Brodner's Cartoon du Jour: Brankrupt Political Philosophy
May 20, 2008
Two good articles this week in The New Yorker and The Nation on the end of the line for conservative dominance in American politics. Comfort food for us told-you-so's, regardless of who wins the White House. I did the one illustrating the very good George Packer piece and my buddy Victor Juhasz (one of the most gifted narrative artists anywhere) was plowing the same field over at The Nation (his is much funnier). The loss for the conservatives is expensive. Think of all we've had to experience for people to start to wake up. Maybe they'll stay that way awhile! Here's to that.
Wish I had a bigger file of this. Victor is consistently spot-on. I always dig his take.
Nixon was not a conservative--by today's standards. He was a "poor man's" Republican. Reagan, while he was a "conservative", would today be called a "neocon" because he believed in deficite spending and supported Israel (a fraction more then the rest of his party). Goldwater was an arch conservative but never won the White House. William Buckley, while a textbook conservative, also smoked pot, which frankly--creates a viable excuse for most any delusions he may have had.
As for McCain, he has had to repo himself far to the right to run in the primaries and more importantly, he is so outmatched in Money by Obama that he will need to lean on the RNC for campaign finance, making him their puppet, at least for the moment. Otherwise, he has in the past been considered a 'swing' Republican.
PS} Eisenhower coined the expression:
"Military Industrial Complex" and it was not intended as a complement.
PPS} Johnson, the guy who pushged through voters rights and other liberal social programs, took over the white house with 2,500 U.S. (mostly advisors) in Vietnam. When he left, there were 250,000 combatants, 50,000 US dead, countless US mamed and wounded (including McCain) and 2-million Vietnamese casualties, many non-combatants.