into uber-dogmatic gauleiters who brook no dissension in the ranks – a bizarre twinning with the anti-abortion cadre who likewise approach their beliefs dogmatically. To these two types of ideologues, it’s their way or the highway.

Quo Vadis

Irony evades the anti-abortion zealots. They insist that a personal and moral dilemma should be argued politically, naively thinking their extreme views are rational.  But after inserting the issue into politics, they offer only a religious argument. To them, God created the fetus, so there is no circumstance that allows termination – even if the life of the mother is in danger. Never mind the argument that the life of a full grown female human being has rights, too.

I went so far as to call for the repeal of Wade v. Roe to send the issue back to the states where it belongs – and where it resided before the court decision – for the simple and consistent reason that local standards should decide. (The great debate over pornography in the late 70s was settled by the US Supreme Court without a fuss by adjudicating that “local standards” apply). But my concession to the issue generated derision.

Another religious angle reared its head in my campaign. The large contingent of Catholics moving to our area over the past 30 years was unhappy that I criticized in my magazine column the Church and the Pope for failing to act – or even make a public comment – when the pederasty scandal started to unfold in 2003. I predicted that ignoring it then would only make things worse later. I also wrote that far-right Christian cults (the Branch Davidians and Jim Jones come to mind) and Muslim extremism shared common traits. Catholics and fundamentalist Christians were not amused.

For Libertarians, who used to exude a low-key rationality, all US troops abroad must be recalled; the IRS abolished and the Fair Tax implemented (naively not realizing this bad idea will require another tax collection agency); and repeal of the Patriot Act. You heard me right. National Security is worth sacrificing for the potential that someone’s individual right of privacy may be compromised. I held firm for the Patriot Act to my peril.

Indeed we do have a three-ring circus: The Big Top Tea Party; the religious/abortion passion play; and the Libertarian mise en scene. Together it is the “greatest show on earth” in American politics today. But it will end in tears when Democrats – with polls showing they are tied to the stake and ready for the boiling pot – wiggle free and annihilate Tea Party nominees in November. Ordinary citizens who rightfully hit the streets behind the Tea Party banner will realize they were had by the old hands that stole their movement and made it theirs.

By forcing the nomination of candidates who will lose, Tea Party handlers have assured two more years of a compliant Congress under Obama that will irreparably harm America. The process will transform the land of the free into a European-styled socialist state in which government, previously accountable to the people, will force citizens to be accountable to the state.

Race And Conspiracy Theory

The high-jacking of the Tea Party involves subtler shifts worth noting. I was defeated by a black candidate to the right of Jesse Helms. But so was Strom Thurmond, Jr, in South Carolina, as was another Republican in Mississippi seeking nomination to Congress. What gives here?

From what I glean inside the carnage of my own race, the Tea Party gurus sold conservative Republicans the bogus concept that a black candidate will steal black votes from the Democrat candidate in the general election. My opponent insinuated this and the Tea Baggers lapped it up. This false premise will not work. Blacks in the Democratic Party in the South do not and will not vote for Oreos. But this kind of warped logic permeates the Tea Party on the operational level where the activists call the shots after the true believers go home after a rally.

But my opponent appeared to obviate this advantage by plagiarizing his campaign issues from Scott Brown, who won Teddy Kennedy’s seat in Massachusetts, and his so-called Charter of Principles word for word from the Sharon Statement – written in 1960 by conservative journalist Stanton Evans at the home of William F. Buckley in Sharon, CT. My guy also exaggerated and misrepresented his background, claiming achievements even a mediocre human resources hack would see through. He was handing us the election – or so it seemed.

My adversary called a press conference the week before the run-off election to answer the already proven charges of plagiarism. In a scene suited for the principal’s office, he weaved and bobbed and inserted more layers of mendacity. The press attending stood there stupefied and tried to ask questions until one reporter, giving up on trying to untangle his defense of plagiarism, asked if he stood by his remark in a debate with me that offshore drilling should commence off the North Carolina coast before questions were resolved about the Gulf oil spill.

The candidate said certainly, since in his opinion the spill was a conspiracy between Obama officials and BP executives who caused the “leak” to halt fossil fuel production in order to usher in “green” energy policies. When prodded, he insisted that anyone can see the spill was a plot. The news report went viral, from the Huffington Post to the Washington Post, from Yahoo News to MSNBC and CNN.

I’m thinking he really is unbalanced and we will certainly win the run-off. Then two days later, he called another press conference – but not to back down. He rambled on again about the conspiracy, ensuring that voters would realize this guy is way out there. A major newspaper in the District said he was unfit to hold office. My victory, it seemed, was in the bag, especially after he maintained the morning of the election on a radio program that he had proof that BP executives engaged in insider trading to sell their stock before the accident. I was working on my acceptance speech.

But instead I was trounced. Low turn-out hurt my campaign (only 10% of the voters from all parties showed up for the primary May 4 – and only 4% for the run-off June 22. Low turn-out allows minority zealots to carry elections, but the question begs: If so many people are mad, how come they didn’t turn out to vote?

But there was something else going on at the ballot box. I was hit by the startling realization that my opponent’s rant about the oil conspiracy actually galvanized his base that had grown listless when we uncovered he plagiarized and misrepresented his background during the campaign. I have my faults, but the reality I could not defeat an opponent who relied on a massive conspiracy theory to get out his supporters says more about who we are as a nation than my political demise.

The End Is Near

It’s fair to say we have reached the end of rational political dialogue. Liberals are crazed with the concept of socialism as the answer for the future. And conservatives, as embodied by the Tea Party activists, are angry and willing to self-immolate to change conditions.  In both camps, extremism rules, with each side screaming across a chasm of hate. My experience validates the reality that 40 years of attacks on our heritage by radical scholars have knocked out the foundations of knowledge and rational discourse. In the void, theoretical manifestos on one side and superstition and conspiracy theory on the other rule the political dialogue.

It’s easy to rake back over the debris of an election and note that little things made a difference. But in truth it was one big thing that ensured my defeat. By representing traditional conservative values and beliefs, I was doomed from the beginning. With far-left Democrats holding on in November due to the destructive antics of Tea Party zealots, America is too.

The NPR caller observed that the Christian far-right, most of whom believe in the inerrancy of scripture, are applying the same method to the Constitution. And from my experience I can testify they are. In debates during my campaign, my opponents in the primary – and my one adversary in the run-off – replied to current political questions with one-dimensional sermons just as a fundamentalist responds to issues of religion. The Constitution says so, or the Bible says so, and no further argument is tolerated.

My take is that the big tent Tea Party has been high-jacked by old-line religious right-wingers who pull the political levers after ordinary tea-baggers return home after rallying for economic sanity. You never hear abortion mentioned at a Tea Party rally, but in the end that is the issue deciding who is the Republican nominee. Sure, the newly aggressive Libertarians are part of the mix – with their “our way or the highway” certitudes – but in the end it’s all about abortion at the ballot box.

This inerrancy tactic obviates subtlety and reality and spills over to purely political issues, which are presented in black and white and delivered in simple sound bites the faithful prefer. If my opponent was asked how to cut federal spending, the answer was swift and simple: abolish the departments of government. On the matter of taxation: get rid of the IRS and implement the Fair Tax. On immigration: round up illegals and ship them out.

Abolishing the federal government, to the tea baggers, centers around enforcing the 10th Amendment guaranteeing state sovereignty. But this narrow-minded interpretation (like picking out a verse of scripture that cannot be challenged) does not take into account the 13th through 15th amendments that establish federal suzerainty over the states.  As in the Bible, some explanations are contradicted by others, but to the true believer it’s the verse he picks that represents the Gospel truth. It is with this righteousness the tea baggers plan to implement the Fair Tax, thinking the IRS would be dismantled, but they fail to take into account that another, similar taxing agency would be required to collect revenues. Removing illegal immigrants in sealed trains and convoys of covered trucks is not the sort of action Americans would accept. But it makes no difference to the tea-baggers, who believe there is no compromise to forced removal.

The religious dimension in tea bag strategy is purposefully not made public, but it drives their vote. My opponent and I were asked in a debate what process we would apply to important votes in Congress. I stuck to my traditional conservative values in my answer, but the tea bag guy simply said he would ask God. The audience erupted in applause. On abortion I declared against public funding and for parental consent. My opponent said under no circumstances is abortion acceptable, including cases of incest, rape or the life of the mother. More loud applause ensued.

The critical goal to nominate a candidate that could win in November was obviously not an issue to the tea-baggers. My opponent, who moved to our district 18 months before the run-off vote, blatantly plagiarized his campaign issues and “charter of principles,” tried to cover it up and continued to lie about it to the end; exaggerated his biography to the extent even a mediocre human resources manager would demand clarification; and announced he was sure the Gulf oil spill was a conspiracy between BP executives and Obama officials. We figured he had handed us the win, only to discover his theory galvanized his base support.

There is one more angle. My opponent is black in a Party with only a handful of African-Americans. He convinced the tea-baggers he could draw black votes away from the Democratic nominee because of the color of his skin. True Southerners know this is a preposterous argument. Blacks vote Democratic and they don’t like “Oreos” – black on the outside but white on the inside. Southern tea bagger operatives appear to be newcomers who detest the traditions of their newly found homes. And they certainly don’t understand race relations. But hey, if a black Republican says he can get black votes in the general election, why not believe him?  If we believe in the Gulf oil spill conspiracy, then why not believe that too?

As Aunt Agatha said of her empty-headed nephew Bertie Wooster in the classic Jeeves and Wooster stories by PG Wodehouse: “We who care for the future of the nation despair.” With Obama looking more and more like Lenin, and the Republicans acting like the followers of a loony religious cult, despair is not strong enough. Try fear.

The war in Europe was an unpleasant sideshow to most Americans until Japan launched a sneak attack on the U.S. Pacific fleet harbored at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The U.S. declared war on Japan — and Hitler, responding to treaty obligations with Japan, declared war on the U.S.

America was suddenly engaged in a global conflict against two fascist empires bent on world domination. President Franklin Roosevelt agreed to rank the war in Europe above retaliation against the Japanese under intense pressure from U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill. As England stood alone after Hitler’s conquest of Europe, the situation on the ground and in the skies was grim as London and other British cities were bombarded by the German Luftwaffe in advance of a planned invasion.

The war in Europe may have taken priority in theatre strategy, but the conflict in the Pacific was pursued with vigor against complex obstacles. The Japanese war plan involved the capture of dozens of Pacific islands, requiring complicated U.S. operations and command structures among the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps.

Today in America, the conflict in Europe takes precedent in the public mind for several reasons. There is an organized and effective lobby to remind the world of the Nazi death camps. And veterans and citizens often visit Europe on holiday, where they can take in the grand cemeteries at Normandy and dozens of sites across Europe preserved to commemorate the war.

But very few people visit the Pacific Islands, where savage fighting raged for nearly four years. Yet it was in the tropical, pestilent jungle that U.S. troops engaged in America’s War against the Japanese. Certainly the fighting in Europe was rough going, but the war in the Pacific was a hellish and up-close ordeal against a fanatical enemy. While the Germans were efficient in warfare, the Japanese were efficient and suicidal.

The war in the Pacific is worthy of increased interest as our own unique contribution to free the world of fascism. Thus it was with great anticipation that World War II fans tuned into the ten-part HBO docudrama “The Pacific,” co-produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks — who brought us the “Band of Brothers” series that followed soldiers in Europe after the D-Day landings.

I could stomach only five of the ten episodes. Excellent production values aside, it fast becomes apparent that the intent is to vilify war and to ignore the justness of America’s cause. Moral ambivalence rears its ugly head, with America’s moral stance equal to the Japanese cause — probably manufactured for the latter’s subsequent suffering at Nagasaki and Hiroshima, as evidenced by the latest take by the radical scholars who see the U.S. as the bad guys for ending the war swiftly and decisively.

The series presents a narrow focus on one Marine unit, which obscures the panorama of the far-flung geography involved and the coordination required to orchestrate Navy and Marine operations. But the big flaw in this granular approach is the omission of the role of the Army. It was infantry that played the key role cleaning up after the Marines moved on, yet their role is obscured and even belittled.

Our protagonists in “The Pacific” weep and whine and emote about the senselessness of war without the writers and producers taking into account the sincere desire for revenge felt by U.S. troops against the empire that attacked their country. Our fighting men were also aware of the atrocities committed by the Japanese against prisoners of war and civilians. The Bataan Death March was well known to our guys. And they held the enemy in contempt based on their own observations of the torture and murder of U.S. soldiers by Japanese units across the battlefields dotting the Pacific.

In the midst of this maudlin and immature melodrama posing as a major contribution to the world’s understanding of one the great events in human history, humor was never introduced to break the tedious moral lesson against war. Each scene reeks of angst, including a break in Australia, where our heroes arrive after days on board ship in battle gear, their faces dirty from combat.

It’s heartening that Spielberg and Hanks are willing to invest in historical productions. But it is depressing to view the result.

Bernie Reeves is editor and publisher of Raleigh Metro Magazine.

Since the people don’t care and generally approve of terrorist interrogations, why are we impaneling an inquisition against our own operatives in the war on terror? Because, as usual, a small cadre of anti-war, anti-American activists are getting their way on the force of a self-righteous head of steam. This hard left crowd has been at it since 2003, so none of this is new. They have been calling for war tribunals against the CIA and the Bush White House relentlessly, even after Obama swept into office. I know – I see their bulletins. And right there with them are the ridiculously biased mass media who offer no perspective in their febrile advocacy of what is essentially an undermining of American policy and security.

Obama backed away from tribunals against the CIA and other agencies, but passed the baton to Attorney General Eric Holder. After a decent interval, Holder announced he will indeed investigate his own countrymen for doing their duty. The hard Left says he is not going far enough – they want Bush and Cheney, remember. But the reality is we are risking our national security by staining the men and women on the front lines of the war on terror.

As I understand it – via my contacts from producing the Raleigh Spy Conference since 2003 – intelligence officers are afraid to act for fear of recriminations, leaving us vulnerable to attack and watching in horror war tribunals against the public servants who protect us. But get used to it. Public policy under Obama is in the hands of the chosen few who act as if the wishes of the people don’t count. The administration’s health care plan is embraced by the Washington Democrat elite but disdained by the people in poll after poll; elections are manipulated by unpublicized legislation that allows new voters to register and vote during one visit to the elections board (a change more than any other that ensured Obama’s ascendancy); muddled pronouncements about the need to cut defense spending to please the hard Left that sends a mixed and weak message to our allies and enemies; and economic policies that are not working for the majority of Americans.

But the big one is the war in Afghanistan. I admire our armed forces and feel pride at the deployment of our technically advanced weapons and intelligence-gathering equipment. But I do not approve of this war in a country unconquerable since the time of Alexander the Great. Worse, I think we are there as part of the ongoing campaign against the presidency of George W. Bush.

During the last weeks of the past presidential election, the “surge” in Iraq worked. Yet every Democrat I met said “so what,” it made no difference because Iraq is not our war. I asked what was “our war” and the reply was Afghanistan. Could it be we are there for political reasons to maintain the cover-up of the success of the “surge” in Iraq just to keep on beating up George Bush?

The Taliban is not our enemy. They are certainly bad characters, but then so was Saddam Hussein, whom the Left said wasn’t worth the effort to invade Iraq. Pundits justify the war in Afghanistan saying we are fighting al-Qaeda there, but we beat them in Iraq already. They are in Pakistan, but does that mean we should be in Afghanistan for no rational reason?

But then it’s not rational to haul up the CIA for doing its job – so there is a consistency to the war tribunals and the war in Afghanistan: politics, Obama-style.

Steve Forbes

There is a huge demand for health services and health insurance. Whenever demand is high, democratic capitalism stokes into gear and provides product. And customers receive the best bang for the buck as providers compete.

So why are we allowing government control of health care services and insurance when the market plainly calls for competitive capitalism, asked former presidential candidate and magazine editor Steve Forbes in a recent stop to promote his new book: How Capitalism Will Save US, co-written with journalist Elizabeth Ames.

Forbes is more animated today than during his presidential campaign, and well he should be as the economic meltdown under Barack Obama dramatizes his key issue: capitalism is the answer to prosperity, as stated in the subtitle of his new book, “Why Free People and Free Markets Are the Best Answer in Today’s Economy.”

Forbes is astonished that, 20 years after the Reagan Revolution, “neo-socialism” has replaced democratic capitalism as the mantra for the US economy. Forbes forcefully maintains it is time for another Reagan to tear down the wall of Obama’s command economy policies as we did Soviet communism. As an example, Forbes relates that if the huge demand for cell phones had been parked under the provenance of government, we’d be talking on inefficient, bread-box sized contraptions rather than slim and lightweight instruments that can connect even Third World citizens to satellites that instantly direct callers worldwide and to Internet sites and GPS coordinates.

Health care and insurance are certain to remain costly and inefficient under government control. Forbes points out the appalling inefficiencies of Medicare and Medicaid that exemplify government run health programs. He points out that the ridiculous prohibition preventing inter-state commerce in health insurance, stating that annual fees for an average customer in New Jersey are twice as high than in nearby Pennsylvania. There again, government regulation stifles free market competition – and affordable rates.

The new book ranges across all the hot spots of economic activity and reiterates the campaign plank that gave Forbes traction: the Flat Tax. As GDP declines in an atmosphere of gloom with more onerous taxation glowering over the horizon, the timing is right to free Americans from the yoke of tyrannical apparatchiks and nomenclatura that soak citizens to fund their schemes – and their pocketbooks.

A time bomb began ticking in the mid-1970s, when the psychiatric and mental health professions went politically correct and identified the mentally ill as “victims” who required advocates. While patients in general do need assistance, the activists turned caring into political action that changed the American cityscape and endangered our well-being.

Even in the Great Depression, or the downturns in 1947 and 1961-62; the oil crisis recession of  the mid-1970s and the  following downturn in the early 1980s; through the crippling 1989-1994 deep recession on the heels of the 1988 stock market crash; and through the dot.com bust of 2001, there was always hope for the future. But not anymore.
Even worse, government and university employees are enjoying the good life with high salaries, retirement benefits and top-shelf health insurance on the backs of taxpayers who watch helplessly as their nest eggs and home values disintegrate. The new class of super-rich, including the crooks that brought down the mighty American economy, is now living la dolce vita and avoiding taxes.

Meanwhile, the consumer and small businesses sectors – constituting 90% of the US economy – continue to decline as the Obama recovery plan ignores their plight. Looking ahead, there is more misery and pain for small businesses in the form of mandatory health insurance coverage for employees in the proposed health care overhaul bill endorsed by the White House. As the alleged recovery continues to founder, the next step will be draconian taxes to feed the bureaucracy — the monster that is devouring America.

The middle class of small business people and their employees who are shouldering the burden are already groaning under outrageous property, state and local taxes and the myriad of fees imposed by their banks and local governments. They now realize the Obama cadre is stealing their quality of life — and the one thing that means the most — the future.