Eschaton

My post below regarding the Honest Republican test wasn't an attempt to brand the GOP as the party of Anti-Semites. Saying that they had failed the test was saying that they'd failed the test of honesty, not that they failed to be not anti-semitic. I personally think that the Republican party has purged itself of its anti-semitic demons much more successfully than it has its racist demons, though I'm amazed that people seem oblivious to some history on this issue. The John Birch society was strongly rooted in anti-semitism, and much of their core worldview revolved around the existence of a Vast Jewish Conspiracy - later somewhat repackaged in the religious right's "new world order" conspiracy theorizing of the late 80s/90s. The JBS was instrumental in helping get Reagan elected Governor of California, though he did later distance himself from them. From that time, words and phrases like "Hollywood elite" and "New York Liberals" and others were all code words for "Jews." As much as people seem to be blind about the history of racism in this country they seem doubly blind to its history of anti-Semitism. Legal housing discrimination in particular was a huge problem for a long time. And, no, I am not making this a simple partisan issue - just pointing out that these phrases do have a history of indeed being code words, whether or not those who use them today intend them to be.


I'm flabbergasted that anyone can defend Reagan's trip to Bitburg as a simple "PR blunder." To ascribe it any other motive than putting a stick in the eye of Jews everywhere baffles me, frankly, and if not anti-Semitism then what?

UPDATE: God I screwed up that post - never post on the way out the door. Couple typos fixed - in particular the first sentence in which was is changed to wasn't.

UPDATE 2: When Bonzo went to Bitburg:

About March of 1985, the Reagan White House announced that the old man would be paying a visit to West Germany. At a press conference, Reagan said he had no intention of visiting a concentration camp site. Doing so, he explained, would only guilt-trip a nation where there are "very few alive that remember even the war, and certainly none of them who were adults and participating in any way." (At the time of this statement, anyone over the age of 60 would have been an adult during part of World War II and the Holocaust.) Weeks later, the White House noted that Reagan intended to lay a wreath at a military cemetery in Germany which contained the graves of Nazi soldiers of the Waffen SS. This spurred an outcry from the American Jewish community and others. Defending the move, Reagan told reporters that the German soldiers "were victims, just as surely as the victims of the concentration camp." Holocaust chronicler Eli Wiesel urged Reagan to cancel the Bitburg stop. Inside the White House, [Pat] Buchanan, a communications (!) aide, advised Reagan to hold firm and not be pushed around by those you-know-who's. Egged on by Buchanan -- and probably others -- Reagan refused to yield. "There is no way I'll back down and run for cover," he wrote in his diary. His White House did hastily arrange a tour of the Bergen-Belsen death camp before Reagan dropped by the Bitburg cemetery for eight minutes. During the Bitburg ceremony, he cited a letter from a thirteen-year-old girl who, he claimed, had urged him to make the Bitburg stop. (In fact, she had asked him not to go there.)