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The Freedom Forum Tweedledee and TweedledumFrom: Pat Baska CommentsThe New American Vol. 16, No. 25 December 4, 2000 http://www.thenewamerican.com Tweedledee or Tweedledum? by William Norman Grigg America’s electoral indecision is a reflection of a presidential election that amounted to a Hobson’s choice, with neither candidate differing substantially from the other. The unprecedented presidential election impasse, according to conventional wisdom, illustrates "grave divisions" in our nation. That a clear division separates partisans of Vice President Gore and Texas Governor George W. Bush is self-evident. However, the candidates themselves are separated more by style than by ideology — not unlike previous presidential elections when the American people were offered a choice between a Republican "Tweedledee" and Democrat "Tweedledum." Presidential politics, it has been observed, shares more than a little with the scripted farce referred to as professional wrestling: Like its "sports entertainment" counterpart, presidential politics involves a charade of conflict that riles up the masses, but involves a predetermined outcome. For the past several decades, the domination of the Executive branch by the Establishment’s chief organ of influence, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), has ensured that whether a Republican or Democrat wins the White House, the Establishment will be the victor — unless Americans redirect their attention to the House of Representatives, which is not as susceptible to Establishment control. There are hundreds of CFR members in important positions in the Clinton-Gore administration, including President Clinton. (According to the CFR’s latest annual report, 548 CFR members are U.S. government officials — not bad for an elitist private organization with a total membership of less than 4,000.) George Bush, like Al Gore, is not himself a member of the CFR. But Bush has surrounded himself with CFR heavyweights (see, for example, the photo on page 16). Condoleezza Rice, the head of Bush’s foreign policy team, is a CFR member, as is virtually every other Bush foreign policy advisor.* Should Bush become president, such "advisors" will likely be appointed to top positions in the new administration, where they will insure that the Insider policies that don’t deviate from one president to the next remain on track. * The New York Times published a 10-member list of George W. Bush’s foreign policy brain trust in its December 23, 1999 issue. In addition to Rice, they are: former Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Armitage; former National Security Advisor Robert Blackwill; former Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney (whom Mr. Bush subsequently selected for his running mate); former Assistant Secretary of Defense Stephen Hadley; former Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle; former Secretary of State George Shultz, former Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz; former Undersecretary of Defense Dov Zakheim; and former Undersecretary of State Robert Zoellick. All but Armitage are members of the CFR. In the parlance of professional "wrestling," the typical presidential struggle is a "work" — a conflict in which the contenders may suffer genuine injuries, but in which the eventual outcome (continued CFR dominance) is dictated in advance. The 2000 campaign, with the prolonged controversy over the contested result in Florida, resembles what professional "wrestling" commentators call a "Schmazz" — a match with no clear victor that disintegrates into a general free-for-all, with the rules thrown out the window. Spectacles of this sort are used to draw out popular conflicts and build fan interest. In like manner, the campaign melodrama, with its incendiary rhetoric and demagogic posturing, has resulted in much greater public fixation upon the presidency as the vessel of the "will of the people." Jesse Jackson, in familiar fashion, descended upon Florida to preside over a mass tantrum of Gore supporters demanding an illegal "re-vote" in heavily Democratic Palm Beach County. Meanwhile, with Gore having come in first in the nationwide popular vote count, calls proliferated for the elimination of the Electoral College. To judge from the acrimonious tenor of the controversy, one would believe that the presidential contest was the very hinge of history, and that a shift of a handful of votes would result in a dramatic change of national direction. In truth, irrespective of who is eventually deemed the winner of the protracted presidential election, the next President of the United States will be an internationalist committed to ruling through "consensus," rather than governing according to the Constitution. Carbon Copies Of course, the candidates themselves would strongly disagree with this assessment — as would millions of good Americans who were frightened by the prospects of a Gore presidency and who found Bush to be, if not the ideal candidate, at least the "lesser of two evils." Yet Bush’s own record and positions show that he is not an advocate of less government, and that the differences between him and Gore have much more to do with nuance than with substance. Consider, for example, Mr. Bush’s stated positions on federal education policy. Not many years ago, the GOP at least gave lip service to abolishing the cabinet-level Department of Education that Democratic President Jimmy Carter had lobbied for and had signed into law. Now we have a Republican president-elect who will, according to his campaign website (www.georgewbush.com), "reform the nation’s public schools, as he has in Texas." In Texas, his website boasts, Mr. Bush’s education reforms increased funding "for public schools by $8.3 billion. State funding per pupil has increased 37 percent." For the nation, Mr. Bush has called for an infusion of new education spending — including $5 billion over five years for a new "Reading First" program, a $3 billion fund for education technology, a $2.4 billion fund for teacher accountability systems, and $2 billion for new after-school programs. But because Mr. Tweedledee is a "conservative," he will supposedly reform the nation’s schools without meddling in local affairs, unlike the "liberal" Tweedledum. The Bush website explains: "States will be offered freedom from federal regulation, but will be held accountable for results." Any questions? Another department that, not many years ago, the GOP supposedly wanted to abolish was the Department of Energy. But Bush has stated that "our country has a great and urgent need for a comprehensive energy policy, with leadership from the president himself." He also supports the development of a "North American Energy Policy" with Mexico and Canada, a federal restructuring of the utility industry, and the mandatory reduction of utility industry emissions — including the dreadful CO2 gas that, Tweedledum Gore claimed in his fright-peddling 1992 book Earth in the Balance, causes global warming. But Tweedledee Bush’s support for oil exploration in a small part of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge alone is more than sufficient to establish his conservative bona fides with the Establishment opinion cartel. Yet the Establishment’s New York Times, in an October 29th article entitled "How Bush and Gore View the Role of Government," claimed: "Both candidates defy the usual stereotypes of what Democrats and Republicans want from Washington." The article noted that Bush "is the first Republican to try to reach the Oval Office by talking seriously about federal education standards and new prescription drug programs." It continued: "Just listen to the stump speeches last week. There was Mr. Bush … his hand chopping the air, explaining how he would save Social Security and Medicare — programs that, more than a half-century ago, Republican nominees for president decried as ‘creeping socialism.’" For decades, the conservative wing of the Establishment opinion cartel has been conspicuously represented by National Review, which presumes to be the doctrinal voice of the Right. In its endorsement of Bush, the magazine described Gore as "a demagogue who curries envy and fashions policy to the end of promoting central government as agent of health, prosperity, and education" — and Bush as "a more modest statesman" who promises "a better, cleaner politics" than that practiced by Clinton and Gore. But should such a "statesman" be entrusted with the growing powers of the presidency? Should anybody? The message conveyed by the National Review endorsement was that the powers of the presidency were simply too vast and all-encompassing to be entrusted to a collectivist like Al Gore, but that George W. Bush was somehow worthier to exercise such powers. After all, conservatives had no choice but "to abide by what was a fair and open process" and support Bush. Left-leaning Americans were told exactly the reverse: That whatever Al Gore’s shortcomings, the presidency and its powers must be kept in "progressive" hands. Lost amid this orchestrated furor was the fact that under the Constitution, no individual is to be entrusted with the powers that have been usurped by the presidency over the past several decades. Court Gestures Significantly, the Constitution was barely mentioned by Bush and Gore during the three 90-minute joint infomercials that were misleadingly labeled "debates." During the first of those encounters, Bush avowed his intention to appoint judges "who will strictly interpret the Constitution" and "look upon the Constitution as sacred." In his rejoinder Gore asserted that "the Constitution ought to be interpreted as a document that grows with our country and our history" — which means, in practice, that the written Constitution is supplanted by the transient whims of activist judges. It was the issue of the future composition of the Supreme Court that served to rally ideological partisans behind either Bush or Gore. Bush supporters invoked the specter of a Court larded with judicial Jacobins lusting to eviscerate the Bill of Rights; Gore’s defenders bewailed the possibility that a Bush-era Court would overturn Roe v. Wade and otherwise undermine decades of judicial "progress." As liberal Newsweek columnist Anna Quindlen observed, "the Supreme Court is not a single issue in this campaign. It is every issue.... The justices of the Supreme Court comprise the least public part of the tripartite process, yet they may touch every aspect of the American political landscape." Through the presidential election, continues Quindlen, Americans "indirectly … get to choose justices." The logic — such as it is — of this position is that the presidential election will ultimately determine who will have the power to rewrite the Constitution. American’s looking for a conservative president rallied to Bush in the hopes that he would be a pro-life ally in the White House. All but forgotten by these voters were reports in the summer of 1999 that Bush would not necessarily appoint pro-life Supreme Court justices. "George W. Bush said … that if elected he would not impose an anti-abortion ‘litmus test’ on his Supreme Court nominees," reported the Los Angeles Times for June 15, 1999. During his first campaign visit to New Hampshire, Bush had stated: "There will be no litmus test except for whether or not the judges will strictly interpret the Constitution." It is doubtful that Bush has changed his mind since 1999. During the October 25th edition of CNN’s Inside Politics, host Judy Woodruff asked Green Party candidate Ralph Nader: "Aren’t you concerned if Bush wins he’ll appoint justices who will overturn Roe v. Wade?" Nader gave a revealing reply. "I don’t think that’s going to happen...," he said. "I’ve heard from so many Republican operatives who say to me privately [that] if the Republican Party is ever responsible for reversing Roe v. Wade, it would destroy the party." If Nader is right, then Bush’s presidency will steer clear of the abortion tragedy. And too, the lessons of history shouldn’t be forgotten. Conservatives should remember that it was Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower who appointed leftists Earl Warren and William Brennan to the Supreme Court. "Conservative" Republican Richard Nixon appointed Harry Blackmun, who conjured up the Roe v. Wade decision and used it to overturn all existing protections for the unborn. When, in 1992, the Supreme Court upheld Roe in its decision Planned Parenthood v. Casey, eight of the Court’s nine justices were Republican appointees, and the three who wrote the majority decision (Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy, and Joseph Souter) were appointed by "conservative" Republicans Ronald Reagan or George Bush. If history is any guide, conservatives who voted for Bush in the hope of reining in the Supreme Court are almost certain to be disappointed by a Bush presidency. If Bush really does intend to rein in the High Court, he would recommend that Congress eliminate Roe v. Wade and myriad other judicial usurpations by employing its power to limit the Court’s appellate jurisdiction. (This little-known congressional power is enumerated in Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution.) Moreover, if he truly opposes abortion based on the principled position that all human life is sacred, he would not be able to justify condoning abortion for selected categories of unborn children (e.g., those conceived due to rape or incest) as he does now. Presidential Power and Prerogative Many conservatives who were properly outraged over Bill Clinton’s frankly dictatorial second term — in which he conducted several illegal military campaigns, issued scores of flagrantly unconstitutional executive orders, repeatedly defied the constitutional powers of Congress, and resorted to blatant extortion to defeat impeachment — have supported Bush on the assumption that he can be trusted with the distended powers of the presidency. "If you give me your trust, I will honor it," declared Bush in his acceptance speech in Philadelphia. "Grant me a mandate, I will use it. Give me the opportunity to lead this nation, and I will lead." Bush’s statement implies that Bill Clinton and Al Gore can be faulted for an unwillingness to use power — which is obviously not the case. Nowhere in his acceptance speech — or, for that matter, at any recorded time during his campaign — did Bush describe his role as the modest one of seeing that constitutionally appropriate laws passed by Congress are faithfully executed, and of conducting diplomacy with other nations under constitutionally defined terms. Instead, Bush — like Al Gore — acted upon the assumption that the powers of the presidency are entirely discretionary, and limited only by the ambitions and judgment of its occupant. "The dirty little secret is that both houses of Congress have become increasingly irrelevant," wrote former Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich in a January 17, 1999 USA Today op-ed column. According to Reich, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan presides over America’s domestic economy, the UN’s International Monetary Fund essentially dictates U.S. foreign policy, and "when the president decides to go to war, he no longer needs a declaration of war from Congress. He just calls up a few generals, phones Tony Blair in Britain and sends in the bombers." There was not a single occasion during the 2000 campaign when George W. Bush promised to reverse the dictatorial accumulation of power in the presidency. "I believe the presidency, the final point of decision in the American government, was made for great purposes," declared Bush in Philadelphia. In fact, the presidency — which, far from being the "final point of decision," is subject to the congressional veto — is an institutionally weak office. Its powers were carefully circumscribed by wise men who were justifiably leery of it degenerating into the quasi-dictatorial station that the next president will inherit. For his part, George W. Bush has openly promised to build upon the statist and globalist initiatives of the Clinton era. For instance: Bush benefited greatly from outrage over the Clinton regime’s eight-year assault on the right to keep and bear arms. But rather than promising a campaign to abolish existing unconstitutional gun laws, Bush has called for "strictly enforcing our nation’s gun laws," as well as new federal legislation mandating instant background checks at gun shows. In accepting the Republican presidential nomination, Bush stated: "We’re learning to protect the natural world around us. We will continue this progress, and we will not turn back." Although he frequently condemned Al Gore’s well-documented eco-socialist zeal and the Clinton-era lock-up of Western lands, it was Bush — not Bill Clinton or Al Gore — who proposed the first framework for intrusive regulation of so-called "greenhouse gases" under the UN’s Kyoto Accords. The October 24th Washington Times reported that the Bush proposal, which was released in September, "would cap for the first time the carbon-dioxide emissions of power plants." "It is a betrayal of a number of members of Congress who have resolutely fought carbon-dioxide regulation, which EPA has wanted and been trying to do since [EPA Administrator Carol M.] Browner took over," observed Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. "This puts every other industry at risk of similarly being regulated, but it especially threatens consumers with much higher energy prices." The Times pointed out that Republicans on Capitol Hill and business officials "refused to be quoted on the record opposing the Bush proposal." "Everyone is being quiet about Bush because people are desperate to get rid of the most unethical administration in history," explained Ebell. The Internationalist In matters of both foreign and domestic policy, George W. Bush, if he becomes the next president, has promised to build upon the legacy of the Clinton era. In late 1994, Bill Clinton — with the connivance of "conservative" Republicans like Newt Gingrich, and media support from "conservative" radio entertainer Rush Limbaugh — illegally raided a Treasury Department dollar stabilization fund to prop up the Mexican peso and thereby bail out those Wall Street banks which had made unwise investments in Mexico. George W. Bush has endorsed this act of presidential grand larceny on behalf of the banksters. Speaking of the Mexican bail-out during the second "debate," Bush said, "I thought the president did the right thing with Mexico and was very strongly supportive of the administration in Mexico." Bush also stated that "we ought to be forgiving Third World debt under certain conditions" — thereby endorsing another Clinton administration scheme. Bush has also conspicuously supported the Clinton regime’s unconstitutional use of U.S. military personnel as globo-cops under UN and NATO authority. "I thought the president made the right decision in joining NATO in bombing Serbia," Bush stated during the second "debate." He also proudly recalled how he had worked to undercut a congressional initiative to extricate U.S. forces from the Balkans: "I called upon the Congress not to hamstring the administration … in terms of forcing troop withdrawals." According to an October 31st Reuters report, senior representatives of Bush’s campaign assured NATO’s leadership collective that "he would not unilaterally pull American troops out of peacekeeping missions in the Balkans" if he were elected president. In fact, Bush actually criticized Bill Clinton for being insufficiently eager to insert U.S. troops into Kosovo: "I didn’t think he necessarily made the right decision to take land troops off the table right before we committed ourselves offensively," Bush observed during the second "debate." Despite his occasional assurances that his administration would eschew "nation-building" and open-ended military commitments abroad, Bush has called for the creation of a "kind of an early warning system in places where there could be ethnic cleansing and genocide the way we saw it there in Rwanda" — which would, in practice, amount to an unlimited commitment to police the world. Bush has also indicated that he would consolidate the Clinton era’s gains toward a centralized national police force. In the second debate, immediately after assuring his listeners that "I don’t want to federalize the local police forces," Bush spoke of the "need to enforce civil rights laws" and to end the practice of so-called "racial profiling." Should local police departments fail to live up to federally dictated standards, Bush continued, "there needs to be a consequence at the federal level.... I do think we need to find out where racial profiling occurs and do something about it. And say to the local folks, get it done, and if you can’t there’ll be a federal consequence." This statement undoubtedly was quite welcome to the Justice Department commissars who are using "racial profiling" and other spurious issues as a pretext to seize control over local police departments (see "Signposts to a Police State" in our September 11th issue). After the eight-year onslaught of presidential depravity under Bill Clinton, millions of religious conservatives eagerly hoped that George W. Bush would be a White House ally in the Culture War. That Al Gore would be a pitiless antagonist was never seriously in doubt. However, two actions taken by the George W. Bush campaign made its priorities perfectly clear: In April, the candidate held a "sensitivity session" with homosexual Republicans; in September, he pointedly spurned an invitation from the Christian Coalition to address its "Road to Victory" conference in Washington, asserting that attending such a function would detract from his message of "compassionate conservatism." Following the April meeting with Bush, former Republican Congressman Steve Gunderson, an avowed homosexual, boasted: "Our meeting [with Bush] set an important precedent: never again will a major-party candidate be able to run for president without addressing gay and lesbian issues." Bush’s snub of the Christian Coalition — which, whatever the merits of its leadership, is composed of decent, intelligent, pro-family conservatives — set an equally important precedent as well. Just as important as these acts of the Bush campaign were several prominent omissions. Where, for instance, were the Bush campaign advertisements condemning the hate campaign by the homosexual lobby against the Boy Scouts? In 1988, George Bush the Elder — who was by no means a conservative — turned Michael Dukakis’s ACLU membership into a winning political issue. The campaign of Bush the Younger was handed several potentially potent issues: The spectacle of an Eagle Scout color guard being booed by hate-crazed homosexuals at the Los Angeles Democrat convention; the equally revolting scene of a police honor guard being spat upon by delegates to the New York State Democrat convention where Empress Hillary was nominated for the Senate; the Clinton administration’s collaboration in the attack on the Boy Scouts; Bill Clinton’s politically motivated amnesty of Marxist cop-killers from the FALN terrorist group. All of these subjects would have made spectacular campaign ads — and all of them were entirely ignored by the Bush campaign. Democratic Centralism As left-wing pundit Christopher Hitchens points out, modern presidential politics is a variant of Lenin’s "democratic centralism" — the concept that a ruler who draws his mandate from the masses has virtually unlimited power. An American corollary to this idea is that since the powers conferred are so vast, the electorate has a duty to choose the "lesser of two evils," and then "throw their votes into the unsorted heap that lies at the foot of the Dear Leader." The bitter truth, observes Hitchens, is that "both parties actually ‘win’ and then proceed to share the spoils" at the expense of the electorate. Our present political system is built around a two-party cartel, with the Republican and Democratic parties acting as retail franchises for an entrenched Establishment. "The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea," wrote Georgetown University history professor Carroll Quigley in his 1966 book Tragedy and Hope. "Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can ‘throw the rascals out’ at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy." In fact, it is to the advantage of the political Establishment to allow the electorate to rotate ruling parties, Quigley continued, since "either party in office becomes in time corrupt, tired, unenterprising, and vigorless. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will have none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies." In this dialectical scheme, the general division of labor is this: Democrats initiate, Republicans consolidate. George W. Bush has clearly and repeatedly promised to consolidate the socialist and globalist policies of his predecessor. But there is an alternative to supporting whoever appears to be the "lesser of two evils" between Tweedledee and Tweedledum. It is to focus our energies upon the House of Representatives, which is the most important and accountable branch of the federal government. America’s power elite may have a stranglehold over the presidency for the foreseeable future, but they do not enjoy nearly the same degree of influence over the House of Representatives, which is where revenue bills originate, and where the excesses of the Supreme Court can be curbed. Under the U.S. Constitution, the president is not intended to be a "Dear Leader" with unlimited powers. Unfortunately, for too long too many Americans have allowed themselves to be seduced into believing that their most important civic duty is to cast a vote every four years for a new king. For those who wish to prevent America’s irretrievable descent into the Total State, the path back to our constitutional heritage runs through the House of Representatives — and the real work of constitutional restoration must be done by informed, organized citizens in each congressional district. The next issue of THE NEW AMERICAN will include information on the congressional elections. — Ed. 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