Everything old is new again

I and many other people have been saying that the Republican Party is destroying itself from within and seems to need little help from their opponents in this matter. Every day I am becoming more convinced that we are seeing the GOP in it’s death throes (1) because the things they are doing are getting crazier and dumber.

Today we find out that Ted Nugent, the gun loving, draft dodging (2) and liberal hating singer, is going to be attending the State of the Union tonight as a guest of Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX).  Nugent most recently and famously had this to say about Pres. Obama and three of the most powerful and respected women in the world all while brandishing assault weapons:

Obama, he’s a piece of shit, and I told him to suck on my machine gun. Let’s hear it for him. And then I was in New York. I said, “Hey, Hillary, you might want to ride one of these into the sunset, you worthless bitch. Since I’m in California, how about Barbara Boxer, she might want to suck on my machine gun. And Dianne Feinstein, ride one of these you worthless whore. Any questions?

Yes, that’s the kind of man that the Republican Party wants to highlight on national television while the President has invited regular folks who REALLY represent America.  Part of me is delighted because it shows just how far off the Rails the GOP has gone and probably will alienate moderate voters.  The other part of me is pretty angry.  This guy has implied threats to the President’s life (to the point the Secret Service had to have a little talk with him), said some of the most inflammatory things about women and blacks I’ve heard spoken in public, and threatened to turn traitor.  Now yes, we have freedom of speech and no one is saying he can’t say such stupid and offensive things.  I’m just saying he doesn’t belong at the State of the Union because his views are so insulting, ugly and yes, violent.  You won’t see the left doing things like this.  You won’t see Bill Maher, who called Sarah Palin a cunt, attending the State of the Union.  You know why?  Because it’s totally inappropriate and does not help bridge the gap between the parties.  If anything, these kinds of people only make bipartisanship that much harder.  Dems know that and care who gets to represent them. The parties should show their best face forward at such events.  The American people and indeed the world, is watching.  Republicans must not give a shit about what anybody thinks.  They must want a racist, woman hating coward to represent them.  To channel Senator McCain, that’s a problem, my friends.

How about this one…..there is a right-wing radio host, Kevin Swanson, who had this to say:

[W]omen who are on the birth control pill, there are these little tiny fetuses, these little babies, that are embedded into the womb. They’re just like dead babies. They’re on the inside of the womb. And these wombs of women who have been on the birth control pill effectively have become graveyards for lots and lots of little babies.

Did you know this idea is called a homunculus (3) and it dates back to Ancient Greece, in particular to Aristotle?  Did you know that Aristotle and most Greek men at that time hated women?  To them the highest form of love was between two men.  Women were only there for two things:  serving as slaves to their husbands and for breeding.  The idea was adopted by the Catholic Church and stood for a couple of thousand years (may still be part of their catechism).  But in the 19th Century modern science began to understand about sperm and eggs and development of the fetus, etc so that this homunculus theory has been proven wrong.  Pushing this kind of ignorant and debunked thought is now makes no sense unless they want people to start thinking this way again.  After all it won’t be too much of stretch for many Republicans, if their politicians are any indication.   Why?  Let me show you.

• A bill was recently introduced in New Mexico that would make any woman who aborted a baby conceived due to rape a criminal.  For what?  Tampering with evidence.  The bill was withdrawn, however the fact that they thought it was perfectly acceptable to bring it up for discussion is horrifying to me.
• So many politicians have said stupid and offensive things about rape in the last couple of years so that the GOP held a retreat and had to have an outside consultant talk to them and convince them that they needed to stop using the word “rape”.  Not change their thoughts about it, not reconsider their position or become more empathic to their constituents positions on it, but just stop saying the word.  Nothing about the wrong and right of it, just completely stop talking about the topic.  See, if a guy thinks that “some women rape easy” or that the vagina has defensive mechanisms to repel a rapists sperm or that there are forms of legitimate rape (4), then they can think it, the ethics of it be damned, all they want but they can’t alert their female constituents to their beliefs because it will cost them votes.  Hmmm, wonder why it would cost them votes…..? Because it’s completely wrong and  horribly offensive, maybe?!?!
• Besides an attempt to have a national amendment for Personhood, several state Republican legislators have been pushing Personhood laws and amendments as well.  In which things like abortion at any stage would be murder.  IVF (5) would be murder.  Miscarriage would be investigated because what causes a woman to miscarriage?  You don’t know until you investigate, right?  And the fetus would be a person, so did the mother do anything to cause it? Can you imagine just having had a miscarriage while you are grieving you could be investigated for murder for that very same thing?

Such willful ignorance as Swanson spewing is falling upon very fertile ground.  That ground is full of conservatives who think in similar ways, believe similar things, and who reject science if it doesn’t fit their narrative.  They home school their kids and teach their kids abstinence.  They believe what their preacher, their priest, their favorite  right-wing TV and/or radio host, and their Republican politicians tell them, even if it is just batshit crazy.

Yet another example of the nutso caucus was the decision to have not one but two Republicans give a response to the State of the Union.  See it’s tradition for one of the opposing party to speak after the President. The GOP decided they would have Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) speak in English and then Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) speak in Spanish.  This idea was quickly squashed by others in the Party not because it is breaking with the tradition of only one response. Not because it is a waste of time since all three of the Hispanics who really want to watch the speeches can find a million other ways to hear and read it translated.  It was squashed because Republicans didn’t want to give the impression that they supported any other language but English.  That’s right.  They turned down the opportunity to reach out to the fastest growing ethnic group in the U.S., a group whose vote they resoundingly lost in 2012, because they didn’t want to legitimize that group’s language.  Keep going Republicans, you’re doing great!

Another….the President receives 30 threats against his life every day.  This is 400% increase.  He is so threatened that the Secret Service is being overwhelmed.

And so many others like…..

• the rapid growth in the gap between rich and poor and the corresponding shrinking of the middle class,
• the extreme opposition to reasonable requests for gun control reform,
• the rise of a propaganda arm of the conservative agenda that disguises itself as objective journalism (Fox News),
• the gamble with the debt ceiling and putting the global economy in jeopardy,
• the willingness to let the sequestration occur and slow down the U.S. economy’s growth just after a recession,
• the number of threats of impeachment the President has received,
• the entire “Birther Movement”,
• the purposeful misconstruing of the health care law,
• the surge in actual political power enjoyed by shock jockeys and TV grifters like Limbaugh and Beck,
• the resurgence of secession talk, etc, etc, etc.

I know that none of these things alone are all that unusual and they have all happened before (except for the Nugent thing, I guess, but we could consider the “You lie!” yell during the 2009 State of the Union to be in this class of offensive and tasteless behavior).  But put together, I am beginning to see a pattern of hate, rage even, that is coordinated, stoked and growing.  And it is helping the Republicans destroy themselves.  Which, in all honesty, is to the good in my eyes.  Unfortunately, it’s also hurting the rest of the country too.   If we don’t learn from the past we are doomed to repeat it and I can tell you, minorities and women do not want to and WILL NOT allow us to go backwards to the dark days when we only had second-class status.

Notes:  

1.  It will take several more election cycles, but I’m thinking around 2020

2.  Just in case you didn’t know, this man who is constantly brandishing guns and bragging about how he would revolt and fight against the evil Government, wasn’t so brave when he actually had a chance to serve his country, in order to avoid going to Vietnam Nugent by his own admission smeared shit all over his body and feigned insanity.  He got a deferment 4 times and was eventually given a 4-F.   But now, now he’s a big, big man and people should fear him.  Did he grow a pair over the last 20 years or is it that his kettle of bigotry and misogyny finally boiled over?

3.  various spellings, not sure which is official

4.  there are too many examples to link to here

5.  IVF, test tube babies, usually they fertilize many eggs, implant them in the womb and then once they attach, those that aren’t attached are removed and disposed of

Sense and Sensibility

Jumpin Baby Jeebus on a cracker! A writer over at the National Review, a bi-weekly conservative magazine that’s been around for about 40 years now, got irritated with the President for having the temerity to say that the Holocaust was “senseless”. The writer, Elian Johnson, responded by saying that Nazism wasn’t senseless because so many Germans supported it. Here’s the quote:

Nazism may have been an ideology to which the United States was — and to which the president is — implacably opposed, but it is hardly “senseless.” By the early 1930s, the Nazi party had hundreds of thousands of devoted members and repeatedly attracted a third of the votes in German elections; its political leaders campaigned on a platform comprising 25 non-senseless points, including the “unification of all Germans,” a demand for “land and territory for the sustenance of our people,” and an assertion that “no Jew can be a member of the race.” Suffice it to say, many sensible Germans were persuaded.

Now, ponder that a moment, will ya? There are so many things wrong with this statement. First, it’s anti-semitic. Jews not being admitted to “the race” is sensible? Did he really write that?! Yes, yes, he did. Second, he’s wrong on the numbers in regards to popularity. I think at the height of the Nazi movement, there were about 8 million members (1945) of the Nazi party in a population of over 78 million (1938)–so that’s about 10%. Of those, there were in 1944, 800,000 SS members–the Nazi elite who were responsible for protecting Hitler, controlling the non-Nazi military officers, and conducting the systematic execution of undesirables.  So that’s 1% were actively engaged in one of the greatest evils man has ever seen. The others? They were regular people, desperate, naive, tricked and sometimes willfully blind.   And then there were the 2/3 of the country that didn’t vote for the Nazis.  Which leads the next point.

Third, historically speaking, there was nothing sensible about how the German people chose the Nazi party. One could only think this if they didn’t know much about German history or even very much about the sociological modus operandi of how hate groups rise to power. Pre-WWII Germany was a classic case of a country in turmoil, vulnerable and desperate for help. They had high unemployment and hyperinflation which led to far too many people going hungry. Add to that the loss of pride in country. Germany lost WWI and Europe enacted some pretty strict punishments on the country. It was thought, at the time, that this would deter Germany, who had one of the largest and best military forces in the region, from becoming aggressive again. Instead it had the opposite effect. It demoralized the German people, embittered the German military forces, and made everyone in Germany suffer by worsening the effects of the economic downturn that followed WWI. So you had a country that had within a single generation descended from the pinnacle of European power and culture to a punished and ostracized nation barely able to feed itself.  They were angry, very angry, not just at Europe but also at their established leaders that had lost WWI and gotten them into the entire mess in the first place. The one thing Germans didn’t do was blame themselves or really take any responsibility.

So along came the Nazi Party–new blood, new faces. They offered Germans some pretty easy answers. The first thing they did was fill their heads with promises of fixing the economy–it’s easy to fix an economy if you control everything (China is the perfect example of this).  Once the Nazi got enough power, they could affect the economy positively because they would remove it from the vagaries of currency fluctuations based on free markets.     The other thing they did was tell Germans that the mess the country was in was not their fault. It was the fault of the old regime and the “others”, in this case most often Jews. They told Germans that they were an exceptional people, above all others. Of course, this is exactly what the German people most wanted to hear–wonderful bumper sticker answers to complicated geo-political problems.   Besides telling people what they wanted to hear, they also used sheer brute force. For example, they joined with the Socialist Party by convincing them they honestly had good will and common cause with them (hence the addition of the term to their name) and as a result they gained a lot of votes they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. Once they had those offices, they then turned around and destroyed the Socialist members from within. Then they leveraged their current position to move to the next level. They did this all the way to the top of the country’s power structure very quickly–too quickly.

Those in business and finance that they couldn’t bribe or convince to join their cause, they threatened and killed. Once they had control of enough of the banking industry, they began to use the banks to persecute their political enemies, along with many other strong-arm tactics. Any party or politician who didn’t join the Nazi party and encourage their supporters to vote for them was threatened, framed for crimes they didn’t commit, beaten or killed, had their bank accounts frozen and their property seized, etc. While they subverted and manipulated the political and financial actors, they were also busy recruiting among the traditional Weirmacht Army officers. Many officers joined the Nazi not because they were bigots or because they wanted to be political in any way (which they had assiduously avoided in the past), they simply wanted Germany returned to its former glory–they appealed to their patriotism and nationalism. And Hitler promised them that would occur. Essentially, the Nazi’s made all the right promises and all the right threats to get to the top but none of it would have been possible had the country not been so vulnerable in the first place.  How Johnson thinks that “sensible” decisions were made under such conditions is just either ignorant or a dangerous reinterpretation of history.

The fourth and final point I wanted to make was that even IF the entire Nazi Party knew of the underlying evil agenda (they didn’t)….even IF they all participated in the evil things they did to rise to power (they didn’t)…even IF two-thirds of German voters voted for the Nazi Party (they didn’t, only one-third did)….it doesn’t make their actions sensible. No, a sensible reaction from Germany would have been to pause after WWI and acknowledge how they played a role in it. When the Nazi’s started to advocate for radical change they would have looked at all the options and found a solution that didn’t require destroying an entire race of people. When they first read Mein Kampf and realized the ultimate consequences of Hitler’s hatred, they would have found a way to stop him before he became too powerful. But they didn’t. It was too easy to sit back and hope that those evil thoughts on paper would never actually come to be in reality.  The German people simply wanted to be rescued and Hitler offered them that with an added helping of guilt-free scapegoating*. I think this is why the German people carry to this day a tremendous amount of guilt about the Holocaust.   Just because only a small portion of the Nazi’s and the country actively participated in the Holocaust, the entire country still made it possible through voting for the Nazis or acquiescing in the face of obvious fascism. Ultimately,  just enough Germans supported their crazy ideas to the point that it was okay to take the Jew’s business.  But they didn’t realize the Nazis weren’t just confiscating his factory, they were also killing him and his entire family.  They could envision the first but not the rest.  But now they recognize that they SHOULD HAVE known that any idea that focuses on the persecution of a single group of people will ALWAYS lead to even worse  actions and that eventually leads to evil. There is no bottom to this slippery slope.   Therein lies their great national shame.

Johnson not only doesn’t understand that Germany feels such shame, he doesn’t see that what they did was all that wrong.  Johnson’s logic is that if a movement is popularly supported by a generally sensible people**, then their platform must be sensible as well.  Fortunately, our country has a balance of powers where neither the Tyranny of One*** nor the Tyranny of the Majority is possible or at least, they cannot rise quickly to power in our system.  As such our governmental system is supposed to counter and slow the spread of the kind of destructive reasoning that Johnson uses in his execrable article.   That doesn’t mean he isn’t having an effect.  He is reinforcing hatred in the minds of our own Neo-Nazi groups and probably influencing the naive, desperate, ignorant or paranoid among conservatives, of which we have no shortage lately.  I can’t read stuff like this and sit silent.  No good person should.  For evil to triumph, the good only have to do nothing.  The Germans understand this, but do we?

________________________________________________

Notes:

*Sounds similar to “illegal immigrants are hurting the U.S. economy” doesn’t it?  

**Germany enjoyed and to a certain extent still enjoys a reputation for excellence in a variety of areas including engineering and manufacturing mainly due to a national characteristic of being very slow, methodical, and meticulous.  The other side of this coin is that once they start down a course, they don’t change direction very easily.  That slowness to change was considered very sensible in the 1800′s and early 1900′s, when slow action and thoughtfulness was considered the height of virtue.  However, their meticulous nature was the source of quite a bit of irony after WWII.  Historians point to the precise and detailed lists of Holocaust victims kept at various concentration camps–the Nazis knew what they were doing was wrong but they just couldn’t help themselves–records had to be kept otherwise how could they keep track of the amount of gold recovered from their victims teeth, the clothes that were taken and sent back to the major cities to be given to poor Germans, the possessions confiscated including works of art, silverware, money, etc.  Indeed, a very sensible people are the Germans.   As horrible as the concentration camp records were, they have been crucial to identifying the millions who were killed, to convicting the Nazi criminals who ran the camps, and to helping survivors figure out what happened to their family members.  

***In spite of conservative nuts who think the President is a dictator, they’re just out of touch with reality and wouldn’t know a dictator if they slapped them in the face…which makes me think….How much fun would it be to have actors who look like dictators (Chavez, Castro, or Jung Il) show up to right wing demonstrations and join in their protest? I would be very interested to see what they do.

Betcha didn’t know….

A list of some news items that caught my attention.

• The DOJ issued an internal memo laying out the legal justification for killing American citizens using drones and NBC got a hold of it.  I’ve been ambivalent about drones (not a supporter, just ambivalent).  But this shows that the White House has established a policy that American citizens who are considered to be enemies of the U.S. because the aid and abet terrorists groups that are trying to harm the U.S. can be targeted because we are at war.  Unfortunately, the War on Terror is not a finite thing and therein lies the problem.  I support the President on most things but on this, I DO NOT.  Here’s a great article on the nuances of the policy and some recommendations for what should be done.
  
• Baby Boomers, folks in their 50′s and early 60′s, were hit harder by the Recession than other age groups, so much so that their average life span has been reduced by three years. But hey, best health care system in the world…..NOT!
• The Postal Service is ending Saturday mail delivery but do you know why?  Because the Republicans in Congress forced them to pay their retiree health care costs up front in 2006 (something no other agency in federal government has to do) and then later refused to actually fund that expenditure.  So it wasn’t anything the USPS did wrong.  Congress has been trying to kill the USPS for years now.
• The little boy being held hostage in Alabama was freed by an FBI raid of the bunker.  What you might not know is that the Mother of the boy actually asked the police to do their best not to hurt the kidnapper.  Her reasoning, he was a sick man who needed help.  Now that is a truly empathetic person.
• Republican factions have begun infighting because one wing is blaming the other for Romney’s loss.  The Karl Roves of the world are squaring up against Tea Party members.  Karl Rove and his supporters represent the Washington insider, the practical Republican who does whatever it takes to win and they expect party obedience.  Tea Party members don’t like to “fall in line” with the party and tend to support candidates that take principled stances (meaning stances that fit into their worldview).   It’s funny, both in an ironic and haha kind of way, that neither wing of the party is looking at their ideas as being rejected by voters, just the way in which they presented those ideas.   So they’re having conferences where consultants are telling Republicans things like never, ever to use the word “rape” again in a public setting.  From their viewpoint, it’s not that so many of them think rape is sometimes justified that turns off female voters, it’s the fact that they share that thought with the public.  Meanwhile liberals are making popcorn and sitting down to enjoy the show.
• The President’s skeet shooting photo is being mocked.  I get this because the White House should have let the derision over the skeet shooting comment during an interview just fade into obscurity.  Putting out that picture was like putting Dukakis in the tank.  Now there are conservatives declaring that the photo is not legitimate and was  photoshopped.   I don’t get this.  Everything is not about fooling you.  Maybe this growing paranoid subculture in the U.S. is based on narcissism….that arguably the most powerful man in the world has the time to cater to some idjits who think that everything revolves around them and that they and they alone know the truth.   Riiiiiiiiiiight……..Sigh….
• Since the President dominated among Hispanics in the last election, receiving 75% of their vote, the Republicans have taken notice.  Their answer?  Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) proposed yesterday that anyone whose illegal immigrant parents brought them to the U.S. as children be granted citizenship.  Wait, isn’t that the Dream Act?  Yep.  So why now?  Why didn’t you support it before?  Oh, they rejected you and now you’re hoping to tap into future Hispanic Voters.  It’s gonna take a lot more than this little morsel to make that happen, bub.

Gluttons for Punishment

I’m sure you’ve already heard by now that Maricopa County residents voted back into office Tea Party darling, Sheriff “People die in my jails” Arpaio.  And he’s speaking out of both sides of his mouth, saying he’d like to get closer to the Latino community while at the same time continuing to perform illegal round ups, detentions, and traffic stops targeting anyone who looks Hispanic.  That’s like having a bully that beats you up every day say, “I’d like to be your friend” meanwhile he is STILL beating you up every day.

We’re still waiting for the outcome of a civil rights lawsuit (one among many I believe). Still waiting for someone in law enforcement to investigate him for criminal charges regarding his involvement with persecuting political enemies with and for his friend, the debarred ex-County Attorney, Andrew Thomas.  The Feds gave up on that one.  Is there anyone else out there that gives a damn about the abuse of power in that case?  Any law officers who still have enough pride in their profession to say his behavior and his Office’s behavior was unacceptable?  Any professional organizations that provide certification to Arpaio and his officers who would consider revoking those certifications because of such known unprofessional behavior?  Anyone want to try to get back all the money ($50 million last I saw) the public has had to pay out to the family members of the people who died in his jails, the victims of civil rights abuses, the mismanaged investigations, the defense of that idiotic SB1070 law?  Anyone want to charge him for taking money from the City of El Mirage to investigate 432 serious felony cases of rape, murder, sexual assault of children and NEVER actually doing the investigations?  No?  Didn’t think so.

How could you do it Maricopa County voters?  Seriously how?  For the sake of the children who were sexually abused and killed (who were, many of them, brown)…how could you vote him back into office?  I’m thoroughly disgusted by your willful ignorance to his blatant corruption and racism.  I take some small comfort that the demographics of AZ is changing so that someday the Arpaio’s of the world won’t be rewarded time and time again.  On that day, I will be mighty pleased.

 

 

Why I am voting for Obama: Reason #3

The GOP released it’s platform in advance of their convention next week and it is VERY extreme.  Here’s some of the planks:

• Women banned from combat – yet another right and responsibility they want to take away from my gender.
• Repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell – what will happen to all those soldiers who have already come out?  Some have been promoted into the High Ranks.  Will we lose these highly trained and exceptional soldiers because of this?
• Deny any legal recognition of Same-Sex Marriage–even a lot of moderates think Civil Unions are ok, but not the GOP.  And what about state rights?  If a state wants to allow Civil Unions or Marriage, why does the supposedly “small government” GOP want to prohibit states from doing that?
• Salute to Forced Ultrasounds – remember the VA bill that made it legal for a doctor to force a woman to undergo a transvaginal ultrasound WITHOUT THE WOMAN’S CONSENT?  That particular gem was specifically praised.
• No abortion in cases of rape or incest – this speaks for itself
• Replicate AZ Immigration laws – what do they not understand about the concept of constitutionality?  What do they not understand about the Feds constitutional  responsibility for maintaining our borders?  Why the HELL don’t they advocate for a complete Immigration overhaul so that the Feds can do their job?
• No new taxes except for war – what if we have several major natural catastrophes that are unplanned for?  What if we have a largescale epidemic for which no funds or not enough funds were appropriated?  If those are too remote a possibility for you, here’s one that is already occurring.  What if population and thus the need for basic services increase without a corresponding equal increase in tax revenues to cover the cost of those services?  This is happening now with the Baby Boom generation.  The wealthy have not paid their fair share of taxes since Reagan was in office reducing revenues to historic lows while our population has naturally grown through birth and legitimate immigration and combine all that with the aging Baby Boomers who will need more and more services as they age.   An increase in revenue MUST occur or our debt and deficit WILL become dangerous.  One more point.  Republicans (and Dems) allowed President Bush to start two unfunded wars.  They are not fiscal conservatives and this plank is utter bullshit.

Source:

http://thinkprogress.org/election/2012/08/22/723241/gop-approves-most-conservative-platform-in-modern-history/