Thursday, December 13, 2007
McCotter's Manifesto
Thaddeus McCotter, rep from Michigan, made a dramatic speech in the House Special Orders last night. It is a full-blown manifesto for a new approach to politics. If we are going to have a non-Communist party in the America of the future, it will have to follow McCotter's basic principles.
McCotter's high-falutin verbosity makes his speeches hard to follow orally, so I started looking for a transcript. Unsurprisingly, none of the brand-R blogs paid any attention to the speech, because it's WAY out of the standard playing field. For the two standard teams, the only permissible political dialogue is 10,000 repetitions of "Bush is God and Hillary is Satan", or 10,000 repetitions of "Hillary is God and Bush is Satan", respectively. Since McCotter's speech does not repeat either form of the rosary even once, it will be completely ignored by our two political brands.
Perhaps oddly, perhaps meaningfully, the first place I found a transcript is a pro-Obama blog, and I give credit and thanks to Arnold Sherr for locating and publishing the transcript.
I've reformatted the transcript for readability, and stored the result here.
Some key points.
Introduction:
His short list of basic principles:
And the strongest bit of his conclusion:
McCotter's high-falutin verbosity makes his speeches hard to follow orally, so I started looking for a transcript. Unsurprisingly, none of the brand-R blogs paid any attention to the speech, because it's WAY out of the standard playing field. For the two standard teams, the only permissible political dialogue is 10,000 repetitions of "Bush is God and Hillary is Satan", or 10,000 repetitions of "Hillary is God and Bush is Satan", respectively. Since McCotter's speech does not repeat either form of the rosary even once, it will be completely ignored by our two political brands.
Perhaps oddly, perhaps meaningfully, the first place I found a transcript is a pro-Obama blog, and I give credit and thanks to Arnold Sherr for locating and publishing the transcript.
I've reformatted the transcript for readability, and stored the result here.
Some key points.
Introduction:
... Republicans must accurately assess our party’s past and present failings; and its future prospects of again providing Americans a meaningful choice between the major parties. This remains, after all, a party’s duty to the citizenry. For my GOP to fulfill it, first we must bury our ideological dead. ... Such was the Republican bathos: a transformational majority sinned and slipped into a transactional “Cashocracy” – promises, policies, principles, all bartered, even honor. The majority now is of the ages, may it rest in peace ... And be redeemed.
His short list of basic principles:
1. Our liberty is granted not by the pen of a government bureaucrat, but is authored by the hand of almighty God.
2. Our sovereignty rests not in our soil, but in our souls.
3. Our security is guaranteed not by the thin hopes of appeasement, but by the moral and physical courage of our troops defending us in hours of maximum danger.
4. Our prosperity is produced not by the tax hikes and spending sprees of politicians, but by the innovation and perspiration of free people engaged in free enterprise.
5. Our cherished truths and communal virtues are preserved and observed not by a coerced political correctness, but by our reverent citizenry’s voluntary celebration of the culture of life.
And the strongest bit of his conclusion:
In this Age of Globalization, however, while Americans are vexed by their seeming inability to influence the potent economic, social and political forces radically reshaping their lives, American corporations are busy decentralizing into 'virtual corporations' reliant upon the outsourcing of jobs to other nations to obtain lower labor costs and evade cumbersome domestic laws and regulations. Such 'rootless capital' being sent around the world in a keystroke to more 'competitive markets' has cost Americans their livelihoods; reduced their wages and employer-provided benefits; diminished their unions' memberships; eclipsed their optimism regarding our economy’s continued vitality; and, in cases of extreme economic distress and angst, destroyed their marriages and dreams for their children.¶ 9:59 AM
The failure to realize the seismic ramifications to normal Americans of this tectonic economic shift was a primary cause of the Cashocracy's collapse. As rising corporate profits and Wall Street bull markets became increasingly divorced from working Americans' prosperity, the Cashocrats clung ever more tightly to their corporate benefactors without grasping that Americans had concluded what is 'good for GM' is no longer necessarily good for them.
The advent of virtual corporations and transient international capital has ended the old industrial-welfare state model of governance, wherein solutions to Americans' economic and social anxieties were the shared burdens of centralized corporations and government. The stark choice is now between increasing the centralized power of the federal government or decentralizing power into the hands of individuals, families and communities.
