Tag Archives: Power

GOP Civil War

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

Despite being more philosophically in tune than ever before in its history, the Republican Party is theoretically in a civil war. The GOP used to have a prominent pro-choice wing, a prominent environmentalist wing, a prominent civil rights wing, a wing that wanted to raise taxes and wing that wanted to broadly increase spending, but those days are long over.

Since Ronald Reagan gained the White House, the GOP has been built on three sturdy legs of the stool. First, there was a libertarian, pro-growth, pro-low tax cut economic conservative leg. Then, there was a values-based, pro-family, anti-abortion socially conservative leg. Third, there was the military industrial, pro-defense, neo-conservative leg. Continue reading →

Why Samuel Adams Matters Today

BY FRANK HILL
Reprinted from TelemachusLeaps.com

And no, it is not because his name is on the great beer brewed by the Boston Lager Company.

Samuel Adams actually was not a very good brewer back in the day and probably lost more money borrowed from his wealthy dad than he ever made in any venture he undertook.

But he was a darned good writer and was able to catch the revolutionary spirit about as well as Thomas Paine or Benjamin Franklin or anyone else back in the day.

For his senior thesis at a small community college back then known as Harvard, Sam Adams wrote on this question: “Whether it be lawful to resist the supreme magistrate, if the commonwealth cannot be otherwise preserved?” Continue reading →

Scandal is Big Government

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

Originally published in The Hill

Twenty-nine years before the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., John Dean, then the White House counsel, sent a list of names to IRS Commissioner Johnnie Walters. On the list were names of enemies of the Nixon campaign that were to be investigated and audited and generally harassed by the tax-collecting agency.

That was among the revelations that came from the Watergate investigation, which eventually led to the resignation of President Nixon.

Some 40 years later, the Internal Revenue Service is once again in the news for targeting political enemies of the president. I would bet my bottom dollar that there is no evidence that the current president is involved directly in this latest scandal. Continue reading →

Rangel’s Defense Very Familiar

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

I don’t know who is advising Rep. Charlie Rangel in his defense against ethics charges, but my guess is that he or she or they got a hold of a book on political campaigns by political scholars Jim Thurber and Candy Nelson of American University.

There’s a chapter in the book on playing defense in a campaign, featuring four classic categories of a good defense. The defense strategy was the creative invention of Jay Bryant, Buddy Bishop and Paul Newman. For those of a younger generation, Bryant, and his wife, Susan, Bishop and Newman were among a vanguard of political strategists in the pre-Reagan era, who helped sow the seeds of a Republican majority strategy.

Continue reading →