Editorial

The New Civil War

"The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority," Will Durant.

It has been asserted recently that the Bradley Report is becoming strident and one-dimensional, that credibility is lost because the BR is focused primarily on an anti-Bush agenda, or, in a broader brush, an anti-Republican agenda. It has also been suggested that the Bradley Report is just another "liberal/left-wing mouthpiece."

We at the Bradley Report heartily disavow all such assertions.

The clearest proof of our independent position is the unexpected, yet heartfelt, and I think, particularly moving personal story included in this edition of The Bradley Report by my friend and fellow journalist William (Bill) Finucane. He has left the Democratic Party, and has explained his reasons eloquently in his personal commentary.

But this editorial was already in development when Bill presented his moving view of a personal transition, so it remains important to continue discussing the criteria used in creating The Bradley Report, and why those principles have led to unsettling facts, facts which have led us to conclude we are in the midst of what is essentially an unstated Civil War.

Obviously a great deal of the Bradley Report’s coverage and commentary has focused on the foibles and extreme misadventures of the Bush Administration and its Republican allies in Congress and on the Supreme Court. But that is not because of an agenda on the part of the Bradley Report. It is because of an agenda on the part of Bush Administration and the Republican Party. 

The Bradley Report cannot be easily categorized and therefore marginalized as a ‘left-wing mouthpiece,’ as the so-called conservatives love to do to any medium that might question them and their tactics and policies. The fact the BR cannot be easily pigeonholed should be eminently clear to anyone who has followed our editorial positions.

The Bradley Report favors the right of American citizens who have never been convicted of a felony to own and carry firearms; the Bradley Report is on record as opposing mandatory seat belt laws (see archived stories and editorials for a full exposition of this viewpoint); the Bradley Report does not favor knee-jerk agreement with the positions of the various teacher’s unions, which usually favor increased salaries over increased performance; the Bradley Report emphatically favors the curtailment of Spanish as a second language in the United States, based on the belief that no nation can avoid Balkanization when it has more than one language in use; the Bradley Report opposes knee-jerk political correctness that defies common sense and values, and the Bradley Report does not believe unions are always right no matter what, although the BR is certainly not opposed to unions; they have a vital role in American economics.

Further, the Bradley Report admires and supports American military men and women as they undertake the dangerous tasks assigned to them, but it is adamantly opposed to any supercilious arguments asserting it is necessary to forego long-standing democratic principles when confronting a dangerous enemy.

The Bradley Report does not support abuses of democratic power, in any form, whether such abuses emanate from the executive, legislative, judicial or military arms of the United States. The Bradley Report will reveal what it can of such abuses without concern for who may be inconvenienced by the information or its result.

The Bradley Report supports and is dedicated to American values as they have been known and acknowledged for many, many generations. The Bradley Report supports individualism and self-determination as those concepts have been practiced and developed in America for centuries, but the BR also stands firmly behind the social reforms Americans created as a result of hard-won experience, such as Social Security, the minimum wage, and Medicare, to just scratch the surface of systems that are reflective of the generous and common sense nature of Americans.

Yet the Bradley Report does not support, in fact it abhors, blind collectivism of any type, political or religious, but the Bradley Report supports full religious freedom, which means that no one religion or religious train of thought should be allowed to gain dominance over the secular political systems.

If there is a preponderance of commentary in The Bradley Report that is unfavorable to the current administration and its Republican Grand Old Party, it is because of clear indications that dangerous radicalism has taken hold among the top tiers of the current GOP.

The current political atmosphere in the United States – starting with Mr. Bush and his executive branch of government, and including the decade-long GOP controlled Congressional branches, plus the increasingly polarized judicial branch that is now coupled with an expected right-wing majority on the Supreme Court – indicates that America is for the first time in its history on the brink of an internal takeover by one ideological faction, a faction driven by extraordinarily narrow viewpoints and collectivist religious postures. It is a civil conflict.

In effect, what is emerging is a new political grouping that is calling itself Republican merely for convenience. This new, radical political movement is unmistakably Southern in its makeup, and it is bringing about a new Civil War.

It is succeeding, so far, by propaganda and political manipulation, masking much of its radicalism with fundamentalist religious theology. The South has ‘risen again,’ as The Bradley Report has stated in detail before (see archives). And the overall goals of this second Civil War are not very different from those of the original Confederacy; that is, the absolutism of State’s Rights, the minimalization of federal authority, and an expansionist foreign policy with a sense of righteous predestination.

This new, Southern-based political power group, unfortunately, appears to be fascistic in nature, which ironically is historically in symmetry with the autocratic elitism of the original Confederacy. Of course, fascism was not a known concept during the first Civil War, but the Twentieth Century revealed it as the developed offspring of autocratic and dictatorial right-wing politics, and the Achilles heel of unrestrained and unrestricted capitalism.

The Bradley Report would like to see this dark vision of GOP policies and practices proven false, and if evidence emerges indicating such conclusions are wrong, or that they can be rolled back and contained, the BR will happily report it; however, all the current evidence indicates that America and American values are under the most concerted and sustained attack in the nation’s history, and that attack is being brought about by the radical GOP.

It is our role and our responsibility, as we perceive it, to pursue the journalistic common sense that public information demands, and which unfortunately so many of our peers in the press seem clearly constrained from providing, usually because of corporate publishing’s distorted view of balance; that is, reporters are restricted from stating what they see and understand of events and are instead confined to allowing anyone in a public forum to say anything, no matter how outrageous or unsupported, especially if they hold a public office or an official title.

Instead of being able to point out fallacies within the stated comments, the journalists are neutered and can only hope to find someone else in a public forum, or more specifically in an official capacity,  who might provide an articulate counterpoint to the other comments they and the journalist know to be slippery if not simply dishonest.

This means, of course, that in practice official lies can be disseminated easily and freely, and the given reporter can only hope to counteract them by finding some other public figure willing to risk challenging a policy statement or official declaration by providing contradictory information. It’s not hard to perceive why that doesn’t work very well!

In the majority of the mainstream press, the reporter’s role in checking the facts and providing an interpretation of what has taken place has been effectively stifled. Most journalists cannot tell the public the story as though explaining it to family and friends. Instead, he or she must couch the information in neutral terminology, and hope and pray that someone in an official capacity will have the courage to go on the record with a different view, and secondarily hope that the reader will have enough savvy to read 'between the lines.'

This is why the second Civil War is currently so successful.

The viewpoints of the GOP radicals aren’t subtle, and should easily be refutable, perhaps even laughable if put honestly before the American public, but almost always that does not happen.

Information is not freely available; it’s all there, in the open, but to get it into print or on the TV is very difficult. The established, ‘mainstream’ media has become so corporate that there is a natural aversion to controversy, and a sense at the executive levels that journalists are a necessary evil that must be closely monitored in order to assure everything is ‘balanced.’

Meanwhile the non-traditional media – the right-wing talk shows, Fox TV News, and right-wing newspapers like the New York Post, The Washington Times, et al – are completely unrestrained and are able to cast information in a specific ideological pattern, often in the most blatant manner. In effect, they take advantage of our principles of journalistic freedom while making a mockery of them; they lie or purposefully distort the facts in print and on the airwaves and no one challenges them, which leaves a large segment of the public feeling that what has been said must somehow be true. This is why the new Civil War is succeeding. 

Average Americans believe that if something is said in public or, still importantly, printed for general dissemination, it must have truth to it or it wouldn't be possible to say it or print it. It's the honest belief that if you lie in public, you'll be called on it  somehow by the government, or someone else through the court system. Of course, that is not how the system works. It is necessary to challenge lies with facts, and that is what freedom of the press is all about. To our misfortune, we are living in a time period when the press, which has the Constitutional freedom, is so corporately constricted - often with Republican ownership - that in the vast majority of publications, large, medium and small, we can not hope to see government lies and obfuscations dissected, much less revealed. And in the electronic media, the chance of having such information provided is even more remote, not only because the electronic media is so completely in the hands of conservative financial conglomerates, but because it is licensed.

Only the print press can say what it wants when it wants without government intervention. That is what was provided to us as Americans by the Founding Fathers through the Constitution. They understood the press, and often hated it and what it did to them, but they still stood up for its freedom; had they perceived the possibility of the electronic press, its reasonable to assume they would have protected it too. But how could they? So now in our enlightened technological age the electronic media is government licensed, and therefore can be regulated. The print press cannot be so suppressed, but it has been so co-opted by its corporate ownership and its unrealistic fear of libel challenges that it suppresses itself. This is perhaps the greatest irony of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Given that the mainstream press self-restricts, the right-wing press stands in stark contrast.

Among the mantras of the unrestrained right-wing media is that the Democratic Party is the root of all evil, even though despite its own foibles the Democrat Party for the past century has consistently done more for the average American than the Republican Party. So truth is turned upside down and no one dares point to it and laugh. People in the boardrooms, however, enjoy the joke, and now their radical GOP counterparts are striking out to take over the American political system permanently.

As P.J. O’Rourke once said, "The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it."

It seems clear to us that O’Rourke’s biting humor was accurate at the time, but that was before the new advent of the South’s new Civil War.

The Southern-based GOP is now concertedly choking government by bankrupting it so that there is no possibility of the federal system serving anything but the most basic national needs; read military strength. This is what the current radical Republicans are moving toward. It is worse than a dysfunctional government; it is a government concept that employs fascistic policies that impoverish the many to favor the few, crushing the middle-class and creating a vast pool of ‘willing workers’ who will essentially put up with any dogma or policies so long as they can derive enough sustenance to maintain their families and themselves.

These seem to be the clear goals of the new Southern attack on America. If the new Civil War is won by the radical GOP, America will be an unequivocally imperialist nation with only two classes of citizens; those with wherewithal and power and those without recourse.

We will, at The Bradley Report, at least state what we perceive as the reality and truth of the given situation, trusting that our readers will also bring their own intelligence and common sense to the issues and will judge the information accordingly.