Repub gov't: ideological extremism, catastrophic fiscal irresponsibility, rampant greed...

Wednesday, March 22, 2006 at 04:55 PM

Finally, a conservative who can see what's right in front of him.  Way back in 1969, Kevin Phillips was helping the Republicans strategize how to use the changing demographics of America to perform a political takeover.  Today, according to a NY Times review of his latest book, Phillips:

No longer does he see Republican government as a source of stability and order. Instead, he presents a nightmarish vision of ideological extremism, catastrophic fiscal irresponsibility, rampant greed and dangerous shortsightedness.

Well, welcome to the club (and reality).  Better late than never, although it certainly would have been nice to wake up before the swirling motion in the toilet bowl began.

According to the review, Phillips' 13th book, titled American Theocracy:

..identifies three broad and related trends -- none of them new to the Bush years but all of them, he believes, exacerbated by this administration's policies -- that together threaten the future of the United States and the world. One is the role of oil in defining and, as Phillips sees it, distorting American foreign and domestic policy. The second is the ominous intrusion of radical Christianity into politics and government. And the third is the astonishing levels of debt -- current and prospective -- that both the government and the American people have been heedlessly accumulating.

It sounds like Phillips has done a particularly thorough job of chronicling the rise of the religious right, and George Bush's efforts to convince them that to view the president's policies as "a response to premillennialist thought. Phillips also apparently suggests that Bush and his friends may be true believers themselves, who employ religious belief as the basis of policy, not just as a tactic for selling the policy to the public.

Sounds like the book is worth taking a look at.  And hoping that several other millions of Americans do the same.