Give Me Those Old Time Family Values...First Reprise

Ah, yes! Larry Craig of Idaho. The poster child for the "I'm not gay, but what are you doing after you finish in that stall?" movement.

Neither he nor Ted Haggard are gay, pretty much in the same sense that neither Truman Capote nor Liberace were gay, except that they were "bachelors".

Let's get something out of the way here. There is nothing wrong with being in love with someone of the same sex. It's not my style, but I must say that when I run into gay couples, whether male or female, who clearly care for one another my first reaction is that they are lucky and I wish that I had a relationship as wonderful.

But there is definitely something wrong with vicious hypocrisy. There is something definitely wrong with the kind of hypocrisy that allows Larry Craig to support the discriminatory Federal Marriage Amendment to outlaw same-sex marriage and to support a filibuster of Federal legislation to declare gay bashing a hate crime and yet to have credible reports that he's been cruising for gay sex since college and throughout most of his career in Washington.

One of the red herrings that right-wing fanatics constantly toss at those who oppose them is that their opponents are "self-hating". Taken in the context of Larry Craig's gay bashing, that sounds a lot like what's called "projection" in psychiatry, doesn't it?

A Diablo, Alberto!

The Garden of Ironic Delights

So Alberto Gonzales, Dubya's legal minion, has announced his resignation from a post for which his sole qualification was his toadying eagerness to torture people and the U. S. Constitution into any contortion that pleased his neo-fascist puppetmasters. As of September 17, 2007, the Constitution will be slightly better protected than it has been since January 20, 2001.

But that's not exactly the most striking statement of the day relative to this bit of news.

In responding to his minion's resignation, Dubya stated, "It is sad that we live in a time when a talented and honorable person like Alberto Gonzales is impeded from doing important work because his good name was dragged through the mud for political reasons."

Don't you just LOVE irony?

Those words in the mouth of the entitled scum who attacked all and sundry to steal the 2000 election in Florida, who suggested that Ann Richards was a lesbian to get elected governor of Texas, who intimated that John McCain had an illegitimate black child to win the South Carolina primary in 2000, and who suborned the Swift Boat Veterans' scurrilous attacks on John Kerry are obscene despite the fact that Dubya is just plain too dumb to understand that he was being ironic.

I am reminded of Richard Nixon's speech accepting the resignation of 2(?), 278(?) "of the finest public servants it has ever been my privilege to know" when Haldeman and Ehrlichman departed the White House. The problem with the Republican Party is that they honestly believe that Alberto Gonzales is "a talented and honorable person" and that the criminals H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman were "the finest public servants". For America's neo-fascist party no crime no matter how petty or how vicious is beyond ignoring as long as the perpetrator is of their ideology. They also believe that no crime, no matter how petty or specious is beyond magnification if it will reflect badly on the political opposition. It is one of the reasons that we should be honest and declare the Republican Party to be the criminal conspiracy that it is instead of pretending that it is simply an American political institution.

RIP: Weekly World News

Fun with...ah...journalism?

Last week there was much ado about the demise of the ultimate screwball tabloid, the Weekly World News. I for one will be sorry to see it go. Though I never owned a copy, it was a source of great entertainment at the supermarket check out counters. It never failed to confirm my worst suspicions about my fellow men and women.

I remember one particular instance when I was on the express line at the Demoulas' Market Basket in the Mystic Mall in Chelsea, Massachusetts some 20 years ago. There were 6 or 7 people in front of me on line at a "7 Items or Less" express register. Every one of them had from 8 to 63 items (well, the 63 might be a slight exaggeration but you get the idea) and I, holding 3 items, was there on break from work and in a hurry to get back. As I was fuming about the delays caused by the mathematically challenged I noticed the Weekly World News with its huge, blaring headline, "SPACE ALIENS LIVE AMONG US NOW!" It instantly changed my mood and I began to quietly chuckle. My stifled laughs didn't go unnoticed. The characters on line ahead of me turned around to look. At that point I realized that at least 4 of the people on line ahead of me were probably those space aliens, accounting for their misunderstanding of the sign. Several looked the part.

Who says the New York Times is "the newspaper of record"?

An Open Letter to Speaker Pelosi

Madam Speaker:

I am a Democrat. I have been a Democrat since I was able to register to vote and I will remain a Democrat for the foreseeable future because I see no actual or potential alternative that respects the basic principles of our nation. However, tonight, for the first time that I can remember, I am ashamed to be a Democrat. That the House of Representatives should pass the amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act demanded by the Bush Administration appalls me. Placing unlimited power, even in a time limited amendment, in the hands of those who have no respect for law, let alone the U.S. Constitution is an unconscionable abdication of your responsibility to the American people.

While the president is quick to make specious arguments about national security we have seen that neither he nor his minion, Alberto Gonzales, can be trusted for a moment yet you have handed them carte blanche to spy on any party whose privacy they feel the need to invade.

Madam Speaker, when you were elected I was very proud of my party for choosing you but your acquiescence in this unwarranted grab for power leaves me wondering whether you are in line to replace Tony Blair as Dubya's latest pet poodle.

I am outraged at this legislation because, time limit or not, it sets a precedent for the future so that future presidents may arrogate to themselves powers prohibited by our Constitution and Bill of Rights. But worse still, it constitutes a perfect example why our party loses election after election. It's not bullying by Republican poll watchers, a packed Supreme Court or yet even Diebold. It is the repeated, consistent failure of Democrats to draw a line and take a stand. While Republican ideologues staunchly defend their bankrupt policies, our party flexes, retreats and caves in at the first hint of entrenched opposition.

We have spent 28 of the last 40 years suffering under Republican misrule and I fear, Madam Speaker, that we will suffer under it longer because you and Representative Hoyer either cannot or will not stand up for the laws and principles of this nation. If you will not stand against such incursions into American's rights, you deserve to be marginalized, stripped of actual power and relegated to figurehead status under an imperial presidency. The most horrible fact about that is that though you may deserve such a fate, neither I nor the many millions of Americans looking to you for defense of our rights deserve that fate to which your faintness of heart condemns us.

Give Me Those Old Time Family Values! It's Good Enough for...who?

It's like shooting decoys, isn't it?

There's Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla. 16^th Dist.), Duke Cunningham (R-Calif. 50^th Dist.), now Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) joining grand hypocrisy parade that includes Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Jimmy Swaggert, Pastor Ted Haggard (who's now completely cured(R) of his homosexual tendencies and cocaine addiction), Henry Hyde who was still having “youthful indiscretions” when he was 41-years old, almost-House Speaker Bob Livingston (who now-Sen. Vitter replaced in the House), Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay and a host of others.

I will be fair. We’ve had Wilbur Mills, Wayne Hays, Jim Traficant, Dan Rostenkowski, Gary Hart and William J. Clinton amongst others. But I do not recall any of them preaching as long, loud or ostentatiously about the sins of others as have the Republicans noted above.

Isn’t it more than a little hypocritical to rail against Hollywood while electing George Murphy, Ronald Reagan, Sonny Bono, Fred Grandy and Arnold Schwartzenegger to office? I can’t be the only one to have noticed that. Or how about derailing Nelson Rockefeller’s presidential candidacy because Republicans would never support a divorced man only to embrace Ronald Reagan and, more recently, Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich?

There’s a story I’ve been telling for years to illustrate the difference between Democrat and Republican politicians. You see both of them will brazenly enter the church vestibule during the service and pry the poor box off the wall. As they’re trying to escape with the fruits of their theft the sexton and some men from the congregation give chase. They catch the Democrat and Republican thieves and drag them back to the church to display their shame to the congregation.

When the Democrat is so presented he’ll actually be ashamed. He’ll return the stolen money and even turn out his pockets to add his change to the haul that’s now in the hands of the congregation. The Democrat will confess his crime and accept his punishment. He will counsel troublesome children in the Sunday School on ways to avoid his failings, not just capture, and will wash dishes at every church supper for the next 6 months or more. He will show up for his penance regularly and on time.

The Republican, however, is a different creature entirely because he’s utterly devoid of shame. This captured Republican will break free of his captors and with great theatricality will throw himself on the altar. He will make a great show of begging for the forgiveness of god right there in the holy of holies. Then he’ll rise quickly, wipe away the crocodile tears and shove his way to the pulpit still clutching that poor box. He will then preach a sermon on how god has forgiven his sins and wants him to keep the money because, when he spends it in the saloon/brothel/casino/Internet porn site that he so vociferously decries, it will help the economy, improving the economy for every member of the congregation – so he claims – in ways that clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, giving drink to those who thirst, succoring the sick or imprisoned could never do. He will equate succor with suckers and, while the congregation stands there, gape-mouthed in amazement and confusion, he’ll slip away with the poor box.

Yes, they’re both thieves but I will gladly take the repentant thief over the self-righteous one any day. There’s far less hypocrisy in the former than in the latter.

If there is a god with a sense of humor I think it's he who gave us Larry Flynt.

Just Wondering II

Given the testimony of former Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona yesterday that he was required to mention Dubya positively at least 3 times per page in each speech he gave I wondered how many mentions per page did Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, Mao Zedong or Pol Pot require?

We wouldn't want a mention gap for our American dictator/monsters when compared with their peers now would we? That happens and the terrorists win...or something.

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.

Just Wondering I

I was just wondering in an apocalyptic mode. You see, I recall that the late (far too recently late) Jerry Falwell and the isn't-it-past-time-that-he-was-late, Pat Robertson sat down together on September 13, 2001 and blamed...well, let's quote Falwell:

"I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the 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.'"

Then there's jailbird/jailhouse convert Charles Colson. He's a great fan of apocalyptic thinking that jives with his ultra-right-wing extremist politics though no great fan of laws or the U.S. Constitution. Chucky offered when asked if Hurricane Katrina were god's judgment on New Orleans, "'Did God have anything to do with Katrina?,' people ask. My answer is, he allowed it and perhaps he allowed it to get our attention so that we don't delude ourselves into thinking that all we have to do is put things back the way they were and life will be normal again."

The neo-fascist and far-from-Christian Robertson a few months later warned the citizens of Dover, Pennsylvania, "I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: 'If there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God. You just rejected him from your city,....'" for throwing out a Board of Education that tried to establish CHRISTIAN fundamenalist fanaticism as that towns religion and teach it in their schools.

So what got me wondering was that Texas has provided us with a number of "the Lord's annointed" such as George W. Bush, Tom DeLay, former Senator Phil (It's just a coincidence that my wife was on the Enron Board of Directors) Graham and current Senator John Cornyn. It's the state with the best(?) record of meting out divine justice in the form of capital punishment to those who offend against god's commandments. Yet for all this "righteousness" it's rained in Texas for more than 40 days and 40 nights and there's not a word about god's judgment on Texas from these pillars of CHRISTIAN fanaticism.

So I was just wondering how that could be?

The Glorious Fourth

The 4th of July, America's national day, the day on which we celebrate the independence of our nation, tends to descend into the wallow of militarism, jingoism and xenophobic triumphalism yet it never fails to move me deeply. I am, at ground, an American patriot but I use a definition of patriotism rather different from that prevailing amongst my countrymen, their definition being more in concert with the definitions of Dr. Samuel Johnson and Ambrose Bierce. As an illustration of my concept of patriotism, let me quote a Republican.

Carl Schurz was a German liberal who was forced to flee his country after the revolutions of 1848 collapsed. He settled in Wisconsin and became a friend and supporter of Abraham Lincoln. In 1862 he resigned his post as Ambassador to Spain and took a commission in the U.S. Army. After the war he was President Andrew Johnson's emissary to report on conditions in the South. He later was a Senator from Missouri. He was Interior Secretary under President Hayes and still later moved to New York where he became a distinguished writer and editor. In short, Schurz's history is one that might well define patriotism. So, without further ado or comment, let me quote him on this 231st 4th of July:

”Our country right or wrong. When right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be put right.”

Impeach Earl Warren

Most people won't remember the billboards that went up in the states of the old Confederacy and some plains states as well after Brown v. Board of Education overturned Plessy v. Furguson and outlawed segregation in America. Those billboards exhorted people to get behind a movement to impeach the new U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice, the former Republican governor of California, Earl Warren. Warren had led the court to a unanimous decision that when our Constitution proclaimed equal rights to all men, it meant it regardless of minor distinctions like skin color, ethnicity, and the like. But that upset a lot of people, rich and poor, who thought that equality was fine for those who were most like themselves and inappropriate for those they preferred to hate.

A decade after the Brown v. Board of Education decision one of the things at stake in the 1964 presidential election was implementation of that decision. Senators like James O. Eastland, John Stennis, Richard Russell and Strom Thurmond couldn't hold back the 1964 Voting Rights Act but they could nullify it if right-wing fanatics took the White House. They didn't get their wish then.

When they did finally elect a neo-fascist in 1968 the majority of Americans' popular perception was that all men and women were indeed created equal. Richard Nixon rode into the White House on the disarray of the Democrats following Robert Kennedy's murder and an effective campaign to blame peaceful protesters in Chicago for the police riot that victimized them. But Nixon also rode into office on his "Southern Strategy". That strategy involved pandering to the racists, segregationists, states-rights proponents, Klansmen and the like who'd been loyal Democrats since 1865. Suddenly the scum of American politics were following Strom Thurmond into the Republican Party that had been anathema to them since Abraham Lincoln's first campaign.

Truth to tell, the populist Democrats from the South in the 1920s and 1930s such as Hugo Black, Claude Pepper, Sam Rayburn and others were less concerned about race than they were about economic standing. That concern allowed them to come to an uneasy accommodation with Northern Democrats, whose more liberal views on race were out of sync with that of their Southern constituents, focused on moving America out of the Great Depression. The understanding that the chains that weighted people down had more to do with class than color opened those populist leaders to change. The casually Democratic and casually bigoted voter did not share that openness and were ripe for picking by Republicans cynically eager to heave Lincoln overboard for racist votes.

But Nixon couldn't manage to shove onto the Supreme Court the candidates of his racist backers, the Klan tainted Clement F. Haynesworth and G. Harold Carswell. He did get the Arizona racist, William Rhenquist, onto the court but Southern racists simply couldn't pass muster. The Haynesworth and Carswell fiascoes taught the Republicans that they needed to reframe their arguments and concentrate on subtlety.

They propagandized their position as opposition to "activist judges" and a focus on "the original intent of the framers of the Constitution". In fact, those catch phrases have always been an Orwellian smoke screen for promoting right-wing extremists who would take us back, not just to the Vinson Court of 1952 but to the Taney Court of 1852. Right-wing fanatics like Robert Bork, Antonin Scalia and Scalia's puppet, Clarence Thomas, have no more respect for or knowledge of the "original intent" that they trumpet than they have for the rights of individuals against corporations. They are exactly what they profess to oppose: activist judges, though they are themselves activists for neo-fascism.

The next attempt to neutralize the Supreme Court during the Reagan Presidency narrowly avoided afflicting the nation with Robert Bork. We despised Bork for firing Archibald Cox in 1973 but the reason for keeping him off the Supreme Court was his neo-fascist extremist vision of the Constitution. No one questions the contradiction inherent in the belief that Bork, Scalia and their ilk can use some bizarre telepathy to mystically understand the "original intent of the founders" even as they insist that the Constitution is ossified and unchanging, that things not specifically delineated in it do not exist. There is no right to privacy in the U.S. Constitution because "the founders" (sounds awfully like Star Trek: Deep Space 9, doesn't it?) never heard of personal privacy and were utterly unaware of the concept when they drafted the 3rd and 4th Amendments in the Bill of Rights.

But persistence counts for something. Having packed the court at last with reliably neo-fascist jurists 53 years later, the Supreme Court that couldn't be rid of desegregation by impeaching Earl Warren has now achieved a reinstatement of Plessy v. Ferguson in the Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 et al. It is an uneasy reversal given that Justice Anthony Kennedy who swallows a great deal of rancid neo-fascist tripe choked on some of the reasoning and consequences that his even more extremist colleagues served up.

As many of us believed when Roberts went before the Senate Judiciary Committee all but wearing a t-shirt that read, "I (heart) Stare Decisis," the new Chief Justice has no compunctions for dragging us back to the 1850s. And that return to segregation if not to slavery is cynically couched in the rhetoric of being "color blind". The irrational explanation for that catch phrase is that if race should not be an occasion for discrimination then ignoring race will magically make racism disappear. One of the requirements for being a right-winger is voluntary an selective disassociation from reality and a kind of magical thinking in which idiocy like closing ones eyes and ears makes bad things go away. The 5-member Supreme Court majority has stuck its collective fingers in its collective ears and intoned "La-la-la-la-la! I can't hear racism!" As if that would make it go away.

Segregation in America was the next best thing to having "happy darky slaves" picking in the "ole cotton fields back home." Had the South been able to completely undo the Civil War it would have done so. The violent opposition to the Civil Rights Movement that culminated in the 1960s proved that. The graves of Medgar Evers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, Viola Liuzzo, Martin Luther King, Jr. prove that. The more recent murder of James Byrd proves that the agenda has not changed. At long last Scalia, Kennedy, Roberts, Alito and their houseboy, Thomas, can effectuate that agenda. How they are going to negate the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments remains to be seen but we can have confidence those who'd sacrifice a mother to save a deformed and non-viable fetus will find a way.