JABbering Stooge

In case you’re wondering, I’m referring to the Jimintou - the party that has dominated Japanese politics since the end of the Occupation. Imagine today’s Republicans controlling all three branches of government for upwards of 50 years, and that’s what you’ve got with Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party. Allow me to elucidate the similarities between the LDP and the Busheviks.

Taking a page from the standard GOoPer tactic of going COINTELPRO on groups protesting Republican policies (most disturbingly at the ‘04 RNC) and going one creepy step further, the GSDF - Japan’s postwar Army - has admitted to spying on peace groups, presumably at the behest of the LDP’s leadership.

Then there’s the practice of amakudari - whereby government employees leave their cushy government jobs for cushy private sector jobs, typically in the economic sector they oversaw as government employees. And as the 1993 general contracting scandal and 1996 mortgage scandal showed, this sort of practice almost encourages corruption. We’ve seen this sort of practice in reverse under the Bush administration - particularly with Bush’s penchant for appointing corporate lobbyists to regulatory agencies in a sort of “Indstry, regulate thyself” honor spoils system - from Harvey Pitt at the SEC to Philip Cooney at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, among numerous documented examples. The practice even explains, at some level, the thought processes behind the U.S. Attorney firings scandal. Meanwhile, Republican rule of Congress in the last decade was marked by what could be considered a special case of the amakudari practice: the K Street Project. And in a bit of bad news for the LDP, the practice has returned to Japanese headlines with the recent suicide of Agriculture Minister Toshikatsu Matsuoka - mere hours before he was to face tough questions over his links to a recent political funding scandal in Japan. That would make him the Jack Abramoff of Japan, for those of you in Lynchburg, VA.

There has also been a particularly militaristic bent to the LDP’s foreign policy stance of late. While the LDP has long been angling to get Japan back into the military misadventures game - the heated debate (in Japan) over the 1960 Mutual Cooperation and Security Treaty comes prominently to mind - that desire had always been held in check until by the domestic political and foreign relations headaches that Japan would face if it followed such a course of action. Unfortunately, the LDP, like President Bush, saw 9/11 as an opportunity for exploitation for political advantage, and current PM Shinzo Abe, like his predecessor Junichiro Koizumi, has taken to pushing for the repeal of Article 9 of Japan’s postwar Constitution - the provision that prohibits Japan’s military from being used for anything other than self-defense. It was in fact Koizumi’s legal wrangling that got Japan involved in the war in Iraq in the first place, and earlier legal maneuvers had allegedly allowed Koizumi to send MSDF forces in support of U.S. operations in Afghanistan.

But it’s not just the push to repeal Article 9 that is worrisome. The LDP has recently put forward a bill to, in the words of Asahi Shimbun’s English edition, “override a 1969 nonmilitary resolution and allow Japan to use outer space for defense purposes.” While this would ostensibly allow only recon satellites for purely defensive purposes, given Koizumi’s ability to twist Japanese law to suit the LDP’s political purposes, I would not put it past Abe or his LDP enablers to try to use this law to enable Japan to join in any race to militarize outer space.

Finally, there’s the matter of the LDP’s addiction to visiting the Yasukuni Shrine, even after the stealth enshrinement of 14 WWII-era Class A war criminals there in 1978 became public knowledge in 1979. Perhaps the most telling aspect of that stain on the LDP’s image is the fact that one of the images on the Yasukuni Shrine’s website is was* a bow-tied dove giving a Hitler salute.

I shit you not:

Does Tucker Carlson know about this?

In other words, the LDP is as liberal as Joe Liberman.

So next time some wingnut claims that the Nazis were left-wing because of the “National Socialist” name, point them to this post and say that just because something’s labeled a certain way, doesn’t mean that the description fits. That’d be like drinking bleach because it’s labeled “Sprite.”

* After the site’s most recent re-design, any page that had imagery with Unfortunate Implications was removed.