Michael Steele--Pragmatism or Integrity?

by Al Benson Jr.

Maybe I should have called this article "Steele lets the cat out of the bag" because, in a small way, he does. Some of his comments, at a speech given to around 200 students at De Paul University, seem to back up some of what Donnie Kennedy and I told people in our book "Red Republicans and Lincoln's Marxists."  For those who may not know, Mr. Steele is chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Mr. Steele is somewhat of an enigma to many folks. The Republican Party portrays itself to us ordinary folks as the party of small government (it isn't) and a staunch defender of "family values" (whatever that means anymore). Yet Steele's name has been connected to a controversy about the Republican National Committee forking over $2,000 "to entertain guests at a West Hollywood erotic bondage-theme club."  I guess it all depends on whose "family" has the values and what they are. This sort of thing has to be an embarrassment to those "family values" folks who just can't find any other solution to the country's problems except voting straight Republican, no matter what. You'd think that by now some of them would have learned, but that doesn't seem to be the case. The same old evangelical leaders come back, election after election, and endorse the same old Republican Party hacks under the pretext that they are "the lesser of two evils." They never seem to grasp the concept that the lesser of two evils is still evil. Give them a choice between a Ron Paul and a John McCain and they will pick a McCain every time, and urge other Christians to do the same.

It seems, though, that Mr. Steele has some problems that need to be addressed. He is reported to have said, at one point, the some whites were afraid to be in the same room with him. Really? If a white man had made such a statement everyone from the Southern Poverty Law Center to the Justice Department would be on his case trying to find a way to label him as a racist, terrorist, or whatever else they could come up with. According to the blog spot http://maggiesnotebook.blogspot.com Mr. Steele is "a self-described Lincoln conservative." That's part of the problem right there. Anyone who has studied the history realizes that Lincoln was no conservative, nor was the foundation of the Republican Party even remotely conservative. If anything, those who founded that party were on the political left. Again, the book Donnie and I wrote details much of that. Part of our problem today is that we have been conditioned to take what was considered radically leftist in the 1860s and in our day we label it as "conservative" and we don't know the difference.

At any rate, in his speech to the De Paul students, Steele is reported to have been telling his state chairmen to try to work with those in the Tea Party Movement. It seems, in some cases, that the Republican Party is actually trying to co-opt the Tea Party Movement and turn it into something they can use and manipulate for their own purposes, which really aren't much different than those of the Democrats. And, while there are, undoubtedly, some individual Republican candidates the Tea Party Movement can and should support, they should stop way, way short of buying the entire Republican Party line. There are too many One World fakes in the Republican Party for the Tea Party folks to let themselves get too close to it.

Steele, in his speech, made a few revelatory comments. He said: "We have lost sight of the historic, integral link between the party and African-Americans. This party was co-founded by blacks, among them Frederick Douglas. The Republican Party had a hand in forming the NAACP." Now there's an interesting comment. The people that formed the NAACP were pretty much on the left politically and theologically and Steele is identifying with them--and he's also identifying with the abolitionists (Frederick Douglas) that helped to found the Republican Party--along with various other socialists and Marxists.  So, in order to give these students a "proper perspective" (one that's just radical enough) Steele is admitting to some of the radical beginnings of the GOP.

If you are willing to connect the dots you will see that it takes only a hop, skip, and a jump to get from what Steele is admitting to some of what Donnie Kennedy and I have exposed in "Red Republicans and Lincoln's Marxists."

Further, if you want to read about why the Republican Party had the relationship with the blacks that it had earlier, I would recommend another blockbuster by Claude Bowers, written back in 1929 called "The Tragic Era." It is the whole miserable story of "reconstruction" in the South. It details, quite succinctly, how the Republican administration, in the defeated South,  set up "reconstruction" governments after the War, mostly staffed by illiterate blacks and presided over by carpet-bagger crooks from the North. They then used these crooked governments to steal whatever of value was left in the South.

Understanding "reconstruction" and how it operated in the South is one of the major keys to understanding the "civil rights" movement that came along almost a hundred years later. Understanding "reconstruction" is the key to understanding race relations in the South after the War. Had there been no "reconstruction" the races would have learned how to get along and work with each other. "Reconstruction" saw to it that this would not happen--as it was intended to.

Mr. Steele's allusion to the foundations of the Republican Party shows that he is at least aware of some of that. The writer of the blog I mentioned earlier in this article suggests that it is time for Mr. Steele to step down from his present post. It is, but he probably won't.

And, for the Tea Party folks, I would suggest that they beware of Republican Party leaders in sheep's clothing who, inwardly, are ravening socialists!