Dear APJ Editors:

This is something I wrote a few months ago & sent to my regular email group. I re-sent it today as a preface to something I'm working up about parallels between the political climate that led to Hitler's rise to power and our political climate today.

In FRIENDLY FASCISM, Bertrand Gross said the U.S. has been gradually nudged to the right.

Gross wrote "the bad news is that evil now wears a friendlier face than ever before."

(He once described Reagan as "the nicest president who ever destroyed a union.")

Today Republican congressmen and the theocratic right make no bones about undermining democracy and sloughing off the will of the people.

Henry Hyde and Jerry Falwell smile when they talk cavalierly about getting rid of a duly elected president.

Friendly facism does dirty work while wearing a happy-face.

The Clinton scandal has just highlighted the fact.

Some Americans are like the frog who won't jump out of the water because the temperature has been turned up gradually instead of suddenly.

If the heat had risen suddenly, the frog would have jumped out and saved itself. (Interestingly, people from other countries are quicker to be alarmed about Ken Starr's damage to democracy.

They don't have our propagandistic mainstream media assuring them this is normal.)

Luckily some of us are alarmed -the liberals I know online among them -- and we want to keep the country from drifting further to the right.

Comparisons between classic & friendly fascism:

1: With classic fascism, there are no free elections.

Under friendly fascism we get the APPEARANCE of free elections, but those elections can be undone by a Congress whose wealthy corporate contributors want to undo it.

Few congressmen would undo the election if they thought their corporate sponsors disapproved.

2: With classic fascism liberal programs are stamped out by a dictator. With today's friendly fascism Congress can -- and DOES -- shut down government, refuse to consider any liberal programs, freeze laws that regulate corporations and impeach or make impotent any president who makes a few too many liberal proposals.

3: Classic fascist dictators keep the public poor and funnel money to a powerful few.

Friendly fascists "ask" the public to pull in their belts to help funnel more of the nation's weath to corporations.

It doesn't do any good to be asked when "no" isn't an option.

Under friendly fascism a corporate-sponsored Congress can take the rare budget surplus that Clinton wants to use to save social security and put it toward tax breaks for the wealthy.

4: Under classic fascism there are no political parties.

With friendly fascism we get the illusion that we have two political parties.

However, one of those parties always votes with corporate America, and the other scolds any of its own party members who fight back.

(ASIDE: Congressional Democrats who muzzle party members who fight back remind me of the following Bob Dylan lines:

"He's got a sweet gift of gab. He's got a harmonious tongue.

He knows every song of love that ever can be sung.

But intentions can be evil.

Both hands can be full of grease. Sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace.")

I added the things in parenteses:

(1) : In classic fascism and in friendly fascism, a powerful oligarchy operates both through government and outside it

(as in our oligarchy where very few large corporations have disproportionate power.)

(2): Each subverts constitutional government (as in trying to unelect a duly elected president through a trumped-up sex scandal.)

(3): Each suppresses rising demands for wider participation in decision making (as in members of Congress saying they don't care about the polls or what the public wants.)

(4): Each suppresses the enforcement and enlargement of human rights and genuine democracy (as in Ken Starr's violating privacy rights and the rightwing's continual attacks on democracy.)

(5): Each uses information control and ideological flimflam to get lower-and middle-class support for plans to expand the money and power of the oligarchy (as in today's news networks focusing on Clinton's flaws while completely neglecting covering the Clinton political enemies; as in the media's role in supporting the corporate ownership's viewpoint.)

(ASIDE 2: In Orwell's "1984" Big Brother spied on citizens using tape recorders -- as did Linda Tripp, and coerced public opinion through propaganda -- as with our present corporate-owned mainstream media.)

When Reagan took office in 1980 rightwingers mobilized.

Their plans for the country included:

getting rid of social programs
breaking labor unions
cutting taxes for upper-income people while dumping the tax burden onto everyone else
repealing government regulations on business
pushing religious right values in schools and elsewhere

The Republican Party and the theocratic right still shove toward friendly fascism.

While some Democrats in Congress have been infuriatingly yielding, they don't bulldoze the country rightward as aggressively as most Republicans are.

Granted, most congressional Democrats aren't fighting the good fight, but they aren't working as hard to advance friendly fascism as Republicans and the theocratic right are.

Republicans are the party that always sides with corporate America, and Democrats are the party that scolds any of its members who fight back. Average people who see the drift toward fascism and away from democracy can alert others and work to slow the country's slide to the right.

We can vote. We can do what Jerry Brown once suggested: Speak the truth to power -- and I'd like to add: "loudly" and "often."

"Man of Peace" Reprise: ("Congressional Democrats' Theme?")

He can be fascinating.

He can be dull. He can ride down Niagra Falls in the barrel of your skull. I can smell something cooking. I can tell there's going to be a feast. Sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace.

Jim Leach, who originally accused Clinton of "an outrageous abuse of authority," with respect to "Whitewater," never did trouble himself (so far as I am aware) to specify, exactly, just what behavior it was that constituted the abuse he had in mind. And of course he wasn't the last Republican to be guided by the accusatory spirit described in Franz Kafka's "The Trial." (Leach was, however, the solitary Republican in the House Banking Committee to explicitly say he believed no criminal impropriety had transpired.) In the second set of hearings (Leach chaired) when the quality of his accusations against the President were called into question, he actually stated that "accusations of McCarthyism can be McCarthyism." Ken Starr proved Leach was justifiably accused of false allegation.

Henry Gonzalez, from the very beginning described the Whitewater allegations as a "witch hunt." Mr. Gonzalez deserves recognition for his basic perspicacity as a human being, and - especially in the face of the Joe McCarthy School of Journalism DC press lynch mob - Gonzalez deserves credit for distinct political courage. He was accused - without any evidence provided, of course - by US News' (at the time) Michael Dufy, of orchestrating his remarks with the White House. In a C-SPAN press conference (regarding several Banking Committee issues), Gonzalez expressly denied talking with anyone at the White House about the allegations.

In the course of the #2 House Banking Committee Whitewater hearings, J.C. Watts, in his 5 minute turn, sneered at the Democrats and referenced the Jack Nicholson/Tom Cruise movie, "A Few Good Men." He specifically associated himself with the character Nicholson played and crowed, "You can't handle the truth!" Of course, what was most revealing in his charge is that the Nicholson character was the villain of the piece, that the "truth" he spoke of - and to which Watts by definition associated himself - was character assassination, lies, and covering-up his own abuse of power by proclamations of self-righteous sanctimony. None of this profoundly revealing insight was ever observed by the press, so far as I am aware. (But I trust C-Span has a copy of the video tape, to replays of which Watts should be subjected many times in the next couple years.)

And in the Senate Banking Committee hearings, Richard Shelby at one point actually declared that he did not know what crime might have transpired, but he insisted that the President must be guilty regardless! This was a prototypical instance of life imitating Kafka, in no uncertain terms. And Frank Murkowski set up a photo op moment, by waving around Vince Foster's empty briefcase, never bothering to identify just what impropriety, exactly, his little exercise in theatrics was supposed to prove had transpired. (Michael Isikoff promoted the moment in his regular Newsweak hit-piece, and - just like the reporters who never asked Joe McCarthy to show them his "proofs" - Isikoff never once obliged Murkowski to support his implied contentions.)

I have written to the White House, urging that they request the Republican Senators on the Banking Committee who remain (minus D'Amato and Faircloth) to recuse themselves from any Senate impeachment trial, for cause of bias beyond mere partisan difference - these people judged guilt when absolutely no evidence of any crime could be discovered, beyond their sheer malicious fantasy conjecture, and indeed when they couldn't even identify an impropriety in particular (save the "murder" of Vince Foster). The public simply cannot trust anyone to judge a case who has demonstrated such monumental prejudice as to conclude guilt despite the total absence of a specifically identified offense. Perhaps you'll join in my suggestion for recusal.

Isn't it a sad day when hypocrits stand and preach 'RULE OF LAW?' This to me is a joke coming from such people. I live in a small town -- Alcoa, Tennessee -- and not too long before most of what is happening now, DeLay was a speaker for a function in our county. I knew then what he really was. I live in a conservative-infested, mean-spirited county of Republican hatred. I am a Black female. But mostly I am the mother of two sons. My oldest is incarcerated for a crime he did not commit and it took me years to be able to say that, but today I can explain to anyone America's Rule of Law. It is what corruption says it is.

The sad thing about what is happening to the President is I could have told him so. The sad thing about the Clintons is that they seem to care. Hillary is wonderful, and it doesn't have anything to do with the fact that she has held her head high throughout this recent mess. Hillary has more class than anyone I can think of.

The next saddest thing is this question: is there no loyalty among human beings now? I have never seen the likes of 'People referring to themselves as "Friends."' Maybe friendship is getting a bad name. I pray for this country, because of all the anger I feel for the Republicans, yet I know within my soul that they need prayer. God bless them.

Don't get me wrong -- forgiveness is 'feeding them with a long handled spoon'.