The Republicans don't seem to be having a whole lot of fun these days...and I, for one, couldn't be happier about that state of affairs. Remember how they strutted after Election Day 2004? Remember how high and mighty they sounded mouthing bombast about "mandates" and "political capital?" Oh, they were on top of the world a year ago.
Now they're looking up from the gutter, lower than a snake's belly, wondering how everything could have gone so wrong so quickly. They all seem to be under investigation--or under indictment!--and you can cut the tense suspense in Washington with a Boy Scout knife right about now.
They're busily blaming the media, the hurricanes, the Democrats...when the REAL cause is something they'll never admit even if they recognize it: Their own failed political belief system.
I call it Crippled Conservatism...
If you ask most people who think of themselves as 'conservative' what they mean by it, what that ideology actually encompasses, they can't tell you. (Don't take my word for it! Try it yourself. Ask the next methane-breather you meet what the Republicans stand for....go ahead!) Beyond a few puffball catch-phrases like "pro-life" or "less government" or "free markets" that they likely picked up from right-wing media, they won't be able to tell you. Why, they won't even be able to explain what makes these things such supposedly good ideas.
None of your rank-and-file GOP voters have any clue about how heartless and corrosive conservatism REALLY is and how thoroughly it opposes the founding principles of our great nation. No, they only understand the gushing geysers of anger, intolerance and hatred that continually erupt from the right...all of which is just jim-dandy with Karl Rove.
Case in point: Franklin Graham, nutbar son of evangelist Billy Graham--no pillar of sanity himself--actually said this: "There's been satanic worship in New Orleans. There's been sexual perversion. God is going to use that storm to bring a revival. God has a plan. God has a purpose." Later, on CNN, this sanctimonious bonkjob tried to deny that he was referring to the Lord punishing the Crescent City as His angels did Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19:1-29. (And don't get me started on perversion, Frankie-baby; I don't know when to let up.)
Graham wasn't the first one to trot out the Hellfire and Damnation rhetoric, either. Jerry Falwell--who apparently hasn't gotten the memo that gluttony is a ranking member of the Seven Deadly Sins--said this as a guest on The 700 Club on September 13, 2001: "I really believe that the pagans and the feminists and the gays and lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way--all of them who have tried to secularize America--I point the finger in their face and say 'You helped this happen!'" Remember that? The rubble of the World Trade Center was still smoking hot and this holier-than-thou pusgut was blaming some women who just want equal pay for equal work! THAT is some kind of over-the-top vitriol! Homosexuals "helped this happen?" The American Civil Liberties Union?!? Good grief. That's so patently absurd on so many levels it just makes my teeth hurt.
If the harrowing conceptions of these so-called Christians is true, I am forced to wonder why, then, Las Vegas has been allowed to prosper so magnificently. Hasn't God been paying attention? For your information, prostitution is 100% LEGAL out past the county line, a quick 15 or 20 minute ride into the desert. The hookers take all major credit cards. Any sexual act, any sexual deviation you can think of--and several you cannot possibly imagine--are available there, night or day, for the right price. Absolute truth. By Graham's and Falwell's roundly ridiculous reasoning, New York City, Las Vegas, Miami, Tijuana, St. Louis, The Bahamas, Atlantic City, Detroit and probably the entire state of California should have long since been blasted to smouldering smithereens. Why, San Francisco alone should have dissolved into its own bay sometime during the Gold Rush...and it certainly should NEVER have survived the Earthquake of 1906.
But the foaming fundamentalists have never allowed their preposterous beliefs to be diluted by any taint of logic or fact. There's no arguing with those people. Lurid condemnations are the rule rather than the exception from the rabid, Rapture-right, whose version of God seems to be halfway between Genghis Kahn and a spoiled seven-year-old. What we have here is a highly distilled hatred of America, her culture, her freedoms and her diversity.
A particularly poisonous example is Kansas Rev. Fred Phelps who first gained notoriety for picketing the funeral of Matthew Shepard in 1998. Shepard was a gay man who had been beaten to death--BEATEN to death!--by a bunch of Good Ol' Boy homophobes. As his grieving parents entered the church before the service, a wild-eyed Phelps stood screaming "God hates fags!!" Soon afterwards, he began a website, http://www.godhatesfags.com and has recently upped the ante with godhatesamerica.com. I've got a redhot newsflash for you, Freddy. It's not God who's doing all the hating...it's YOU.
Somebody needs to remind Phelps and fatso Falwell and all the rest of these religious psychopaths that it was no less a personage than Thomas Jefferson who FIRST decided that America ought to be secular. He built into our splendid Constitution the strict separation of religion and governance. It was Jefferson himself who wrote of "the loathsome combination of church and state," recalling clearly the "holy" wars and the horrifying persecutions which had ravaged the Old World. His marvelous First Amendment neither inculcates religion nor inoculates against it. As a result, Americans are able to be entirely loyal to their nation without being hostile to God. And vice versa. It is, very literally, 'freedom of the soul.'
Furthermore, it was the Plenipotentiary of George Washington, our first president, who signed The Barbary Treaties in Tripoli on Novembr 4, 1796. Article 11 of the Treaty of Peace and Friendship explicitly states that "The United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion." (Emphasis mine.)
It's not just the God Squad that has problems with our country, either. We all know about the hideous harpies Michelle Malkin and Ann (the man) Coulter, both of whom have plenty of issues of their own. They'd merely be a couple of easily-ignored loony tunes if their continual outpouring of ordure didn't contain a very real kernel of loathing. Coulter is the misanthrope who wrote, "In California, the fabulously rich support the poor with government jobs paid for by the Middle Class which is now living in Arizona." Also: "My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is that he did not go to the New York Times Building." Advocation of mass murder goes far beyond the boundaries of mere tastelessness, Annie. Malkin's book, In Defense of Internment, is an abomination if one ever saw print, particularly considering that it comes from someone whose features have such a pronounced Asian cast that she'd likely have been imprisoned herself had she lived during those dark days.
Their commentary, such as it is, consists almost entirely of baseless, sense-free and often contradictory accusation, deliberately calculated to be as incendiary as possible. Coulter again: "It is more dangerous to be a friend of Bill Clinton's than it is to be an abortionist." And this: "Even Islamic terrorists don't hate America like liberals do." Also: "Democrats actually hate working-class people." Yeah, they DO talk about hate a lot; it's a subject they know well and practice constantly. Even the radical right keeps this sort of vituperation at arm's length...but they're delighted to use this pair as attack bimboes for their obvious nuisance value.
Everyone here should be familiar, also, with the fact that both Michael Savage and Junkie Limbaugh were booted out of lucrative television contracts because they just couldn't keep their hatred bottled up. (In Limbaugh's case, it was thinly-veiled racial slurs; he a bigot.) Audience reaction to both their outbursts was predictably vociferous and predictably negative. Of course, these purveyers of prejudice have since found niches churning out similar bile on AM radio where standards are significantly lower and controversy equates with market share. (Yes, they ARE desperate for listeners.)
Racism is a singular iniquity and Republicans have made it all their own. Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy," a tactic of the right ever since his blighted administration, is one especially vile manifestation...but I wasn't intending to get off on a tangent about the politics of bigotry here. Still, if you doubt that the GOP is racist, I would ask you to name one current, nationally-elected non-white party member. Just one.
It's pretty obvious that the right's blatantly partisan media seek to sow, water and fertilize hatred between genders, races and classes. Divisiveness is Karl Rove's meat and potatoes. It is equally self-evident that those Rapture-ruptured Evangelicals have wholly bought into it; the concept is central to that bizarre heresy which they seem determined to ride into the bowels of their own Hell.
I submit that their core principles of societal heirarchy, based on no more substantial a criterion than mere wealth, run absolutely counter to the fundamentals of American democracy. They are incapable of believing in Jefferson's "self-evident truth" that "all men are created equal."
Their aberration appears to have started with Edmund Burke, born in Dublin, Ireland in 1729, the son of an attorney. He entered Brisish Parliament as a Whig--known as 'the people's party'--in 1765, but it became obvious early on that he was not altogether comfortable with their ideals. Burke was dead set against hasty reform, for example. Worse yet, he believed with every fiber of his being that the concept of aristocracy was natural and proper; the Divine Right of Kings and all of its attendant hogwash was just fine as frog hair in his estimation. (Here we have one bedrock concept of conservtive thought.)
Burke's bitterest enemy was the rationalism that came out of the Age of Reason (a fundamental principle of liberalism) and his entire ideology harkened back to the Dark Ages. Broadly speaking, it is entirely fair to say that conservatism shunned enlightenment. Sound familiar?
Burke urged the Parliament of King George III to conciliate the American colonies, a plea which fell on deaf ears, resulting in the Revolutionary War. This led, indirectly, to the French Revolution because Louis XVI, inept grandson of Louis XIV, had emptied his country's coffers assisting us. Burke soundly denounced the French Revolution, its injustice to individuals, its attacks on religion and its attempts to create a new social order...all hard-headed notions of the the rightwads of today. He wrote Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790 which greatly influenced British policy and opinion...and also became the basis for the Conservative Party of the United Kingdom. For this, Burke has entered history ostensibly as the father of modern conservatism.
Meanwhile, on our side of the Atlantic, the colonies were seemingly beset from every side. Bloody Indian wars on their western borders kept them occupied and hemmed in. The British, anxious to bring these long-distance upstarts to heel, initiated a series of oppressive Acts to both punish and tax them. The Stamp Act, the Townshend Act, the Tea Act, and the Coercive Acts were all resisted or flatly refused, fanning the ire of the colonists. Finally, the Restraining Act of 1775, which declared Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut to be in rebellion, was the proverbial last straw.
It must be remembered that even at this stage, some 16% of American colonists didn't want to break with Great Britain. They were known as British Empire Loyalists and one of their leaders was Joseph Galloway, a conservative with sympathies toward the crown who grew to be an active Tory, known in England as 'the king's party.' He was Speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly and a delegate to the First Continental Congress convened in the autumn of 1774, where he tried mightily to avert the break by submitting a Plan of Union. Before it could be decided upon, however, Paul Revere rode into town bearing the Suffolk Resolves from several Boston-area communities...and Galloway's Plan of Union died a-borning.
So it should be clear from this chain of events that even before there was a United States of America, conservative Joseph Galloway opposed the very concept. That first Continental Congress drafted a Declaratuion of Rights addressed to George III which, as a sop to Galloway's Assembly, conceded the right of Parliament to regulate colonial trade. (VERY bad move.) By the time of Continental Congress 2.0, convened in May of 1775 and bigger and better in every way, the fledgeling colonies had a shooting war on their hands in Lexington and Concord. Washington was appointed Commander in Chief of the newly formed army and on July 8, 1775, the Congress issued a Declaration setting forth the need to take up arms against the redcoats.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Now as hard as they try and as badly as they want to, the flying monkeys of the far right cannot alter the origins of our country. They cannot change the fact that Thomas Jefferson, himself a slave-owner, could be sufficiently forward-thinking, sufficiently progressive, to write into his splendid Declaration of Independence the notion of equality for all men. All men. They cannot change the fact that he--and Dr. Benjamin Franklin and George Washington and Thomas Paine and many others--chose the enlightened rationalism of Descartes, Rousseau, Voltaire and John Locke over superstition, ignorance and blind loyalty to out-dated aristocracy. This is precisely what the conservatives...and the out-of-touch neoconservatives now in power, can neither do nor even contemplate. They want an America, and by extension a world, ordered according to their own Neanderthal idea of social Darwinism, a term coined by Nelson Rockefeller to justify predation. They really and truly mean to legislate the notion that the wealthy elite are inherently more valuable, more important than everyone else. Don't believe me? Well, Neal Boortz, a bonafide flaming anus from the land of AM Hate Radio, actually said it out loud, right in front of God and everybody.
That's the end of Part One. I will be continuing this deconstruction of Crippled Conservatism over the next couple of months and expect it to include three or four more chapters. Thank you for your kind attention and please stay tuned! Angel Of Mercy signing off...