From The Valleys To Vegas?

Yes, I know that Cardiff is not in the valleys. But the titles are often the hardest bits to write.

John Dixon might consider taking a trip to observe the Senate race in Nevada, where the Republicans have nominated Tea Party favourite, Sharron Angle, against current Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid. Angle advocates treating prisoners by means derived from, taught by and practised by the Church of Scientology. But then, the neoconservative movement had as perhaps its loudest cheerleader of all a newspaper founded, and until recent months always run at an enormous loss, by the Moonies.

With the impending release of Conrad Black, consider that the neocons' cheerleaders were all either basically Canadian with British pretensions (not all Canadian pro-Britishness is pretentious, but Black's was and is), or basically Australian, or basically South Korean to the point of believing, among many other things, that the Koreans were the Lost Tribes of Israel.

Meanwhile, the NRA has as good as endorsed Reid, and may very well do so officially. Association with the likes of Angle is too much for them, a fact which speaks volumes about who the Tea Party people really are and are not. Not only does Reid at least believe that the Lost Tribes ended up in America, and that the Second Coming will take place there rather than having already done so in the person of Sun Myung Moon, but what has the Republican Party ever done for the NRA, or indeed for the pro-life and pro-family movement that the Tea Parties never mention?

In their different ways, both the GOP Establishment and the Tea Parties lionise the President who signed the Brady Bill, who massively increased welfare dependency and who glorified selfish greed, who presided over the rise of Political Correctness that was wholly of a piece with the 1980s' general moral chaos, who was an extremely infrequent churchgoer, who did not formally belong to any church, who remains the only President of the United States ever to have been divorced, whose no fault divorce law in California was copied by most other states, and who signed into law the legalisation of abortion in that state.

The loss of control of The Washington Times indicates that the Unification Church is a declining power on what purports to be the American Right. The rise of Sharron Angle indicates that its place is being taken by the Church of Scientology. There is no reason to assume that its agenda are any more conservative than those of its predecessor as expressed in that organ of global capital and therefore of global war. In view of the forces that have and have not swung behind Angle, there is every reason to assume that those agenda are at least as bad, or even worse.