Fundamentalism Gone Sideways

Tags

Extreme right-wing, fundamentalism, theocracy

Anyone who knows me at all well, knows that I’m a bit of a crusader when it comes to fundamentalism. Since I fully admit that, I never ask people to accept my conclusions without good documentation.

I’ll try to be nice here, but please don’t hold me to it.

First of all, fundamentalist Christians refuse to accept that this description to the left is actually what is described in Genesis as the structure of the earth and universe. As you can see, it is not a globe at all, but rather a series of pillars, o’er covered with a “dome” with water above it, and of course below. The sun and visible planets and stars are inside the dome.

If you read the flood stories, you will note that this depiction allows for the waters to both arise from the earth and the sky. It also accounts for the oft-heard phrase, “four corners of the earth”. The “earth” was actually a flat disk. This is acknowledged by Jewish experts who ought to understand their own texts better than others, one would think.

Since even the most staunch Christian fundie accepts the spherical actuality of the globe, you can see why they can’t accept this actual description of Genesis but must fudge it to account for reality.

My point is simply that fundamentalism is based in large part on a fanatical belief in the truthiness of a book, and it is a self-serving literal-ness at best. In this they are no different from other fundamentalists in other religions. As any Muslim will tell you, fundamentalist jihadists misread and twist the Quran in a similar fashion in order to get it  to “say what they want it to say.”

Suggesting that all fundamentalists are cut from the same cloth,  sets the Christian right on edge. They deny it of course. Indeed if you look at the Wikipedia entry on fundamentalism, you discover that it is not limited to even religion at all but pertains to any ideology which is reduced to an irreducible set” of precepts which cannot be deviated from in any respect. A strict literalism is imposed as to the agreed upon rules.

Bob Altemeyer has done some exceptional work in this area, and makes his main research “The Authoritarians” avail as a PDF file here.  The Wikipedia entry, while certainly nothing  but a starting point, has a fine bibliography to get your started located here.  Psychology has done much work in the area and you might start with this Pathos article, which will lead you to books and studies. Another well-researched book might be The Fundamentalist Mind by Strozier, Termen, Jones, and Boyd. This should help get you started if you wish to learn more. Again, don’t accept my word for it, go to the actual sources.

My point is not to rehash what is common knowledge, among anyone who wants to understand why we are troubled in this country with a segment of society which continues to place it’s personal religious interests above the common good, and most would say common sense. It is rather to point out by the above, that these are not choices made by rational minds, but rather what certain brain configurations are prone to fall into. Since in most cases it is extremely hard to eradicate or upset these mindsets, the only solution is to be ever vigilant to keep them out of the decision-making arenas of our common lives.

This we have done a poor job of doing.

Since we believe that religion is a matter of personal preference, we are loath to interrupt those preferences by any sort of “test” to eliminate those belief systems that threaten us all. And I agree that we should continue to do so. But we must also recognize that there are those among us who want a world much different from the one we inhabit. It is their stated purpose and their heartfelt belief that we should all be forced if necessary to accept their world vision in the guise of a government reactive to their vision of God.

They believe in a nutshell that all laws must be referenced to a book, the Bible in this case, and that of course they will tell you what the Bible says should be the law.

You may or not be aware that James Inhofe, (R-Ok) is the new chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee. Inhofe has for years argued that climate change is a hoax. Inhofe has received, tens of thousands of dollars from fossil fuel interests to fund his campaigns. Of course he tells you that he is a true believer, and perhaps that is true. It is always hard to say. But in any case, the Senator is prepared to argue that 98% of the scientific community is wrong on the issue of man-made climate change, and that his fundamentalist-driven approach is true.

What Inhofe admits, is that it doesn’t matter if climate change is occurring. Man is arrogant to go against God in this matter. As his proof he raises Genesis 8:22 which is God’s promise:

As long as the earth endures, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.”

Of course they also interpret that “as long as the earth endures” involves a “self-correcting resilience” that they nowhere find in the bible, but assume.

What I am being asked to accept is that the US and by implication no one else, should do anything about the clear evidence of a catastrophe in the making because of what a few people who are in no way experts in either the bible or the science of climate have decided is best for us all. Are you willing to stake the lives of your children and grandchildren on their being right?

Is Inhofe any different from the thousands who have gone to stand upon hilltops on the appointed day and hour to await the second coming, always to return home at dawn, a home that often no longer is theirs since they have sold or given away everything to insure God knows them as the true believers they profess to be?

Are we to go instead to live in Chief Justice Roy Moore’s world in Alabama? Judge Moore tells the Governor in that state to ignore a legal judicial pronouncement from a federal court on the illegality of a  gay marriage ban because the judge has determined that the bible told him otherwise, and by fiat he proclaims the federal court decision as “unconstitutional.”

So much for the rule of law. While running for governor himself, Moore decried evolution teaching as “distorting our way of thinking”. Yet, the electorate in Alabama saw fit to elect him as Chief Judge of their Supreme Court, making him the greatest interpreter of the law in the state. This is sanity?

My point is that these people are dangerous to OUR life. We can laugh at them, we can face palm their stupidity and their childish emotional needs all we want, but they have carefully and for the most part quietly wormed their way into positions of power within our country. They have infiltrated school boards, city councils, state legislatures, and obviously on into our higher governmental positions where they, armed with pseudo-science and pseudo-theology, restructure our laws to fit their kingdom to come as they view it.

We ignore them at our peril. If we don’t stand against this sort of soft-headedness, we cannot expect an electorate who by and large is too busy to think these things through themselves to do it for us. We will find ourselves soon before the modern-day Inquisition defending truth against a country that is now governed by a rabble of no longer able or willing to discern truth from fantasy religious fanatics. They are NO DIFFERENT THAN JIHADISTS PEOPLE.

You have been warned.

 

 

The Rest is Just Commentary

Tags

Extreme right-wing, tea patriots, teabaggers

As one rows through life, (apt analogy notwithstanding), one does, at least once, come to  what seems to oneself at least, an original conclusion about this or that flotsam that crosses the bow.

See, right there, I probably wrote a sentence that is unparalleled in human history, if not for its brilliance, then at least for its collection of words before unknown in such conjunction.

Yet, I am torn between the fact that we humans probably talk too much (ala Hillel and his oft quoted remark ““That which is hateful to you, do not unto another: This is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary.”) and my own creative genius, “no original thought has occurred since December 14, 1963.”

Put together, they form a perfect indictment that is hard to avoid the next time you decide to open your mouth and spew forth with some sort of “wisdom” meant for the ages. You’re just whistling Dixie as it were.

Yet, in my endless quest for truth, I stumbled across a word that seems to me, “new” and so perfectly fit for today, that it required a few tingling fingerprints across the keys to bring this dose of enlightenment to you, my dearest reader of all readers. Alas, but a cursory “google” proved that this “new” word was hardly new, but had been bounced around for some time, proving again, my only original thought.

(By the way, my original thought, occurred sometime after December 14, 1963, for it must be in a linear time progression, so it is perhaps better not to think to hard on the subject. The December 14, 1963 original thought was “Oh damn, the music died,” uttered by Dick “Night Train” Lane upon discovering the dead body of his beloved Dinah Washington, dead by her own “oops” overdose of barbiturates. Not to be confused with “the day the music died, in the song American Pie written about the untimely deaths of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. “the Big Bopper” Richardson, in a plane crash on February 3, 1959.)

Back to the word.

The word was freedumb.

It seemed to encapsulate all that is Amerika these days. Dumbasses who spout “freedom” always with the slavering spittle of “I’ll die for it” flung from their lungs as their eyes cart-wheel and spin in ways that would make the average carny feel right at home.

Freeeeeee-dummmmmmb. Catchy no?

Ain’t nothin’ new under the sun as they say.

What has been will be again,
    what has been done will be done again;
    there is nothing new under the sun. (Ec 1:9)

Here’s a few notions ’bout freedumb you might have missed.

Don’t that just bring back fond memories? Old George was all about protectin’ them freedumbs from those A-rabs, when he wasn’t holdin’ hands with ’em. Lest we forget.

Damn facts as usual, getting in the way.

There was a man with a messed up head, fit for finger painting, which is where it all ended up.

It’s all been said so many times before.

It’s all be cried about, over and over.

It’s all frustrated the right good sense of the few, the proud, the thinking.

The word speaks volumes, leaving us the refrain, all else is commentary.

My latest entry?

Oh a someone who shall remain nameless who just posted one of those oh so obvious memes from Facebook that we all use because they say in few words what we think, even though often if looked at carefully, they are stupid? Those things.

It was a “oh, gosh, I feel so bad and so sorry for all those poor parents whose children were murdered by that awful kid who went on a rampage.” Except said person, had but a week or so ago, on MOTHER’S FREAKIN’ DAY, posted a meme of a purdy pink hand gun and at the ripe age of 65, moaned how much she wanted one of her very own.

How do your reckon with a mind that has warped itself into a slippery eel who no longer can tell head from tail? It has swallered its own head!

Such is the state of too much of Merika these days. Freedumb don’t begin to explain it.

In watching the badly done History channel’s marathon of the Great Wars, one noted that Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin, all managed to design and wear spiffy new “uniforms” to define themselves as something “new under the sun”.

The poor turds that banner themselves as Tea Patriots, will never see the demagogue coming, cuz, so far I ain’t seen Ted Cruz or Adam West, or any of the other high hyenas of crazy parading around in high boots and military garb. And ya know, that’s what demagogues wear. It’s a rule.

So much for sanity today. I’m all crazied out.

*Taking down the crazy, one stupid placard at a time*

I Kinnah Unnerstan Thees Pepal

Tags

Extreme right-wing, History, revolution, tea party

God knows I try.

But it seems an impossibility. It’s like Jesus is said to have said, to gain your life you gotta lose it.

To understand the Tea Party People, ya gotta lose your mind.

It’s not that I’m such a great student of history, though I know my fair share. Not so much the dates and stuff, but the general threads of causation. I get the big picture.

The Tea Party is filled with deliberately false history. I mean that. It’s “history” designed to support the meme of the party, however that might be defined.

Let’s start with the “tea party” label. Who is a tea party person?  Well, the Koch’s envisioned a “populist” groundswell of people who hated government. Why would they do that? Oh because they are struggling economically and paying taxes has never been popular. So the Koch’s lassoed that common feeling, and then fed the flames that most of the taxes were going to the wrong places: i.e. poor “takers” who were not pulling their weight because the Democrats had found an endless supply of voters by giving them “stuff”–like food.

The Koch’s were willing to accept that a lot of these angry folks brought a lot of ideas of their own about how things should be run, and since the Koch’s vision doesn’t include them every running anything, they allowed for their anti-gay, anti-free choice, anti-immigrant, anti-not-white, pro-fundamentalism stuff to play in the mix. The Koch’s themselves? Who knows what they think beyond accumulating all the money in the world.

So basically the Tea Party contains a collection of economic super conservatives and/or social super conservatives. They can be all one or the other, or some mix of both. A bunch of grifters always rise to the occasion when they smell a mark. And the folks like David Barton step up and decide they will now call themselves “historians” and rewrite it to suit their new audience of gullible angry people.

We all know from a lot of studies that have been done, that to a degree, one is kinda born conservative or liberal. The latest entries in this growing body of work are Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us, and Predisposed: Liberals and Conservatives and the Biology of Political Differences. No doubt these predilections are not written in stone, and environment probably has much to do with it as well. However, it does mean that we enter the world with a certain “world view”. If we get the “liberal” gene we are predisposed to be curious about the world, open to new things, willing to explore changing our minds and our way of doing things. If we get the conservative gene, we are more frightened of the world, see it as dangerous, think it’s best to stay with what has proven good in the past, and stick with our “own kind”.

When the extreme Right decided on adopting a logo and meme to describe who they were and are, it was no doubt comforting to align themselves with the history of the country. Yes, it made sense to see themselves as much like those brave souls who gambled everything to stand against the Mother country and strike for independence. They became Tea Party Patriots, self-described. They took to wearing three-corner hats dripping with tea bags as their costume.

Although studies do show that overall, those who identify as Republicans are a bit more educated than Democrats, this has little to do with intelligence if anything. It merely suggests that to a slightly greater degree, Republicans in general have more education. They also tend to be grossly more white, and older.

Clearly it seems to education has not served them well as regards the history of their own nation. One has but to remember Sarah Palin’s famous explanation of Paul Revere’s ride:

“He who warned uh, the British that they weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms, uh by ringing those bells, and um, makin’ sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be sure and we were going to be free, and we were going to be armed.”

While Palin was sorta right about warning the British (Revere was actually stopped by the British, and had his horse taken from him, and he did tell the British that they would make a mistake if they marched on Lexington, he this was not the purpose of his “ride”.), she added in ringing bells and warning shots, which have nothing to do with the story.

Similarly, Michele Bachmann helped us understand our founding by explaining our “founding fathers worked tirelessly to end slavery” and that our “founding father John Quincy Adams would not rest until he had eradicated it.”

Of course this was not true. Slavery was written into the Constitution, several of the Founding Fathers owned slaves themselves, and John Quincy Adams was a mere child at the time of the revolution, was not a founding father, and died well before slavery was abolished.

No matter that this sort of thing is common with the Tea Party, they also as we have said, claim to be of the same genre as those patriots. And this is odd indeed.

For if one were to conclude anything from studying that period of our history, one would conclude that the men who pursued independence for this country were anything but conservatives. They were men who were well read in the new theories sweeping Europe based on the writings of John Locke, Montesquieu,  and Voltaire, and scientists such as Isaac Newton who brought us to a new way of understanding the world around us. These men were not conservatives, but just the opposite, they were men of the Enlightenment, that amazing time when there was a burst of new ideas and new thinking.

One of those new ways of thinking was a serious questioning of theocratic and monarchical forms of government. Britain represented both, and those soon-to-be Americans who supported the conservative position were holding with the Brits were called “loyalists” or “Tories”. They were the conservatives of the day, while Jefferson, Washington, Adams, Franklin and those who declared for independence were liberals.

Our Tea Party adherents are not in any way aligned with the kinds of thinking that motivated the Founding Fathers. To claim such a joining is simply intellectually indefensible. Frankly I suspect the average Tea Bibber of today has no clue, has never thought seriously about any of this, and would be shocked if you tried to explain it. They seem to be satisfied that their willingness to argue against taxation automatically puts them in league with the Founders.

That might work if we didn’t have pages of subsequent history to prove otherwise. Those who decided to bring armed rebellion against the new country in the form of the Whiskey Rebellion soon found that the 2nd Amendment was used, not to insure their private right to bear arms against the government, but for the government to put them down as an illegal rebellion against a duly passed law.

I suspect this is all too confusing for the average Tea Bagger. It’s just feels better to wave “Don’t tread on me” flags and feel that you are in the tradition of such great men. Alas, that ship won’t float.

 

One Witticism Goes a Long Way

Tags

Barack Obama, Calvin and Hobbes, Christopher Hitchens, Donald Trump, Entertainment, Extreme right-wing, GOP, Halley Barbour, Literature, racism, teabaggers, wacko right-wing media

“It’s hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.” [Calvin & Hobbes]

Believe me, there are days I think like that.

Most of the time, I’m a mild-mannered pleasant enough woman, the one you meet here everyday. But some people and some things get my dander up, and I seriously wonder if the planet would not be a better place should they depart it. It’s then that I secretly almost wish that Hell existed.

I figure most people have their list. You know, the list of those who most certainly deserve hell and damnation.

I also figure that no two lists are probably identical.

That signal fact convinces me that I best leave the whole thing up to God.

My revenge then lies in witticisms, snarks, and acid-dripping sarcasm.

I tend to bow to those who do this well, even when I sometimes, mostly, or even always dislike their point of view on just about everything. Christopher Hitchens is one of those types. William F. Buckley was one. Gore Vidal is one.

Vladimir Nabokov famously said that he thought as a genius, wrote as a distinguished author, and spoke as a child. He was awful as an interview in other words. Martin Amis, writing for the Guardian UK, suggests that Hitchens is just the opposite. And for me, that is exactly true. His ideas are simply awful and knee jerk, he writes wonderfully, and he oratory is captivating and brilliant.

“The measure of an education, is that you acquire some idea of the extent of your ignorance.”

“A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realisation that you can’t make old friends.”

Just a couple little gems.

♦

We groused here often about why so much of the working class in this country votes against its own economic interests in voting for the GOP. Up through 2010, the Rethuglicans have been successful in painting President Obama as “other” meaning other than a white man. They have called him a socialist, a communist, a dictator, they have challenged his birth, his patriotism, his religious affiliation–all this in an attempt appeal to the deep-seated and hotly denied latent racism present in America. PoliticusUSA has a fine piece on the topic.

♦

Oh by the by, we are 1-1 on our predictions so far. Halley Barbour has opted out of running for the Oval. I’m not sure more than three people took note.

♦

Oh, if you want a fun site with tons of Calvin and Hobbes quotes, I found this today. I am an unabashed lover of all things C & H, even named the ginger twins after ’em.

♦

It comes as no revelation to me that air traffic controllers are constantly falling asleep at the switch. Have you looked at those radar screens? What is there that would not  put you to sleep? Which reminds me of what I thought was probably the most boring job yet created. A man who comes to work each morning, weighs himself on the company scales next to the assembly line, and then steps on a platform. As each set of bathroom scales comes down the line, he steps down on to it, checks its accuracy, and steps, back. He does this all day. ALL DAY!

I once applied for a summer job in a large building in downtown Flint, Michigan. The lady gave me a set of about 25 3-x5 cards and ushered me into a very very very very very large room where there were aisles and aisles and aisles and aisles of tiny file cabinets just the right size for 3-x5 cards. She told me to file the 25 in alphabetical order, and return to her when I was finished. (This was my “test”). I stood there, I looked at the first series of cabinets that rain A’s the entire length of the room. I turned, walked out, placed the 25 cards on her desk, and walked out without saying a word.

Got a “most boring job”? Let us hear about it.

♦

Trumpy is upping the ante, now wondering how a relatively poor and relatively stooopid little black kid ever got into Columbia and Harvard. The Trumpster ignores all the evidence to the contrary, merrily making evidence-lacking assertions that sound good to the airheads on the extreme right. No, they don’t sound good, it’s the stuff they desperately want to hear to justify what they really want to do, which is hate Obama without being accused of that pesky racism they do deeply harbor in their cold shriveled hearts.

Like his baseless assertions that the President might not be a citizen, again here, he’s “heard” it from someone that Obama was a terrible student, and he knows “lots” of kids with great grades and boards who can’t get in, so, well, it smells, The Donald alleges. And well, you hair smells too Donald, shall we conclude it came from another country?

♦

You may have heard that the Prez went to Sunday services on Easter. Well, the wackos on the extreme right had something to say about that too. Of course it was a “racist” church, where there were only “black” people and well, you get the drift. Chauncey De Vega gives his take on the “conservative media’s”  assessment.

♦

What’s on the stove? Shrimp pasta with a lemon/wine Alfredo sauce, and coleslaw.

Who’s Your SuperBowl Champs?

Tags

astronomy, Bill O'Reilly, Billy Kristol, cosmology, Egypt, Extreme right-wing, Glenn Beck, GOP, Green Bay Packers, Media, Ronald Reagan, Sarah Palin, Superbowl, universe

Doin’ the happy dance, oh yeah, oh yeah.

Who’s your daddy?

Who’s goin’ to Disney World?

Who’s got a peaceful house? ME!

Who’s unfortunately watching a replay of the whole dang game at 10:00 a.m.? ME!

If ya didn’t know, there is an NFL channel. No sane person would know that, only insane ones. Insane—–>Contrarian.

***

Speaking about insanity, the political world seems just chock full of wackadoodles. And a surprise or two along the way.

Sarah “now channeling Reagan” Palin decided to open her big mouth and spew more idiotic rhetoric. She finally gave her “analysis” of the situation in Egypt. Which means, that she read a headline in the WSJ, her ADD preventing her from actually reading an article.

In any event, she orders the President to come clean on what he “knows about who the next president of Egypt will be.” Where she comes by this notion, is anybody’s guess. Probably in a dream that has been interpreted for her by Beck.

She also sternly warns that we “should not stand” for a government run by the Muslim Brotherhood. This from the same hairbrain whose every third sentence is about protecting and regaining our freedoms and liberties.

I guess Sarah doesn’t see that any other people on the planet have the right to their freedoms and liberties to determine their own form of government and those who will lead them.

While it may not be in our best interest to have Egypt run by the MB’s, it is not our call to make. If, in fact we actually believe in democracy.

In a shocking editorial, Billy Kristol, in the Weekly Standard, lambasted Glenn Beck and by implication (although his story appeared before Ms. Palin’s bullcrap) Sarah’s belligerent woofings.

Kristol had this to say about Beck’s crazy conspiracy theories regarding the Radical Left/Radical Islam joining hands to destroy the world:

[H]ysteria is not a sign of health. When Glenn Beck rants about the caliphate taking over the Middle East from Morocco to the Philippines, and lists (invents?) the connections between caliphate-promoters and the American left, he brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society.

[. . .]

Nor is it a sign of health when other American conservatives are so fearful of a popular awakening that they side with the dictator against the democrats.

I fairly reel with surprise in having to say, “spot on!”

***

Outside The Beltway has a full transcript of her remarks and as Doug Mataconis points out, you can’t make sense of it. It’s the typical “word salad” that just seems to go on and on and never make any point, other than somehow she suspicions that Obama isn’t doing it right. She throws in plenty of her clichés here and there, and just runs in a stream of unconsciousness.

***

One has to laugh as Ms. Sarah. She likens herself to Ronnie Reagan. She claims they both refused to “sit down and shut up,” and both her and he were maligned and vilified by the media. Yeah, really. But one has to wonder at the near deification of Reagan by the uber Right. It seems they can find no one else in the Retootlican pantheon, at least in the recent past to hold up for idol worship. 

But the reality is that Reagan did many of the things that Obama is now doing. The extremists on the Right are prevented from seeing this because the red haze of hatred is so thick.  Politicususa strips away some of the mask. So I say, if Sarah wants to compare herself to Reagan, then by all means do, and after reading the post by Rmuse it will establish that this woman shouldn’t be elected dog catcher.

***

I don’t know if you heard about Billo the Clown’s silliness that God is proven because the “tides go in, the tides go out, never a miss communication.” When e-mails poured in explaining gravitational pull from the moon, Billo replied that they were “pinheads” and then went on to ask, “the moon, how did it get there? huh? how did it get there? tell me.” And then he went on to ask, “why do we have one? Why doesn’t Mars?”

Of course O’Reilly is dead wrong again. The moon came from a planetoid that hit the earth billions of years ago, broke up, and then gathered in part from the refuse, held in orbit by that darn gravity again. And Mars has two moons last time I checked.  I guess I’m a pinhead.

No matter, the NYTimes has a nice editorial on how many new planets have been located by the Kepler satellite. If projected across the heavens, Kepler should find upwards of 400,000 planets. This is good news for astronomers and those (exobiologists) who specialize in “life on other planets.” The more there are, the more chance that some support life.

Don’t  bother to tell Billo, it would only make his tiny brain explode.

***

Well, that seems enough for today.

What’s on the stove: Stir-fry, egg rolls.

 

Related Articles

• Kristol calls out Beck over ‘hysteria’ (washingtonmonthly.com)
• A Lack Of Confidence (andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com)

Easier Said Than Done

Tags

Bill O'Reilly, Extreme right-wing, Fox News, GOP, Obama, Politics, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Tucson shooting

By all accounts, the President hit one out of the ball park. I certainly thought so.  It was eloquent, touching, inspiring, uplifting. It was pure Obama. Even the Right had to admit that he had struck the right note.

Flipping over to Fox, you got plenty of “good jobs” from the panel, albeit with the Foxonian twist: The President had taken their advice, stayed away from finger-pointing and had subtly told the Left to quiet down. Actually of course, he gingerly suggested that both sides temper their remarks.

“If this tragedy prompts reflection and debate, as it should, let’s make sure it’s worthy of those we have lost,” he said. “Let’s make sure it’s not on the usual plane of politics and point scoring and pettiness that drifts away with the next news cycle.”

This is of course lost on the Right who find themselves incapable of ever admitting that they are anything but perfectly right. In fact, this propensity is what made Palin’s remarks what one expects of her ilk, and by definition, not Presidential.

I think the President is most right of course, and many on the Left, and a very few on the Right (those who stand for principle in the face of the Tea Party onslaught), have been saying so and begging for some civility for some time.

Why isn’t it happening? Why can we not get beyond this name-calling?

It may come as no surprise that I see the problem as largely on the Right. And the problem is simply because the Right, as I have said, NEVER ever admits they have overstepped. Ever. Sarah and all her kind are always the victims of intentional smears, they are never wrong.

Many on the Left have said that Palin was not personally responsible for the events in Tucson, either directly or ever indirectly by herself. We have said that she participated in the creation of a culture of vitriol that encourages people to act out their angers and their fears. Both of these, anger and fear are the emotion of choice of Palin, Bachmann, King, Cantor, Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, and Fox in general.

I read a few days ago of a journalist from another country who had the temerity to criticize Bill O’Reilly some years ago. He was astounded, that within twenty-four hours, his education, his employment, and his ethnicity and motives were called into question by Fox. His e-mail was flooded with hate mail. At no time, he said, did O’Reilly or Fox address the fundamental criticisms he leveled.

All these extremists deal in ad hominem attack. They never respond in substance. If they did, then we could dialog.

This is what frustrates reasonable voices on the Left. If Palin, had simply acknowledged that indeed she has in the past used imagery and words that could be misconstrued and for that she was sorry, many who oppose her would have listened and approved. But she cannot do that, for the internalization of criticism is too deep, she takes it too personally. She can’t let it go. She knows of only one way and that is retaliation.

She tells herself, apparently, that no matter how reasonable she might be, the criticism would continue. That is probably true to a degree. The Left has its haters too, and nothing Palin could say or do would be good enough. But that is not true of the mainstream progressive and independent.

While patient education might change the above, the other element in why the Extremist Right cannot change their tenor, is more insidious. It’s not can’t but won’t. And they won’t because it continues to help them achieve their goals. Winning big in the 2010 mid-term elections is proof to them that hate and fear work.

I read something like this yesterday:

You can fool a few of the people all of the time, and this is Fox’s targeted audience.

The truth is, this is actually true. Fox panders to an audience that has been warned off the MSM, and all pundits and politicos that are not following the Fox agenda. It’s audience therefore never becomes informed that so much of what Fox runs is provably wrong. They don’t see the clips of their talking heads saying opposite things from days and weeks and months earlier. They are safely closeted from MSNBC, The Daily Show, and The Colbert Report, as well as PBS and a plethora of middle-to-light Left commentary and journalism.

Therefore, the Fox lie works. This of course is not lost on the Extremists in the GOP. They too have learned from Fox that lying works to their base. They have come to depend on a largely uneducated, largely ignorant electorate who reads and watches only what they have given them permission to. Members of the Tea Party and GOP Extremists in general have learned the value of repeating the mantra of the day. What is the mantra for Health Care repeal?—JOB KILLING. The phrase is used by EVERYONE on the Right. No matter that it isn’t true, no matter that the CBO has projected that repeal would add billions to the deficit. They simply reply that that is an “opinion.” Is it called the Health Care Act? No it’s called Obamacare, by EVERYONE on the Right.

So in the end, I find it hard to see how the President’s call for civility can be accomplished. When Rush Limbaugh pounds the table and announces that the Democratic Party is “all for the Tucson killer” and Tom Pawlenty barely suggests that Palin’s crosshairs might be “not what he would do” before having to walk it back in the face of condemnation by Fox, then how can we take them seriously? When they are unwilling to admit any culpability in our climate of hate, it is hard to see how we talk with quiet respect to one another. When they are unwilling to condemn the hate mongers among them, how can we honor each other’s real beliefs?

If you know a way, by all means suggest it. I’m stymied.

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