Democrats shouldn't get too comfy between now and November because the Republicans are cookin' up all kinds of crazy and that always has its consequences for everyone... especially when there's a lot of money behind it.
Here's a brief rundown of the madness:
To refresh yourself on some of the
GOP insanity from 2010, click here.
We'll kick off crazy-fest 2012 with our reigning queen of
drunken bigotry, Jan Brewer. Since her mostly failed attempts at Birtherism, immigration deform and hating on gay people,
Jan Brewer has taken it upon herself to join her Tea Party fan-base in defining "personhood". She says that the idea that women can secretly prevent pregnancy from rape is
only "a little bit outrageous" and that it's totally up to legislators and voters whether or not they agree. Brewer has outlawed abortions in Arizona after 20 weeks... making NO EXCEPTIONS for the life/safety of the mother if the doctor doesn't feel like it. It's an outrageous law that is not seeing nearly enough media attention considering that a woman could conceivably die from this in Arizona before the election.
Of course, we can't really discuss fetal personhood without an honorary mention of the grandfather of all screwy looney-toons soundbytes,
Todd Akin. By now, you should know all about the idiotic belief system he holds and the statement that stirred the pot. But if you don't watch Rachel Maddow, then
you wouldn't know all of THIS. Akin's coo-coo for cocoa puffs lunacy stems from other pro-lifers with these crazy ideas before him... including a
man by the name of John C. Willke.
Willke, if you’re curious, endorsed Romney’s 2008 presidential run—a fact Romney freely boasted about at the time. “I am proud to have the support of a man who has meant so much to the pro-life movement in our country,” Romney said in a 2007 release, according to the New York Daily News. Even some Florida Republicans have seriously twisted ideas about rape.
Todd akin did not act alone in this insanity, though. Which brings us to your Republican Vice Presidential hopeful,
Paul Ryan. “Nobody is proposing to deny birth control to anybody,” said Paul Ryan
in a CBS interview where he backed away from every single point in the pro-life agenda. This is a very DRASTIC flip-flop for the congressman. Akins and Ryan had conspired immediately upon Ryan's entrance to the House of Representatives to draft a fetal
personhood bill called H.R. 3 which, if it had become law, would have legislatively overturned the Roe Vs. Wade Supreme Court decision and made NO EXCEPTIONS for a woman who is raped or the victim of incest. The Paul Ryan lie that "nobody is proposing to deny birth control" is a
BIG LIE indeed, however. You can read all about these attempts (by Catholic Republicans like Ryan, no less) right
here,
here and
here.
From Paul Ryan on the subject of fetuses, we come to the big guy -
Mitt Romney. The "fetal skeletons" in Romney's closet were LITERALLY swept away by his corporation called
Stericycle. It was an awful blow to the pro-life movement when they discovered that Mitt Romney had inked the deal for his
Bain Capital corporation to purchase Stericycle. It is a company that they had been
protesting all the while because it facilitates abortions by removing the "medical waste" and disposing of it properly. I don't need to tell you why pro-lifers have a problem with the term "medical waste". This is just the tip of the iceberg with Romney and Bain though. The time at which Mitt Romney saw over the acquisition of Stericycle was a time that he
said he was NOT in the employ of Bain Capital. Obviously, since the signatures are there, and it was Romney himself conducting this business, he lied. This is also, conveniently, one of the many years for which Mitt Romney never released his tax returns. But it gets EVEN WORSE for the Presidential hopeful... It turns out that Romney lied yet even once more before all of this about his taxes... and the consequences of this other lie are insurmountable for him in his bid for the Presidency. Mitt Romney never paid any taxes from an address in Massachusetts. Why is that important? Because his eligibility to run for Governor of the State of Massachusetts was entirely predicated on the idea that he had. Romney had not been a Massachusetts resident for the required seven years. He brushed that concern aside by LYING. He told the people of Masshachsetts that he had paid TAXES in Massachusetts for seven years. It turns out that everyone just assumed nobody would tell a lie that big... They had apparently never met someone like Mitt Romney before... because
he did in fact, lie.
Somebody who's very concerned about how all of this will pan out for Republicans is a man by the name of
Bryan Fischer. Fischer is one of those guys that Paul Ryan now claims doesn't exist. He is totally in agreement with the Akins fantasy about "legitimate rape" not causing pregnancies. He also doesn't want women to have access to contraceptives. Fischer heads up the
American Family Association. Immediately, you recognize that name because they are the secondary source of all things "anti-gay" in the United States. The first and foremost source being the hate group known as the Family Research Council. While party leaders were immediately frightened by the onslaught of adverse reactions to Akins' crazy "magic vaginas" story, Fischer was upset with them for reacting to it. His Twitter account relays:
"Akin staying in. GOP elites, by gangtackling Akin instead of having his back, have put this seat in play. Loss is on them." This is basically like saying that a legislator should not be held accountable for being wrong about something... That even if something is a total fabrication - we'll all be fine as long as we stick with it.
Bryan Fischer draws from the same fanbase as 700 Club Televangelist, Pat Robertson. Of course,
Pat Robertson has the heavy burden of explaining to Christian America what should be done with all the "persons" who will not be aborted when Republican policies take effect... You can apparently do whatever you want with unwanted kids after they're born...
as long as you DON'T dare adopt them, says Robertson. No man is going to want to be tied down to the "whole United Nations" which includes "weird" kids of other races "who may have been molested" he says.
Pat Robertson seems to be on a rampage against our nation's young people lately. The religious school that he owns is called Regent University. Of course, it's not a real university because it's a private religious school. The word "regent" means "governing in absense of a higher authority". School boards and county-area branches at all levels of government are often called "regents" or regencies. It has been this way for over 100 years, actually. But you guessed it...
Robertson has assembled a crack-team of lawyers to restrict the government from being able to use the term. He is suing local community colleges and non-religious public schools to try to take ownership of the word that he's only been using since 1979.
Speaking of "other races" whose children one should supposedly not adopt, lest they find themselves hosting a United Nations convention in their living room - we would be remiss in not reminding you that the
Tea Party Express still has plans to plow over every last brown-skinned American until there are none left. No man is better suited for this task than white
America's favorite skinhead -
Joe The Plumber. Joe has given up the glamorous job of plunging toilets so that he can enjoy Government funded healthcare at taxpayer expense as a United States Congressman. His plan is apparently to shrink the size of Government by adding himself to it. He is running in Ohio on a platform of "don't spread my wealth" and "let's start shooting at the Mexican Border". Yes, you read that correctly. Apparently, Joe is very sensitive about being called a racist by "liberal Obama supporters"... he routinely complains about that on
his facebook page, but he just leaves that statement dangling there without apology. Apparently, if Marco Rubio's parents happened to be anywhere near the border between Mexico and the United States, Congressman Plumber would suggest that border police should shoot at them. No joke.
Let's not forget that Joe The Plumber was brought to us by the same public relations department in the GOP that delivered Sister
Sarah Palin to us. Palin, if you recall, put
shooting targets over a map of Democrats in the United States, including one over the name and location of congresswoman Gabby Giffords who was shot, almost fatally, yet still luckier than a number of other innocent people at her event. The mainstream media has failed to mention that Jared Laughner (the shooter in Arizona) listed "Mein Kampf" as his favorite book on his YouTube profile. He also had a very creepy video he took of himself burning the American Flag in the Arizona Desert. The media mostly in concert with CNN and Fox News, decided apparently that since Laughner was "crazy", that it somehow ruled out the possibility that he was ALSO an antisemitic white supremacist and gun-nut. Shockingly,
violent racists who are connected in any way to Sarah Palin are never held up to scrutiny for their political alliances.
Since Palin has gone national with a lot of support from Fox News and the Oil and Coal lobby - a new Republican has emerged in Wasilla, Alaska. His name is Mark Ewing...
Palin would be so proud of Ewing. Some of his latest stump speech talking points have included
"I love coal. I love the smell of burning coal in the morning." and
"We need to educate our children, but there are certain individuals that are just not going to benefit from an education... like kids who have a hard time making their wheelchair move."
Really? The latest Republican attack will be... against kids in wheelchairs! That's just made of win, isn't it?
7. Nationalism - Throughout history, Nationalism has usually been the driving motivator for war, fascism and all sorts of other reactionary misdeeds. Nationalism is a hyper-idealized view of one's country in which the nationalist ascribes their own sense of morality to the foundation of the entire nation. Usually dressing itself as ordinary patriotism, Nationalism is far more feverish and irrational than simply being a fan of the government. It is the result of mass propaganda, fear and an erasure of the lines that usually separate business, media, religion and government.
6. Charity - It has been said that Republicans give more to "charity" than Democrats do and I'm inclined to believe it. In fact, our charitable donation system in America seems specifically designed for the purpose of justifying that statement. The fact is, things get much worse when you indiscriminately throw money at your television screen. Religious charitable funds are some of the biggest and most unregulated industries in the world and many of them do as much harm as good. Mormon adoptions of underprivileged children from over seas are largely a justified version of human trafficking< and just recently, CBN (the Christian Broadcasting Network) told their donors that Haiti had caused its own earthquake destruction by signing a pact with the Devil. The network drew in millions of dollars in one week and much of that funding will go toward furthering their own presence and infrastructure in the small, underprivileged nation. Very little (if any) of the donations will actually help the people of Haiti.
5. Racialism - Racialism is the thought process that skirts around racism and disguises itself as harmless observation of racial differences. The most important thing to understand about racialism is that even when the racialist appears to be only pointing out racism in others, they are obsessed with it. Their first instinct is always to discuss race. Their hypersensitivity and bizarre misunderstandings generally give them away as outright racists in the end. A classic example of this was when a young John McCain campaigner named Ashley Todd cooked up false accusations about a ficticious black male Obama campaign worker who supposedly assaulted her by cutting a letter "B" into her face. The story was immediately picked up by Fox News and celebrated within Republican ranks as a sure-fire win for McCain in the 2008 election. The idea was that voters would react in a racist manner by associating Miss Todd's "attacker" with the skin tone and gender of Barack Obama. So while Miss Todd could simply indicate that the man who "savagely" attacked her was black, that unto itself would not be perceived as racist... except for the fact that she made it all up.
4. Public Opinion - Republicans and Conservatives are married to the idea that a majority of Americans agree with them. They love to indicate polls and percentages of "true Americans" who think exactly as they do. Truthfully, the general public can manipulated to believe just about anything. Certain people in the media have developed an intimate understanding of how propaganda can be used to create the illusion that mob rule is the law in America. The most glaring example of this is CNN's Nancy Grace. Nancy Grace runs a gossip show on CNN where she focuses on muders, rapes and abductions. She leads her viewers down a path of mob rule in which they feel as though they can investigate these matters from the comfort of their living rooms. The problem with Nancy Grace's style of entertainment is that her viewers rarely suspect that her show is simply entertainment. Nancy Grace fans feel as though they are actually doing the work of judge, jury and executioner and they hand down a guilty verdict every single time. The result of an actual trial matters very little to these people. It is the court of public opinion that they aim to try cases in. It's basically a mass-media form of public flogging and shunning without a trial, evidence or proof. Guilty until proven innocent, every single time.
3. Oil - One of the most shocking revelations of the 2008 election season was when video was leaked on to YouTube of Alaska's then-governor leading her hometown in prayer for a gas pipeline. To many right-wingers, there was nothing wrong with this scene and it all seemed quite normal to them. They even chanted "drill baby drill" as a campaign slogan of sorts. What resulted was a shockwave in the larger community of educated persons - the sudden realization that Republicans had created a new religion in which God & Oil had been merged into one holy concept. This also includes, of course, Global Warming Denialism and a celebration of private ownership over natural resources. Incidentally, that brings us to the 2nd False God of the Right Wing...
2. The Corporation - What can be said for a situation where Republican traders at an energy company laugh at elderly Bush voters and say they can go fuck themselves because their electricity has inexplicably gone out but the company got what it wanted? Well, this is exactly the situation shown with shocking clarity in the documentary calledEnron: The Smartest Guys in The Room. Republicans used to openly argue for what's called "deregulation" - a process of removing government restraints and safety nets on corporations. These days, they disguise deregulation as Independent Regulation which is not really regulation at all. To put it in simpler terms - they appoint the fox to guard the henhouse. Another interesting Republican tool is to disguise large multi-national conglomerates in terms that sound less severe, making the public think that they are protecting "small businesses" and somehow deregulating in favor of Ma & Pa shops in the American countryside. Nothing could be further from the truth.
1. Sexual Purity - This is the number 1 false God of the Right Wing because it is the most powerful. Everywhere you go in America, you are met with people who confuse virginity with innocence and religion with heterosexism. But there are contradictions to be found in this view of reality. For instance, Salt Lake City Utah, the epicenter of Mormonism, is the capitol of online pornography consumerism in the United States. Furthermore, those who protest sexual impurity the loudest are invariably caught with their pants down at any given moment. Two of the most devastating examples can be found in the cases of Ted Haggard (the disgraced President of the National Association of Evangelicals) and Carrie Prejean (the disgraced leader of the "opposite marriage" movement). But the real reason that Sexual Purity is number 1 on the list is because the consequences of worshiping this false god are the most deadly. In recent news, the Republic of Uganda has decided to implement the death penalty for persons who are charged with what they call "aggravated homosexuality" and prison sentences for anyone who refuses to testify against the behavior.
