STRANGE DOIN'S A-TRANSPIRIN

Reader Jonathan emails with an interesting tidbit. See, he uses some anti-spam software for his email account, but as a result, when stuff does slip through, he finds some, let's say, unusual non-html text.

In one case, an email encouraging him to "Become Debt-Free!!!" revealed a lengthy discussion of racial electoral politics and George HW Bush:

The method that the southern Republicans devised to breach this solid front was the one theorized years later by Lee Atwater, the manager of Bush's 1988
Presidential campaign. This was the technique of the "wedge issues," so called precisely because they were chosen to split up the old New Deal
coalition using the chisels of ideology. The wedge issues are also known as the "hot-button social issues," and the most explosive among them has always
tended to be race. The Republicans could win in the south by portraying the Democratic Party has pro-black. Atwater had learned to be a cunning and
vicious practitioner of the "wedge issue" method in the school of Strom Thurmond of South Carolina after the latter had switched over to the
Republicans in the sixties. Racial invective, anti-union demagogy, jingoistic chauvinism, the smearing of opponents for their alleged fealty to
"special interests"-- none of this began in the Baker-Atwater effort of 1968. These were the stock in trade of the southern strategy, and these were
all Leitmotivs of Bush's 1964 effort against Yarborough.

From the vantage point of the police state conditions of the early 1990's, we can discern a further implication of the southern Republican project of
which Bush was in several moments of the 1960's a leading operative. As the southern GOP emerged out of the play of gang and counter-gang between
McGovernite left liberal investment bankers and Nixon-Reagan right liberal investment bankers (and Bush has been both), it made possible that Southern
Strategy which elected Nixon in 1968 and which has given the Republicans a virtual lock on the electoral college ever since. The Watergate-Carter
anomaly of 1976 confirms rather than alters this overall picture.

The Southern Strategy that Bush turns out to have been serving in the sixties was not called to the attention of the public until somewhat after
the 1964 election in which Goldwater had garnered electoral votes exclusively in the south. As William Rusher wrote in the National Review:
"The Democrats had for years begun each race with an assured batch of delegates from the South." "The Republican Party strategy," argued Rusher,
needs refiguring, given a chance to break into this bloc once denied them...." His conclusion was that ""Republicans can put themselves in the
position of having the Southern bloc as a starting handicap; after that, they can compete for the rest of the country, needing only that 50 per cent
minus (say) 111 [of the electoral college votes]." Doing all this, Rusher contended, would allow Republican Presidential candidates to ignore the "
traditional centers of urban liberalism," especially in the northeast. [fn 4] These ideas were further refined in Richard Nixon's brain trust, presided
over by Wall Street bond lawyer John Mitchell at 445 Park Avenue, and received their definitive elaboration from Kevin Phillips, who in those years advanced the thesis that the "whole secret of politics" is in "knowing who hates who," which is of course another way of speaking of wedge issues.

The result of the successful application of the Southern Strategy in 1968 and in the following years has been a a period of more than two decades of
one-party Republican control over the Executive Branch, of which George Bush personally has been the leading beneficiary, first through his multiple
appointments, then through the vice-presidency, and now through the possession of the White House itself. This has had the decisive structural
consequence of making possible the kind of continuous, entrenched bureaucratic power that we see in the Bush regime and its leading
functionaries. As we will see, such administrators of the corporate state as James Baker and Brent Scowcroft, for whom the exercise of executive power
has long since become a way of life, appear to themsleves and to others as immune to the popular reckoning. The democratic republic requires the moment
of catharsis, of throwing the bums out, if the arrogance of the powerful is ever to be chastened. If there is no prospect for the White House changing
hands, this amounts to a one- party state. The southern Republican Party, including two-party Texas, has provided the Republican lock on the White
House which has proven a mighty stimulus to those tendencies towards authoritarian and even totalitarian rule which have culminated in the
Administrative Fascism of the current Bush regime.

Bush's opponent in that Goldwater year of 1964 was Senator Ralph Webster Yarborough. Yarborough had been born in Chandler, Texas in 1903 as the
seventh of eleven children. He attended public schools in Chandler and Tyler, worked on a farm, and went on to attend Sam Houston State Teachers
College and, for one year, the US Military Academy at West Point. He was a member of the 36th division of the Texas National Guard, in which he
advanced from private to sergeant. After World War I he worked a passage to Europe on board a freighter, and found a job in Germany working in the offices of the American Chamber of Commerce in Berlin. He also pursued studies in Stendahl, Germany. He returned to the United States to earn a law degree at the University of Texas in 1927, and worked as a lawyer in El Paso. At one point he found a job as a harvest hand in the Oklahoma dust bowl of the late 1920's, and also served a stint as a roughneck in the oil fields. Yarborough entered public service as an Assistant Attorney General of Texas from 1931 to 1934. After that, he was a founding director of the Lower Colorado River Authority, a major water project in central Texas, and was then elected as a district judge in Austin.

Yarborough served in the US Army ground forces during World War II, and was a member of the only division which took part in the postwar occupation of Germany as well as in MacArthur's administration of Japan. When he left the military in 1946 he had attained the rank of lieutenant colonel. It clear from an overview of Yarborough's career that his victories and defeats were essentially his own, that for him there was no Prescott Bush to secure lines of credit or to procure important posts by telephone calls to bigwigs in freemasonic networks.

Fascinating. I mean, I knew I wanted to become debt-free, but wow. Who knew it was so informative to get out of debt.

UPDATE: Jonathan has one more piece of text, though this one is more vague:

A third conclusion is also warranted, viz. that it is easy to overrate the value of precise and rigid classification. We need not deny that a good and natural grouping (i.e. a grouping in accordance with the real affinities of the objects dealt with) is very helpful both for exposition and investigation. By its aid, features of resemblance and of contrast are most easily perceived, and new and hitherto neglected relations are often suggested; but notwithstanding these undeniable advantages, the most essential matter after all is to give adequate and proper treatment to the material of study, and even with a somewhat faulty arrangement this end can be attained. And not only so; the merits of any particular classification depend partly on the end in view

I hope you took notes!