CPAC?

Never heard of it! Well, I never heard of it; until today, that is. Conservative Political Action Committee, CPAC: so what is that? Well, evidently it is the great hope of the hopelessly hopeful conservative movement on mainland United States. I would have to guess that for anyone who watched any of the CPAC conference on TV today, or anyone who happened to see the extended news accounts of it played all day on Fox; it had to have seemed kinda peculiar. I mean their keynote speaker, their main guy, was Rush Limbaugh, i.e., conservative “shock” radio—he lost his TV show years ago, but apparently not his ties, but that’s another story.

President Obama hasn’t been in office long enough for the coffee to finish brewing in the oval office and already groups like CPAC are beginning to put together what might very nearly be described as a hate campaign against him. Certainly Mr. Limbaugh is on the verge of such. So why is that?

Well, evidently one reason is that the far right is unhappy with the tax proposals of the new administration. It seems that Mr. Obama’s advisors and bill writers are targeting folks who make more than $250,000 annually. The word is that whatever the actual proposed tax rate is, that it will mirror what it was when Bill Clinton was in office. I have to admit, I have no idea what that rate is, nor have I ever felt the need to find out since I have never even so much as approached the $250K earnings level. And I know very few people who have. And none of the few I do know about are related to me. I guess most of those who do make that kind of money are members of CPAC.

Watching pieces of it on Fox today, I noted that commentator Julie Banderas—no relation to Antonio—posed the question to viewers: “Is President Obama’s tax plan the first salvos in a new class war, i.e., the poor against the rich; or, is it a plan whose implementation is long overdue?” FOX ran a poll on the question; don’t know what the outcome was.

The point is that the class war was begun a long time ago. The chief warriors in it on the side of the $250Kers are the lobbyists who wine and dine and worse congressmen to do their bidding: big oil, big pharmaceuticals, big banks, even big foreign investors. The losers? Those who have seen their jobs head overseas or south of the border: “Can’t find reliable workers for a dollar a day? Yes, you can, in Yucatan.” This last was an actual ad run in, I believe, The Economist in late 1993; I forget the exact month. So, who’s doing battle on the side of the poor people? Well, we don’t really know. It may be that their “ain’t” nobody!

Personally, I don’t feel the need to align myself with either the far left or the far right. On some issues I would label myself a liberal: I do think we need universal health care. On still other issues I see myself as a conservative: for me less government is better government. I don’t have any illusions as to the intelligence, knowledge level, or integrity of people in the political sphere. Having lived this long I have become wise enough to align myself with neither the Republican nor the Democratic Party. Indeed, I am now a card carrying member of the Cynical Party and a charter member of their Suspicious Caucus.

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