There was a period in which Jack Kemp vaguely mattered. That was a long time ago. Now he’s practically unknown. There’s a multitude of excellent reasons for that, the best of which can be perused in his Dec. 22, 2005, column entitled “Washington Fails to Embrace Supply-Side Truths”. In it, he’s hoping like hell you haven’t a clue about economics. He’s expecting you were as miserable a student as our President-select, a man whose grasp of business produced a long string of horrifyingly ineptly run businesses, and, thus, you won’t know enough to parse his, Mr. Kemp’s, utter gibberish for the semantic folderol it is. In the annals of columnist gobbledygook, there have been some gems, but rarely so lustrous as this one. Step behind the curtain with me, won’t you?

Kemp gaffes himself no sooner than the fifth and sixth words in, baiting the title to this untidy mess. ‘Supply side’ is a piece of Rhetoric signaling the business community to a highly sympathetic slab o’ tripe being indited, though the semantic bias would make it seem to lean to populism.

The phrase is just an oblique way to sidestep saying ‘business positive’, a euphemism for stench-generation.

Pursuing his thread, in the pertinent economic theory, there’s ‘supply and demand’, a phrase already an example of misframing: demand precedes supply and thus should appear first, any well-established history of economic doublespeak be damned.

‘Demand’ is from the people, ‘supply’ is from business; thus, you can guess why the nameplate is textbooked the way it is. ‘Supply side’ means business somehow becomes primary, a reversal of reality, not to mention democracy, and an odd way to refer to the reactionary side of the equation. If you know the most basic economic rudiments, you understand that people initiate (demand), business reacts (supply); hence, there are no ‘supply side truths’. Truths issue from the demand side. The supply side only caters, indeed panders, to demand.

Supply’s only “truth” is sheer naked profit and how to get it as quickly and as thoroughly as possible, ethics and society trampled underfoot. Nothing revelatory there; hardly a truth, merely opportunism.

What can we next expect, do you suppose, given such an egregious launch? Well, every sentence is an alarming exercise in glossolalia, something that would be expected of a Bedlamite, but we’ll unpack a few salients before growing ill.

Kemp bases his farrago by lamenting the abandonment of Reagan-Bush supply side lunacy, noting the “paradoxical” adoption of it in Russia. He states this because the actions he refers to were, in his words, an “economic miracle” (Repuglicanese for ‘planned disaster’) but sober assessments and history itself some time ago revealed that they were highly advantagist maneuvers snake-oiled to the Russians, rigged by the U.S. and others, a bum’s rush into our pat little perversion of capitalism by the usual predatory mercanto-cabal gutting what little had survived in that bedeviled country from preceding years. The Reagan-Bush miracle knew another continental mark when it saw one, having just finished an orgy at home, buggering the slumbering American public amongst a trash-heap of riches tripling the national debt before it left office.

But Kemp isn’t really wanting to stick to alleged miracles; no, he’s changing his mind in mid-aberration, instead now talking about the “supply-side precepts that drove the Reagan economic revolution” [emphasis mine], a much more earthshaking event, obviously; it only appears to be the selfsame “miracle” to the unindoctrinated - those who thought Reagan, long before his Alzheimer’s, was just a doddering regurgitron puppeted like his even more brainless successor three kings hence: King George II. Mr. Kemp tells us that unless we heed the connoted wisdom of this revolution, we “will confront a crisis of unsustainable big government and a declining economy”.

Will??? Which “unsustainable big government” and which “declining economy” might those be, the ones you refer to in the future tense, Mr. Kemp? The exact same charades we’re suffering now and have been since the day the ‘caine-n-brewski besotted christo-conservative the Supreme Court legislated into office began his coup? The stultifying engulf-and-devour program based precisely on a resuscitation of the principals of the Reagan-Bush ravenings? The program that, after Herr Gipper’s astounding 3X feat, Apollo-launched the national debt through the accountancy roof? That one? Funny, but we don’t see Mr. Bush’s, nor any, name here in your piece in relation to this. Odd. Oh, but we do see Mr. Clinton’s.

Kemp imputes that “it was the Clinton tax increases rather than the Republican Congress’ supply-side tax reductions that restored economic vitality after the Clinton recession”. Let’s see now, would that have been the same Clinton years that produced the leviathan federal surplus which Bush gifted to shilling corporations the moment he was jurisprudentially commandeered into The High Seat, rebates to those funding and running not only the long dirty slog to dictatorship but the crowning ”Florida miracle” as well, a holy rite replicated again in Ohio in ‘04, rebates that guaranteed America would have no least prayer of economic sanity, much less a small ace in the hole in a time of need (i.e., every nanosecond since Inauguration 2000)? Is that the “economic vitality” in question, Mr. Kemp? More “supply side“ bequeathing us with a man who has proven to be remarkably, indeed unbelievably, inept at everything he sets his tutor-bought Ivy League C-minus mind to?

This recession Kemp speaks of most definitely occurred...after Bush Inc., LLC, successfully captured the White House, not during the Clinton years. At this point, Jack may wish to make a memo: most of the country, except for the very uppermost crust of the business class, is desperately yearning for a return of the imputed “disasters” Mr. Clinton wrought upon the land, “catastrophes” Mr. Gore, despite his obviously much weaker positions, would have continued had Bush not been pirated into his new Skull and Bones boho frat party.

The degree of Kemp’s bizarre word play is seen when he suddenly reverses the previous Repuglican claims of “supply-siding” imputed to be derived from Keynes. He doubles back and now refers to a previously untouted “demand-side Keynesianism”. The concept’s an interesting one and much closer to what the Repugs should’ve been attentive to in John Maynard...but then, they could have cared less about Keynes or any other inconveniently intelligent theory-based fellow, now could they? Their plan, as plainly seen, was purest economic rape and one need merely have read as introductory a text as Robert Heilbroner's classic The Worldly Philosophers to understand what the even more erudite work of Harrington, Gailbraith, and Reich makes increasingly understandable.

Sorry, but that’s all I can handle, multiplying headaches just trying to sort it all out. In the end, Kemp’s mindlessly dogpiling, joining the yattering fray led by Lummox Slanthead (Hannity) and Heroin Hillbilly (Limbaugh), hoping against hope that sheer weight of numbers will prevail and that he, amongst them, will be allowed to feed at the trough during The Political End of Days. He may have a good gamble in that, too: so far, the ruse has succeeded, though not through drunken parrots like him. The conservative agitprop media built the freeway, Kemp and cohorts merely travel it, throwing loaded dice (to mix metaphors appropriately). He’s opportunistic, as is the entire Repuglican Party, but the grease under the wheels of the coterie is supplied by the thoroughly accommodationist Dimocrat Party, lest any think there are two sides here.

Kemp’s spiel is pure business duck-gabble, the kind of smarmy circular unspeak Scott McClellen excels at when he and George aren’t busy swapping militarystud.com trading cards at midnight in the White House backrooms with Jeffy Gannon-Guckert-Whatever. And we remember the Prime Verity, do we not?: “Q. How do you know a businessman’s lying? A. His mouth’s open.” Adam Smith went to his grave bitterly damning businesses and men like Kemp and the multitudinous merry bands of thieves, excoriating how they’d tortured and neutered his work. Nothing has changed. “Supply-side truths” are just literary Alzheimer’s.

We’re trudging through one of Kemp’s buddies’ nightmares, Newt Gingrich’s Contract On America. Are you happy with the Repuglican Revolution, America? No. Then you know what to make of these horsedung “truths”. We could disencode the entire excretion but even a vicious polemicist like myself can stand only just so much nausea. Kemp cites himself, through the very conservative Copley News corporation, as a co-director of some outfit cognomened Empower America, which sounds like another in an endless line of rhetorically reversed conservative think-tanks, though I’m not going to waste one second investigating the ploy. The drivel contained in his aimlessly perambulating manifest would make even a Libertarian blanch, and Gawd himself knows what a stretch that is. One way or the other, though, Kemp needs a check-up from the neck up if he thinks anyone other than Joe Cornpone is going to swallow this, let alone begin to understand it. Read it, o’ moaning soul, and know the horrors of the damned.

Mark S. Tucker, a critic, presently writes for Perfect Sound Forever on-line. Retired from aerospace, he tutors Language Arts in Palos Verdes, California, while working on several books: a re-design of English grammar, a tome on San Diego radical architect James Hubbell, etc. He can be reached at progdawg@hotmail.com. This article is originally published at opednews.com. Copyright Mark S. Tucker, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, blog, or web media so long as this credit is attached.