WHAT JOHN Q. PUBLIC SHOULD KNOW ABOUT THE FISCAL FANTASIES OF REPUBLICANS.

Hey, sucker! Yeah, you—the so-called average male, the guy those pollsters tell us favors the Republicans because you want to end “wasteful” government spending. Wake the hell up, buddy!

(Now, if you aren’t one of those foolish enough to want more of what George W. Bush has given us—the most bloated federal government ever—pass this on to someone who needs to read it. Thanks.)

Sorry, but it ticks me off that so many people I run into—mostly guys—still believe this crap about how “liberals” rip off our tax dollars. The reality is it’s not the folks who collect Social Security and Medicare checks who benefit from government charity. These people paid for their so-called
entitlements.

No, when it comes to the “discretionary” federal budget items that can be controlled, the big pigs at the trough are the military and corporate war profiteers—what President Eisenhower termed “the military-industrial complex.”

They gobble up more than half the slop. Without missing a beat, they saw the “War on Terror” as
a perfect replacement for the now-defunct Cold War, a way to keep a wartime economy running for another 50 years.

After a terrorist attack that used no weapon more sophisticated than a $2 box cutter, the current administration and a GOP-led Congress lavished the profiteers with a plethora of contracts to build futuristic and astoundingly expensive weapons systems—at least 72 of them in all. Never mind that
they are designed to fight a superpower enemy that does not exist.

For example, while al Qaeda sits in the desert with not even a dinghy to its name, we are now committed to spending $85 billion for a new Virginia Class submarine fleet. That is hardly relevant in a war against cave dwellers. But hey, those subs’ll look good in the recruitment commercials, and that means more Appalachian boys to walk those deadly beats in Baghdad.

According to official statistics of the Government Accountability Office, since 2000 the Department of Defense (DOD) has roughly doubled its planned investment in new systems from $790 billion to $1.6 trillion in 2007. Compare that to the $4 billion allotted to provide medical insurance to uninsured children, funds that George Bush vetoed as wasteful.

We’re like a man in a midlife crisis who decides to spend his children’s college money on a Ferrari. Only we spend it on things like the troubled Joint Strike Fighter plane that Lockheed Martin is building for a projected $240 billion.

Do you hear any of those right-wing talkshow jocks mention that if we decided to stick with our reliable old subs and jets—of which we have more than the rest of the world combined— we could give every American child full health coverage for decades and have hundreds of billions left over? No, you won’t hear that, but you can’t scan the AM dial without encountering some blowhard raging about how the government wastes money providing emergency room care to illegal immigrants or complaining about high taxes.

This is the ultimate in misdirection. Whatever you think about such “bleeding heart” social programs, you need to remember the total expenditure on such programs is chump change dwarfed by what the Feds are spending on useless war toys. In fact, John Q. Public has been brainwashed into believing
the lie that liberal programs are a significant part of our budget—and deficits—ever since the so-called Reagan Revolution.

Despite slashing social programs for the poor, President Reagan ran up the biggest debt this nation has ever incurred, bigger than the combined total of all his predecessors in the White House. He threw trillions in tax breaks and federal contracts at corporations that hardly needed a handout, especially those in the defense industry.

The end of the Cold War threatened this river of money. How could we justify spending trillions building weapons designed to defeat an enemy that no longer existed? Under the first President Bush and Bill Clinton some modest steps were taken to cut the most outrageous pork-barrel weapons systems.

Then came the 2001 attack by a score of well-prepared and highly coordinated men armed with…razor blades? Suddenly, illogically, insanely—yet predictably—all those massive Cold War projects were revived from their crypts.

It might come as a shock to some, given his pro-military spending rhetoric in the current Presidential campaign, that John McCain was one of the few Republicans to challenge the absurdity of military spending after the fall of the Berlin Wall. That was then, however. Now he has to appeal to the yahoos in what’s called the GOP “base.”

In other words, McCain has to pretend to be ignorant. But you don’t…and now you’re not!

BIG BROTHER CLAMPS DOWN ON FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION, ONE DIRTY WORD AT A TIME.

In 2002, during Fox’s live broadcast of the Billboard Music Awards, Cher answered critics who for years had been saying she was through. “So fuck ’em!” the singer/actress exclaimed triumphantly. The next year, on the same Fox program, honoree Nicole Richie asked rhetorically, “Have you ever tried to get cowshit out of a Prada purse? It’s not so fuckin’ simple.”

On March 17, 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court announced that it will rule in its next term whether or not the Federal Communications Commission has the authority to levy fines on Fox for violating the government’s indecency standards. For the first time since its historic act of censorship in the notorious “Seven Dirty Words” case in 1978, the High Court will decide what words we will be allowed to hear over the airwaves.

Thirty years ago, on the Pacifica Foundation radio network, George Carlin had listed—mocking the silliness of the FCC’s prudery—“the original seven words you couldn’t say on the public airwaves: shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits.”

The verbatim transcript of Carlin’s hilarious (but also sharply serious) assault on the FCC’s contempt for free speech is an appendix, for all to read, to the Supreme Court’s decision in FCC v. Pacifica Foundation.

The Supreme Court plans a new probe into whether “fleeting” indecency is permitted (as with the spontaneous Cher and Nicole Richie comments). If the law is interpreted on the restrictive side, an offending station or network could be fined, by the current FCC gag rule rates, up to $350,000.

It is likely that the current Roberts-Alito-Scalia Supreme Court will agree with the FCC that the children of America must not be exposed to such shockingly coarse language on the public airwaves. Such a ruling—especially if the next President fills vacancies on the Court with other upholders of the 17th-century Puritan standards of the Massachusetts Bay Colony— means the FCC could go on to purify cable and satellite television and radio. And after that, why not the Internet?

The contagious nature of government censorship—particularly when “family values” are at stake—was evident to me when I did not see one mainstream newspaper or magazine or a publication devoted to the law itself (Legal Times in Washington being the sole exception) use the word fuck in reporting on the Supreme Court’s taking on FCC v. Fox Television Stations. But the print media are not licensed by the government. That’s why we have a First Amendment.

As Harvey Silvergate—a Constitutional lawyer, a veteran and a formidable defender of free speech in the courts and his writings— said in Boston’s Phoenix Weekly : “[A]ny newspaper that voluntarily keeps out vital information—something that the broadcast networks are fighting not to have to do— betrays our First Amendment right to free speech and free press. As Lenny Bruce might have observed, it’s a fucking outrage.”

And by contrast, that’s why I feel privileged to write for HUSTLER. Why shouldn’t the First Amendment also apply beyond the print media? Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who wrote of the First Amendment the way Louis Armstrong played trumpet, answered that question in logical and Constitutional terms: “TV and radio stand in the same protected position under the First Amendment as newspapers and magazines. … The fear that Madison and Jefferson had of government intrusion…was founded not only on the specter of a lawless government but [on the specter] of government under the control of a faction that desired to foist its
views of the common good on the people. …The sturdy people who fashioned the First Amendment would be shocked at the intrusion of government into a field which in this Nation has been reserved for individuals.”

I quoted Douglas’s ringing of the Liberty Bell in my 1980 book The First Freedom: The Tumultuous History of Free Speech in America (Dell). Douglas was no longer here when cable, satellite radio and the Internet began to abound, but I have no doubt he would have included them. In its coverage of the Supreme Court’s ominous intention to rule on FCC v. Fox Television Stations, the New York Times did not dare tell its readers that Cher and Nicole Richie had committed the speech crime of saying “fuck.”

Dissenting in the 1978 “Seven Dirty Words” case, Justice William Brennan accused the majority of his brethren of a misguided intention “to impose its notions of propriety on the whole of the American people…[violating] the broadcaster’s right to send, and the right of those interested to receive, a message entitled to full First Amendment protection.”

However, writing for the Court in upholding the FCC and exiling George Carlin’s right to swear forbidden words on the public airwaves was Justice John Paul Stevens, for years since a leader of the so-called liberal wing of the Supreme Court. But as for those “dirty words,” Stevens in 1978 brushed off the First Amendment: “To say that one may avoid further offense by turning off the radio when he hears indecent language is like saying that the remedy for an assault is to run away after the first blow. One may hang up on an indecent phone call, but that option does not give the caller a Constitutional immunity or avoid a harm that has already taken place.”

The “harm” inflicted by the FCC is to the core of what differentiates us—if the Constitution is alive—from all other countries. John Paul Stevens still sits on the Supreme Court of the United States. Will he repent? And as you would expect, the Bush Administration is enthusiastically supporting the FCC.

Nat Hentoff Nat Hentoff is a historian of the Constitution, a jazz critic and a columnist for the Village Voice, the Washington Times, the United Media Newspaper Syndicate and Free Inquiry. His incisive books include The First Freedom: The Tumultuous History of Free Speech in America ; Living the Bill of Rights ; Free Speech for Me But Not for Thee ; The War on the Bill of Rights—And the Gathering Resistance ; and the forthcoming Is This America?