Recent online posting.

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Conservatives or Reactionaries?

/by Ben Palumbo/,/former staff director of the Democratic House
Caucus/

Political reactionaries, epitomized by the factually challenged
Michelle Bachmann, CPAC darling Allen West, the inimitable
former, half-term Governor Sarah Palin, and their Tea Party
allies, hurl the label "socialist" at President Obama in
connection, above all, with the new health care law. President
Obama, whose actions may be characterized as having saved huge
parts of America's so-called free market system, clearly is not
a "socialist" anymore than Bachmann is "conservative".
Conservatives, you see, have an obligation to answer the
question posed by Professor and author Scott Russell Sanders:
"What do you want to conserve?"


... reflect on a letter written to Charles Dickens by Albino
Luciani when he was Patriarch of Venice. It appears in a book of
Albino's letters to others entitled "Illustrissimi". He praises
Dickens' love of the poor; describes the heartless Scrooge
before his redemption; and, he quotes Jacob Marley's bitterly
mournful lament after Scrooge noted that he (Marley) was always
a good man of business: "Business! Mankind was my business. The
common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and
benevolence were all my business..."


The Venice Patriarch goes on to assure Dickens that things have
gotten better for the poor and workers since he wrote "A
Christmas Carol". To what does he attribute the improvement in
their lives? This is what Luciani wrote: "The workers...in their
unions and in the various forms of socialism, which have the
undeniable merit of having been, almost everywhere, the chief
cause of the workers' upward rise....have advanced and achieved
much in the areas of economy, social security, culture. And
today, through the unions, they often manage to make their
voice heard still higher, in the upper ranks of the government
where, actually, their fate is decided". He goes on to say:

...

Yet it is obvious that Bachmann, West, Palin, et al., to the
extent they actually think about the consequences of their
name-calling, do not want to conserve any of the things that
John Paul I believed were great improvements in the lives of
workers: improvements brought about by unions and "various forms
of socialism". On the contrary, they want to return the country
to a time when workers and their families, like those described
in the letter to Dickens, were helpless in the face of the
overwhelming economic power of an unrestrained economic elite.
That is not conservatism; it is oppression and injustice. It was

...

then, it is Obama's progressive policies that most accurately
reflect this "conservatism" of the American people. By contrast,
the reactionary rhetorical excesses by the Bachmann-West-Palin
crowd are designed not to conserve the things that improve
American lives, but, rather, the power of America's economic
elite to further enhance their wealth at the expense of those
very same American workers and their families.

...


BOB KLAHN bob.klahn@sev.org http://home.toltbbs.com/bobklahn

... Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. -AH
--- Via Silver Xpress V4.5/P [Reg]
* Origin: Doc's Place BBS Fido Since 1991 docsplace.tzo.com (1:123/140)