SPRING THOUGHTS 2021

The Proud Boys have little to be proud of and much more that is their shame.

Are you really a "patriot" if you want to tear down the democratic government of your country?

The people who attacked the U. S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 and the lying scum who encouraged that attack are "PATRIOTS" in the same sense that right-wing Evangelical CHRISTIANS are Christians (i. e. they are not!).

Dr. Samuel Johnson defined patriotism as "the last refuge of a scoundrel." Ambrose Bierce, writing in America and over 100 years later, corrected Dr. Johnson noting that patriotism is the first refuge of a scoundrel. I think we need a new word for love of country. The word "patriot" has been so abused for 60 years that it has no positive meaning anymore when lunatics, fascists, cultists and assorted other scum can call themselves by that name.

If people like James Dobson, Jim Bakker, Creflo Dollar, Franklin Graham, Tony Perkins, Pat Robertson and Roy Moore are CHRISTIANS it is just as well that Jesus of Nazareth has been dead for more than 2000 years.

The Oath Keepers might want to look for an oath that's actually worth keeping.

If Stewart Rhodes is an actual patriot, I'm the Queen of Sheba. Please note: I have never been a queen in any sense of the term and have never visited "Sheba" in any sense of that term either. 

The Second Amendment to our Constitution reads as follows:

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

We have only to look at the Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021 to see that these self-styled militias are anything but "well regulated" and oppose "the security of a free State". In consequence of their NOT meeting the conditions set forth in the Second Amendment their right "to keep and bear Arms" needs to be "infringed" and actually curtailed in the same way that we would take a firearm away from any other lunatics.

When we're being polite we call Republiscum office holders, candidates and voters Republicans even though they can't. The Republiscum Party and its adherents have made a disastrous mess of the national economy causing a total of 22 Recessions and Depressions of the 35 Recessions or Depressions since the Republican Party was founded. In almost every case it is Democrats who have had the task of cleaning up the mess that Republiscum have left the nation. Please note that the Republiscum Party bills itself as the party of "fiscal responsibility".

We also call them "Conservatives" when "Fascists" is the correct term. Why?

Once upon a time there were Republicans and Conservatives but largely since the 1950s there have been Republiscum and Fascists with few notable exceptions.

Jeffrey Epstein, his girlfriend and abbetters Ghislaine Maxwell and fellow trafficer(?) the Failed Orange Führer, trafficed in underage girls. Now Rep. Matt Gaetz, who describes himself as the most dedicated of dedicated Failed Orange Führer supporters, is under investigation for trafficing in underage girls. One of the most basic lies of the QAnon Cult involved in the sexual exploitation of underage children. I wonder how the right-wingnuts came up with that idea?

Antifa is shorthand for anti-Fascist. Other notable anti-Fascists include Dwight D. Eisenhower, George C. Marshall, Mark Clark, Omar N. Bradley, Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Josephine Baker, Frederico García Lorca, Berthold Brecht, Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi, Niels Bohr, George Kistiakowsky, Alan Turing, Reinhold Niebuhr and most of the soldiers and sailors who fought in World War II. So what's not to like unless, of course, you are a Fascist?

About half of white, evangelical voters say that they will refuse to be vaccinated against Covid-19. While their decision is both stupid and a prime example of sheep being led by the Judas Goat of disinformation  to the slaughter by from Fox, OANN and other right-wing media outlets, look on the bright side: many idiot right-wing evangelicals will be culled from the national herd, an outcome devoutly to be wished. If that makes me a bad person, so be it.

Unfortunately, many of those unvaccinated imbeciles will go out and infect smarter people and some imbeciles will survive this pandemic. That is a tragedy.

One of the reasons that the Republiscum Party has been so successful in locking in the evangelical vote is that the majority of evenagelicals will believe any bullshit that's fed to them. They believe in The Rapture. They believe that mental illness is caused by demonic possession. They believe that they can tell who is possessed by nonexistent demons. In short, they believe the same utter nonsense that allowed 20 citizens of Salem, Massachusetts to be murdered in 1692 and 1693. Technology progresses but we remain the same ignorant apes  century after century.

WIDDLE PEETY AND THE QANON CON

 

In the past year and currently I have had the utter displeasure of encountering a couple of QAnon Cultists. 

One was Jeff, not the racist, anti-semetic Jeff who was just a garden variety bigot. No. This Jeff was a self-made imbecile. He was 20-something and had devoted himself to Meth. Jeff hadn't a single tooth left in his face and not two brain cells to rub together. That latter characteristic may have been the reason that he'd gotten involved with Meth in the first place but the Meth had killed off any brain cells that might have helped him overcome his addiction.

One of the things about many addicts is that they never overcome the addiction qua addiction. They simply switch an addiction to drugs or alcohol for an addiction to religion or some other, more acceptable object of desire. Jeff had transferred his addiction to Meth to QAnon. Jeff's faith in the QAnon Con was absolute, as absolute as had been his addiction to Meth. He constantly had his phone tuned to some right-wing loonie channel. His earbuds carried directly to that malfunctioning brain messages of fiction that he never questioned. Worse yet, Jeff felt, with the zeal of the new convert, that everyone within earshot needed to hear the latest verse in the Gospel According to QAnon. When told to shut up and not annoy those who had not had his vision on his personal road to Damascus, Jeff would, in true Republiscum fashion, became irate that someone would impinge on his "Freedom of Speech". Explaining to Jeff that he was welcome to speak his lunatic nonsense somewhere else had no effect on his well-schooled indignation.

Jeff moved on to somewhere - I neither know nor care where - though I would not have been at all surprised to have found him smearing shit on the Capitol's walls on January 6th. Jeff could do something like that but might well have no idea why. In any case, Jeff now fades completely from my narrative although I hold him up as one very dangerous type of the QAnon Con Cultist.

Let us now turn our attention to Widdle Peety. Please be aware that the sarcasm is mine alone but Widdle Peety's actions are all actual, verifiable facts.

Widdle Peety is 50-ish if not 60 already but that's only the outward appearance of Widdle Peety because in his heart, in his soul, in every fiber of his being Widdle Peety is only 2½ years old. At some point in the past Widdle Peety fell out of a chair at the charitable institution where he lives (and I live too) and "hurt his back". I place that in quotes because Widdle Peety can pick up a 35 pound dog and carry him 10 or 20 yards if he wants to but he cannot pick up a paper towel that he dropped on the floor or an empty plastic bowl that he dropped. He especially cannot pick such things up if there's someone around whom he can con into cleaning up his mess. In one notable incident Widdle Peety clogged a toilet in the communal bathroom. There was no plunger handy, not that Widdle Peety would have cared to use it had one been close at hand, but, in this case, no plunger was present in the communal bathroom. So Widdle Peety, being so little and defenseless, rousted out of bed another dorm resident, a young man with serious mental health problems who is both quiet and pathologically helpful, and sent him to find a plunger and unclog the toilet. And, no, Widdle Peety did not offer to help.

In any case, thanks to that fall from a chair Widdle Peety's back has the Worstestest Owie® in the WHOLE WIDE WORLD! Nobody should ask Widdle Peety to do anything that might aggravate that Terwible, Terwible Owie® and you should know that aggravating that Terwible, Terwible Owie® can be anything at any time that Widdle Peety doesn't want to do. Why it's even so bad that Widdle Peety's Terwible, Terwible Owie® makes it impossible for him to lift those terwibly heavy wrappers for toilet paper rolls and put them in a nearby waste basket.

In the interests of full disclosure, you, dear reader, must know that Widdle Peety thinks that Bahstan Rob is the Meanestest Man in the Whole Wide World and He's Fat too®! Bahstan Rob is fat. Widdle Peety is, on the contrary, just "big boned". 

Being only 2½ years old, Widdle Peety has very few ways to defend himself against the mean, nasty, horwibleness of Bahstan Rob. Every time Widdle Peety thinks of a way to get back at Bahstan Rob, Horwible, Horwible Bahstan Rob® makes it so other people think that Widdle Peety, who is the Bestest, Smartest and Most Wonderful Widdle Peety in the Whole Wide World®, did a bad thing but it's only because Horwible, Horwible Bahstan Rob® reported Widdle Peety for doing it that other people think that Widdle Peety did a bad thing which he would never, ever do, except maybe the time Widdle Peety shit in the communal shower stall and left it there for Bahstan Rob to clean up. But that was only because of the horwible, horwible things, like breathing or not wanting to clean up poor Widdle Peety's shit, that Horwible, Horwible Bahstan Rob® did to poor Widdle Peety.

It should come as no surprise to you that Widdle Peety is a QAnonsense cultist. Widdle Peety believes that The Failed Orange Führer is the Mostest Greatest Man to ever, ever live, next, maybe, to Jesus, but only maybe, Widdle Peety believes that all Democrats are demons who traffic in minor children and drink the blood of babies, especially Hillary Clinton and Oprah. You should know that Widdle Peety has only been married once (once was enough says Widdle Peety) and is now divorced because no self-respecting woman would want to stay married to a 2½ year old whose shit she would have to clean out of the shower. Rejoice, dear reader in the fact that Widdle Peety has not passed his gene cesspool along to a new generation. Widdle Peety knows for an absolute fact that there is no disparity between the pay of men and women because that lie has been debunked by the very knowledgeable people who tell him over the Internet that they or the researchers whose credentials they never cite have debunked it. He also knows that it is a crime that the Deep State® keeps Hillary from being LOCK HER UPed for her many crimes. The late, great Rash Lamebrain told him so before ascending bodily into Heaven.

In short, the shit that Widdle Peety left in the shower stall was only an infinitesimal fraction of the overflowing shit that fills Widdle Peety thanks to his commitment to QAnonsense and neo-Nazi radio and Internet sites. Widdle Peety is a bundle of misogyny, bigotry, hate and ignorance. Widdle Peety attended college but found it unrewarding because professors were "not open" to the "different ideas" that Widdle Peety expressed to them.

These QAnonsense cultists are, like Jeff and Widdle Peety, people of no mind or closed mind. Like the ultra-right wing Evangelical CHRISTIANs the QAnonsense cultists will believe any bullshit that a self-appointed prophet or preacher shovels at them. The critical reason that the fools and fooled accept these noisome piles of utter nonsense is that they come from a person who has some claim to authority. People who cannot think for themselves or simply don't want to do so deliver their autonomy to someone they trust and they trust people they see on television or on their other screens. They trust the loud voice on the radio that appeals to their weaknesses and/or bigotry. If you doubt this I would suggest that you look again at the ascendency of The Failed Orange Führer.

A friend of mine has a framed calligraphic saying on her wall that reads, "Never try to teach a pig to sing. It only frustrates you and annoys the pig." Widdle Peety is, unquestionably, a pig. I have never heard him sing and hope that experience continues to elude me. I certainly will never offer him singing lessons.

We who are capable of rational, critical thought have been bombarded with many messages urging that we learn how to speak with QAnonsense cultists like Widdle Peety and Jeff. That impulse is inherent to our rational thought and a fallacy that we cherish because we believe that everyone else is also capable of rational, critical thought. It is absolutely and unequivocally a fallacy. The QAnonsense cultists, Evangelical CHRISTIANS, 3%ers, Proud Boys, Bugaloo Bois, White Supremacists, Oath Keepers, Anti-Maskers, Anti-Vaccers and their similarly mindless, irrational fools have, as an inherent tenet, rejected rational, critical thought. In fact, they have rejected thought itself. We need to stop the frustrating practice of trying to teach these pigs to sing and simply ostracize them from all access to the institutions of rational society. They must be banned from all aspects of communication other than person to person meetings. The public media that promote their lunatic conspiracies need to have their licenses to use the public airwaves revoked. Their lunatic views must be exposed and disqualify them from holding public office. Colleges and universities, indeed even lower level private educational institutions that do not teach rational, critical thought and the actual scientific method, should not be certified as being like those public and private institutions that do teach those disciplines.

I am not for censorship but rather for separating lunacy and stupidity from rational behavior. We need to distinguish between fact and belief. Widdle Peety and Jeff have the right to believe any idiocy, bigotry and hate they choose to believe. They may communicate their lunacy to anyone they please and be heard, person to person, to anyone patient or foolish enough to listen. I will defend their right to their beliefs and right to communicate those beliefs in person. However, that does not stop any hearer from turning his or her back on them. If they wish to use a public utility, like the public airwaves, to communicate those lunatic beliefs they have no special right to do so. 

Belief is something that needs no factual basis. Belief is not and never is fact. Belief is not understanding. No belief should ever trump fact. The distinct difference between fact and belief must be a preeminent distinction maintained for the benefit of public discourse. If you have and can present verifiable facts you have access to public means of communication. If you have beliefs not based on facts, regardless of how venerable the mythology you accept, you are welcome to present your beliefs in person to others who are willing to listen but not to use public resources to vent your un- and often counterfactual beliefs.

I just don't want the multitude of Widdle Peetys, Sean Hannitys, Tucker Carlsons, Marjorie Taylor Greenes, et al. out there to be able to continue shitting in the communal shower.

A MELTING SNOWFLAKE

 

Two days after our national election at about 9:00 P. M. Eastern Standard Time a national embarrassment embarrassed the nation further while undermining American democracy. Let's face it, when our Orange Führer opens his mouth he embarrasses everyone in the nation and most of the world except for himself and his family and his cadre of grifters, yes-men, white supremacists and just scumbags that form the Republiscum Party. He came forth to meet reporters in a house that he never should have occupied in the first place because he was and is unworthy of the office that racists, lunatics, fascists and stupid "reality" television show fans elected him to in 2016.

 The Orange Führer and the Republiscum Party have never been thrilled with the messiness of democracy. In Republiscum ideology they know what's good for the nation and they have to tolerate, at least, and manipulate, usually, the "great unwashed" so that democracy doesn't get too "uppity" and try to do positive things for the poor and middle class. In Republiscum ideology fascism is the object; they just don't like to be up front about it. 

William F. Buckley, looking at the problems of the Republiscum Party in the 1950s and 1960s, offered the formula that Republiscum could be as fascist as they wished in private as long as they pretended to patriotism and gave lip service to democracy in public. Buckley's formula began to degrade with the election of Richard Milhous Nixon in 1968. Once Nixon and the Republiscum absorbed the white supremacists in the "Southern Strategy" at the urging of dyed-in-the-wool racist, Strom Thurmond, the marriage of fascism and native racism brought both a bit too far out in public. It was the equivalent of the drunk relative at the family gathering who forgot to zip his fly though he was still tucked in.

Since the Reagan Administration, however, what once was trucked in has (there isn't any good adjective for this) increasingly hung out to the disgust of many. A lot of revisionists in politics have tried to find positive things in the Reagan Administration. I lived through it. The only positive things about the presidency of corporate spokes clown, Ronald McReagan, were the positive brakes imposed on him by Tip O'Neill and a Democratic Congress.

What Reagan did manage to do was upset the Democratic coalition of working class Americans by convincing millions, with no evidence but empty rhetoric, that the Republiscum Party really had the interests of the middle class at heart. It doesn't and never has had but as Abraham Lincoln put it, "you can fool some of the people, all of the time and all of the people some of the time...." Thus, for 40 years the Republiscum, with the complicity of many Democrats, have cut taxes on the wealthiest few in America while also cutting services to the poor and middle class. This farrago has the effect of making the middle class angry at the poor, who do get a small and shrinking safety net, while adoring the rich which they delude themselves into thinking they can be with the correct lottery bet.

Very few understand that the taxes "cut" were providing them with essential services and reliable ways out of poverty and debt for themselves and their children. Those tax cuts that have disproportionately benefited the small percentage of the wealthiest Americans have brought on higher tuition at public colleges and universities, stagnant wages, greater personal debt and decreased upward mobility for themselves and their children. Meanwhile phony "news" services like Faux, Sterling and NewsMax con the unwary into hatred of those who are worse off than themselves so that few of the middle class understand that they are being fleeced by the wealthy.

This election saw the Republiscum Party and our Orange Führer move from their ambient fascism to full totalitarian Nazi mode by undercutting democracy itself and inciting violence against even their own elected officials, those who had the temerity to break with the Orange Führer's party line and tell the truth for once.

American democracy has evolved over the last 233 years. That evolution has seen us move to a greater and greater inclusiveness in our electorate which is a good thing as long as that electorate is informed by actual facts and genuine concern for the broad education of the public. That is what our Freedoms of the Press and of Speech were intended to promote. When those freedoms are perverted into the spouting of lies in the guise of news our democracy breaks down into camps of those who can be fooled "all of the time".

For the 7 weeks since the national election the Orange Führer and a majority of Republiscum office holders have lied, obfuscated and generally undermined our democratic institutions in order to promote the false claim that the Orange Führer actually won an election that he lost by 7 million votes of the people and 39 Electoral College votes. Even a U. S. Supreme Court heavily weighted with Republiscum ideologues could not stomach the Orange Führer's false claims or the lunatic conspiracy theories of his unethical lawyers.

According to legend, as Benjamin Franklin left the Constitutional Convention in 1787 a person in the crowd outside of Independence Hall shouted, "Dr. Franklin, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" To which Franklin replied, "A republic, if you can keep it." It is the job of every American to keep it. The self-styled "patriot" militias, Proud Boys, Bugaloo Bois, white supremacists, Ku Klux Klansmen, "Patriot" Prayer members and right wing evangelicals that make up the Republiscum Party are not keepers of our republic. They seek to undermine it with every foul breath they take. They are abetted in their treason to their nation by the right wing extremist television and radio media that trumpet nonsense instead of news, conspiracies instead of facts and idiocy disguised as opinion.

Thanks to the Orange Führer and the Republiscum Party we are on the verge of not being able to keep the republic we have and of losing the democracy that we have won at great cost over the last 2 centuries.

PYROMANIACS

Yesterday, July 1, 2020, I heard one of the men in my building telling another that the Democrats (to this Trumpite/Republiscum a dirty word) are trying to cancel the Fourth of July and want to bomb Mount Rushmore. For the moment let's set aside the absurdity of his oral diarrhea and focus just on his assertions.

It is correct that our Orange Fürher has scheduled one of his rallies for Mount Rushmore in South Dakota for the Fourth of July.

It is also correct that many people, not just Democrats, see his rallies as major vectors for transmission of the CoVid-19 virus since there will be neither social distancing nor mask wearing at the event. With new infections from the novel corona virus hitting new peaks daily (48,000 new cases on July 1 alone) all opportunities for mass transmission of the disease should be curtailed.

Further, it is correct that the Orange Fürher has scheduled a fireworks spectacular for the close of his rally at Mount Rushmore. Both the National Park Service and the Forestry Service have asked that the fireworks display be eliminated because of a serious risk of forest fires. The Orange Fürher and the Republiscum Party have ignored those warnings.

If you, dear reader if you exist, ever played the game of "Telephone" when you were younger you know that information can get garbled and strangely perverted in the course of transmission. While such things do happen, this nonsense is of a particularly nasty and vicious order. The message that my Trumpite/Republiscum co-resident receives has been intentionally garbled and intentionally perverted to suit the Trumpite/Republiscum supporters and rile them up to new heights of frenzy. This imbecile in my building has no idea who is shoveling this offal onto the Internet pages he frequents. He doesn't know who funds his sources or where they are actually located. All he cares about is that they feed his bigotries and stupidity with drivel that he's predisposed to credit.

As America began burning up with rage over the murders of George Floyd and others, far too many others for far too long, the German magazine, Der Spiegle published with a cover that showed America on fire in the background through a White House window. In the foreground sat the Orange Fürher holding a lighted match. The caption to the artwork reads, "Der Feuerteufel/ Eine Präsident setzt sein Land in Brand". In English that means literally "The Fire-Devil (Pyromaniac)/ A President sets his Nation on Fire (to the Torch)".

The great and very Conservative Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wrote in the opinion in Schenck v. United States that "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing panic." The scum who use any forum to foment panic by shouting the kind of idiocies that my co-resident mouths are precisely "falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing panic." The Rash Lamebrians, Ann Coulters, Sean Hannitys, Janine Pirros, Laura Ingrahams, Glenn Becks, Alex Joneses and others both in and out of Russia and China are fomenting hate and violence against those whose politics simply differs from theirs or the candidate that they prefer. They know that the gasoline they are pouring on the fire is gasoline. They are abetted in their pyromania by Mark Zuckerberg and some more well-meaning Internet entrepreneurs confused as to the scope of our Constitutionally guaranteed free speech.

Perhaps you will recall "Pizzagate" in which Alex Jones and other ultra right-wing and white supremacist web sites spent weeks promoting the farrago that Hillary Clinton and her campaign chairman, John Podesta, were running a child trafficing ring out of the basement of a Washington, D. C. pizza parlor that didn't have a basement. The result was that on December 4, 2016 a North Carolina man who, like my imbecile co-resident, credited such crap invaded the pizza parlor and briefly shot up the place before being arrested and disarmed by the police. What went unnoticed was that the businesses neighboring the pizza parlor as well as others as far afield as New York City and Austin, Texas were harassed and vandalized by the idiots taken in by this heinous lie. Members of the pizza parlors owner's family, his friends and even members of bands who'd played at the parlor received threatening phone calls and mail.

Our Constitution enshrines our right to speak our minds and make our opinions known. It does not, however, protect those who incite violence, as  our Orange Fürher and his minions on Fox News and the Internet have done. Deliberately promulgating patently false information is not protected free speech. It is rather incitement to violence. My freedom of expression is not curbed by being forced, under penalties established under law, to wear a face mask or stay at least 6 feet from other persons during an epidemic. Mary Mallon, known to history as Typhoid Mary, was not unjustly imprisoned when she'd infected 53 people with typhoid fever and caused 3 deaths. Public safety, that is the safety of the public at large, was endangered by her free movement. When Mary Mallon refused to give up her work as a cook, she had to lose her personal freedom to prevent more and wider infections.

Not only are the Orange Fürher and his syncophants of the Republiscum Party  pyromaniacs, the Orange Fürher himself is also a Typhoid Mary spreading the disease of phony conspiracies, lies, bigotry and hatred to thousands who share his bigotry and ignorance.

My co-resident is an imbecile and a fool. He never seeks to question anything he hears as long as it comports with his hatred and ignorance. He is not alone in that. He is far from alone in that. My very faint hope is that Abraham Lincoln was correct in saying (and he may never have said it but it's still a pretty good line), "You can fool some of the people all of the time and you can fool all of the people some of the time but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." I will stick with the attribution to Lincoln and hope against hope that enough of the voters in enough of the states will not be fooled this coming November 3rd.

MODERATION IN...NOTHING

Two years ago I listened to a lot of news up to and following the 2018 mid-term elections. One of the tropes that kept coming up was the "demise of the Moderate Republican". It seemed to be something that news outlets enjoy discussing and airing interviews with self-appointed experts and even alleged Republiscum Moderates. The problem with this Republiscum Moderate trope is that it comes 50 or 60 years too late, possibly even more. The only reason that some Republiscum look "moderate" is that, like Ivory Soap, the Republiscum Party is 99 and 44/100ths per cent pure fascist shading over to full Nazi. If you're a Republiscum elected official who doesn't think that our military should be shooting refugees from Central America, you're a moderate because you only want to make it impossible for those same refugees to gain acknowledged refugee status and ultimately become U. S. citizens. The only way that is "moderate" is in contrast to the "build the wall and shoot anyone who tries to climb over" vast majority of Republiscum.

I'm sorry, Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, and a few others but you would have been right-wing extremists in 1950 and Goldwaterites in the early 1960s. Now that the vast majority of your colleagues are goosestepping to whatever tune The Orange Führer is tweeting you look moderate but you are absolutely, definitively not anything like moderate. Jeff, brokering a week of seriously curtailed investigation of Brett Kavanaugh and then voting for the alcoholic, rapist, ultra-right-wing bastard is not the stuff of which moderation is made. You may be a fascist looking for some cover in case we ever get a U. S. version of the Nürnberg Trials but that is not the stuff of moderation.


I have been paraphrasing General Philip Sheridan for decades saying the only good Republiscum is a dead Republiscum. That doesn't mean I or anyone should go out and start shooting Republiscum. By ignoring sensible precautions to control the corona virus pandemic the Republiscum will be making plenty of dead Republiscum without my or anyone's intervention. What I mean by that phrase is there are plenty of good Republicans but they are all dead: Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, Robert LaFollette, Margaret Chase Smith, Millicent Fenwick and Elliot Richardson to name but a few. All moderates and even Progressives of their day but they are all dead.

Actually, I'm being a little unfair because Pete McCloskey is still alive at 93 and William Ruckelhaus only died last November at 87. Some might point out that Mitt Romney passes as a moderate but that is sort of like saying that Albert Speer wasn't much of a Nazi. Mitt, whether governor of Massachusetts or senator from Utah, is a vacuum filled by whatever makes Mitt look good for the moment. That self-serving thing of the moment can then be whisked away in the slightest breeze from a different direction. Mitt Romney is the walking, talking personification of there being no "there", there.

Currently the Republiscum Party has committed itself to Trumpist dictatorship. Mitch McConnell has been running the U. S. Senate with a playbook cadged from the Nazi takeover of the Weimar Parliament. Like the rise of the Nazis in 1929-33 there is no concern with venality and corruption in government as long as those corrupt, venal Republiscum in question adhere to the Republiscum Party line. There is no concern with actual violation of the Constitution so long it is a Republiscum who's violating it.

There are some differences between the Republiscum of today and the Nazis of the 1920s and 1930s. For one they don't resort to assassination, so far as we can tell. They just make as many legitimate voters as possible ineligible to vote so that their inability to attract a majority, one they congenitally despise anyway, won't be a bar to elective office.

Unless I am somehow mistaken, along with every dictionary and close to two hundred and fifty years of political rhetoric in this country, "democracy" means "government of the people, by the people and for the people" just to add in Abraham Lincoln's apt phrase. Keeping "people" from casting votes on specious and spurious grounds is the very definition of "anti-democratic", that is opposite to democracy itself. But that doesn't bother the Republiscum. They are only interested in the oligarchs who fund them and in hugging a flag now and then for show or using a Bible as a prop and means of paying no taxes.

The Orange Führer and his Republiscum allies like Mitch McConnell and Tom Cotton decry voting by mail as an invitation to vote fraud. They ignore the fact that many states have used vote-by-mail for a decade or more without any hint of voter fraud. Meanwhile the only confirmed case of voter fraud in the nation over the last fifty years was a systematic action by the Republiscum Party in one Congressional District in North Carolina in 2018. If we are worried about vote fraud, it is the Republiscum Party whose actions we must vigilantly check, not the individual voter mailing in a ballot.

When the demos, the Greek word for the people, take to the streets peaceably because, regardless of our skin color, we have had more than enough of police abusing their power by murdering citizens, most often citizens of color, the Republiscum start screaming about riots and suppressing dissent. I seem to recall that their attitude was a bit different when smaller demonstrations by the Astroturf "Tea Party" group their oligarchs funded were carrying idiot signs that read things like, "Keep Govt out of my Medicare!" The Orange Führer's attitude toward protesters was different when neo-Nazis demonstrated in Charlottesville, Virginia and one of their number used his car to murder and maim protesters. Also, it's particularly interesting to watch the talking heads of the Volkische Beobachter (i. e. Fox News) scream about violent protesters when time after time in Minnesota, Colorado, Washington and California it has been police who have initiated the violence or the Republiscum and "Libertarian" supporters like the "Proud Boys" or the "Boogaloo Bois" (spelling and, more broadly, education are not the strong suit of these thugs) who have infiltrated peaceful protests and initiated violence.

The fact is that the Republiscum have no shame and no moderation at all. They incite and condone violence in defense of their anti-democratic attempts to establish a neo-Fascist oligarchy in the United States. There is no instance in which we can rationally speak of a "Moderate Republiscum". Like fairies, demons and unicorns the "Moderate Republiscum" simply does not exist except in the rhetoric of some news networks desperate to fill air time. How "moderate" is the Mussolini-style Fascist when compared with his Simese Twin brother the neo-Nazi anyway?

RIGHT-WING RALPHING

The neo-Fascists among us have long railed against anything that does not comport with their world view. If if isn't echt Fascist than it must be (Heaven forefend!) Liberal which is, in their blinkered and jaundiced view, Progressive which is Socialist and also Communist! That is the formulation the neo-Fascists continually use to delude the rubes and, to borrow from the very apt H. L. Mencken, Boobouisie in the electorate. Of course, they don't like the Fascist or neo-Fascist label and have gone so far as to convince the ahistorical and semi-literate that Nazism and Communism are one in the same simply because Nazi is a contraction of Natzionatalische Socialistiche Partei. If the Nazi's abused the name of socialism to blinker German voters in the 1920s and 1930s then they must have been Leftists like the Liberals=Progressives=Socialists=Communists of today. Of course they must because CHRISTIAN preachers and their Volkische Beobachter, Fox News says so.

For 50 years we've had the neo-Fascists railing against "the Liberal Media" meaning all Non-Fascist Media. Dr. Goebbles'...I mean Rupert Murdock's...(so confusing trying to keep those two straight!) media outlets have recently had a guest on railing against Liberal and Feminist bias in the Disney animated film Ralph Breaks the Internet. The claim was that Disney's characters influence the good, seen-and-not-heard, obedient children of neo-Fascist parents to become disobedient "smart-mouthed children". We certainly can't have that! Why, children have never had such disobedient role models is the good, old Martin Dies/Joe McCarthy/Richard Nixon/Barry Goldwater days. It may also have something to do with the pernicious and insidious effect that the voice of smart-mouthed Liberal Democrat Feminist Sarah Silverman may have on children unaware that she is a Liberal, Feminist and Democrat or of what those terms mean.

In those good, old, kill-a-Commie-for-Christ days there never were smart-mouthed and disobedient children if you eliminate Nancy Drew, Nancy and Sluggo, the Hardy Boys, all the kids putting on shows with Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, Pippi Longstocking, the cartoon kids in Peanuts, Dennis the Menace, all those later kids on the beaches with Annette Funicello, Frankie Avalon and Gidget, the Goonies and...well, the list goes on.

This active search for movies, books, radio and other media that offend the delicate sensibilities of the lunatic right-wing goes on from generation to generation. Why aren't these self-appointed guardians of public morality against all that ruffles their nether feathers called "special snowflakes"? They certainly are flaky enough! I vividly recall a similar right-wing hack railing against the 1964 movie, The Yellow Rolls Royce. That film's crime came in the third story regarding the eponymous automobile. You see its owner, played by Ingrid Bergman, found herself in Yugoslavia during the Nazi occupation and turns the car over to partisans fighting the Nazis. Anyone with any historical knowledge will know that the leader of the chief faction fighting for Balkan nationalism and against the Nazis was Josip Broz Tito a (shudder!) communist. Despite the leader of the movie partisans being played by Omar Sharif and there being no mention of any politics other than opposition to the Nazis the mere hint of support for someone who turned out to be an avowed communist was intolerable in the year that Barry Goldwater ran for president.

All of this is nonsense at best and insane even when given the benefit of the doubt. The neo-Fascist will never be satisfied unless the media of all sorts looks and sounds like a brown-shirted Nürnberg rally. If everyone isn't goosestepping on the march in straight-arm saluting conformity with them then those who have the temerity to question, to dissent and to be "smart-mouthed" will always be a danger to be expunged. I must, however, ask the question weren't Patrick Henry, John Hancock, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and all the others, weren't they questioners, dissenters and "smart-mouthed" too? Isn't our Declaration of Independence one of the great "smart-mouthed" documents of all time? If the answer to those questions is, Yes, who should we conclude is opposed to the basic values of America?

P. S. Ralph Breaks the Internet's opening weekend had the highest gross of any movie currently in theatres. The best revenge on the neo-Fascists is beating them at capitalism.

Taking The Prize

In Richard Rhodes magisterial work The Making of the Atomic Bomb he recounts how the Nobel Prize committee was concerned for the safety of Italian physicist Enrico Fermi. Fermi’s wife, Laura, was Jewish and Fermi himself was no friend to Mussolini’s Fascist Regime. Members of the selection committee for the 1938 Physics prize made overtures in advance of the award to see if Fermi would be ready to leave Italy if the Nobel could get him and his family out to Stockholm and safety while providing them a financial buffer. Thanks to the award of that Nobel Prize in Physics the first controlled nuclear fission reaction happened in a squash court at the University of Chicago and not within the confines of Mussolini’s Italy or Hitler’s Germany.

That story came to my mind when I heard the announcement that President Barak Obama was the selected recipient of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.

Since the award we have been subjected to cogitations by an array of fools, scum and thinkers opining on whether President Obama deserved the prize. Some have objected that there are groups working, often with little recognition, to promote peace in The Congo, Sudan, Liberia, Sierra Leone, the Horn of Africa generally and promoting democracy in China, Burma, Iran, Saudi Arabia and a raft of countries that once were part of the Soviet Union who might lay more claim to this prize. Others, mostly lurking in the neo-fascist shadows of Fox News, the Heritage Foundation and the Weekly Double Standard, have attempted to argue that Obama does not deserve the prize at all based on a thinly disguised version of the racist “it’s just affirmative action” farrago.

I am about as far from knowledge of what goes through the minds of the people who select the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize as one can get. Still that story about Fermi came to mind.

To those who consider themselves members of the political Left who object that President Obama has not yet closed the Concentration Camp at Guantanamo Bay, repudiated all of the odious acts of the previous Administration or withdrawn troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, let me point out that in 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt was awarded the Peace Prize for organizing and hosting the Portsmouth Conference that ended the Russo-Japanese War. At that same time Roosevelt was pursuing a genocidal war in the Philippines and bullying much of Central and South America.

America’s next Peace Prize winner, Elihu Root, was a staunch Republican from Clinton, New York who won the prize for his work in that bugaboo of the xenophobes and jingoists in his own party then as now, international law. Root won despite his record of support for Theodore Roosevelt’s worst imperialist tendencies and service to William McKinley in promoting the overtly imperialist Spanish-American War. In short both TR and Root won their prizes more in spite of their records promoting strife rather than their records of promoting peace.

But let’s go back to the story of Enrico Fermi’s prize in Physics. The Nobel Committee chose Fermi as much because of his future potential as for his past accomplishments and, most significantly, to demonstrate its opposition to Mussolini’s fascism and Hitler’s Nazism. Those wise men, whose formative experience had been the senseless and vicious World War I, now saw their world descending rapidly toward the horrors of World War II. Their practical motive was depriving the forces of fear and violence of a great mind whose genius might be forced to feed the fascist monsters’ military bloodlust. Their ideological motive was to demonstrate their opposition to fascism.

The faces of the committee members have changed many times in the last 71 years but the motive to oppose fascism has, I think, remained constant. I would suggest that the Nobel Peace Prize winners, particularly since 2001, have demonstrated the committee’s increasing fear of America’s descent into fascism.

In 2001, the prize went to Kofi Annan who had capped his service as Secretary General of the United Nations by opposing the Bush Administration’s imperialist militarism. In 2002, as the Bush Administration gear up for an unjustified, ill-planned and ill-executed war against Iraq, the prize went to former President Jimmy Carter for his 21 years of work toward world-wide democracy and peace. Carter, we should note, has been the neo-fascist’s whipping boy since the day of his inauguration and at no time more than during the Bush Administration. In 2005, as the Bush Administration ginned up nuclear fears for a third war against Iran, the prize committee chose Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in good part for his refutations of Bush propaganda. Then in 2007 the Peace prize went to Al Gore for his work in raising awareness of global climate change though no one could miss the rebuke in honoring the man from whom Bush and Cheney stole the 2000 presidential election.

And now we have the selection of President Obama. The president has accepted the prize with characteristic modesty and decency while the neo-fascists scream that he’s done nothing to deserve the prize. That, however, is only in their blinkered and clouded eyes.

Throughout most of the rest of the world Barak Obama has done many things from addressing the Arab-Israeli conflict in real terms to trying to mitigate the world-wide economic collapse created by American financial pirates. But his greatest achievement is neither his personal history, his understanding of Islam nor his skin color. President Obama has done enormous service to world peace simply by not being George W. Bush or, in fact, any other Republican. Just not being a representative of American fascism is to be worthy of the prize in the eyes of those beyond our borders.

And, I believe, the committee that chose him as the 2009 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize also had in mind another factor that may have moved them to significant haste. You see the Nobel Committee awards the prizes to living persons. I suspect that committee members may have worried that their time might be short. America’s reputation for violence and insanity, its racism, its senseless fetishizing of guns and its history of turning character assassination into actual assassination may have influenced the award while the committee had the chance.

The Nobel Committee, I’m sure, wishes President Obama well and long life just as I do. Yet I cannot but think that some members saw the news footage of neo-fascist lunatics bringing pistols and assault rifles to presidential appearances and thought those pictures a prelude to their worst fears for the President.

So I have to conclude that the award of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama was both earned and timely. Earned by the simple fact of his presidency making the world a less dangerous place and timely because we do not know when the next Timothy McVeigh, Byron de la Beckwith or Eric Robert Rudolph incited by a Rush Limbaugh, James Dobson, Fred Phelps or Glenn Beck will target this good man.

If those considerations entered into the prize committee’s deliberations I am as ashamed for my country as I am proud for President Obama. I am glad he’s been awarded this honor. After eight years of wishing that my president could live up to even the lowest aspirations of my country I find myself in the position of hoping that my country will rise to the least of President Obama’s expectations for it. However, since this award, we seem to have been bent on demonstrating that Americans generally stand shoulder to shoelace with the president.

Oiling The Cogs of Cognitive Dissonance I

When General Motors and Chrysler were in financial trouble in the end of 2008 and beginning of 2009 we heard very little about the ways in which management had screwed up those companies. What we heard was a deafening chorus primarily from those in the pocket of the Chamber of Commerce and similar neo-fascist organizations of blame heaped on the unions. A great, Visgothic Horde of pillaging unionists were sucking the lifeblood out of the American auto industry having steamrollered a valiant phalanx of noble executives and directors in a 20th Century Thermopylae. There were no incompetent, greedy members of management. The Unions alone were the ravening wolves dragging down American industry. In fact, this is a chant we've heard for decades. Noble corporate executives aided by white knights like Lee Iacocca, Carl Icahn, Kenny-Boy Lay and Jeffrey Skilling and more faceless others are simply overwhelmed by the selfish, vile trade unionists who make unreasonable demands like living wages and decent medical care for their workers or comfortable pensions for those who've given their productive lives in service to the company. The critiques were all but silent on the multi-million dollar salaries and bonuses paid to executives and directors regardless of the health of the companies. The Wall Street Journal editorial page, Fox News, The American Enterprise Institute, Hoover Institution and economists well aware of the side on which their bread is buttered from The Wharton and Harvard Business Schools or that nexus of neo-fascist thought, the University of Chicago demanded the gutting of union contracts as the sole prescription for saving these corporations.

Yet when it came to bonuses in the millions and billions of dollars for the people at banks who had bankrupted their own institutions, their investors and the nation as a whole, with barely a pause for breath, we were told by the same propagandists for neo-fascism that the contracts with these pirates must be honored, the exorbitant bonuses paid. While perpetuating this con they mount a vociferous defense of the necessity of paying these traders and executives to blare from their propaganda machines.

This is only one of the more subtle -yes, subtle - examples of how the Republican Party, fundamentalist religion and the right wing generally actually are a corporate sponsored criminal conspiracy got up in ill-fitting but no less ugly Halloween disguises.

Another example?

How about Jamie Leigh Jones?

Ms. Jones is a very pretty young woman. Let me note at this point that those are three attributes over which she has little or no control: pretty, young and female. They are an accident of birth. Her husband was in the military and at age 20, she decided to do her part by taking a job with Halliburton's subsidiary, Kellog, Brown and Root (KBR), Inc. Subjected to the unwanted advances of a KBR supervisor at its Houston headquarters, Ms. Jones requested a transfer. We don't know whether Ms. Jones refusal to put out for her supervisor influenced the choice of tranfers offered to her but she was sent to work for KBR in Iraq. KBR placed Ms. Jones in a dorm with no separate facilities for women. The bathroom was one floor below her bunkspace accessed through a men's dormitory.

Ms. Jones was subjected to continual harassment whenever she had to pass through that dorm. At this juncture it seems only fair to note that the sexual harassment of Ms. Jones has nothing to do with accidents of birth other than the lack of intelligence in those who carried it out. The harassment is behavior over which the rapists engaged in it and their employer had complete and absolute control. Had KBR personnel docked the pay of or fired any of the harassers they would have sent a powerful message that such behavior had to stop.

Ms. Jones complained about the harassment to her supervisors exactly as she was supposed to do. The next day following her complaint she was cornered, drugged with a date-rape drug and repeatedly gang raped. As the drug began to wear off she made her way back to her bunk only to find another rapist lying there. The next day she reported the rape to a supervisor. She was sent to an Army hospital where they took a rape kit and photographs. The medical staff also completed reports all of which were supposed to be confidential. Yet the next day her rapists threw her into a shipping container where she was imprisoned without food or water by the rapists under armed guard for more than 24 hours.

After she'd been out of contact for a couple of days, her father back in Houston contacted KBR for news of his daughter. He got no help from KBR and so contacted his Congressman. The Congressman contacted the State Department which eventually sent a delegation that freed Ms. Jones from her imprisonment and got her out of Iraq.

What is eminently clear so far is that the KBR supervisors colluded if not participated in Ms. Jones' drugging, rape and imprisonment. Moreover, the Army may have colluded with KBR because reports and photos of Ms. Jones taken at the Army hospital in Iraq remain missing. In fact, the damage even now continues. You see, Ms. Jones found that she had signed away her right to sue KBR over its, at minimum, negligence as a condition of her employment under a policy implement under the leadership of - I'm sure you're way ahead of me here - Dick Cheney. In short and in fairly typical right wing cognitive dissonance Ms. Jones was not even entitled to the apology that Cheney undeservedly got from a friend whom he'd shot in the face during a drunken quail hunt.

Ms. Jones was more than a little upset by her treatment by co-workers and KBR. When she found that she could not hold her rapists or KBR accountable she went public and testified before Congress. This, of course, set off the whores paid by Halliburton in the neo-fascist blogosphere. Predictably they have projected their own trade on Ms. Jones. After all, those neo-fascist bloggers voluntarily line up to accept money for what they do. But there is more which is how we now come to the most interesting development in this case.

One would think that gang rape would be unable to gather much public support. You would think. Yet this is not just a matter of gang rape. It involves Halliburton and KBR. If you are a Republican Senator and very well paid to lie back and make noises like you enjoy whatever Halliburton chooses to do to you, you do as you are told.

Senator Al Franken of Minnesota proposed an amendment inspired by this case to a military funding bill. Franken's bill would withhold Federal funds from corporations that attempt to shield themselves from liability when their employees rape a co-worker. Not a tough call one would think. Yet 30 of the Senate's Republicans bent over for Halliburton, just as they have been well paid to do, and sang, "Do It To Me One More Time."

Amazing? Who would go on record siding with rapists rather than their victims? I am so glad that you asked.

From Alabama - Sens. Jeff Sessions and Richard Shelby
From Arizona - Sens. John McCain and John Kyl
From Georgia - Sens. Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson
From Idaho - Sens. Mike Crapo and James Risch
From Kansas - Sens. Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts
From Kentucky - Sens. Jim Bunning and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell
From Louisiana - Sen. Mike Vitter
From Mississippi - Sens. Thad Cochran and Roger Wicker
From Missouri - Sen. Kit Bond
From Nebraska - Sen. Mike Johanns
From Nevada - Sen. John Ensign
From New Hampshire - Sen. Judd Gregg
From North Carolina - Sen. Richard Burr
From Oklahoma - Sens. James Inhofe and Tom Coburn
From South Carolina - Sens. Lindsay Graham and Jim DeMint
From South Dakota - Sen. John Thune
From Tennessee - Sens. Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker
From Texas - Sen. John Cornyn
From Wyoming - Sens. Mike Enzi and John Barrasso

To be honest I don't think that any of these senators are in favor of rape, gang or otherwise. The issue for them was not crime. The issue was who pays their bills. These senators, all of whom will grab a noose and scream for the public hanging of the odd criminal, even rapist, who is not a generous campaign contributor found themselves suddenly overwhelmed with Christian charity and, dare I say, empathy when the issue became the profits of corporations that pay for their campaigns. They have spent a great deal of time on the public airwaves and in the Congressional Record decrying Federal funding for ACORN which tries to insure that all Americans actually get to vote and are counted in the census, but will eagerly give KBR a pass on gang rape.

These senators argued that the Federal government should not interfere with the terms of private contracts. They were arguing a few months ago that the Federal government needed to void all sorts of terms of the contracts between both current and retired workers of General Motors and Chrysler.

These same senators have argued that there is grave moral hazard in renegotiating mortgages of families who were conned into contracts that they plainly could not afford by loan officers and companies interested only in their own commissions. Yet these same senators see no moral hazard in exempting corporations from liability when they fail to protect all their employees.

To a man they argue that 1 trillion dollars over a decade is too much to pay for universal health care for Americans yet have had no trouble in writing 1 trillion dollars in checks to pay for an unnecessary and ruinous war in Iraq.

They claim a mantle of fiscal responsibility in the face of deficit spending while expecting everyone to forget that when they came to unrestricted power in 2001 they immediately turned a Treasury surplus into the largest deficits in American history.

The fact is that we aren't even talking about cognitive dissonance which implies honestly held opinions at variance with one another. We are dealing with simple, old fashioned fraud. The Republican Party has long been bought and paid for. One can reasonably argue that has been true since it emerged as a majority part following the Civil War. Yet over the last six decades with the fascist militarization of America the whoring of the Republican Party has reached its apotheosis. We accept that both parties are in thrall to wealth and particularly corporate wealth. Yet the Democratic Party has created the "big tent" that the Republicans lie about having. The Democrats' multiple constituencies both immobilize it, at worst, and make it, at best, responsive to the people. The Republican Party, the ultra-right religious fanatics and Fox News whores who promote it, is responsive to none but its corporate masters. The Republican Party is more a criminal conspiracy like the Mafia than a political party and far more a threat to the nation than most of organized crime.

So when a Republican or one of the neo-fascist apologists from their foundations, institutes or propaganda outlets like Fox News begins to spout about fiscal responsibility, moral hazard, or the necessity of something utterly counter-intuitive, ask yourself, "Who's profiting from the course he or she proposes?" If it's not you and/or your partner and your combined income is less than $75,000.00 per year let me suggest that regardless of any buzz words in the presentation, it is not in your interest. Taking a position opposite to the con man to whom you are listening is almost certainly the best for you. The Republicans would not know moral if it bit them on the ass. It is they who are the hazard to America.

Praise the Lord! I

So homosexuality is "against god's law." Evolution contradicts the "inerrant word of god." Science, we are told must take a back seat to revelation. It's claptrap and is actually acknowledged to be claptrap. Fundamentalists don't dispute the cosmology that science gave us: a solar centric universe. They don't dispute the speed of light or the existence of electricity or of the atom. But Fundamentalists do dispute the things they wish to dispute.

A lot of air time and forests of paper and rivers of ink have been devoted to noting this idiocy, but there's very little discussion of why revelation needs to reign over empiricism. Perhaps one way of getting at that problem is in asking why it is so important to publicly support such nonsense for people who don't actually believe it themselves?

I think that the attack on science is identical in origin and purpose to the attack on "the media." For 40 years at least the right-wing has been attacking the amorphous, indistinct strawman "the media." Of course what goes unsaid most of the time is the modifier "the Liberal media." The right-wing fanatics found it expedient to convince a large segment of the public that the information they receive through newspapers, radio and television is biased and, therefore, untrustworthy. It's rather like the old joke about the wife whose husband catches her in bed with another man. The punch line is, "Who are you going to believe? Me or your eyes?" The first step in getting people to believe something other than their actual experience is to convince them that what they are seeing is a lie.

We should note that the media outlets most ideologically skewed, Rupert Murdock's newspapers and Fox News, and Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times, present themselves as "fair and balanced" though they are anything but. Meanwhile probably the most fair and balanced media outlet, Public Broadcasting, is vilified and under constant attack. The term "the media" may be shorthand for any reporting that displeases the right-wing fanatics but, in the minds of those fanatics, it never includes the media outlets spouting their bias and outright lies.

Yet there's a weakness in the narrow focus on "the media." The weakness is that sometimes something happens that is so outrageous that claiming that it's a construction of "media bias" just won't wash. In those cases, even some of the fanatics themselves are forced to accept the truth of what they see or hear. The senses are a powerful contradictor of ideology.

So how does a fanatic convince people that even their senses can't be trusted? Well there is a way...Praise the Lord!

God is the ultimate paradigm for contradicting one's senses. If you can get people to believe in god, you can get them to believe in any absurdity. The "big imaginary friend in the sky" not only doesn't require sensory confirmation, god continues to be a delusion for millions world-wide specifically because there is no sensory confirmation for its existence. Further, since almost no one actually reads the Bible as a book very few have any sense of what it actually says. The majority of those who do read the Bible do so in a controlled environment of belief. They read passages seeing the book only as a fragmentary work. The basic assumption is that it is the word of that mythical Judeo-Christian god and the reading consists only of interpretation within the context of belief. In fact, the discussion tends to be about which of several interpretations that differ from one another very little is actually the "correct" interpretation and those discussions are usually guided by someone with a particular viewpoint. Thus, even the secondary, indirect experience of god is limited and perverted.

Enter religion. Fundamentalist religion's entire existence is based on the false premise that the Bible is the "revealed truth and inerrant word of god." Even more absurdly, most of the Christian fundamentalists overcome by their shallow religiosity insist that the "inerrant" text is the King James Bible. That gives rise to the satire that holds that if god hadn't wanted Moses and Jesus to speak Jacobean English he wouldn't have revealed himself in those words. So a lovely but a corrupt translation made somewhere between 1,600 and 5,000 years after the alleged events described is the sole source of "truth" and "inerrant."

Still the alleged inerrance of the Bible is only the starting point. You see, if the Bible is "inerrant" then Darwinian evolution and all subsequent modifications of that hypothesis must be errors. If the prevailing view of how life evolved, the age of the earth and the development of species over time are in error, then all science and all knowledge derived from scientific examination must also be wrong. If that is true then all empirical observations of anything from social behavior to nuclear physics must be wrong.

True enough that the right-wing fanatics won't go quite that far. After all, they are funded by corporations and individuals whose very lucrative livelihood would be threatened if we were to question nuclear physics, the solar centric planetary system, and even the chemistry that goes into the increasing number of drugs that we take. They won't even go whole hog on evolution. Where evolution can be directly observed, as in laboratory mice, insects and other animals, they claim that all of nature may evolve along Darwinian lines but human beings, alone in all the universe, are the exception. By stomping on empirical science via evolution the right-wing fanatics achieve the goal of establishing that not only can we not believe our media, we can't even believe our senses. Confusion and doubt result and into that state of disorientation comes a "preacher" - he or she may be a purveyor of religiose or political ideology - who offers soothing, simple reassurances, bumper-sticker length ideas and the promise that this person who's been disoriented, confused and frustrated can know the ultimate truth if only he or she will surrender all thought to the direction of the "preacher".

And we accept all this madness simply because in America the right-wing fanatics have changed "Sieg Heil!" to "Praise the Lord!"

Surprise! Surprise?

For over a week now since the failed car bomb attacks in London and in Glasgow we have been hearing an endless stream of blather from people shocked that the fanatics involved in this terrorist plot were doctors. We seem unable to grasp the idea that dangerous fanatics can be educated individuals.

First, anyone who has ever been to an institution of higher learning, including some of those with great reputations, knows that learning does take place there but on a much narrower scale than the student enrollment would indicate. The vociferous objection of a student shill for the neo-fascist Young America Foundation at Roger Williams University who was required to watch An Inconvenient Truth should be signal enough that one can lead fanatical whores to learning but can't make them think.

Still the surprise that the bombers in Britain and Scotland are educated professionals is utterly foolish. That fanatics can be educated professionals really ought to be obvious to anyone. We have a government rife with them here in the United States. At least four of them sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. One only needs to cite Dartmouth graduates P.J. O'Rourke and Dinesh D'Souza as evidence of why the terrorists in the British Isles are simply one expression of of a phenomenon one can see any day if one tunes in Fox News.

I must be fair and acknowledge that some of the surprise is justified on cultural grounds. In the U.S. we have our ideologues (e.g. Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, etc.) who will engage in utterly insane acts because of their fanaticism. However, far more common in our corporate society are the outright whores. O'Rourke and D'Souza, Ann Coulter, Andrew Sullivan, Tony Snow and the like are far less motivated by ideology than they are by money. The right-wing extremist foundations and the plutocrats that sponsor them pay good money to get the unthinking and unswerving loyalty of those folks. Thus we're lulled by the idea that these verbal terrorists will undergo a Huffington-esque change of heart and direction should the wind and the money that flies upon it blow from an opposite pole. Being mercenary ourselves we find it hard to understand that these doctors would set their car bombs and participate in the attacks without being paid very well for their trouble.

Still our shock that terrorists bent on destroying the prevailing order might be educated indicates our ignorance of their motives and of our own history. After all, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison and Monroe were all highly educated gentlemen. And not very far from home there's the example of Fidel Castro, a doctor.