It’s Official–I Don’t Have to Like Any Republicans

Tags

conservative, GOP, ideology, liberal, teabaggers

I’m a big fan of UP, formerly with Chris Hayes and now Steve Kornacki. Given that it starts at 6:00 a.m. here in New Mexico, that tells ya just how much.

They usually have an interesting and varied panel of folks who dissect whatever interesting topics of the day seem appropriate.

Well, live and learn as they say. I came, I saw, I learned. And now I am no longer ashamed of disliking Republicans pretty much to a person.

You see, the Contrarian likes to think of himself as somewhat more centrist than me.

me<————->Contrarian<—————->Crazy Right

Mostly he’s just as liberal as I am, but it makes him feel better to think he’s not.

Me? I’m almost off the page. I’m an anarchist with the foresight to know that politics belongs to those who realize that you gotta give up something to get something. So I am willing to swallow a  bit of bitter for the sweet. I recognize that the only people who get exactly all of what they want are dictators and they usually don’t last too long. Facts is facts.

Any the how. One of the things said Contrarian likes to dig me with, is shit like “if George W. Bush discovered a cure for cancer, you would find something wrong with it” and other bitter ilk of that sort, all designed to make me look unreasonable in general and downright wrong in any given specific instance in which he decides for the fun of it to argue with me. Basically he claims that “you don’t like any of ’em”, ’em being Republicans.

So I always argued that such was not the case, and cited an instance or two, of people who were not downright by birth pathological liars, cheats, and shills for big business, and had just maybe one bone in their wretched bodies that hummed like a tuning fork when hit as to the poor and you know, the brothers and sisters out there barely gettin’ by. Am I my brother’s keeper keeps echoing in my head, though it seems to have not had the same effect upon most Christianist Republicans I have known.

I defended that position to every challenge.

Until.

I saw this graph on UP. I can’t find the graph on UP today, but I recall it generally. Congress is made up of 535 seats all told. Back in the 60’s or so, on a liberal/conservative continuum, 355 members were overlapping between the two parties. That means that while there were some Democrats all alone on the far left and some Republicans alone on the far right, there was a vast middle where they scored about evenly.

Given that for some 40 years, the Democrats had owned both Houses of Congress, it became incumbent on the part of Republicans to cooperate and find common ground on some things if they wished to participate in governing. There were a lot of Northern liberal Republicans and lots of Southern conservative Democrats, but there were enough in the middle that compromises were worked out and legislation passed. No faction was large enough to overcome the vast middle.

Then 1994 happened, and Newt Gingrich orchestrated a majority win for the GOP. This happened for a variety of reasons not the least of which was the loss of the South to Democrats following the Civil Rights acts of the 1960’s. Democrats in the South left the party in droves, or certainly were prepared to vote Republican if only given a good reason. Newt gave them that reason in his Contract with America, touching on sensitive issues of “welfare” and budget deficits.

He also started something new and unique in Congress, the 4-day work week. Members were encouraged (especially in the House) to return to their districts each weekend and spend time with constituents. This gave the average voter the illusion at least that his congress person cared about his or her opinion. The downside to all this was that the sense of collegiality that had been the grease in the machine of Congress was now gone. Weekend parties, and various other gatherings for dinner and drinks were no more. Members didn’t get to know one another as they formerly did. Many Republican wives or husbands stayed in the home district, missing the other opportunity for camaraderie.

With Gingrich and Tom Delay, more emphasis was placed on sticking with the team no matter what. Voting as a cohesive unit was prized to control a larger agenda that was dreamed up in the offices of the Speaker and his upper echelon elites.

It all went down hill from there.

Denny Hastert gave us the Hastert rule: thou shall not bring to the floor any bill that does not have the majority blessing of your own party–it is irrelevant if enough members of one’s own party plus enough members of the other party would ensure victory.

Today we reap the results of a Congress that is entirely partisan. Today that same graph indicates that of 535 members only 11 overlap. Yes you read that right. Only ELEVEN senate or house members from the two parties are rated at the same point on the liberal/conservative spectrum. All the rest, 524 lie to the left (Democrat) or to the right (Republican). There are essentially no moderate Republicans to embrace. There are no fiscally conservative, socially liberal GOP members. They have been purged or threatened so fiercely that they deny the emperor has no clothes.

There is simply no Republican left for me to “like”.

And so I don’t.

So sue me.

That’s the way I see it. If you don’t well, there is a comment box.

Preachin’ and Teachin’ and Face Palming to the Point It Hurts

Tags

Americans, body politic, climate change, evolution, ideology, ignorance, science

I am singularly aware that I bang a drum slowly, preach to the choir, and will change not one mind. Those minds that need to change, I fear are so atrophied by lack of use at this point as to be irredeemable.

However, why should that stop me?

I preach because in the great unwashed population, I sense a great number of hanger-ons, barely listening, hardly conscious of that which is beyond their own field of vision. They are the “average” person in American, and perhaps in the world. People so busy making ends meet, schedules kept, children raised to do more than gnaw raw bones on the front lawn, that they have little time for other “stuff”.

In other words, what polls show is perhaps hiding the truth rather than exposing it. I speak of yesterdays revelation from the PPP poll, to the question of whom is to blame for Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath? Nearly a third, 29% thought that Obama was to blame, while ONLY 28% thought George Bush was. A full 44% had no clue.

Now, this means but one thing. Twenty-nine percent of the people in Louisiana are dumber than the dirt they stand upon. Or are they? Granted, those that truly believe this, well they are lost to us. They should be kept in locked houses, taken for walks on leashes, and fed a low-fat diet and given a few chew toys for amusement. A car ride once in a while will suffice to keep them happy.

But I reckon those are just a few. I would hope that they are no more than 10% of the fine people of Louisiana (I reserve judgement on say, Alabama, where the number might be much higher however *wink*.) Most, I would argue, are that group from above, that are barely aware of what day of the week it is. Syria is “some place over there” and “the war to end all wars” was that movie with Tom Cruise. Asking them a serious policy question is akin to asking the average three-year-old what they think of Keynesian economics versus those espoused by Friedman and the Chicago school.

See, it really doesn’t matter what “they” think, since thinking is an experience they have had precious little experience with.

Do we stop there and just go on about grown-up business therefore? Do we just ignore the vast array of childlike innocence portrayed by much of the hard right?

Unfortunately not. I say unfortunately, because gosh darn, lots of people flourish in relative happiness in their ignorance. Some say (Thomas Gray to be specific–go look it up) ignorance is bliss. They might well be right. It’s all fine if everyone has an opinion on everything under the sun and above it for that matter, with one tiny proviso:

THOSE WITH AN ELFIN MIND HAVE NO BUSINESS IN THE PUBLIC’S BUSINESS, I.E., THEY SHOULD NOT BE VOTING ON ANYTHING BEYOND WHAT COLOR TO PAINT THE NEW SWING SET AT THE TOWN PARK!

That said, the rub is, who decides, and what are the standards. I leave it there, for I admittedly have no answers. Feel free to mingle and talk among yourselves.

That the issue is however reaching critical proportions is evident by a few of the following statistics:

1. Forty-six percent of Americans would agree that God made humans pretty much as they are today.
2. Only 58% of Americans see climate change as a problem, DOWN from 63% in 1989.
3. Eighteen percent believe that the sun revolves around the earth.
4. Twenty-five percent believe that vaccines cause autism.
5. Seventeen percent believe Obama is a secret Muslim.

I could go on with a list that would run to several pages of idiotic things that Americans believe. One can find lists of urban legends that denote the belief that Obama is gay, lost his license to practice law in Illinois from some mysterious illegal thing. There are plenty of folks who don’t believe we ever landed on the moon, plenty believe that aliens walk among us, and so on and on.

Most of it doesn’t matter.

But it matters a great deal when it has to do with evolution and our need for continued funding in medicine, geology, and many other disciplines that help us understand disease and how we can stop it. It matters a great deal when it has to do with our response to the increasing danger of man-made climate change, something that 95% of all scientists engaged in this study now believe. (Ninety-seven percent believe in that we are in a time of global warming man-made or otherwise.) It matters because in North Carolina, scientists and their predictions about increased sea levels are PREVENTED from being used by state planners in determining the future allocation of funds to protect the shore lines. DID YOU READ THAT? They are prevented from considering SCIENCE in making decisions about the future of their coastline!

As to evolution and climate change, millions upon millions have been spent in order to convince people that these things are untrue. The evolution deniers write books, create museums, and prepare homeschooling material for profit. They have a great desire to increase the number of people who “don’t believe in science”. The same is true of fossil fuel producers. They are almost the sole funders of the “science” that passes for anti-climate change. They have everything to lose by a weaning of American off of fossil fuels and a turn toward green energies.

We, on the other hand, present the evidence, but we don’t spend a lot of money to spread the word. We have been content mostly to giggle at the “stupid” people and pay no further attention. But they are voting, and they are electing people who are prepared, through either their own dumbness or because it’s lucrative to them, to speak for them, and against truth.

We can no longer remain quiet. We must beat the drum, loudly, rapidly, and continuously, until we break through the thick shell of “I don’t have time for that” mentality that affects probably 80% of our people.

I learned a new term today. Lysenkoism. It happened in Russia, or more properly the Soviet Union, when it attempted to veer off the evolution track into their own sort of biology that gave the results they wanted rather than where the science drove them.

It means:

the manipulation or distortion of the scientific process as a way to reach a predetermined conclusion as dictated by an ideological bias, often related to social or political objectives.

This is what we face in America. And we cannot assume or wait for our ignorant friends to “learn from history”, they won’t because they won’t expend the time to learn anything. Fox with its few seconds of sound bites is the most they can absorb, and only that when it is repeated continuously all day and all week long.

We, who can and do think. We, who do read, and do so critically,  and across the board of left to right, must be the voice that repeats the message again and again until we drown out those voices of personal gain who would lead our society to ruin for their own benefit, who would teach our children ideologies rather than science and truth.

This is why we beat the dead horse.

 

Related articles

• New Poll Shows Louisiana Republicans Blame Obama For How Bush Handled Hurricane Katrina (addictinginfo.org)
• And You Know That Whole Pearl Harbor Thing? Obama’s Fault. (juanitajean.com)

Can You Understand a TeaPotter?

Tags

GOP, Humor, ideology, teabaggers

Okay, I confess. I don’t understand the TeaPotters. It’s not for lack of trying. I truly have tried.

What the problem seems to be, is that in order to understand them, you have to forget a whole lot of stuff you know. Like facts about history, your basic understanding of the constitution, things like that. It helps if you are fairly uninformed about science too.

Wikipedia defines them thusly:

the Tea Party movement tends to be anti-government, anti-spending, anti-Obama, anti-tax, nationalistic, in favor of strict immigration legislation^[26] and against compromise politics. Since the 2012 elections, many local Tea Party factions have shifted their focus to state nullification of the health care law, and protesting the United Nations Agenda 21.^{[27][28][29][30][31][32]} The Tea Party is skeptical towards the courts, shows a commitment to individualism and takes an originalist view in constitutional interpretation. ^[33] The Tea Party is opposed to the bailouts, stimulus packages, and has expressed an interest in repealing the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments. It is also in favor of amending the Constitution to grant states the right to veto

federal laws. It is known as the Repeal Amendment.^[34]

Read that part again. They are generally in favor of an originalist” view of the constitution. Now I know a few teapotters myself, and I am categorically sure that they wouldn’t have a clue about what originalist even means, let alone how it might apply to the constitution. That is defined as one of two things, “original intent” or “original meaning”. That would require at minimum a thorough knowledge of the Federalist Papers. Again, the teapotters I know haven’t read that collection EVER.

But here’s what really strikes me as hysterical. In the same breath that they tell you that the constitution is the most important document (next to the Bible of course) ever created by mortal and or immortal hands, they are, as stated above, not so sure we shouldn’t repeal the 16th and 17th and then add an amendment of two. So this perfect document ain’t so perfect after all.

And don’t forget the 14th Amendment which Teapotters don’t like because of that Section 1 giving citizenship to all those born within its confines. (read anchor babies!!)

See, that’s the crazy logic merry-go-round one is forced to ride upon if one wishes to “understand” the average teapotter.

I think what they mean, and it’s only a guess since trying to figure out the logic behind a teapotters beliefs is a bit like trying to find a tiny white pearl in a ton of newly fallen snow, is that they like the Constitution, except some of those amendments. Some is the operative word here since the one they embrace with both of their beer-huggin’ arms is the 2nd.

Now the 2nd has many scholarly definitions, but to a teapotter it’s real simple: I can buy all the sexy sounding, and biggest killin’ machine guns that are marketed and go to war against the Feds should they “tread on me”. The usual teapotter has watched a tad too many John Wayne movies in his white privileged life, and is darn certain that an armed march on Washington is just what the country needs.

The 1st Amendment is okay as far as it goes. I mean THEY have a right to say what they wish, but Muslims?–well not so sure about them. And that part about separation of church and state, well that don’t mean good Christians should be hampered in their right to display their version of God in every public place–all others are lucky that they can practice their versions behind closed doors–and that’s somewhat iffy too.

If they argue that the Constitution broadly protects a persons right to be left alone, they see that as selective as well. Women have no rights to be left alone when it comes to their reproductive body parts. White men have always known better where that’s concerned. After all, it’s their responsibility to ensure the survival of the white race.

Gays have all the rights in the world as long as they do things heterosexually. Anything else is against God’s wishes as they see it, though they aren’t too sure why God created gays anyway. Most assume gays are just willful and stubborn adherents to a lifestyle they find more “fun” than hetero life. One is never quite sure whether they are complaining or not.

Blacks (who are never called African-American) could be just as good as white people if they would only act more white. Just try harder!

Most teapotters are happy to tell you just how hard they have had to work for EVERYTHING they have, and boy you should be impressed by their sacrifices. What is left unsaid of course, is that they feel cheated by their country because as they walk down that last bit of road to the pearly gates, they definitely aren’t living the life they feel entitled to.

That of course is due to the feds who take all their money in taxes and give it to the “lazies” the “takers” the 47%’ers, and other such names. Since they are not deemed worthy of respect, they aren’t really entitled to any of the constitutional things any way.

Mostly it comes down to as best I can tell is this: Teapotters want the country run by white people and they don’t want to pay for anything beyond a big old military. The Constitution was written by them, for them, and about them. It doesn’t really apply to anyone else. Anyone getting in the way of “their way of life” is to be declared an “illegal” “enemy combatant” or some other such “backward, heathen reprobate” and dealt with by means that Jack Bauer would approve of.

PS: If you are not white, male and Christian, you can of course be left fairly alone as long as you act white, male and Christian.

The TEA PARTY: brought to you by free market big business. You fell for that one too teapotters.

Solution to the teapotter problem: send them all back to high school and start all over again.

 

 

 

Look At That Again

Tags

anarchism, capitalism, Chris Christie, GOP, ideology, Politics, teabaggers, Wing nuts

Perhaps it’s the new year, and my intent to be a kinder gentler pundit. (Did you see how I slid in that word pundit, raising myself to the realm of Rachel and Ed and Lawrence? Well, you can’t blame an old girl for trying.

Anyway.

Gee that begs the question why my favorite form of prose is the stream of consciousness, just writing down whatever flops out of my over-active mind. Does it read as easily as it trips through my neurons?

ANYWAY.

It may be the nicer me that I’ve conjured from the depths of my often described cold-dead heart (by those who despise the things I say), but I’m not sure.

Not sure about what you ask?’

Why, that Chris Christie is seeming to start to thaw my rather unfavorable image that I have henceforth had of him.

I know, I know. You will say, “why sure, Sherry, he’s raggin’ on the GOP. What’s not to like?”

And I will say, “Yeah, I do enjoy that to be sure.”

But it seems more than that.

I get these flashes when I am watching him, that in some ways, he is EXACTLY what we need. He is just bombastic enough to get people’s attention. And he at least gets it that some things are NOT political, or shouldn’t be. And he’s not afraid to rant at his own party when they are politicizing that which shouldn’t be.

As opposed to John of Orange who is so afraid of his crazy caucus that he cancelled a vote on disaster relief that is already LONG OVERDUE, because he was scared that his idiot faction would vote against it, because they are inclined to only do with comes naturally, which is ACT STUPID.

Which is not to say that Chris Christie still espouses all the dumb Republican philosophies that I find both repugnant to economic stability and to common decency as regards the average Jane. But he at least realizes that the federal government has SOME purpose and disaster relief is sure one of them, as opposed to the Norquistian element which wants to just turn over the keys to the Capital to Stanley Morgan and Mobil Oil.

Which is to say, that you can’t get everything in one package, and Christie being a mighty big package, you are gonna get a lotta bad with some good. But when the good that he might bring is exactly the sort of thing that might move this desperately ineffective and “taking up oxygen for no good reason” Congress, well, it might be the bad tasting medicine we need.

I mean the man is not stark raving mad, and quite frankly, any Republican who can be so defined, is now someone to be embraced as at least a fellow human being. The rest of the GOP is so in the cesspool of crazy as to not be salvageable. I mean they ARE crazy. They are not posers nor grifters, they are simply top-spinning MAD. They cannot be allowed to continue to gin up the gaggle of gun-totin’ jackasses out there who have been bunkered and arsenalled up ready to re-enact Bunker Hill with live ammo.

So maybe I’m being seduced by his rhetoric. Maybe he is just saying the right things that will make his approval ratings soar and will position him for a run in 2016, even though the Right Wing glue sniffers hate his guts for being their latest version of RINO. I dunno. Maybe I’m coming down with the flu. Or maybe rabies. Or maybe I’m being practical.

Now I’m an ideologue of the first order. I don’t like practical politics, I simply endure it. I do. I make the best of what is at hand. I have enough time in the business of political watching that I know that you never get what you want, you get hopefully a tad more than 50% of it. And you live to fight another day.

But I’m still an ideologue who is quickly giving up on the idea of capitalism as a viable future way to conduct economic matters. I’m in short, becoming an anarchist, as best as I now understand the term. I don’t believe there is a way to regulate business to a degree that it doesn’t game the system eventually and control the government. As it does now. And thus we find ourselves in a mess where the people’s voices are being ignored in favor of whatever suits business.

But that’s another story.

One best left to another day, when I might know a bit more about what I’m talking about.

But this Christie thing. Well, I’m in pondering mode.

Tell me, have I lost my mind, or is there something to my madness?

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Ideological Wars That Never Were

Tags

conservatives, ideology, liberals, society, The Gilded age, theory

Because Willard was only a pretend conservative (my words), Joe Scarborough laments we have never had the conversation we should have: namely the ideological underpinnings of those two behemoths, Liberalism and Conservatism. And we should have, he argues.

According to Joe, conservatives are about securing individual liberties for folks, keeping regulations and taxes low so that people can create their lives as they see fit. Read that as small government. It’s job mainly I would assume is to protect the population from enemies and to intrude only in those areas that require a uniformity in order for things like commerce to operate smoothly.

Sounds okay.

Liberalism, as I define it at least, see government as a much bigger deal. Liberals see government as the last foundation for human lives. It provides the minimum needs of its population. That includes food, clothing, housing, medical care, and education, while providing the basic environment for work–fair wages, safe conditions, and a means to redress grievances for conditions and benefits.

Conservatives, I think, see the Liberal model as bringing about an indolent population that is happy to recline on the sofa, with remote in hand, living on the dole. Liberals see the Conservative model as pie-in-the-sky unrealistic and contra to human nature.

Shall we examine?

Conservatives believe that business (free markets) are best. Business is left unfettered to compete against each other, and everything stems from this. Men and women who have ideas, secure capital, hire workers, and make products that are freely offered in the market place where they compete with other products. As a business succeeds, the products improve, the wages improve, blah, blah, blah.

But this is not what happens. I have read in a number of places recently that the sociopath is not limited to only serial killers. They are indeed often found among CEOs. We have the evidence of this in the period of American history known as the time of the Gilded Age, or the Age of the Robber Barons.

What we learned is that certain men, in all the major industries were not about making great products, but instead were driven by only one thing–winning. And winning was defined by money, and power. And that was determined by putting competitors out of business and controlling the market. No thought was given to the quality of the product, and no thought was given to the life of the worker who made it all happen.

Business left unchecked leads to no trickle down of money or opportunity to all. It simply leads to the oligarchy of the corporate few.

That is the error in conservative thinking as I see it. While there are thousands of compassionate business leaders, most are driven to succeed and success is measured by money and power. Nobody is handing out awards to the CEO who paid the highest wages, made the best quality product, and granted the biggest benefits package to her workers.

Moreover, giving everyone the opportunity to succeed on their own, is not for everyone as conservatives seem to think. Many folks are not driven, not intellectually up to the task, and not psychologically oriented to that pioneer spirit of striking out into the unknown with only their wits and their muscles as tools. Most small businesses fail in their first year.

Conservatives are very good at giving the failures in society someone to blame. It’s government with its taxes, and this or that minority with its willingness to take a hand-out, that takes your money and prevents you from doing for yourself. When we have others to blame for our shortcomings we never look at ourselves and perhaps discover what we are not suited for and what we are. Conservatives short-circuit that process, giving us false enemies to blame for what are really our personal failings.

Some of us are meant, for many reasons to follow, to work for others, to concentrate on things other than monetary success in the world. The Conservative mind sees everyone (except the real people–the creators) as susceptible to any offer that allows them to receive rather than do. The truly do think most people will sink to the lowest level if given the chance. But where does the Conservative model leave the artist–the songwriter, the sculptor? Where the scientist or historian? Years upon years of work may be necessary before any apparent benefit is seen. How many painters are unknown and unappreciated during their lives? Do not these folks have a right to subsistence?

I recall back in the ancient days when I was in college, taking a philosophy course. A question was posed, and of course it was one of those that has no real answer, only promoting your thinking skills.

Would you pay someone a subsistence living wage to read–with no strings attached?

My answer was an unqualified yes. Yet I could not articulate exactly why. I just knew the answer should be yes.

Today, I can articulate why. It is because it is not human nature to learn for ever and go to the grave having never divulged what you learned. Whether from wanting the adulation or recognition or from a more socially acceptable need to help humanity, we as humans are driven to share what we know or think we know. It is why we are community animals and not lone wolves.

That is why the seminal error that conservatives find in liberal theory–that all receive the basics of food, clothing, housing, medical care and education–is not an error at all. They think this will lead to a dull, passive, uncreative, lazy, society in which nothing valuable is done. It will not.

If one looks to Europe, where a safety net such as described has long been in place, one doesn’t see a decadent useless society. One sees countries who are leading the way in alternative energy, in medicine, and in education. I see no evidence that people in Europe eschew work and prefer to sip wine on the veranda.

Conservatives lives in a dream work, one abetted by the likes of Ayn Rand who reacted to the soviet world that descended upon her country and stripped her family of freedom. She interpolated all that into some fantasy where job creators created for the pure love of creation, and worked tirelessly to improve their creations, where fair wages were paid by happy entrepreneurs who knew the value of  a well-paid workforce.

Yet, history tells a different story. We did not institute clean air and water acts because of some fear of dirty air and water that might happen in the future. We did not institute child labor laws because someday some boss might work children too many hours. We did not institute safe working conditions, safe food laws, safe drugs, and so forth, because of potential greedy men and women who might endanger us.

WE ENACTED THOSE LAWS BECAUSE ENTREPRENEURS HAD DONE THOSE THINGS.

We protected unions because fair wages were not being given.

Clearly I come down on the liberal side of things. I think to be considered civilized, a nation must care for its people. It must provide them with the basic foundation from which to compete in the world. Poor children are BEHIND at the beginning because they come from less rich environments. We owe them a fair and level field.

Tomorrow: What we owe, and why we owe it.

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