I’m not going to warn you or say “I told you so.” I’m going to tell you the Cassandra was a seer in Troy who was cursed to see the truth but that no one would believe her.

29 OCTOBER 2010 · 5:49 AM

Enter Title Here (conclusion)

Like I told you at the beginning, the Koch machine is going for a hostile takeover of the Republican party, and by their mantra ye shall know them: “limited government and tax and spending cuts.” You know: “Your mortgage isn’t my responsibility.”

[…]

I won’t even bother with the final, crushing irony of this shrieking Festival of Mendacity: the selfsame candidates running on “smaller government” and “local control” are running the most expensive campaign in U.S. history, all financed by a national apparatus, sending out-of-district money into all those “local” races.

A “bottom-up” campaign financed from the top down.

As the Dead Tree Media continues, comatose …

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17 DECEMBER 2009 · 9:21 AM

An Inconvenient Poof

Whatever Illarionov’s current connection to the Institute of Economic Analysis, it seems clear that we’re dealing with a very close partnership with CATO, and, thus, Koch.

What we have here, kids, is a whole attempt by the US “libertarians” — the tea partiers who are trying to effect a hostile takeover of the GOP — to create an international network, seeding their “think tank” franchises around the world, just as they’ve created them in nearly every state, from the Cascade Policy Institute in Oregon to the Maine Policy Institute, et al. (Sometime, if you’re actually interested, I’ll lay out just how the process was planned, designed and implemented, but that’s for another day.)

So, a Russian affiliate of our Koch tea party gang releases a “report” in Russia, which is picked up by a “libertarian” climate change contrarian, and it’s quoted by the US rightie blogswarm….

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18 NOVEMBER 2009 · 1:01 PM

Teabaggers in Portland to protest Gore

I have talked about this ‘libertarian’ attempt at a hostile takeover of the GOP:

3 September 2009*
“MSNBC Misses the Astroturf in its own Building”

[2011 Note see URL: http://hisvorpal.wordpress.com/2009/09/03/koch-machine-hostile-takeover-of-gop/]

… in future columns (although I’d really rather be working on my book) I’ll talk about the attempted takeover of the GOP by the hard-core crypto-Libertarians (who are the TRUE RINOs, having only infiltrated to subsume).

But, this is going even further. After the thuggish events at town halls this summer, this is evolving into ever more coordinated, more angry attempts to derail public debate and democratic discussion….

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5 MARCH 2009 · 11:39 PM

Daddy Long Legs

No, these are the twitchings of a dead Daddy Long Legs.

There are two distinct possibilities at this point, both leading to the same conclusion:

That the GOP will arise from its own ashes as someone significantly reformulates philosophy and rebrands a “new” GOP that IS significantly different than the failed larceny of the party that’s been in charge of not one, but TWO bank meltdowns since the “Reagan Revolution.”

That the GOP will die, like the Whigs, and reformulate around the Libertarian wing, as seems increasingly likely.*

[…]

[* From Memeorandum today:

Megan McArdle:
Atlas raised his eyebrows —  Perhaps predictibly, Ayn Rand is making a comeback on the right, with Congressmen handing out her books, and loose talk of rich people “Going Galt”.  —  I don’t think that we will see a mass exodus of productive people to secret hideouts.

Discussion:
David Weigel / The Washington Independent: Congressman: We’re Living in ‘Atlas Shrugged’
Michelle Malkin: Where in the world: Going Galt and Wreck-overy.gov logo-mania
TBogg: You’re going to miss me when I’m gone.  No. No I won’t.  Why are you still here?
Sonny Bunch / Conventional Folly: Atlas Shrugged (Again) ]

Either way, the Party of Nixon and Reagan is as dead and buried as the “Party of Lincoln” was dead by 1876 and the unholy deal with the Klansmen of the South to kill Reconstruction as a “compromise” to install Rutherford B. Hayes and dump Samuel J. Tilden, who won the popular vote. (The first “stolen election,” if you don’t count John Quincy Adams’ plurality theft in the House of Representatives over the much larger plurality of Andrew Jackson.)

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17 NOVEMBER 2008 · 11:49 PM

The Better Angels of our Nature

For two years, Bill Clinton had a Democratic congress, and they stymied him at every turn. Worse: Clinton actually managed to get more accomplished with a hostile, Republican congress (you know, the guys who impeached him) than he had with the purportedly “friendly” Democratic congress of his first two years.

No: the enemy here isn’t Republican mulishness, but, rather, Democratic intransigence, as the various factions peel off to “freelance” their own micro-concerns and petty grievances.

[…]

We accept that agreement to disagree without being disagreeable as the PRICE of liberty, the price of freedom. Nowhere is the concept of utter personal selfishness enshrined. Citizens must, ultimately, band together, or we go back to rule by a tyrant. Civility is the price of liberty, but, really, who is going to strenuously defend INcivility as the proper way to get things done?

This is every bit as true for Democrats as Republicans, but, as the song goes, let there be peace on Earth and let it begin with me. Democratic presidents have been in office for twelve years out of the past forty. Of those twelve years, SIX were squandered by Democratic congresses refusing, mulishly, to cooperate in the elephantine task of national governance.

We have squandered our peace and prosperity because we thought that in a time of ease, we should ignore the future problems and focus on trivial issues of dogma and ideology.

Whether we realize it or not (because the recession deepens by the day) the days of plenty have passed away for a time. And we sit in this limbo of war-that-is-not-war, dangerously extended and building up murderous hostility each day. Shouting names at one another, or throwing a hissy-fit because our priorities are not shared by all is a luxury we can ill afford….

=========================

And we’re back to the present-day.

The hostile takeover as predicted is well under way, and the necessity of civility, as noted above, is still rejected.

I warned you clearly and explicitly.

And call me Cassandra.

Courage.

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A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog His Vorpal Sword. This is cross-posted from his blog.