Eric Cantor and the Jewish Vote

By Eric Futterman

Eric Cantor is one of us.  

I say that as an active member of the Richmond Jewish Community that sits in the heart of Cantor’s huge 7^th Congressional District. After all, he is a member of what we in the Jewish culture call the Tribe.    

As we commemorate the most important holidays in the Jewish faith, while at the same time circle around our decision as to who represents us in Congress, it’s an important time to assess the 12-year history of Eric Cantor’s representation in Congress of the people of the 7^th district and the Jewish community here.

It has become quite clear on the eve of these important dates that Eric Cantor does not represent either the 7^th District or the Jewish code of conduct and faith.

I acknowledge right up front that I speak for myself, as I am neither worthy, nor do I have the right to speak for Judaism as a whole. But when I see someone highlight our faith as a rationale for support and then watch as he tarnishes our core principles, I am speaking out due to an insatiable urge to defend the tenants of my faith.    

Enter Eric Cantor.

Thus invites a big dilemma Jews in our area as we face come election time. Do we elect one of our own—a member of the Jewish faith and culture who we expect will most certainly do what he can to protect the relationship between the United States and Israel—or do we turn to his opponent Wayne Powell, who promises to take a far different approach to the way Congress works.
  

Or do we risk creating a new generation of Americans who will be fooled by the old and horrific stereotypes of Jews we have been forced to endure and fight to discard for centuries by electing a Congressman who is lending unwelcome credence to those stereotypes?

I am talking of course about Eric Cantor, my Congressman in the 7^th District of Virginia since 2001.  Cantor’s actions as a member of Congress in the last decade have caused many of us in the Jewish community true angst by showcasing the worst of greed that we see all too often in Congress.

I remember going out on a first date many years ago. My date, upon realizing I was Jewish, immediately asked if I was wealthy.  Children in the Arab world are still taught the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the book ordered up by the Russian Czar Nicholas who was looking for a scapegoat while his imperialistic kingdom was crumbling around him.

The book is a greatest hits version of all the worst stereotypes used to demonize, criminalize and decimate the Jewish populations of many different Easter European countries. It’s being taught to millions of Arab children every day, creating an almost innate bigotry against a people who share such similar DNA and even cultural heritages.

We Jews have been called all of these ugly names: miserly; greedy; cheap; all consumed with making money; willing to obviate the larger population in order to create a small, elite group that seeks to control the world’s riches. Some stereotypes stick and all it takes is one example of someone reflecting those stereotypes to make them stick to an entire culture for more than a generation, Just ask any successful and educated African American who has to deal with certain types of rap that misogynies women.

In his 12 years in the United States Congress Eric Cantor has seemed to do all the things that deliver this stereotype about the Jewish people.

The latest in a string of decisions, speeches and votes is the one that makes me the most uncomfortable.

Unbelievably, until this year members of the United States Congress could legally conduct Insider Trading; buying and selling stocks and investments based on information they knew as members of Congress that was not available to the public or to investors at large. I admit, I didn’t even know this until the Democrats came up with a bill, the STOCK Act, which banned Insider Trading among members of Congress. The entire Congress approved and passed the bill and President Obama signed it into law in April.

But there was a catch. Eric Cantor’s office, according to an investigative report by CNN, “wrote a loophole into the House version of the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act (STOCK) by exempting Congress members’ spouses and children from having to report stock market transactions.”

This was one of those instances that give every anti-Semite who ever lived an opportunity to say, “See I told you so!”

Cantor, whose family enjoys great wealth, has a gold plated health care plan provided by the U.S. Government; has voted to give his family more than $1 million in tax cuts over the last ten years; has taken money from Wall Street, Big Oil, Big Pharma and Big Insurance and worked tirelessly to deregulate those industries. The result of that support has been a disaster for our nation.

Cantor’s desire to deregulate Wall Street led to the collapse of our entire economy in 2007 and 2008. His support of deregulating the Oil Industry led to the BP Disaster, and of course he has fought vigorously to allow insurance companies to reject children who have pre-existing conditions by repealing the Affordable Care Act.

Cantor is clearly a man who is for sale.

For instance, Cantor took $625,000 from the pharmaceutical industry and gave them $439 billion in return with the Medicare Part D drug plan. This plan, which also added more than $700 billion to the National Debt, took away the government’s right to negotiate drug prices with Big Pharma on behalf of the millions of Medicare enrollees across the nation, forcing seniors to negotiate one on one. It was a giant windfall for Big Pharma and a big loss for seniors. When ObamaCare repealed it, Cantor voted no.

Last year the Republicans deliberately created a financial crisis by refusing to pass the same kind of debt ceiling increase they passed more than a dozen times when Bush and Cheney were in office, Cantor bet against the United States, ‘shorting’ U.S. Treasury Bonds in his personal portfolio and thereby bettering against his own country in a blatant conflict of interest.

Back in January Cantor was on 60 Minutes trying to explain to Leslie Stahl why American Jews tend to be more liberal. Cantor’s response was telling;   “It’s Tikun Olam,” he said. “That is a concept in Judaism which means, “ repair the world” – and it’s a very charitable concept. And it’s that way in the Christian faith and others as well, that you give back. And clearly there is the ability to characterize all the social programs that exist at the federal level as reflecting that need to repair the world and to help those who can’t help themselves.”

It’s almost astonishing to see how he quickly understood why American Jews have supported the most vulnerable in our society from civil rights for African Americans, to Gays & Lesbians to the impoverished and uneducated.

Yet Cantor has turned directly away from this sense of morality. Time and again when George W. Bush was President Eric Cantor voted against the middle class. He voted to put the ‘donut hole’ into Medicare, forcing millions of seniors to pay more for drugs. Then he did it again with Medicare Part D, which put an end to Medicare negotiating drug prices for all Medicare recipients, which took away all the negotiating leverage for American seniors and raised drug prices.

To counteract President Obama’s Jobs Act, an effort to reconstruct America’s infrastructure and in way that would not increase the national debt, Cantor proposed his own Job’s act, very simply a massive tax cut for millionaires.

Time and again, for his entire run as a representative of Virginia’s 7^th District, Eric Cantor has favored windfalls, giveaways and subsidies to the millionaires and billionaires of our society, while cutting the legs off of teachers, firefighters and police officers; middle class Americans who struggle to get by.  

This is not the Jewish way. It never has been.

Eric Cantor has also had the audacity, the chutzpa, if you will, of joining in with the negative stereotype of President that has been pushed hard by the Tea Party and its leadership of President Obama; using his ethnic sounding name to brand him as somehow anti-Semitic or anti-Israel. I cannot tell you how many times I have encountered fellow Jews who believe this. Though Obama’s philosophy of Middle East Peace and Israel’s rightful place in the world is nearly identical as all presidents since Truman, I hear some of my fellow Jews say they are sure he hates Israel and wants it destroyed.

Cantor joined this phony fight before Obama was even elected. During the 2008 election Cantor even accused Obama of calling Israel “a sore on America.” This was a misquote from an interview Obama gave with Atlantic magazine calling the never ending Israeli-Palestinian conflict “a sore on America and a danger to Israel’s security.”

Of course the reality of President Obama’s relationship with Israel is quite different. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who served under both Bush and Obama, testified before Congress on March 2, 2011 that, “In terms of concrete steps to improve the security relationship between [the U.S. and Israel], more has been done in the last two years than in any comparable period in my entire career.’ Gates Career started at the CIA in 1966.

Former Israeli Prime Minister and current Defense Minister Ehud Barack refutes Cantor’s assertion rather bluntly. Barak recently praised Obama, telling CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, “I should tell you honestly that this administration under President Obama is doing, in regard to our security more than anything that I can remember in the past.”

Beyond all those specific issues, Eric Cantor regularly sides with the far right Christian Conservatives who have dominated the Republican party over the last 40 years. He sides with them on gay rights, women’s reproductive rights and claims them as allies in their support of Israel.

It’s so easy to vote for one of your own; to support someone who has lived within your own culture and faith; especially when your culture has suffered so terribly over so many generations. It’s instinctive to feel more secure about someone from your own faith and culture to represent you at the highest levels of government.

But Eric Cantor does not represent the humanity and values that American Jews have displayed since coming ashore in such great numbers in the late 19^th and early 20^th century. Instead he represents the power of greed or humanity, the power of money, obtained in ways that ordinary Americans, including American immigrants just like the Jews of earlier generations had no way of obtaining.

By violating so many tenants of the Jewish faith; by decidedly voting on laws and regulations that favor the wealthiest people and biggest corporations at the expense of seniors and children who are of modest and impoverished means, by voting against the expansion of education, Eric Cantor does not deserve the support of the Jewish people in our district.

He needs to be sent home and back into the private sector. And maybe a lesson in humility will teach Eric Cantor to make changes in his values that can bring him back to the Jewish American values that have benefited our nation and our district so well.

©2012 EAF Custom Communication

November 2^nd, 2004. 

I remember it well. Some good, loving, liberal friends threw a post-election ‘wake’, giving us all an opportunity to mourn the electoral defeat of John Kerry, a good man, an intellectual, a war hero and a terrible candidate, to George W. Bush, who possessed the exact opposite characteristics. We all correctly feared more war, more economic demise in the coming years and wondered what could have been done differently.

The food was wonderful. The kinship was enjoyable. The determination to do what it takes to actually beat the massive machine that Movement Conservatism had become was tragically self-defeating.

Getting fed up with Democrats and Liberals from Carter to Mondale, from Dukakis to Gore and finally to Kerry, I told everyone that we had to stop apologizing for what we believe. We must stop allowing ourselves to be defined by this powerful message machine comprised of conservative think tanks, Rush Limbaugh and all his wannabe talk radio mimics, and the nascent and newly powerful conservative force, Fox “News”.

The title wave was only going to get bigger and more powerful. I told everyone that we had to stop being nice. We had to force Conservatives to defend themselves as being a threat to individual rights, working class Americans and families struggling to get by.

The push back I received was what I expected. “We don’t want Republicans to think we hate them. We just want them to try to understand where we’re coming from.”

Sigh.

The 2006 and 2008 elections were victories won the only way modern Democrats have been able to win in the last 30 years; with Republicans having governed for more than 2 years. Democrats won those elections mainly because Republicans in full power had governed the way we knew they would and their governing was having a traumatic effect on our nation and its economy.

Having Sarah Palin as a Vice Presidential candidate didn’t hurt our cause either.

The Iraq War was, in 2006, a full blown humanitarian disaster. Tens of thousands of Iraqis were being slaughtered and millions were forced to move from their homes, never to return.  American soldiers were losing their lives by the hundreds while going back to tour after tour of duty. Al Qaeda, a non-presence in Iraq before the war, was now fully present and operational, adding violence and terror to an already vicious mix.

And the economy was starting to crumble. Warnings of a pending housing crisis were beginning to be realized, employment was getting worse and our national debt was piling up. The veneer of George W. Bush as a swashbuckling President creating an all-powerful America was falling apart with frequent verbal gaffes and extraordinary failure in Iraq, in the war on terrorism and the economy. Dick Cheney’s lies were becoming more and more exposed.

The Bush/Cheney failure, the economic disaster that was unfolding and the Republicans weak candidates opened a path for a young and unproven Barack Obama to take the election in 2008 with positive messages of hope and change.

Then after the 2008 election Democrats and Liberals went back to their apathetic and apologetic political zone. They and our new President once again settled into to my friends’ operational belief that if we offer an olive branch of peace to conservatives they’ll work with us to forge a great American partnership.  They believed that conservatives would see the history of the disastrous Bush/Cheney administration and realize they could not repeat it.

Then disaster struck once again. Every effort by President Obama—doing  his best John Kerry impersonation—to find middle ground with Republicans was met with a stab in the back.  In fact, a newly published book by journalist Robert Draper, “Do Not Ask What Good We Do”, reveals that Republicans leaders past and present and pollster Frank Lutz, gathered on the night of inauguration and conspired to simply block every item on Obama’s agenda through his entire term using any means possible. Not surprisingly Newt Gingrich led the discussion.

A growing force that emerged as the Tea Party began to dominate the conversation. Tea Party sympathizers and members started believing the lies of an angry Sarah Palin, that there were death panels in Health Care Reform. Millions believed in the strategically created lie that Barack Obama may not be an American citizen and that he surely must be a closet Muslim who, as Palin asserted, “pals around with terrorists.”

Obama’s Health Care Reform plan was going to force millions of Americans into a plan they didn’t want and couldn’t afford.

None of it was true of course. These were carefully crafted lies repeated over and over on talk radio, on Fox News and in conservative newspapers.

The mainstream media, after 30 years of being frightened at being labeled “liberally biased”, treated every false accusation as if it might be true, just as they had with the buildup to the Iraq War, just as they had during Clinton’s impeachment, just as they had with the Swift Boat Liars who successfully turned war hero John Kerry into a coward with questionable patriotic credos.

This was a tried and true method of the Movement Conservatives; turn your political opponent into a hated figure. That way, the people whom your opponent’s policies will most surely benefit—in this case working class and middle class professionals—will be blinded to the policies by their anger and hatred of the man.

The examples are abundant.

Dukakis and the furloughs of frightening black murderers.

Gore and his ties to an immoral President.

Mondale promised to raise taxes and make us weak.

 Liberals believed in free sex and allowing gays to ‘recruit’ young people into their world threatening family’s nation-wide.  Remember the era of the “angry white male” in the early 80s? They were angry at all the efforts to bring equality into our nation after 350 years of slavery and another century of minority disenfranchisement.

Obama was an easy mark;  a mixed race man with the middle name of our enemy and a full name that reeked of Muslim terrorist ties. I’ll never forget a video I saw during the 2008 election. A young man with a home video camera asked more than 50 people waiting in line for a McCain-Palin event what they thought of Senator Obama. Every single one of them said he was a Muslim. Every one of them!

The foundation of the Tea Party was born. Large corporations and health insurance companies knew that once they had the hatred of middle class Americans on their side, they could get away with creating policies that would cause great harm to those same people while generating huge profits and tax cuts for large corporations and wealthy individuals.

In 2010 all those factors created a big victory for right wing conservatives nationwide.

States like Wisconsin, Ohio, Virginia, Arizona and Florida elected far right wing Tea Party supported governments that began to strip away voting rights, reproductive rights and workers’ rights, while giving huge tax cuts to large corporations.

Right on cue.

Today former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney stands poised to be the next Republican to benefit from these false stereotypes and the historical amnesia of middle class America. He promises to enact economic and foreign policies that are not just similar to the Bush/Cheney model but far more destructive.

Romney has shown during the Republican primary and at the beginning stages of the general election campaign a willingness to make statements that are blatantly false, the most egregious being that he never supported “Obamacare” for the nation and that the statement about Romney’s wife, made by a CNN pundit, was most certainly attributable to the entire Obama nation.

That was then….

This is now.

Take that one statement by Hillary Rosen. She said that Anne Romney “never worked a day in her life,” and therefore doesn’t understand what life is like for middle and low income working moms. Romney’s campaign lashed out at Obama, falsely claiming that Rosen was speaking for the Obama campaign. For several days the Romney/conservative message machine was gaining traction with this phony “war on moms”.

This time the response was different. It was swift and it was destructive. Instead of a compliant media and apathetic liberals apologizing for, well for nothing, the truth came bursting through.

Facebook liberals started posting a video and quotes from Romney speaking in New Hampshire in January. “While I was governor,” Romney said, “85 percent of the people on a form of welfare assistance in my state had no work requirement. I wanted to increase the work requirement. I said, for instance, that even if you have a child two years of age, you need to go to work. And people said, ‘Well that’s heartless,’ and I said ‘No, no, I’m willing to spend more giving daycare to allow those parents to go back to work.  I want the individuals to have the dignity of work.’”

Facebook Nation erupted. The hypocrisy of Romney’s statements was impossible for the formally compliant and frightened corporate media to ignore. They, too, had to play the quote. Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, Lawrence O’Donnell all chimed in, exposing this huge hypocrisy before the entire nation.

Their satire, their reporting, their quick wit were instantly copied and posted on Facebook by the tens of thousands, opening up formerly complacent liberal eyes with their morning coffee.

Women who were already furious with state legislatures and Governors in Virginia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and other states forcing women who chose an abortion to take medical procedures that were medically unnecessary and as invasive as invasive gets, understood immediately what was happening.

This time they fought back with a vengeance.

For the first time since Lyndon Johnston’s era, liberals have found a fighting voice. They have found their muscle and they are ready to punch back. Even more challenging for Romney is where that muscle is derived; Social Media.

Facebook has changed our world. For many it’s a way to stay in touch with old friends and deliver family news to friends.

But Facebook has been a powerful force for change. Take Virginia for instance.

When the Commonwealth’s right wing legislature and Governor passed the law calling for invasive medical procedures on women who were about to have an abortion, a Facebook protest was organized in less than a week, resulting in more than a thousand ‘silent’ protesters in front of the Governor’s mansion and making national headlines. Governor Bob McDonnell was compelled to remove the invasive procedure provision in the law. His opportunity to become Romney’s Vice Presidential candidate was severely hampered.

A bigger picture is August of 2011. This was arguably President Obama’s weakest point in his office. The huge mid-term victories by the Tea Party were still serving as fresh evidence that Obama might just be 21^st century version of Jimmy Carter. Those Tea Party candidates who were about to govern had yet to implement some of the extremist agenda that would quickly sour most people’s impression of the movement.

So the Republicans, with the media still frightened, with the Muslim/Birther issue still strong within their base, with the nation not happy with the economic recovery, decided to put the hammer down.

They took the debt ceiling to the brink. They forced President Obama into a weeks-long negotiation to prevent the American people and our entire economy from defaulting on our debt obligations. They believed they could force this weak president, and convince this weak generation of journalists, that the only way to cut debt was to cut spending and allow for a continuation of the Bush/Cheney tax cuts for the wealthy.

This time the compliant liberal base was no longer compliant. With social media providing the muscle they punched back.

Every news story on Eric Cantor and the Republicans’ effort to look like the true deficit busters was met with massive social media digging up the stories and the facts not seen on Fox or on Sarah Palin’s mythical “lamestream media”.

Facebook, web logs (Blogs), YouTube all became windows to a truth that had been effectively covered for decades by an aggressive conservative movement echo chamber.

As Cantor tried to position himself as the hero of debt reduction, his own record of voting to raise more than $5 trillion in debt during the Bush years was thrown right back into his face. The Daily Kos was one of thousands of sites that pounded on the proverbial bully.

Eric Cantor and the "tea party" Republicans …turned the raising of the debt limit—nearly a yearly occurrence, under Bush, and with zilch in the way of fanfare—into some new unholy amalgamation of the Battle of the Bulge, Custer's Last Stand, and a particularly plotless Michael Bay film. We must balance the budget! We must not raise taxes! And it must happen right now, because after ten years of sitting on our collective asses and ballooning the deficit with our own ridiculous demands, we conservatives finally realized all of this the very moment a Democrat moved into the White House!

This kind of language, repeated millions of times on social media sites gave formerly disheartened liberals factual ammunition and a powerful voice. They forced journalists to dig up archival stories they used to be too lazy or too frightened to do; like  Cantor & Co. raising the debt limit regularly for the better part of a decade.

Polls reflected this new-found strength in a year that should have been disastrous for liberalism.

The CBS/New York Times poll conducted in August of that year revealed, “A record 82 percent of Americans now disapprove of the way Congress is handling its job — the most since The Times first began asking the question in 1977, and even more than after another political stalemate led to a shutdown of the federal government in 1995.

More than four out of five people surveyed said that the recent debt-ceiling debate was more about gaining political advantage than about doing what is best for the country. Nearly three-quarters said that the debate had harmed the image of the United States in the world.”

That poll was followed by the beginning of the Occupy Wall Street movement. People young and old but mostly young, occupied valuable New York City territory for weeks, displaying their grave concerns over Wall Street and large corporations running government at all levels; leaving ordinary working Americans little voice and little economic benefit. The Occupy movement spread across the nation and the world. Suddenly the national conversation wasn’t about cutting spending but economic equality.

Occupy was fully organized with lightning speed on social media.

And it’s remained that way ever since. Republicans will continue to talk about spending cuts but they now are forced to fight the fight of economic fairness. This is, to say the least, an uncomfortable battle for them. When it became public that their shiny new presidential candidate is building a car elevator in one of his mansions, Facebook nation has revealed that, as Governor, Romney vetoed a $65,000 bill to enhance a few elevators to make them more accessible for people with disabilities.  

The biggest battle this new generation of muscular liberals will have to fight will be against the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court that allows millions to be spent on behalf of candidates secretly.

Progressives must keep up the fight, keep talking and ignore those who say we’re not being polite enough to our fellow conservatives. Otherwise we will be enjoying delicious food at yet another progressive ‘wake’.

The marathon buildup to Mitt Romney’s apparent nomination to the Republican ticket revealed through more than 25 debates one very clear thought the candidates wanted Republican primary voters to understand; they planned to run the federal government just like their political deity Ronald Reagan ran things.

 Low taxes. Small government. Freedom & flags as far as the eye can see.

The fact that the Gipper grew government to huge levels and raised more middle class taxes on more Americans than any other president were, like so many facts in the distorted reality of the Fox and friends era, irrelevant to these proceedings.

The ghost of Reagan permeated the debates. A January Washington Post analyses of the Republican debates revealed that Republican candidates mentioned the Gipper 221 times at that point. Newt Gingrich was, by and far, the most anxious to associate himself with Reagan, though he was a huge critic of the man when Reagan was president.

And yet through all the debates; from 9-9-9 to the Department of…uh…oh well…, to Newt’s constant proclamations of the Holocaust like horror if Obama continues his reign of terror, we didn’t really hear the names of two people who came long after Ronald Reagan retired his presidency to sunny California.

George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney. While Reagan garnered those 221 mentions in those debates Bush was only mentioned 56 times.

Can anyone remember any of the candidates saying, “I want to return America to the days of “W”? Or, “remember the wise words of that great leader, Dick Cheney…”

I certainly don’t.

And yet when it comes to policy, if Mitt Romney succeeds in defeating President Obama and the Republicans take over all of Congress, we will likely see a very clear look at a Bush/Cheney III term on steroids and something quite different than a Reagan presidency. After all Reagan raised taxes a lot, negotiated with terrorists and the Soviet Union and said often that he believed in a progressive tax code.

Romney’s announced economic plans are far different. They reflect the deepest of movement conservatives’ commitment to the idea that when all benefits go to the very top of the pile—the wealthiest individuals and the biggest corporations—then those entities would take their tax cuts and newfound regulatory freedom and shower it on the people with jobs and economic expansion.

First and foremost Romney wants to extend the Bush-Cheney tax cuts including those for the very wealthiest and make them permanent. Those tax cuts added more than $1 trillion to the debt at the beginning of the century and another $800 billion when Obama reluctantly signed a 2 year extension into law in the December of 2010, when Republicans threatened to cut unemployment insurance for the 5 million Americans who lost their jobs and the health care of 9-11 Responders (you know, the people who ran toward the crumbling buildings to rescue their fellow citizens?)

Then the Governor wants to take those tax cuts to another level.

Added up, the Romney cuts would increase the national debt by more than $10 trillion over ten years, more than twice what the Bush tax cuts cost our nation. He and Paul Ryan, his boy wonder tax cutting pal and possible VP candidate, say they will slash Medicare and other spending on, well they haven’t said what they’d cut, to offset that $10 trillion in revenue cuts.

Like Bush and especially like Cheney, Romney wants to rattle the cages of war with yet another Middle Eastern country and continue the steady buildup of our military might and all the costs associated with that. The former Massachusetts governor is ominously bringing on some of the architects of the Bush/Cheney neo-Conservative foreign policy including, State Department counter- terrorism coordinator Cofer Black, former CIA Director Michael Hayden, and former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff. These are the guys who were part of the team that brought you torture, phony WMD warnings, phony terror alert warnings and phony theories about Sadaam having a hand in 9-11 attacks.

Like Bush and Cheney, Romney found a way out of the Vietnam War while supporting the war. In fact as a student, Romney protested against the protesters, demanding the Vietnam War continue. Then he was off to a palace in Paris where he served as a Mormon missionary, exempting him from being drafted and going off to war himself.

Sound familiar?

The truth is, while so many Republicans refused to utter Bush or Cheney’s names because they know most Americans blame W and the Shooter for the economic and foreign policy disasters from which we are working to recover, they want to continue those policies long into the future.

This is like Philip Morris, makers of deadly cigarettes, changing their names to Altria while still adding addictive chemicals to their products. A cancer stick by any other name will still make breathing a challenge.

Despite this all-out effort to keep the Bush/Cheney brand silent during this campaign, the former leaders of the free world may make that quite difficult.

On the day Rick Santorum effectively ended his race, Bush himself made a speech before his own Bush Institute in New York lamenting only the name of the tax cuts he enacted that began the collapse of our economy. “I wish they weren’t called the ‘Bush tax cuts,’…If they were called some other body’s cuts, they’re probably less likely to be raised.” Such lovely prose.

Then just weeks after receiving a heart transplant, Cheney, the architect of the Iraq War, the man who failed to figure out how to catch Osama bin Laden, the man who said “deficits don’t matter”, the man whose Halliburton stock option prices skyrocketed during a war in which more than 100,000 human beings were slaughtered, called President Obama an "unmitigated disaster."

While Bush has remained somewhat quiet since the unmitigated disaster of his own presidency, you can be assured that Cheney, with his fresh new heart and his huge ego, will keep pounding home the idea that the Iraq War, the torture, the tax cuts for the rich, the war profiteering, were all better than what Obama has to offer.

My guess is Governor Romney will try very hard to avoid having his name and face associated with Cheney and Bush, while channeling Reagan every chance he can get.  But his ideas, his policies and his biggest supporters will do all they can to ensure that a Romney first term will be more like a Bush/Cheney third term than anything even resembling what Ronald Reagan produced.  

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It was a scene nearly 40 years in the making. The famous Las Vegas strip. The place that forgives all sins. Donald Trump who used inherited wealth to build a real estate business that included harassing tenants and discriminating against minorities, endorsing for President Mitt Romney, who used his inherited wealth to build a business that tossed thousands of innocent people out of their jobs.

Both are worth hundreds of millions of dollars.  

2,000 miles away, a third man, Barack Hussein Obama, who chose Christianity as his religion, used it to guide his career and his personal family values, quotes biblical scripture at the National Prayer Breakfast. “John tells us,” The President says, “that ‘if anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him?’”

And there it is; the great crossroads in American culture. A 30 year pivotal moment in which the candidates being supported by the fervent Christian right, live lives of personal sin and the kind of greed that devours entire segments of our population, while displaying vitriol and anger toward a man who lives his personal life with a powerful devotion to his the family he values above all else.

I really thought this was going to happen, in one form or another much sooner. It’s been building for more than 3 decades…

Let me take you back to the beginning of it all; when Christian leaders decided to abandon the values of standing up for the poor and vulnerable among us and Conservatives abandoned their libertarian values of keeping government out of the private lives of American citizens.

In 1980 Jerry Falwell, creator of the nascent political organization “The Moral Majority” decided the group should endorse Ronald Reagan. Reagan, who rarely practiced his religion, either before or after this marriage with Falwell’s group, knew he was getting a political ally who could attract an enormous number of evangelical, religious Christian voters and, unlike Martin Luther King, Jr. and the religious left, would convince his followers that top down economics, and an immense military machine, somehow fit into the Christian credo.

Besides they were good at sending checks they really couldn’t afford to causes that mirrored their beliefs.

Reagan agreed that speaking Falwell’s language of family values, homophobia, and evangelical Christian dogma would give him an enormous political boost.

They were both considered then and lionized today as people who truly defined morality.

I guess it depends on your definition of moral.

Both Regan and Falwell had histories of fervent objection to the civil rights movement and its goal in the 1960s. Running for Governor of California in 1966, Reagan promised to toss the Fair Housing Act in the dustbin of history. "If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house," said the most revered Republican in modern history, "he has a right to do so."   

Falwell was even more blunt. After the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that ended discrimination in schools, Falwell, a fervent segregationist, said this; "If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God's word and had desired to do the Lord's will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made. The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn the line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line.”

Moral?

While both Reagan and Falwell wisely cooled off their racist rhetoric as it became politically toxic they clearly came to an agreement that would cement the power of their two institutions. The highly profitable political religious right, and the Movement Conservative ideology that calls for soaking the rich even at the expense of the middle class and the working poor, would abandon their core moral values.

Falwell rejected Jesus’ lifelong commitment to lifting the poor and vulnerable in society and Reagan washed his hands of the libertarian roots of Conservatism.

And in Reagan and Falwell’s America, commitment to Christ equaled a commitment to unhinged and unregulated Capitalism, no matter what trail of destitution was left in its wake. 

Falwell fully supported every one of Reagan’s efforts to cut effective anti-poverty programs, raising taxes on middle class Americans, and creating an astonishing 43% increase in spending on building up a powerful, deadly military machine.

Falwell and his followers fully supported Reagan’s economic theology called Supply Side Economics; the theory that slashing taxes on the very rich and deregulating the Financial Services industry and the biggest polluters, would trickle down to the middle class and the poor. And why not? Falwell himself was beginning to reap enormous profits from his leadership of the Moral Majority and Lynchburg’s Thomas Road Baptist Church, now home to a TV empire. Falwell’s wealth grew exponentially, worth hundreds of millions of dollars at the time of his 2007 death.  

This of course flies in the face of Jesus’ depiction of wealth as written in the gospels. “I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”  In the same conversation Jesus had with a young man he said, "If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.”

In today’s conservative America, if a Democrat made a statement like that he would be condemned to eternal political purgatory and damned as a godless socialist. In fact at a recent Republican debate, when Ron Paul suggested our foreign policy should follow the Golden Rule—Do unto others as you would have them do unto you—he was booed by the crowd of Tea Party conservatives who polls show  overwhelmingly consider themselves religious Christians.

The roots of this rejection of Jesus’ statement can be found in Calvinist thinking that transformed the humility and abiding concern for the poor and impoverished into a justification for greed. A 2005 article by Gordon Bigelow in Harper’s Magazine lays it out quite clearly.

“These [evangelicals] were middle-class reformers who wanted to reshape Protestant doctrine. For them it was unthinkable that capitalism led to class conflict, for that would mean that God had created a world at war with itself. The evangelicals believed in a providential God, one who built a logical and orderly universe, and they saw the new industrial economy as a fulfillment of God's plan. The free market, they believed, was a perfectly designed instrument to reward good Christian behavior and to punish and humiliate the unrepentant.”

In other words, if you are poor or struggling then you must have done something to deserve it.

As Falwell grew more and more wealthy, working class Americans were headed in the opposite direction. From putting the hammer down on unions, to raising middle class taxes multiple times, to nearly defunding successful anti-poverty programs like Aid to Families and Dependent Children, Reagan began what has become a 30 year process of inflating the wealth of the top 5% while the middle class and poor lose ground; creating in 2009 the greatest gap between the top  5% and the rest of the country since the Great Depression. According to the new Christian Conservative dogma, that meant 95% of all Americans must have been doing something to deserve their loss of wealth and economic security.

During the Clinton years Falwell and his followers, which now included powerful radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, vigorously opposed abortion reduction programs that were rooted in ending poverty and teaching prevention. Abortion rates and unwanted pregnancy rates declined significantly after Clinton promoted prevention, education and an economy that benefitted both the middle class and the impoverished.   

George W. Bush, the converted evangelical Christian, abandoned those policies while promoting more deregulation and more tax cuts for the rich. In 2009, as poverty increased, both abortion and unwanted pregnancies began to increase after a long steady decline.

Using hatred and bigotry toward gays and lesbians and shouting ‘family values’ at the top of their lungs, this combination of Conservative economic greed and Religious dogma created the most powerful political force in American history. This allowed Conservative politicians to put forward economic policies that decimated the middle class, while the middle class continued time and time again to vote for the people who were laying waste to the foundations of our economy. It was no surprise then that Bush became a favorite of the evangelical right. His 2004 campaign included an enormous effort to make gays and lesbians second class citizens across the country. This further entrenched evangelicals to his side and brought out more than 4 million voters who wanted to cement ant-gay marriage laws in 18 states.

Bush of course called himself pro-life and based it on his religious beliefs. Yet he had no problem lying lied to the nation to get us into a war in which hundreds of thousands of God’s children were slaughtered while companies like Halliburton profited immensely.

And so the former Libertarian Conservative movement, in cahoots with the formerly compassionate Christian movement, became purveyors of greed, bigotry and anger. Writer and actor John Fugelsang put it best recently when he said, "Only in America can you be Pro-Death Penalty, Pro-War, Pro-Unmanned Drone Bombs, Pro-Nuclear Weapons, Pro-Guns, Pro-Torture, Pro-Land Mines, and STILL call yourself 'Pro-Life'."

As our nation’s economy tilted toward a second Great Depression the American people elected a man named Barack Hussein Obama. This mixed race man with the middle name of a Muslim dictator was an easy target for people who were frightened of Islamic terrorism and not too many years removed from the days of Falwell’s beloved segregation. Vicious lies about Obama permeated the churches and religious based elements of American society; many of whom have been led to believe Obama was a closet Muslim who sympathized with terrorists and in fact, wasn’t even an American.

Proof had no chance against the power of faith.

In 2010 one in five Americans believed Obama was a Muslim. Even those powerful religious leaders, the second generation of Falwell’s movement, when confronted with undeniable facts, still found a way to tie President Obama to a religion they considered evil. Franklin Graham, son of the evangelical icon Billy Graham, said this about Obama, "I think the president's problem is that he was born a Muslim, his father was a Muslim. The seed of Islam is passed through the father like the seed of Judaism is passed through the mother. He was born a Muslim; his father gave him an Islamic name."

And so we end up back in Vegas. Mitt Romney, the man who promised even bigger and more permanent tax cuts for millionaires like himself, while calling for the decimation of Medicare and tax increases on Americans earning $50,000 a year or less, will once again get the support of the religious right, albeit reluctantly because he’s Mormon. Not as bad as the man with the Muslim seed I suppose.

And Barack Obama, a true Christian, a man who lives Christian values in his family and in his policies, will be rejected by the religious right. They will recoil at his calls for asking those same millionaires to pay their fair share to support education, increased jobs for working class Americans and programs that take care of our elderly population, like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

And unlike the commercial, what happens in Vegas will not stay there. Romney and Trump and the rest of the crowd that sees economic greed as part of their religious dogma, will continue to tell the American people that Barack Obama is not one of us, that he just doesn’t understand the values of Christ or America.

                                                                              

©Eric Allan Futterman/EAF Custom Communication