Today's GOP Would Excommunicate Bob Dole
Dole felt his party had a duty to support voting rights. But his colleagues in Congress today would rather punish those in the GOP who choose to defend democracy.
By John Nichols

When Bob Dole bid for the presidency in 1996, the very conservative Republican from Kansas ran a campaign that proudly announced he "supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965" and "played an instrumental role in extending the Voting Rights Act in 1982."

Dole won the party's nomination with relative ease that year, chose the party's leading advocate for outreach to Black voters-former New York representative and housing secretary Jack Kemp-as his running mate, and mounted a campaign in which he regularly touted his support for voting rights and the fact that, as Senate floor manager, he shepherded to enactment the bill to create Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

That didn't make Dole, who died Sunday at age 98, a Lincoln Republican, or even an Eisenhower Republican. He was still wrong on a long list of issues, from labor rights to environmental policy to affirmative action, and he lost that 1996 race for some very good reasons.

But Dole, whom I interviewed a number of times over the years, was an old-school conservative who felt that the Republican Party had a duty to support voting rights. He was proud to have fought for democracy, not just as a member of the House and the Senate but also as a courageous, decorated soldier in the battle against European fascism. Severely wounded in World War II, he became a lifetime advocate of disability rights and worked closely with Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy, the liberal lion of the Senate, to enact the landmark protections contained in the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Such was Dole's record that Dr. Deborah Turner, president of the League of Women Voters, which worked with the former senator on the Voting Rights Act reauthorization of 1982 and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, declared, "Senator Dole will be remembered as an exemplar of statesmanship and public service. May we honor his memory by upholding the voting rights and disability rights that he championed."

Wade Henderson, interim president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said, "Bob Dole's lifetime of public service exemplified the notion that civil and human rights are not a partisan issue. Some of his strongest friendships were across the political aisle. Our current elected officials would do well to honor his memory and work for the common good."

Unfortunately, today's Republicans are disinclined to honor Dole's memory by advocating for voting rights. In fact, they are prepared to punish members of their party who choose to defend democracy.

Dole's passing comes at a moment when conservative justices on the US Supreme Court have done severe damage to Voting Rights Act protections, when Republicans in the Senate are blocking action on the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and when Republicans in the states are actively supporting extreme gerrymandering, voter suppression initiatives, and schemes to challenge election results that fail to favor them.

With the recent news that Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney has been excommunicated by her own state's Republican Party's central committee for daring to suggest that Donald Trump and his associates should be held to account for their support of the January 6 insurrection and efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, does anyone doubt that Dole would be similarly abused by Republicans who countenance no deviance from their current assault on democracy?

Indeed, Dole was a conservative and a party loyalist who, like Liz Cheney, invariably endorsed GOP nominees, including Donald Trump in 2016. Yet he lost patience with Trump's Big Lie politics, acknowledging after the 2020 election that Trump lost, and adding, "He had Rudy Giuliani running all over the country, claiming fraud. He never had one bit of fraud in all those lawsuits he filed and statements he made."

Dole came from the era when Republicans still embraced basic premises of democracy, and believed they could win battles of ideas. He also believed in working with Democrats, including liberals such as Kennedy, to achieve progress for civil rights and voting rights.

In 1982, when Ronald Reagan was president and Republicans were in control of the Senate (with South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond chairing the Judiciary Committee), Dole took it upon himself to develop a plan for extending the Voting Rights Act. As The New York Times reported, Dole "drafted a compromise that civil rights lobbyists and liberal Democratic Senators said they could support. The lobbyists and the Democrats, including Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, commended Mr. Dole and said negotiations were continuing."

The negotiations forged a strong bill that extended essential protections for 25 years. Dole then lobbied his Republican colleagues, especially those on the Senate Judiciary Committee, to back the bill. His support was critical to breaking a deadlock, defeating amendments that sought to weaken the measure, and winning for it the Senate's approval-with an overwhelming 85-8 vote. In a Republican-dominated moment, Kennedy said, "This victory is a heartening sign that Congress will not endlessly turn its back on the needy in our society and the minority who are not white."

The Congressional Black Caucus Foundation would later recall:

On June 29, 1982 President Ronald Reagan signed a 25-year extension of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). Though the Act had been renewed twice before by Presidents Nixon and Ford, the 1982 reauthorization made Section 2 of the VRA permanent. This section of the bill prohibited the violation of voting rights by any practices that discriminated based on race, regardless of if the practices had been adopted with the intent to discriminate or not. This amendment of Section 2 had a significant impact on minority representation in Congress.

(c) 2021 John Nichols writes about politics for The Capitol Times. His book on protests and politics, Uprising: How Wisconsin Renewed the Politics of Protest, from Madison to Wall Street, is published by Nation Books. Follow John Nichols on Twitter @NicholsUprising.

The Golden Age When Women Ruled
By James Donahue

By James Donahue The written human history that exists has been proven through archaeology and mere deduction to be so distorted and religiously and politically twisted that we lack a true understanding of our past. This is true about even relatively recent history. And the farther back into the past we search, the more perverted the information becomes.

Fortunately there is a memory, deeply implanted in our DNA, that makes it possible for us to all have a way of separating the lies from fact; truth from fiction. Also our distant ancestors passed down stories . . . now declared to be mythology . . . that give us insight as to the way things once were on this planet.

There is strong evidence, for example, that there was an earlier eon that existed even before the great Mesopotamian Empire when women ruled the earth. It was a long period of peace and tranquility, remembered genetically as Eden in the Christian and Hebrew Old Testament, and the Golden Age among other world cultures.

William Bond, in an article Did Women Once Rule The World, writes about the ancient ruins of Catal Huyuk, a 9,000-year-old city that once existed in Anatolia, Turkey. The ruins were excavated by James Mellaart between 1961 and 1965. What Mellaart discovered proved to conflict with contemporary beliefs about the ancient past and his work was literally swept under the rug in archaeological circles.

The researchers at Catal Huyuk could not find evidence that the people of that city were warriors. The city was not fortified. There were no weapons of war discovered. And examination of bones in the graves turned up no evidence that anybody died in battle. The artwork was so filled with feminine images that Mellaart concluded that the people worshipped the Ancient Great Mother.

Bond wrote that the findings at Catal Huyuk were so unsettling "the site was closed down for 30 years and the academic world ignored the implications."

The late Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, in her book The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, drawing from personal findings in digs in Achilleion, Thessaly, Greece, and other archaeological finds in Northern Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldavia, the Ukraine, Crete, Cyprus, Thera, Sardinia, Sicliy and Malta, declared that a European society existed between 6,000 and 8,000 years ago that lived in peace and harmony.

Gimbutas wrote that "women ran the temples and in doing so held predominant positions, while men performed such physical chores as hunting, building and navigating. The deities these people worshipped were overwhelmingly female, and their values, emphasizing nonviolence and reverence for nature, came from the female realm. It was marauding Indo-Europeans, the forerunners of Western civilization, who destroyed these societies."

As early as 1861, Swiss writer J. J. Bachofen wrote the controversial Das Mutterrecht which means "Mother-Right." Based on his study of mythology Bachofen hypothesized that a peaceful, female-led agrarian culture once prevailed throughout Europe and the Near East until the rise of militarism resulted in a male takeover.

Author Richard Rudgley, in his book Lost Civilisations of the Stone Age, laments that human civilization has existed on this planet for a much longer time than the Christian Bible teaches. He believes that 95 percent of human existence occurred in "pre-historic times." That is, except for ancient art and ruins of ancient cities, there has been no surviving written record of what happened during that early period of human existence. But Rudgley supports Gimbutas in noting that all carved and painted images of human beings found in those ancient ruins are "overwhelmingly images of women."

Bond wrote that: "What Gimbutas shows is that most of these images celebrate the whole process of birth from the sex act to breast feeding. It seems in prehistoric times menstruation, the vagina, the sexual act, giving birth and breast feeding was seen as something divine, holy and sacred. This is in contrast to historic times when menstruation became taboo and unclean in many societies. The sex act also became sinful and dirty.""

The Christian teachings are that children are born into sin. The implication here is that this is because they are born of women. In today's society in many parts of the "civilized world" the act of breast feeding is something shameful, especially if done in public.

Since that Golden Era came to a violent end, with conquering tribes taking over these peaceful communities, the world shifted to a male dominated culture. And the results have been war, violence, the rule of kings and a general enslavement of the people. This has continued even to the present day.

Bond wrote that "the new rulers behaved like Mafia bosses in imposing a reign of terror on the people to control them, and started a protection racket that was in effect the first taxation, making the rulers extremely wealthy and forcing poverty onto the people.

"Now the population had to not only work to feed and shelter themselves, but they had to work to feed the new rulers and their armies, as well as build them palaces and fortifications and make arms and luxury goods. This is a clear case where men like Adam had to work by the sweat of their brow while the new rulers encouraged men to disrespect women and turn them into slaves."

It should be interesting to note that the male dominated culture seems to exist only in the so-called "civilized" societies. Aboriginal tribes throughout the world still maintain the high regard for the women and even worship feminine gods. The Hopi and Navajo tribes in Arizona, for example, perceive Spider Woman as an important deity.

Also interesting to sociologists is that a shift from the male dominated social order has been slowly occurring. It began with the Women's Suffrage movement and the world wars in the Twentieth Century, that called women into the work places while the men went off to battle. Since the end of World War II, women have remained in competition with men for every kind of skilled job, and they are yet battling for equality in pay.

Women living under extreme Islamic suppression in the Middle Eastern countries are fighting for the right to simply drive cars, appear in public without having their entire bodies covered in cloth and justice in the courts against abuse by men.

The world is in chaos today as crowds of angry protesters take to the streets in rebellion against the men who control the wealth and power. Governments are beginning to topple. There is so much unrest that the leaders are building armies and digging into bunkers to go into hiding. The imbalance is growing. It is obvious to nearly everyone that something significant is about to happen.

There is a theory among the occultists that humanity is moving into a new era. There is a belief that the women ruled the world in peace and harmony during the first known era that lasted about 7,000 years. Then the male era began about 4,000 or 5,000 years before Christ and has continued unchecked until the current day. This means the second era under male dominance has lasted at least 7,000 years. Is it now coming to an end as well?

The question then would be: what is the new era about to bring? Will it be a time of equality and shared leadership? Will the women rise to power once again? Or will it be something totally unexpected?

The English occultist Aleister Crowley, who founded the theology of Thelema based on The Book of the Law, a text he claimed was dictated to him by an angelic or alien entity identified as Aiwass in 1904, wrote of a division of three "aeons" of the human experience.

Crowley called the first the Aeon of Isis. This was a time during pre-history when mankind worshipped a Great Goddess symbolized by the Egyptian deity Isis. The second and current period was called the Aeon of Osiris, when humanity worships a singular male god symbolized by the Egyptian god Osiris.

The third period described by Crowley is the Aeon of Horus, the hawk headed son of Osiris and Isis. Crowley believed that this child god would bring humanity into a time of self-realization and self-actualization. He described this as a time when there will be a growing interest in all things spiritual, when humans will seek their true will and practice unconditional love for one another.

All we can say is that change is clearly in the wind. The people of this war ravaged world would truly welcome a new period of peace and tranquility. We could all use a lot more love and compassion for one another.

(c) 2021 James L. Donahue is a retired newspaper reporter, editor and columnist with more than 40 years of experience in professional writing. He is the published author of five books, all dealing with Michigan history, and several magazine articles.

Why We Should Oppose The Democracy Summit
By David Swanson

The exclusion of certain countries from the U.S. "democracy summit" is not a side issue. It is the very purpose of the summit. And excluded countries have not been excluded for failing to meet the standards of behavior of those that were invited or the one doing the inviting. Invitees didn't even have to be countries, as even a U.S. backed failed coup leader from Venezuela has been invited. So have representatives of Israel, Iraq, Pakistan, DRC, Zambia, Angola, Malaysia, Kenya, and - critically - pawns in the game: Taiwan and Ukraine.

What game? The weapons sales game. Which is the whole point. Look at the U.S. State Department website on the Democracy Summit. Right at the top: "'Democracy doesn't happen by accident. We have to defend it, fight for it, strengthen it, renew it.' -President Joseph R. Biden, Jr."

Not only do you have to "defend" and "fight," but you have to do so against certain threats, and get a big gang in on the fighting to "tackle the greatest threats faced by democracies today through collective action." The representatives of democracy at this amazing summit are such experts at democracy that they can "defend democracy and human rights at home and abroad." It's the abroad part that may make you scratch your head if you're thinking of democracy as having anything to do with, you know, democracy. How do you do it for some other country? But keep reading, and the Russiagate themes become clear:

"[A]uthoritarian leaders are reaching across borders to undermine democracies - from targeting journalists and human rights defenders to meddling in elections."

You see, the problem is not that the United States has long been, in reality, an oligarchy. The problem is not the U.S. status as top holdout on basic human rights treaties, top opponent of international law, top abuser of the veto at the United Nations, top incarcerator, top environmental destroyer, top weapons dealer, top funder of dictatorships, top war launcher, and top coup sponsor. The problem is not that, rather than democratizing the United Nations, the U.S. government is attempting to create a new forum in which it is, uniquely and even more than before, more equal than everybody else. The problem is certainly not the rigged primary election that Russiagate was concocted to distract from. And in no way whatsoever is the problem the 85 foreign elections, counting just those we know of and can list, that the U.S. government has interfered in. The problem is Russia. And nothing sells weapons like Russia - though China is catching up.

The oddest thing about the democracy summit is that there will not be a democracy in sight. I mean not even in pretense or formality. The U.S. public votes on nothing, not even on whether to hold democracy summits. Back in the 1930s the Ludlow Amendment almost gave us the right to vote on whether any war could be started, but the State Department shut that effort down decisively, and it's never returned.

The U.S. government is not just a system of elected representation rather than a democracy, and a highly corrupted one that fundamentally fails to represent, but it's also driven by an anti-democratic culture in which politicians routinely brag to the public about ignoring public opinion polls and are applauded for it. When sheriffs or judges misbehave, the main criticism is usually that they were elected. A more popular reform than clean money or fair media is the anti-democratic imposition of term limits. Politics is such a dirty word in the United States that I received an email today from an activist group accusing one of the two U.S. political parties of "politicizing elections." (It turned out that they had in mind various voter-suppression behavior, all too common in the world's beacon of democracy, where the winner of every election is "none of the above" and the most popular party is "neither.")

Not only will there be no national democracy in sight. There will also be nothing democratic happening at the summit. The handpicked gang of officials will not vote or achieve consensus on anything. The participation in governance that you could find even at an Occupy Movement event will be nowhere to be seen. And neither will there be any corporate journalists shrieking at them all "WHAT IS YOUR ONE SINGLE DEMAND? WHAT IS YOUR ONE SINGLE DEMAND?" They already have several completely vague and hypocritical goals on the website - produced, of course, without a shred of democracy being employed or a single tyrant being harmed in the process.

Not wishing to impose thousands of pages on you, let me select at random just one of the invitees to the Democracy Summit as identified by the U.S. State Department: the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Here's is just a bit of how the State Department describes the DRC in the last year:

"Significant human rights issues included: unlawful or arbitrary killings, including extrajudicial killings; forced disappearances; torture and cases of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary detention; political prisoners or detainees; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary; arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy; serious abuses in an internal conflict, including killing of civilians, enforced disappearances or abductions, and torture and physical abuses or punishment, unlawful recruitment or use of child soldiers by illegal armed groups, and other conflict-related abuses; serious restrictions on free expression and the press, including violence, threats of violence, or unjustified arrests of journalists, censorship, and criminal libel; interference with the rights of peaceful assembly and freedom of association; serious acts of official corruption; lack of investigation and accountability for violence against women; trafficking in persons; crimes involving violence or threats of violence targeting persons with disabilities, members of national, racial, and ethnic minority groups, and indigenous people; crimes involving violence or threat of violence targeting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex persons; and existence of the worst forms of child labor."