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"It remains highly significant that Bush began his public political career
in the ideological guise of a southern Republican, specifically in Texas.
... In order to create a Republican Party in the south, it was first
necessary to smash the old FDR New Deal constituent of labor, the cities,
farmers, blacks, and the Solid South. ... The method that the southern
Republicans devised to breach this solid front was the one theorized years
later by Lee Atwater, the manager of Bush's 1988 Presidential campaign.
This was the technique of the 'wedge issues,' so called precisely because
they were chosen to split up the old New Deal coalition using the chisels
of ideology. The wedge issues are also known as the 'hot-button social
issues,' and the most explosive among them has always tended to be race.
... Racial invective, anti-union demagogy, jingoistic chauvinism, the
smearing of opponents for their alleged fealty to 'special interests' ...
these ideas were further refined in Richard Nixon's brain trust, presided
over by Wall Street bond lawyer John Mitchell ... and received their
definitive elaboration from Kevin Phillips who advanced the thesis that
the 'whole secret of politics is in knowing who hates who,' which is of
course another way of speaking of wedge issues. The result of the
successful application of the
Southern [South Park] Strategy
in 1968 and in the following years has been a period of more than two
decades of one-party Republican control over the Executive Branch ...
which has proven a mighty stimulus to those tendencies towards
authoritarian and even totalitarian rule which have culminated in the
Administrative Fascism of the current Bush regime."
Unauthorized Biography of George Bush,
by Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin
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