Bush's Back-door Political Machine

By Jerry Landay, AlterNet. Posted April 5, 2004.

Editor's Note: This article is adapted from a longer essay at MediaTransparency.org, which covers the organized radical right.

On a Tuesday evening in mid-January, a right-wing Washington writer-for-hire named Clark Judge appeared on public radio's Marketplace.

In a commentary heard by an estimated five million people, Judge complained that the philanthropist George Soros was engaged in an "unethical" effort to outwit legal restrictions on campaign contributions.

Judge huffed that Soros, along with the Democratic Party, was "ponying up" millions of dollars in funding to tax-exempt, liberal advocacy organizations to prevent the re-election of George W. Bush. He labeled Soros and the Democrats "prime abusers," for using barely legal tactics to evade the contribution ceilings of the McCain-Feingold campaign reform law.

Judge was correct when he implied that legal and IRS regulations that are supposed to curb political activities by tax-exempt non-profit organizations are riddled with loopholes. Judge went much farther, though, implying that Soros and the Democrats had cornered the market on cheating. He warned his listeners to "brace...for the biggest tidal wave of political sewage in American history" from these Soros-supported organizations.

In political parlance, Judge was acting as a surrogate. He had no apparent connection with the Bush campaign. But he had struck a blow for Bush's re-election on behalf of the political propaganda machine of the organized right. To the uninitiated, Judge's credentials seemed to lend throw-weight to his attack: managing director of the White House Writers Group, an umbrella firm of former ghostwriters for Republican presidents and bureaucrats now at the service of anyone willing to pay.

But only those in the know would understand the flaws in Judge's statements. He failed to mention that hundreds of tax-exempt organizations of the far right have been exploiting the twilight zone of campaign and IRS regulations for three decades – receiving billions of dollars in grants and contributions to wage ideo-political warfare for far-right ideas, causes, and Republican candidates. Liberal political organizations resort to the same shortcuts, but they pale when compared to the scale and duration of right-wing mischief. Judge is one more cog in a vast machine that, in the judgment of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) has "played a critical role in helping the Republican Party to dominate state, local and national politics." It is now operating at full throttle to keep Bush in office.

Though its activists like to call themselves conservatives, there is nothing they wish to "conserve" beyond their power, status, and wealth. They are right-wing radicals who have stolen the GOP away from the true conservatives who once dominated it.

This constellation of ideology is counter-revolutionary and anti-Constitutional. Its strategic endgame is a one-party state. It dominates the three branches of the federal government, and undermines Constitutional safeguards against rampant power.

In terms of the state power it wields, the activist apparatus of the American far right has a modern historic parallel to its left, the Apparat, the vast web of bureaucracy and radical politics that ran the old Soviet Union. It stood on triangular legs: the dominant Communist Party, the organs of state security, and the military. The organizations that constitute the American model lay down the broad, strategic aims of the governmental wing, the Bush Administration. The third branch, the Republican Party, is limited to serving as a money funnel of campaign cash and election machine on behalf of candidates with the American Apparat's good housekeeping seal of ideological purity.

In a new study called "The Axis of Ideology," the NCRP tracks the funding of the right-wing machine, noting that "it has played a critical role in helping ... dominate state, local, and national politics." The Apparat's activist groups labor from the same page to roll back the gains of center-to-left politics. Its power has tilted American governance, economics, education, social policy, the media, and the law rightward.

NCRP finds that between 1999 and 2001 alone, $253 million flowed to the Apparat's 350 organizations from 79 private grant-making organizations. The Heritage Foundation, the senior cadre of the Apparat, was lead recipient, at $25,500,000. Heritage drew up the main agenda of the Bush Administration and serves as its employment and personnel vetting arm. The NCRP report concludes that the right-wing establishment, fertilized by multiple millions, has "undoubtedly helped to advance, market, and strengthen the conservative agenda in all policy realms," from civil rights to international relations.

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