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Sep 8, 2008

1898 speech echoes 2008 campaign issues

One-hundred-ten years ago, on Dec 5, 1898 William Jennings Bryan delivered a message which reverberates into the 2008 presidential campaign - its issues, jingoisms, and propaganda-touting.

As you know, orators of the past were expected to speak for quite some time - a speech resembling today's 'sound bites' would have been considered a complete flop and a huge disappointment to entertainment-starved audiences everywhere.

The speech I've dug up for you, 'Imperialism', touches upon many topics of current value, not the least of which is a Republican house of representatives who complied with President McKinley's request for the authority to increase our standing army to 100,000.

Bryan called a large standing army, "not only a pecuniary burden to the people," but much more: "it is ever a menace to a Republican form of government."

Today we should recognize these things by well-worn experience, and yet the GOP still has its way in the realm of war profiteering and expansionist policies a la 2008.

Bryan paraphrases Abe Lincoln in his speech, "In 1859 Lincoln said that the Republican party believed in the man and the dollar, but that in case of a conflict it believed in the man before the dollar."

My, some things have changed, haven't they? Unless you're one of the elect few, that is - the cream of the one-world-government crop.

1898 (the decade when the Robber Baron class got its claws into every pie) and Bryan almost wholly could have been speaking of the 2008 presidential campaign when he said:

"Against us are arrayed a comparatively small but politically and powerful number who really profit by Republican policies; but with them are associated a large number who, because of their attachment to their party name, are giving their support to doctrines antagonistic to the former teachings of their own party."

Bryan goes on to discuss, among other things: the gold standard, the greenback, imperialism in the Philippines and Cuba, the paralyzing influence of imperialism, and then gives the four principle arguments advanced by those who enter upon a defense of imperialism.

He then identifies to whom each argument is addressed ('addresst'):

1. the nation's pride
2. the nation's pocketbook
3. the church member
4. the partisan

If any of this sounds familiar, it's because they're using the same tactics in the 21st century! If it works, why change, right?

So is America caught in a loop of self-destruction she can't break out of? Is she too dizzy to see she's being duped yet again?

Now I know that a vote in November may bring little improvement if you vote for the Dems. But if you vote for the Republicans you can be certain of encouraging the cynical imperialists who have been misdirecting our nation for a over a century.

What's it to be?

Change? Hope? Or simply the audacity and hubris of nation-rotting, Republic-destroying imperialism?

~:~

Thanks go to a great resource, American Rhetoric!

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