Taking Back the White House, A Guide

Here is part of the introduction to my guide to taking back the White House.

I am self publishing this book to kick start it. The cost for initial version is 24.50 plus appropriate local taxes. It is the Collectors Edition furnished in a three ring binder version incorporating 12 months of updates and inclusion on my database. It is personally signed by me and will eventually be published in a smaller edition for wider and more generalized distribution. I intend to only print 1,000 of the original edition. So, please get your order into me as soon as possible. See the end for mailing information. Thank you.

Short bio!

I am publishing this myself; whatever monies come from this will support my activism and push for a more progressive government. For any of you who don't know me, you should be aware that I have been involved in government, peripherally, for thirty years and directly for the last six years. I have been a writer for progressive, liberal causes; an editor for left wing websites; a former officer and editor of Democracy Chronicle; a mailing list operator and have written under names like Armchair Curmudgeon for years; I've had my editorials published in many newspapers across the US; I have been an organizer; I supported Howard Dean from the beginning, becoming a coordinator and spokesperson for him; I was a party host, speaker, fund raiser and Meetup Host and Coordinator; I also helped support the Kerry group, served as advisor, PR director to the local Kerry Coordinator; I started a Vet's program called the Purple Ribbon Society; was a Kerry coordinator for the Vets in my state; I attended meetings, gatherings, marches, protests for Al Gore; and I supported other Dem liberals in the past including the Rainbow Coalition, and provided support for Jerry Brown and Moe Udahl (one of my all time favorites); I was a delegate to my state's convention; I headed up many organizations and chaired committees for democratic action; I was involved in grass-roots organizations including the DFA and others that Dean spawned; I am in the process of working with Baptist ministers in forming and serving on a committee to root out prejudice and intolerance; I am a 'tree hugger' starting a new organization called the Tree Huggers of America to save our forests and wetlands; I was chair of the South East Democrats, a program designed to raise money to get out the vote; I was asked to serve as coordinator for the local progressive movement and have tried with every fiber of my body to advance progressive and liberal causes. I am a scientist and marketer by training, teach college and work with local chambers of commerce. I am a member of Rotary and assorted organizations committed to the Arts, founder of the local arts council, speaker to the statewide arts council, etc. among other activities I am engaged in during my spare time along with finishing my fourteenth book.




A Bare Knuckled Guide to Taking Back the White House

Hard Talk and Harder Answers

By Les Aaron
consultant, advisor, organizer
for progressive causes





Introduction:
Virtually half of the population, more than 50 million Americans have been side-lined by a government more intent on satisfying its own aspirations than those of the people it swore to uphold. As democrats, independents, “Greens,” libertarians and those classified simply as “others,” most have stood silent under the withering PR barrage that emanated in the White House and reverberated through all of the mechanisms and institutions that this government had set up in the last thirty years to make the rest of us seem irrelevant and unpatriotic. This new form of autocracy that has enabled the government to leave democracy behind under the ruse of protecting us against terrorism is the most dangerous and free-wheeling government to emerge in two hundred years. And our reaction to it for the most part has been intimidated silence.


As ‘the rest of America’, we have been subjected to every kind of humiliation by a right wing autocracy that doesn’t mind saying anything that works to get it’s way. It’s time that this government be exposed for what it is and that America be returned to its former self.

But as experience shows, saying that we are facing the death of the two party system and an autocracy that does what it wants is not the same thing as giving them the door.

If we want to restore the kind of government envisioned by our forefathers and laid out in the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, we are going to have to work for it…because, and this is the hard part, there is no one left to intercede if we don’t. Truly, what lies ahead is the will of the people and what we do from here on out will decide our ultimate fate.

There is much work however that needs to be done to restore Federal programs, achieve a balanced budget, reinvigorate our economy, build jobs and a future for the ‘middle class,’, return sanity to our affairs with people, reinstitute separation of church and state, return us to the rule of law, institute a rational environmental policy and protect us against the policies that this government has instituted that make the world a more dangerous place to live….

The above may sound daunting but with courage and conviction, the ‘rest of us’ can change the course of the world; for as we’ve seen, if we don’t who else?

This little guide tells us what we need to do to win the next election and make it happen.


Background: A Belated “Wake-Up” Call for Democracy

For those of you who can’t handle the truth, we suggest that you put this book aside. This is not the book for those who cannot deal with things that have not been filtered through rose-colored glasses.

We are going to talk hard truths here, like it or lump it.

Hey, let’s take off the smiley face and look at the new realities: ie. Where we are in a world where America is so focused on fighting everyone, we have lost all rationality and sanity. While this is going on, our former allies and potential enemies have formed new alliances all around the world.

While we are looking to fight new wars , China is building the strongest economy on earth. While we are spending hundreds of billions of tax payer monies on a fool’s errand, China has gained financial control of America that can’t see the forest for the trees. While we are interested in imposing our will on the rest of the world, our thirst for oil has enriched our enemies and weakened our country’s democratic form of government and led to a new autocracy where privacy and freedoms are no longer guaranteed. While our government takes photo ops against a backdrop of American values, we have demonstrated a level of compassion that is only skin deep. While jobs leave these shores in growing numbers humbling this once great power, we extol our military might. While we urge the terrorists to ‘bring it on,’ our workers are left swinging in the breeze as their jobs move to foreign lands with strange sounding names.While we tout our macho qualities, the environment rebels against neglect and abuse. For these and other reasons, it is necessary that Americans wake up to the new realities and decide whether this is the kind of life they want to leave their children and grand-children. It is time to take a long hard look at where we are and where we need to go.

What we as Americans who don’t play the Republican’s game have experienced is the death of a thousand cuts. Everything and anything Democrats do is put through the wringer. We are vilified, ostracized, criticized and cracked side of the head by the most organized and most aggressive Republican Blitzkrieg in history.

According to the architects of the Extreme Right, we who call ourselves Democrats, ‘free thinkers’,Independents, Greens, Libertarians, Conservatives and anyone who doesn’t agree with their policies of destroying ‘good government’ are the devil incarnate.

Clearly, in their lexicon, it is legitimate to call those who don’t agree with their policies, anything and everything under the sun. We have been accused of everything. We are “pinkos,” “commies,” “fellow travelers,” “peace-niks,” “sympathizers,” “Bolshevicks,” and even “pseudo-terrorists”…and, lately, we have even become the “Anti-Christ.”

According to these people who have chosen words for their attack properties, our politics, too, endorses lame-brain giveaways!.... We are extravagant, we expand government unnecessarily, add to the debt, support malingerers, are driven by Hollywood’s extremes, underwrite the Gay movement, want women to have their own lives (God forbid!), believe in education at any price—even if it takes away from Missile Shields that don’t work, have no discernable values, are unpatriotic and guilty of worshipping false idols and we suck the blood out of little children during the full moon.. It is only through some strange perversion of God that we are still allowed to exist to torment the righteous and the true believer.

Of course, all of this spun palaver has been reinforced and rubber stamped by the punjabs of pomposity, the twisters of truth in the land of Alice: The Talking Heads of Fox and CNBC and the other cable outlets run by businesses seeking to curry favor or extol their own selfish view of the world. This no longer has anything to do with “the news,” journalism or media objectivity. It is simply doing the expedient for profits!

What a wonderful world we inhabit! We wonder if the scientists and historians will see this as a blip in our evolutionary development or symptomatic of the end of civilization as we know it.

Only time will tell!

All in all, it is not very hard to imagine being transported through the rabbit hole and finding ourselves the guests of the Mad Hatter.

So, while the democrats are vilified and the voters distracted, our Attila-like foes, the “Right Wing” cabal is free to do what it does best: sow disorder while taking apart that which our Forefathers so laboriously put together…

Through the smoke and mirrors, we wonder at their myopia and marvel at the fact that they practice deception as if it is second nature. . Who would have thought that they could have fooled so many of the people so much of the time.

What are these bottom dwellers going for?

Well, that should be obvious. They are working up a lather trying to dismantle our government in time for the next terrorist threat so that the only thing that remains is a geographical scrap heap with no jobs, a pile of debt that reaches to the ceiling, an Anti-Missile Shield system that costs 260 billion dollars and doesn’t work and a population scampering the “wrong way” across the Mexican border..

And they are well on their way to that objective.


No wonder they want us back every few years to pull their chestnuts out of the fire. Without us, there would be no America!

But this time, they’ve gone too far. And they have pushed the system beyond the brink, beyond rationality for even the greediest of the self-interested and self-absorbed.

One shudders to think of the monumental task that lies before us. Is anyone equal to the task? Surely, on this question depends the future of mankind…

So, what’s left?

A Yawning Chasm that no democrat of right mind has seen to fill unbelievable as that may sound.

Is that the bell tolling our end that we hear?
Or an opportunity just waiting to be grasped?
The Yin and Yang of political strategy just waiting to be plumbed..

That is what we have yet to discover in light of the greatest theft of our liberties and the loss of our freedoms that this Democracy has ever had to endure.

And if that doesn’t reve up your engine, try these on for starters…

For starters, Ask yourself, why are democrats running scared and looking to keep a low profile? Why are we feeling guilty for doing the right thing? What is wrong with this picture? Why isn’t the media having a field day picking over the excesses of the Republicans—their ability to say one thing and do the exact opposite? Whatever happened to those ‘checks’ and ‘balances so valued by our Founding Fathers?’ And what is happening with our Constitutional Rights? Why have we allowed for the suspension of those rights guaranteed under the Constitution?
Why is there no discussion; no major debate?.
Why are we at war with a country that has proved not to threaten us? Why have we shipped all our jobs overseas? Why have we not meted out justice to all of the corporate heads who have committed acts of indecency and are guilty of liable and fraud? Why are we continuing to poison the water and the air?
And why is nobody actively engaged in doing something about these atrocities that continue to pile up?

Conundrum heaped upon conundrum. And why do we let them attain legitimacy when all we see is a house of cards ready to tumble.

Yes, the truth is that we are being attacked from a hundred different directions; and, overall, we seem to be cowed by the attack dogs sent to decimate us in every way they can…

We have done the worst thing possible:
We have bought into their rhetoric.
And we have dodged the bullet..
And we have lived to breath another day.
But in the end, we are saddled with guilt!

Why?

Because we have simply accommodated that which should not be accommodated. So we must posit the hard questions:

Where, if anyplace, do we go from here?

And that’s not an easy question to answer.
The payroll types will say it is time to plan the work before us and work the plan. But that is a gross oversimplification.

Why? Because it fails to consider the myriad variables that decide outcomes….

What are they?

They are the options that are available to us.
And they will become clear as we expand our view and start to look at things with fresh eyes. And that is the key for massive “make-over” ahead. .

If we truly want change, we need to admit that everything, everything is fair game. And nothing is off the table. And we have to be able to submit our own motives and actions to intense scrutiny. For what is truly remarkable that a leadership that has blown itself out of the water time and time again, could have won in 2004. And it’s a signal that we were effete, inept, inconsequential, and irrelevant!






Here’s the tough part:

As a precondition to moving on, we need to admit what we did and what we did not do and swallow the bitter pill of humility.
. ….
So, sit back, have a brew or a happy pill and let’s see if there is not anything that we can salvage out of the last two elections that we can put a happy face on.




Mailing Info:

Please make your check/money order payable to Rose Friedlieb; send your check or money order to:

Rose Friedlieb
239 Lakeside Drive
Lewes DE 19958

Thank you.

Please allow four to six weeks for delivery