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Title: How Bush Rules: And How Sonny Bono Predicted the Downfall of the GOP Congress
Source:
Huffington Post
URL Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sidne ... h-rules-and-how-s_b_32202.html
Published: Oct 23, 2006
Author: Sidney Blumenthal
Post Date: 2006-10-23 11:36:33 by aristeides
Keywords: None
Views: 237
Comments: 14
How Bush Rules: And How Sonny Bono Predicted the Downfall of the GOP Congress As the fortunes of the Republican Party in the Congress collapsed, I found myself in the middle of a book tour in Palm Springs, California. Promenading down Palm Canyon Drive, I stopped by the larger than life statute of a smiling mustachioed man with an open collar sitting on the edge of a fountain in the center of town. Sonny Bono, singer, songwriter and mayor, was perhaps the most unlikely person elected in the self-proclaimed Republican "revolution" of 1994. To mark his rise to power, the new Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, "held a mad celebration featuring people dressed as the cartoon Power Rangers and Rush Limbaugh," as I write in "How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime." "One new Republican member, Sonny Bono, who had fallen from grace as a celebrity, warned Gingrich to guard against hubris." Bono was the only one at the beginning to warn Gingrich that his arrogance and unchecked will to power would be his undoing. "You're a celebrity now," Bono said. "The rules are different for celebrities. I know it. I've been there. I've been a celebrity. I used to be a bigger celebrity. But let me tell you, you're not being handled right. This is not political news coverage. This is celebrity status. You need handlers. You need to understand what you're doing." Bono saw the dramatic events unfold before him through the prism of his own dimmed star. He had had it all with Cher and lost it, staging a recovery in the Palm Springs oasis as a politician, which to him was a secondary level of celebrity. Yes, the beat went on, but he had heard it before and louder. That was the insight he imparted to the new Speaker that was instantly ignored. Gingrich gloried in his rhetoric about "the revolution." He had little use for the experience of the older and wiser song-and-dance man. Instead Gingrich, a failed professor, described himself as a world-historical figure, leader of a universal transformation. It was befitting that one of his closest advisers, the lobbyist Grover Norquist, co-author of Gingrich's political program, the Contract with America, hung a picture of Lenin on his wall. Gingrich was a self-styled Republican Lenin "determined to annihilate his enemies and extirpate the 'counterculture,' as I write in my column in Salon and The Guardian. This Republican Lenin was followed by the Republican Stalin, "the ruthless consolidator and centralizer," Tom DeLay, the Sugar Land, Texas exterminator. After Gingrich's demise, DeLay put into place his puppet as Speaker, Dennis Hastert, the former small-town Illinois wrestling coach. When DeLay was indicted for corrupt campaign practices and resigned, the "revolution" was left in Hastert's ham-fisted hands. Just as he had tried to cover-up DeLay's ethical transgressions, he and his aides were implicated in the cover-up of Rep. Mark Foley's sexual preying on teenaged pages. Hastert, the bewildered party boss, "transmuted from omnipotent Leonid Brezhnev into ghostly Konstantin Chernenko, presiding over the final decrepit stage." If only the Republicans had taken Sonny Bono's advice, gleaned from Hollywood, they might not resemble the Soviet Union today.
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#1. To: aristeides (#0)
If Sonny had understood the level of evil he was dealing with; he might still be alive.
Didn't somebody else famous die of a suspicious skiing accident around the time Sonny Bono did?
Katrina was America's Chernobyl.
Off the top of my head; I believe it was a member of the Kennedy crime syndicate, but I can't be sure.
Didn't he get treed also? Wellstone was planed.
They killed Sonny?
"The desire to rule is the mother of heresies." -- St. John Chrysostom
It was a conspiracy. A remote-controlled tree jumped in his way, and then afterward "they" (and you know who "they" are, don't you?), injected barbiturates into his corpse.
"We become what we behold. We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us." -- Marshall McLuhan, after Alexander Pope and William Blake.
Killer trees! I knew it!!
"The desire to rule is the mother of heresies." -- St. John Chrysostom
Nobody dies from 'natural causes' anymore. :-)
yes, it was member of Kennedy family who died by exact same type of accident in the same time-frame.
Lucifer..er ahh..Gingrich..is a legend in his own mind.
If only the Republicans had taken Sonny Bono's advice, gleaned from Hollywood, they might not resemble the Soviet Union today.
Remember...G-d saved more animals than people on the ark. www.siameserescue.org
#2. To: who knows what evil (#1)
#3. To: aristeides (#2)
Remember...G-d saved more animals than people on the ark. www.siameserescue.org
#4. To: who knows what evil. Richard. all (#3)
I believe it was a member of the Kennedy crime syndicate, but I can't be sure.
#5. To: who knows what evil (#1)
If Sonny had understood the level of evil he was dealing with; he might still be alive.
#6. To: Destro (#5)
They killed Sonny?
#7. To: YertleTurtle (#6)
#8. To: Destro (#5)
They killed Sonny?
Remember...G-d saved more animals than people on the ark. www.siameserescue.org
#9. To: who knows what evil, aristedes (#3)
#10. To: aristeides (#0)
Gingrich, a failed professor, described himself as a world-historical figure, leader of a universal transformation.
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition
#11. To: aristeides (#0)
Not bad, works for me.
This Republican Lenin was followed by the Republican Stalin, "the ruthless consolidator and centralizer," Tom DeLay, the Sugar Land, Texas exterminator.
#12. To: Red Jones, aristeides (#9)
http://www-tech.mit.edu/V117/N65/cbono.65w.html Bono's swift death - a coroner's report said he died immediately of massive blunt trauma - resembled the accident that killed Michael Kennedy, the 39-year-old son of the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy as he played football with family members on Dec. 31 along an intermediate-level slope in Aspen, Colo.
#13. To: who knows what evil (#1)
They only kept him alive long enough to get their lates extension toward PERMANENT COPYRIGHT out of him.
#14. To: aristeides (#0)
Now these two are sycophants of the neocons, and by extension, neocons themselves; and of course, staunch globalists. It certainly fits with the Trotskyist history of that bunch.
Instead Gingrich, a failed professor, described himself as a world-historical figure, leader of a universal transformation. It was befitting that one of his closest advisers, the lobbyist Grover Norquist, co-author of Gingrich's political program, the Contract with America, hung a picture of Lenin on his wall. Gingrich was a self-styled Republican Lenin "determined to annihilate his enemies and extirpate the 'counterculture,'
“The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity, since the tastes, knowledge, and principles of the majority form the tribunal of appeal.” James Fenimore Cooper
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