one time boasted that his staff contained at least 28 media experts and political operatives
who had worked in at least three previous presidential elections, many of which were also
winning efforts for the GOP. These men were drawn from New York's Madison Avenue
and from Washington's Connecticut Avenue "Power Alley," where many of the best-
connected political consulting firms have their offices. It is clear that men like Atwater,
Ailes, Spencer, Deaver and others have performed a function in the consoldation of a
modern American leviathan state that is exactly analagous to the vital services rendered
to the Third Reich by Propaganda Minister Dr. Josef Goebbels between 1933 and 1945.
There is a crime of menticide which consists in the deliberate destruction of the cognitive
powers of another human being, and the campaigns organized by these consultants have
represented menticide on a mass scale. Further: if the international economic policies
inflicted on the world by the Reagan-Bush and Bush regimes have exacted a yearly
global death toll of upwards of 50 million needless deaths, primarily in the developing
sector, it has been the image mongers and public relations men who have organized the
US domestic electoral consensus that has permitted those genocidal policies to go
forward. For all of these reasons, the media and campaign consultants are fascists. They
are virulent fascists typical of the American totalitarian state of the late twentieth century,
and this is true even if these consultants lack the bombastic trappings of the central
European fascists of more than a half century ago.
Lee Atwater celebrated the Bush inauguration by playing his electric guitar at a rhythm
and blues concert in which his gyrations bordered on the outright obscene. Although Lee
Atwater had masterminded the most racist presidential campaign in modern history, he
still had the gall during the spring of 1989 to be a candidate for a post on the Board of
Trustees of Howard University, the historically black institution of higher learning in
Washington, DC. Atwater was forced to abandon this outrageous candidacy by a mass
mobilization of the Howard students.
Some months later, Atwater was found to be suffering from a malignant brain cancer. It
is rumored around Washington that Atwater in his final days became a convert to Roman
Catholicism and expressed repentance for many of the deeds he performed during his
political career. It appears certain that he personally apologized to some of the candidates
whom he had vilified during the course of various political campaigns. When Atwater
died in April, 1991 at the age of 40, it was widely rumored in Washington that he had
expressed the deepest remorse for having contributed to the creation of the Bush
administration.
NOTES:
- Jack W. Germond and Jules Witcover, Wake Us When It's Over: The Presidential Politics of 1984 (New
York, 1985), p. 489. - Joseph Kraft, "The Real George Bush," Washington Post, October 18, 1984.
- Wake Us When It's Over, p. 522.
- George Will column, January 30, 1986, in Will, The Morning After, p. 254.