Putnam joins the McCain train

Calling him a common-sense conservative, U.S. Rep. Adam Putnam of Bartow joined the other members of the House Republican leadership in endorsing Sen. John McCain for president.

Putnam, the third-ranking Republican in the House, had backed former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson, whose campaign fizzled last month. He joined House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio and Minority Whip Roy Blunt of Missouri in endorsing McCain after McCain addressed House Republicans earlier today.

"Senator John McCain is a man of great character and conviction who has done much for this country," Putnam said in a statement. "There is no candidate better qualified to serve as our nation's next commander in chief."

Comments

He was too late. Arlene will never allow him on board.

Cong. Putnam is a solid conservative but Sen. McCain is not.

HEY SALTER MITCHELL, FEB 12TH WAS YESTERDAY

[Dee]

Since when is open borders, huge guest worker programs and amnesty plans common sense conservatism.

President Reagan made a terrible mistake granting amnesty that he acknowledged later on when he realized border security and immigration law in the Simpson-Mazolli amnesty bill were not going to be enforced.

Rep Putnam you have made a bad mistake hopping on board the sellout America express.

Nobody can hold a grudge like Arlene...

Putnam did what he had to do. Who was a senior member of the republican party going to endorse? Clinton? A lot of us will probably do the same as we pinch our noses.

[putnam is a teacher. and teach this.]

The Fascists were completely against individualism in general and especially against individualism in a free-market economy. Their agenda included minimum-wage laws, government restrictions on profit-making, progressive taxation of capital, and “rigidly secular” schools.

Unlike the Communists, the Fascists did not seek government ownership of the means of production. They just wanted the government to call the shots as to how businesses would be run.

They were for “industrial policy,” long before liberals coined that phrase in the United States.

Indeed, the whole Fascist economic agenda bears a remarkable resemblance to what liberals would later advocate.

Moreover, during the 1920s “progressives” in the United States and Britain recognized the kinship of their ideas with those of Mussolini, who was widely lionized by the Left.

Famed British novelist and prominent Fabian socialist H. G. Wells called for “Liberal Fascism,” saying “the world is sick of parliamentary politics.”

Another literary giant and Fabian socialist, George Bernard Shaw, also expressed his admiration for Mussolini — as well as for Hitler and Stalin, because they “did things,” instead of just talk.

In Germany, the Nazis followed in the wake of the Italian Fascists, adding racism in general and anti-Semitism in particular, neither of which was part of Fascism in Italy or in Franco’s Spain.

Even the Nazi variant of Fascism found favor on the Left when it was only a movement seeking power in the 1920s.

W. E. B. DuBois was so taken with the Nazi movement that he put swastikas on the cover of a magazine he edited, despite complaints from Jewish readers.

Even after Hitler achieved dictatorial power in Germany in 1933, DuBois declared that the Nazi dictatorship was “absolutely necessary in order to get the state in order.”

As late as 1937 he said in a speech in Harlem that “there is today, in some respects, more democracy in Germany than there has been in years past.”

In short, during the 1920s and the early 1930s, Fascism was not only looked on favorably by the Left but recognized as having kindred ideas, agendas, and assumptions.

Only after Hitler and Mussolini disgraced themselves, mainly by their brutal military aggressions in the 1930s, did the Left distance itself from these international pariahs.

Fascism, initially recognized as a kindred ideology of the Left, has since come down to us defined as being on “the Right” — indeed, as representing the farthest Right, supposedly further extensions of conservatism.

If by conservatism you mean belief in free markets, limited government, and traditional morality, including religious influences, then these are all things that the Fascists opposed just as much as the Left does today.

The Left may say that they are not racists or anti-Semites, like Hitler, but neither was Mussolini or Franco. Hitler, incidentally, got some of his racist ideology from the writings of American “progressives” in the eugenics movement.

[Gene Smith]

"There is no candidate who's going to win the Republican nomination, so I guess I'll endorse MCain".

Adam Putnam, former lover of Fred Thompson and astute political analyst.

[Charlie Brown]

Adam Putmnam is a decent guy. If there were more like him we would be alot better off. It is a good thing for conservatives for him to show some support for McCain. He could be the future of the true conservative force in the party and he may very well temper some of McCain's liberal slants as long as he keeps his confidence. Don't construe this as Putnam's endorsement of McCains' positions, look at it as damage control. In typical Adam Putnam style he chose his words carefully. He said there was no better "candidate," he didn't say there wasn't a better man.

so what do you propose Dee - rounding up 12m and sending them all back?

Reagan made the mistake, but its now the practicality in dealing with the reality.

[cynical idealist]

Simply put, Putnam is a day late and a dollar short. Conservatives and liberals alike have yet to figure out that neither can gain a majority without those of us in the middle. I'm making a way too broad statement here, but if R's are all conservative and D's are all liberal, then you each can take your 40 percent of the electorate and go home. Because, unless you can convince the 20 percent of us in the middle that we should go with you, you're screwed!

[Sound Off]

9:01 P.M. Much of what you say is true, pertaining to the history of fascism. But you remind me of the guy who stole the neighbors cow and was subsequently arrested and indicted for same. At his trial, he decided to testify in his own behalf. He stated clearly that he didn’t steal the neighbors cow, that the cow simply followed him home. Under cross examination, the prosecuting attorney said: “you say the cow simply followed you home, is that correct?” To which the cow thief replied: “yes, that is correct.” The prosecutor then asked: “isn’t it true that the cow had a rope around its neck?” The cow thief replied: “well...uh, yes that is true.” Then the prosecutor asked: “Sir! Where was the end of the rope that was around the cows neck?” To which the cow thief responded: “uh...well, it was in my hand; but I don’t know how it got there.” In other words, 9:01 P.M., the cow thief wasn’t telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It was true the cow followed him home. But that wasn’t the entire truth, which was: the cow followed him home, because he had a rope around his neck; and the rope was in the hand of the cow thief, who was tugging and guiding the cow to his place.
Fascism is real today in America. It’s now a right wing, neocon format, to the new United States, run by the Military Industrial Complex, (http://www.militaryindustrialcomplex.com/), in coercion with the current neocon administration. To learn more about the fourteen points of fascism, go to: http://www.ellensplace.net/fascism.html . After reading that platform, one can easily relate it to the current administration and the 2000 election.

[Dee]

Rep Putnam by endorsig McAmnety is doing nothing more than agreeing to more of the same Z-visa,amnesty,massive guest worker plan mentality of the Chamber of Commerce.

Illegal aliens, regardless of how many there are got here on their own and they can get back from where they came on their own.

Guestworkers don't bring children and spouses with them that are able to access taxpayer funded education, medication and social services. Guestworkers don't end up in gangs, trafficing drugs etc. Guestworkers don't end up becoming the majority of those imprissoned in California and 27% of those in the Federal system.
Guestworkers and their PRESIDENT CALDERON don't involve themselves in politics and vote illegally.

GUESTWORKERS GO HOME!!!

We don't have a bunch of guestworkers here, we have a full scale invasion and this is what Rep Putnam endorsed when he endorsed Senator McAmnesty who is an open borders, global elitist. Talk about a Manchurian candidate.

I didn't think Rep Putnam would be a sell out but that reality cannot be ignored.

[Clyde]

Found here: racism, bigotry and xenophobia

[to 8:01am]

wilson and fdr developed war socialism and further development the militarization of society to combat social ills (or to increase the power of the socialist which wanted to do away with organized religion and replace it with the religion of the state) Go read more about Mussolini's fascism--and the accolades that FDR and Wilson paid to Mussolini and the accolades mussolini paid to Wilson and FDR. don't forget the eugenics for the leftist socialist---if it weren't for the catholic church---would be have gone further with sterilization. Go read justice holmes (i'm sure one of your socialist god supremem court justices) who wrote the controlling opinion that a state could sterilize the backward woman as it would end her types of class from the world.

[take a gander at europe these days]

even Sweden is implementing Reagan's supply side economic policies. But here in america--we want to follow what the European did in the last mid-century--that has hobbled their fate ever since. WAke up america---and avoid liberal democrats who are looking for a world wide union that is controlled by a few bureaucrats who will live high off the hog with their power.

[and so it goes]

fascism in America predated the regimes of Mussolini and Hitler. He believes that Woodrow Wilson turned the United States into a “fascist country, albeit temporarily” during World War I. Americans in 1917 were reluctant to join the slaughter in Europe. Their nation hadn’t been attacked; there was no defining event — a Fort Sumter or Pearl Harbor — to rally public support. So Wilson formed the country’s first propaganda ministry, the Committee on Public Information, to teach people what they were up against. The devil became German militarism — the merciless Hun — and Americans were encouraged to lash out at those of German ancestry inside the United States. Vigilante groups arose to mete out justice and spy on fellow citizens. Congress passed draconian laws banning “abusive” and “disloyal” language against the government and its officials. The Post Office revoked the mailing privileges of hundreds of antiwar publications, effectively shutting them down. Rarely if ever in American history has dissent been so effectively stifled.

At the same time, Wilson formed numerous boards to regulate everything from the production of artillery pieces to the price of a lamb chop. The result, Goldberg argues, was the birth of a socialist dictatorship that “whipped, cajoled and seduced American industry into the loving embrace of the state.” Though partly dismantled after the war, this model, we are told, became the blueprint for Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal

[so who is a fascist]

Benito Mussolini was a socialist and earned the title “Il Duce” as the leader of the socialists in Italy. When he founded the fascist party, its program called for implementing a minimum wage, expropriating property from landowners, repealing titles of nobility, creating state-run secular schools and imposing a progressive tax rate. Mussolini took socialism and turned it in a more populist and militaristic direction, but remained a modernizing, secular man of the left.

The Nazis too were socialists, “enemies, deadly enemies, of today’s capitalist economic system,” in the words of the party’s ideologist Gregor Strasser. The party’s platform sounded a lot like that of the Italian fascists. The Nazis wanted to chase conventional Christianity from public life and overturn tradition, replacing them with an all-powerful state. Both Hitler and Mussolini were revolutionaries, bitterly opposed to “reactionary” forces in their societies.

By what standard, then, are they considered conservatives who took things to extremes? The left points to their anti-Semitism and militarism. But anti-Semitism isn’t an inherently right-wing phenomenon — Stalin’s Russia was anti-Semitic. As for militarism, these regimes looked to it as a way to mobilize and organize society, something deeply anathema to the anti-statist tradition of postwar American conservatism.

On the other hand, the progressive movement of the early 20th century looked to Mussolini as an inspiration and shared intellectual roots with European fascism, including an appreciation of the “top-down socialism” of Otto von Bismarck. Goldberg eviscerates Woodrow Wilson as the closest we have ever had to a fascist president. Wilson and his supporters welcomed World War I as an opportunity to expand the state, instituting “war socialism” and a far-reaching crackdown on dissent.

FDR picked up where Wilson left off. The crisis of the Great Depression was the occasion for reviving “war socialism.” The man who ran the National Recovery Administration was an open admirer of Mussolini, and the alphabet soup of New Deal agencies had their roots in World War I and the classic fascist impulse to mobilize society and put it on a war footing.

The fascist exaltation of youth, glorification of violence, hatred of tradition and romance of “the street” in the New Left of the 1960s, still the subject of the fond memories for the liberal establishment in this country. “Liberal fascism” — the phrase was coined by H. G. Wells, and he meant it positively — is a distant heir to European fascism. The liberal version is pacifist rather than militaristic and feminine rather than masculine in its orientation, but it also seeks to increase the power of the state and overcome tradition in sweeping crusades pursued with the moral fervor of war.

the perils of state aggrandizement and of revolutionary movements. If nothing else, it should convince liberals that it’s time to find a new insult.

Babble on. Facism by definition is what Bush plutocrats are implementing at speed of light. Corporate crony interest top citizen rights.

You did not make a little mistake. You spew sickening, fearmongering, big lie propaganda. Go read a dictionary.

I'm still waiting for Putnam to have an original thought. Chirp, chirp, crickets.........lemmings splashing.