Michael S. Steele, RNC Chairman wrote:
Hope and change? Try fear and politics-as usual…
From: Michael S. Steele, RNC Chairman [ecampaign@gop.com]
Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2009 8:10 AM
To: tomc2322
Subject: Hope and change? Try fear and politics-as usual…Dear Tom,
Preident Obama and Rahm Emanuel
As President Obama’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, said last November, “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”
It didn’t take long for the liberal Democrats to put that political strategy into play.
They have taken advantage of our nation’s present economic woes to ram through Congress the biggest spending bill in American history.
I’m signed up to receive email from the RNC and a Republican Congresswoman from the State of Washington, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers. I did this just to keep up with the right-wing daily talking points. The snippet above is from an email I got today from Michael Steele, the latest RNC Criminal, I mean, Chairman.
Mr. Steele has quoted Rahm Emanuel from an interview with the Wall Street Journal back in November of 2008, I be live. What Mr. Steele is alluding to here is the charges that Bush had created a nexus between two unrelated things, 911 and Saddam Hussein, then exploited that nexus to ram through Congress an illegal war (according to UN charter, the capture and subsequent occupation of Iraq was illegal) that we neither wanted nor needed for America’s survival. Mr. Steele clearly wants to turn that meme (taking advantage of a crises) that has stuck so well to the Republican’s coattails onto the Democrats.
Another thing that he could be referring this Emanuel quote to is the theory of Shock Doctrine so eloquently described by Naomi Kline in her book by the same name. Shock Doctrine – the rise of disaster capitalism, involves the exploitation of man-made or natural disasters, economic or physical, used by far right-wing politicians to implement sudden and shocking ideological changes in policy, allegedly justified by the disaster.
True to form, Mr. Steele has taken Rahm Emanuel’s statement out of context. Emanuel goes on to say in the very next sentence that America missed an opportunity during the oil crises in the early 70s to make meaningful change to our energy policy and rid ourselves of the yoke of foreign oil. The oil crises lead President Carter to take unprecedented giant steps toward energy independence. But President Reagan came along shortly thereafter and threw it all away. To get the gist of Emanuel’s interview, you need to hear the whole thing.
Here’s a snippet of Emanuel’s statement with the Wall Street Journal:
“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that, it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before. I think America as a whole in 1973, 1974 and that’s not just my view but obviously the administration, missed the opportunity to deal with the energy crises that was before us. For a long time our energy policy came down to cheap oil.
This is an opportunity that used to be long term problems, be they in the healthcare area, energy area, education area, fiscal area, tax area, regulatory reform area. Things that we had postponed for too long that were long term are now immediate and must be dealt with. And this crises provides the opportunity for us as I would say, the opportunity to do things that you could not do before. The good news I suppose if you want to see a silver lining is the problems are big enough they lend themselves to both parties for a solution.”
And here is the video. Hear for yourself:
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