Recent online posting.   
      
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    Conservatives or Reactionaries?   
      
    /by Ben Palumbo/,/former staff director of the Democratic House   
    Caucus/   
      
    Political reactionaries, epitomized by the factually challenged   
    Michelle Bachmann, CPAC darling Allen West, the inimitable   
    former, half-term Governor Sarah Palin, and their Tea Party   
    allies, hurl the label "socialist" at President Obama in   
    connection, above all, with the new health care law. President   
    Obama, whose actions may be characterized as having saved huge   
    parts of America's so-called free market system, clearly is not   
    a "socialist" anymore than Bachmann is "conservative".   
    Conservatives, you see, have an obligation to answer the   
    question posed by Professor and author Scott Russell Sanders:   
    "What do you want to conserve?"   
      
      
    ...  reflect on a letter written to Charles Dickens by Albino   
    Luciani when he was Patriarch of Venice. It appears in a book of   
    Albino's letters to others entitled "Illustrissimi". He praises   
    Dickens' love of the poor; describes the heartless Scrooge   
    before his redemption; and, he quotes Jacob Marley's bitterly   
    mournful lament after Scrooge noted that he (Marley) was always   
    a good man of business: "Business! Mankind was my business. The   
    common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and   
    benevolence were all my business..."   
      
      
    The Venice Patriarch goes on to assure Dickens that things have   
    gotten better for the poor and workers since he wrote "A   
    Christmas Carol". To what does he attribute the improvement in   
    their lives? This is what Luciani wrote: "The workers...in their   
    unions and in the various forms of socialism, which have the   
    undeniable merit of having been, almost everywhere, the chief   
    cause of the workers' upward rise....have advanced and achieved   
    much in the areas of economy, social security, culture. And   
    today, through the unions, they often manage to make their   
    voice heard still higher, in the upper ranks of the government   
    where, actually, their fate is decided".  He goes on to say:   
      
    ...   
      
    Yet it is obvious that Bachmann, West, Palin, et al., to the   
    extent they actually think about the consequences of their   
    name-calling, do not want to conserve any of the things that   
    John Paul I believed were great improvements in the lives of   
    workers: improvements brought about by unions and "various forms   
    of socialism". On the contrary, they want to return the country   
    to a time when workers and their families, like those described   
    in the letter to Dickens, were helpless in the face of the   
    overwhelming economic power of an unrestrained economic elite.   
    That is not conservatism; it is oppression and injustice. It was   
      
    ...   
      
    then, it is Obama's progressive policies that most accurately   
    reflect this "conservatism" of the American people. By contrast,   
    the reactionary rhetorical excesses by the Bachmann-West-Palin   
    crowd are designed not to conserve the things that improve   
    American lives, but, rather, the power of America's economic   
    elite to further enhance their wealth at the expense of those   
    very same American workers and their families.   
      
    ...   
      
      
   BOB KLAHN bob.klahn@sev.org   http://home.toltbbs.com/bobklahn   
      
   ... Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. -AH   
   --- Via Silver Xpress V4.5/P [Reg]   
    * Origin: Doc's Place BBS Fido Since 1991 docsplace.tzo.com (1:123/140)