DOMESTIC TERRORISM IN AMERICA

We won’t see Rep. Peter King (Neo-Fascist, N.Y.) bring it up in his hearings into domestic terrorism but if I were Ayman al-Zawahiri, the new leader of Al Qaeda, I would be finding ways to send all of the bin Laden billions and any change I could shake out of the sofa cushions to the Tea Party and the Republican Party. Flying planes into skyscrapers and government buildings isn’t anything compared to destroying the “full faith and credit” of the United States government. I have believed that the Republican Party has essentially been a criminal conspiracy since at least the 1950s. But with the passing of control from the old guard oligarchs to the young Turks of the supply side, Ayn Rand true believers who came in with Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich in the 1980s the Republicans have become a full blown terrorist organization.

I give some credit to President Obama on two issues. First, he has kept in mind that he is the President of the United States of America, not just the leader of the Democratic Party. He has consistently acted in the interest of the nation as a whole rather than following the Republican paradigm of acting solely in the interests of the relatively small number of super-rich backers who control the money that buys power for the Republican officeholders and finances the Astroturf movement known as the Tea Party. It was President Obama’s job to save the American economy in the face of Republicans, particularly Tea Party Republicans, who expressly stated that the nation’s economy was of less importance to them than making a statement about their perverse political ambitions and philosophy. The Tea Party and Republicans more broadly have read too, too much of that proponent of fanatical sociopath, Ayn Rand, and decided that they were collectively Howard Roark. Their stated solution to America’s problems was to blow up the nation in the hope that they could gain something by demagoguery while standing in the rubble. After all, they blew up the economy in 2008 after 30 years of relentless work at doing so and created the Tea Party by demagoguing in the ruins. The president is president of all the people regardless of how stupid, misled, craven or sociopathic they are. Barak Obama deserves immense credit for understanding that basic principle.

The second issue on which President Obama deserves credit for giving a nod to the “leaders of the Republican Party” in his statement following reaching the agreement on the debt ceiling on Sunday, July 31^st. Again, in the interest of responsible governing, President Obama has put aside partisanship, if only minimally, while Republicans have not. By contrast Speaker Boehner’s subsequent statement that same night was a purely partisan polemic.

Still, regardless of attempts at conciliation by the president, make no mistake, the terrorists won this round. The lunatic wing of the Republican Party (as opposed to the neo-fascist mainstream) embraced extremists like Michelle Bachmann and Ron and Rand Paul to create a crisis where none existed before. Their voices magnified by Majority Leader Mickey Kantor nearly wrought complete destruction of the economy in the name of saving future generations from onerous debt. So let’s look at that issue of “onerous debt”.

I could go into a history lesson but the fact is that Republican insistence on low tax rates has kept revenues low while spending has increased. Most of those increases have come from useless, pointless and unjustifiable wars and military excesses whether in Vietnam, Granada, Nicaragua, Afghanistan in the 1980s, the Persian Gulf and Iraq not to mention the similarly unjustifiable covert actions in places like Chile, Bolivia, and other parts of the world, especially the Middle East. Deficits rise under Republicans because of their commitment to a grossly unfair tax system that exempts the wealthy and burdens the middle class. During the 1990s after a tax increase the nation’s economy boomed and we were on track to reducing the nation’s debt. But the Republicans then switched tunes. Instead of allowing the Federal government to run at a nominal surplus which would reduce the debt, they insisted that governments shouldn’t have more tax money than was absolutely necessary to pay for operations. That gave us the Bush tax cuts that reduced taxes on the wealthiest 10% of the population more than on the entire remaining 90% and just to make matters worse the Republicans created a much needed Medicare prescription drug benefit but refused to fund it, they initiated two wars, one in Afghanistan that had some justification and one in Iraq that had no justification whatever and they either deregulated or refused to regulate industries and markets at home. The result of reduced revenues alone was that any surplus available to reduce the national debt ceased to exist and the continuing Republican waste and mis- or non-management ballooned the debt quickly and immensely.

In the meantime prices for goods and services kept increasing, often out of all proportion to actual costs while wages for most workers remained stagnant and the real value of those wages declined. Pressed by stagnant wages and rising costs the middle class was encouraged by banks, investment firms and the financial media to use credit especially to mortgage their homes to the hilt on the false promise that real estate prices never, ever fall.

We saw the result in 2008. The joy ride came to a screeching, crashing halt just in time for President Dubya and his crew of criminals to slink out of office and leave the mess for someone else to clean up.

There is only one tried and proven way to clean up an economic collapse on the world wide scale that befell us in 1929 and 2008. That solution is massive government spending on programs that put people to work and which also subsidize lower branches of government faced also with falling revenues. It increases the debt in the short term while reducing the economic disruption for states, counties, cities, towns and families. The subsidies to the lower branches of government prevent job losses in those sectors and generate private jobs by promoting municipal projects like road improvements, construction of and improvement to public buildings, parks and such. Programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s put people to work who might not have been able to support themselves otherwise and trained those people in trades that they frequently pursued in private employment for the rest of their lives. Both the CCC and WPA were major creators of middle class employment both in their time and for the rest of that generation yet they are reviled by the neo-fascists as “make work” programs.

Once again the Republican propaganda machine changed tack and went into overdrive. Having piled up a massive debt then wrecked the economy so that current revenues could not keep up with that debt the Republicans decided that debt was bad per se. It was an evil that must be stamped out, however, those most able to help reduce that debt, those who benefited most by running it up had absolutely to be exempted from paying a penny more in taxes. They conveniently ignored the fact that many of those wealthy ultra-right wing oligarchs already pay not a penny in taxes.

The neo-fascists party line is that we are burdening “our children and grandchildren®” with a massive debt. There is no question that our national debt is large but if the ultra-right wingers were truly concerned with anyone’s children or grandchildren they would pony up and use their billions to help reduce the debt by paying another percentage point or two in taxes.

But aren’t those people the “job creators” we here so much about?

If they are, where are the jobs?

Well, they can’t create jobs because of “uncertainty”!

What “uncertainty”? They have bought themselves a minority of a minority in Congress that makes retaining the huge subsidies for their corporations not just certain but holy writ. That same minority insures that they will never have to worry about increases in taxes so what, pray tell is the “uncertainty” that stymies these alleged “job creators”?

Well, look at Europe! There’s a debt crisis there that could tank the world economy.

If those poor, beset “uncertain” “job creators” were truly worried about a collapse of the world economy their money would not be flowing at phenomenal rates out of the United States into investments in China, India, Brazil and elsewhere. The “debt crisis” in Europe is no more real than Standard and Poor’s reasoning in reducing the U. S. bond rating or the tooth fairy. That “crisis” is the creation of bond rating agencies which are the wholly owned subsidiaries of the ultra-right wing oligarchs whose corporations those agencies purport to rate. Standard and Poor’s, for example, is all in a tizzy over the debt of Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Ireland and a few other smaller countries besides the United States. By contrast they were just ecstatic about the bonds of Enron, AIG and all those mortgage backed securities that destroyed the world economy when we found that they were worthless in 2008. The European “debt crisis” is a fiction created by some enormously wealthy people speculating in currencies and bonds while using that speculation to destroy the social fabric of nations purely for their own profit.

The end of all this is that the ultra-right wing propaganda machine led by Fox News and the various Foundations and Institutes that those oligarch have established to give a veneer of rationality to their irrational greed promotes a bunch of “Big Lies”. The “Big Lie” was not invented by Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels but he did bring it into the age of mass media. The “Big Lie” is a lie shouted often enough and loud enough that some fools begin to believe it. Worse yet, in the age of 24-hour news networks desperate to fill air time, people and media that should know better talk about those “Big Lies” as if they had some credibility. They trot out the con men of the Heritage Foundation, Hudson, Manhattan and Cato Institutes and their odious kin and allow them to peddle their snake oil as if it were efficacious medicine.

The result is terrorism. The American public lives in constant fear and anger. The purveyors of the “Big Lie” direct public anger away from the rich who pay little or nothing toward maintaining the American social fabric and direct it toward the poor and the unemployed. They dare not talk about eliminating Social Security or Medicare so they pontificate about reducing “entitlements”. The paid liars for the ultra-right wing oligarchs won’t say that your child shouldn’t have coverage on your medical insurance policy until he or she finishes her education or that a cancer patient should be denied care because he or she forgot to mention a minor surgery 20 years before the person got coverage but they can rail against “Obama-care”.

And should someone have the temerity to demonstrate how false and empty their arguments really are, they fall back to the equally craven and empty position of pretending to be protectors of “our children and grandchildren®”. These con men so concerned about the financial burden on “our children and grandchildren®” are simultaneously arguing that government should not intervene to protect those same children and grandchildren from contaminated food, water, air and unsafe products.

The true terrorists are the monied sociopaths like the Koch Brothers, Richard Mellon Scaife and their ilk who bought and paid for the Tea Party Republicans. They have done more to destroy America than ever Mohammed Atta and the rest of the September 11^th hijackers did or imagined that they could do. It’s time to treat them with the horror and disdain that we reserve for those Al Qaeda murderers because they are the true enemy within, the true domestic terrorists.

BROTHERS UNDER THE SKIN: OSAMA BIN LADEN, FRED PHELPS, HAROLD CAMPING AND TERRY JONES

A war on terrorism is a perfect example of treating the symptom rather than the disease. The disease is fanaticism. As I've written before, it doesn't matter whether it's religious fanaticism (e.g. bin Laden, Fred Phelps), political fanaticism (e.g. Michele Bachmann, Pol Pot, Timothy McVeigh), simply fanatic, egotistical greed (e.g. the Koch Brothers, Rupert Murdock, Donald Trump) or egotistical lunacy (e.g. Jim Jones, Charles Manson) fanaticism is the disease behind terrorism of the ilk of the Tea Party, Al Qaeda, and the Killing Fields. Fanaticism is inherent sociopathic and should be treated with the same sanctions that we place on a Charles Manson or a Ted Bundy.

However, sometimes it can be absolutely hilarious. Case in point: Harold Camping of Family Radio, an alleged CHRISTIAN broadcasting group though it's more the megaphone for Camping's religious lunacy and fanatic egotism. Camping has predicted that the "true" CHRISTIANS will be Raptured this coming Saturday starting at 6:00 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time. Let's forget for a moment that The Rapture is a bunch of utter nonsense though no more nonsensical than worshiping, in George Carlin's apt phrase, a "Big Imaginary Friend in the Sky". For now let's focus on Camping's prediction alone.

Camping has been eagerly searching for the date of the end of the world for a very long time. Some seventeen years ago he informed all who would listen - unfortunately there were at least as many credulous dolts then as now - that the world would end in September, 1994. Now let's all get out our calendars, boys and girls. You will notice that it is generally agreed that this is 2011 and, unless we all, along with Harold Camping, missed something, his September, 1994 Armageddon is a bit tardy. But hold on. You may remember that the Republicans lead by New Gingrich took over the U. S. House of Representatives in the elections of November, 1994, as clear evidence of Satan's ascendance as I can imagine. Be that as it may, one might think that such a whopper of an error might deter someone from uttering similar whoppers in the future but you'd be wrong. Learning from one's mistakes is the activity of a rational mind, something of which Harold Camping is manifestly not possessed. So what did Camping use as an excuse for such a whopping error. His excuse was essentially, "Son of a gun! Look at that! There's a Book of Jeremiah in The Bible. It was there all along and I just must have missed it!" Quite an admission for a self-proclaimed Bible expert. Still Harold Camping returned to his search for the hour of his personal Rapture.

Frankly, Camping seems a bit selfish to me. He is now 89-years old and unlikely to get another 17 years to recalibrate though there is that adage that "only the good die young". But I also think he's rushing things because he's trying to beat the Mayans. If the world ends in 2011 I think Camping believes the score will be Jesus 1, Quetzalcoatl 0. Not only is Camping cooking the books to insure that he's above ground for The Rapture but he's trying to win one for the Jeezer.

Some unkind souls have suggested that Camping and his followers should commit to not being in this world on May 22nd but I'm not quite willing to go that far even for as total a waste of breath and space as Harold Camping. Camping insists that "there is no plan B", that The Rapture will occur on Saturday, May 21, 2011 absolutely and without fail. I'm sure that on Sunday, May 22nd Camping will show up in church somewhere and suddenly discover some other book of The Bible that he'd heretofore overlooked. After all there's a whole 14 books in The Apocrypha or maybe he just forgot to carry a 1. But you must forgive me for suggesting that on May 22nd Camping needs to be true to his beliefs and pack up his radio ministry for good - in several senses of that term. My reasons that Harold Camping needs to find a nice, quite assisted living facility and shut up for the rest of his life is that, if he's correct, clearly he has been found unworthy of The Rapture. By his own definition he is an unredeemable sinner left behind to suffer the tribulations and ultimate damnation.

As I've said already, I think that The Rapture is utter nonsense. It is an heretical fantasy of an ego driven CHRISTIAN cult obsessed with an idea best expressed as, "Jesus loves ME and not you. I'm saved and you're not. Nyah-nyah-nyah." It couldn't be farther from the Jesus who offers salvation to all. So, if The Rapture is lunatic, egotistical nonsense what of Camping? Should he still "go gentle in to that good night"? I think so still. Camping owes it to those he's misled and the rest of us to shut up for whatever time remains to him because if his god hasn't judged him unworthy that leaves only two alternatives. Either Harold Camping is a charlatan who's profiting from conning a bunch of gullible fools about the end of the world or he's simply a lunatic who's disguised his tinfoil hat as a cross. In either case he does not belong on the public airwaves. He is abusing his license to broadcast either by intent to defraud or by being a deranged sociopath. In neither case does he deserve a forum.

So why do I link him with Osama bin Laden and the equally odious Fred Phelps and Terry Jones? Through their fanaticism. Bin Laden's fanaticism inspired truly horrific acts turned against innocent people. Bin Laden's murderous fanaticism may be quantitatively worse but is gualitatively no different from Jim Jones' leading the gullible to mass suicide in Jonestown or Timothy McVeigh's murders at the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Phelps and Terry Jones too share this perversion of religion into the service of their own fanatcism and egotism. Their acts haven't cost many lives yet but they are trying to up the body count. "Pastor" Jones in particular has blood on his hands from provoking other lunatic fanatics with his own lunatic fanaticism.

I can't emphasize enough that our Constitutional guarantees of Freedom of Religion also guarantees Freedom from Religion regardless of what CHRISTIAN fanatics like revisionist historian David Barton would like to sell the gullible. I don't want anyone deciding what is the "true religion" or even the "true" form of worship but I think we have slipped too far from freedom into fear and perplexity. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously proclaimed that freedom of speech does not license those who cry "fire" in a crowded theatre. Currently we have an insane system where Christain Scientist parents can watch as their tiny son dies of a readily treatable intestinal blockage, Mormon sectarians can "marry" 12 and 13-year old children, cult leaders like Jim Jones or Heaven's Gate's Bo and Peep can shepherd their flocks into mass suicide and Phelps, Jones and Camping can preach their perversions of religion to anyone who's foolish enough to listen. We protect ourselves against profiteers who would feed us poison in our food, infected meat and impure drugs. I think the time has come to look at what is religion and what is just fanaticism and lunacy. Let's protect the former and sanction the latter.

FRIENDS AND UNFRIENDLY

A couple of years ago I was in the process of garnering signatures for a petition on something that was, most definitely not a pressing social issue. I was advised to join Facebook in order to increase the total number of signers. I did join Facebook, had no idea what I was doing - in innumerable ways as it turns out - and added minimally to the petition's signatures. Still, that put me on Facebook. Periodically I get e-mails from that site notifying me that someone wants to be my friend. When I know the person by name or association, I approve the request, leave Facebook and visit it again the next time those requests pile up and get insistent enough to warrant my attention.

I really didn't have much of an opinion about Facebook for a very long time. I truly despise the usage of "friend" as a verb. There seems to me something rude, drooling and imbecilic about "Friend me," as opposed to "May we be friends?" That's probably a function of my age and respect for language. Yes, I understand that languages are living, mutable things but that doesn't mean that they have to grow niggling and stupid like the sleaze from the Cato Institute I recently heard insist that because he is a "Libertarian" he will use any word he pleases, regardless of the ignorance it betrays in him, until it shows up in the dictionary.

Last autumn I got a message from an old and very dear friend. The message was one of the nastier and angrier I've ever received. She and I have been friends since the spring of 1967 when a mutual friend introduced us. We dated for a bit in college but have remained in touch more or less regularly ever since. We've spent hours on the phone during various crises in each of our lives consoling one another or simply allowing each other to vent. In short, she is a friend, an actual, real world friend and has been for some 44 years.

Earlier in 2010 she'd been diagnosed with breast cancer. She is undergoing some aggressive and, from what I gather, debilitating treatment that, like much cancer therapy, runs a three-way race to kill the cancer before the cancer or the treatment itself kills her. My friend tends to focus outward rather than in. She is angry - as she has a perfect right to be - at her predicament as well as frustrated by the lack of control that she has over the disease and her body. She can't take out that anger on the cancer itself. It just doesn't listen. If the cancer could listen to her it would have left her body within minutes of its discovery. She can't be angry with her doctors because that's simply counter-productive in the extreme. Still the pressure of that anger and frustration is building up like unvented steam in a boiler. She must fall back on her friends when she needs to vent the venom.

The sources of the vicious message was that she'd decided that I and "unfriended" her on Facebook. That was news to me. First, I hadn't even logged onto Facebook in several months. Second, I'm not sure that I'd known that she was on Facebook or that I'd "friended" her there. Third, and finally, after logging onto Facebook and searching for an actual hour and a half, I still have no idea how one "unfriends" anyone. Please don't send me a response with detailed instructions on how to "unfriend" someone. I simply do not want to know. The real point of her message was a shout that translates as, "I'm here and you're not paying enough attention." Both points are true and might have been remedied by a phone call but the steam needed venting too and I'm far less likely to shy away after being scalded than a doctor or the impassive and relentless cancer.

I try to be in touch more frequently now but the other effect of that angry message was to get me to examine Facebook and how I feel about it as a site as well as linguistically.

I have friends most of whom have been close to me for between 30 and 50 years. They are genuine friends, people whose lives I have orbited, some closer, some farther away, from the days when we were children to the present in which we have grandchildren. They are my friends, my true and enduring friends.

I have other friends who are congenial people whom I know from some of my activities. I know this larger group of friends usually because we share a common interest or because we have worked in the same place bearing with the same horrid boss. A few of these friends I have never met face to face. A couple of them are in Sweden, a place I've never been. I think of them as friends as well but there is a difference born of duration and the comprehensive sharing of experience that characterizes the first, small group.

I also have acquaintances, the largest group of all, who come from the same spheres as the second group but whom I am in no way close to. I like their company, respect their abilities and knowledge but, nice and congenial as they may be, they are not anything like what I call friends. This is the group that tends to gather to me on Facebook. It's not that I don't like them. It's not that I don't care. But they are not my friends nor are they truly likely to be. I think their activities are sometimes interesting but I am not going to spend more that a couple of minutes every few months to find out what they are.

Friends, true friends, the first kind of friends I've described, are the family we choose for ourselves and who, better yet, who choose us. They aren't companies who want to keep us apprised of new products or offers. They aren't people who simply want our attention. They are the people who are godparents to our children. They are the people who know that they can phone us at 3:00 A. M. when the world had dealt them a blow and we will listen to their anger and tears because we love them and have loved them time out of mind with a love that no number of 3:00 A. M. phone calls can diminish.

So I may -may - link up with you on Facebook. But without that true friendship born of time and love and shared crises, you are not my friend. Don't be offended, please. It's just that true friendship isn't an Internet phenomenon. It is the absolute antithesis of "social networking". I may give a glance to you vacation photos, the pictures of your children or grandchildren or even the latest thing you want to sell me though the chance of that last is vanishingly small. Just don't delude yourself into thinking that because you have taken the time to do the linguistically foul act of "friending" me that we are friends. We are acquaintances at best. You are not like Lynn and Jeff, April, Anna, Richard and Anne, Harold and Karen, Michael and Rilla, Tony and K.R., Aleisha, my daughters all of whom know how to reach me without using Facebook.

SOUTHWEST OF FASCISM

It didn't start with Barry Goldwater though his 1964 presidential campaign began the realignment of racists, Klansmen, and similar bigots to the Republican Party consolidating them with the fascists of the American First Movement, the neo-fascist McCarthyites, the John Birchers and the militia movement's progenitor, the Minutemen. No, Arizona grew its own species of racism, bigotry and fascism that, honestly, Goldwater was less a part of than he was a symbol for.

But now Arizona has followed Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the contemporary avatar of Birmingham, Alabama's Jim Clark, off a cliff with its immigration legislation. Despite much blather to the contrary, Arizona has adopted a racist law under the influence of fired con-man, Lou Dobbs, the looniest ultra-right wing members of the Republican Party and it's Frankenstein monster, the Tea Party Movement.

 The right wingers object to "aliens" because they are "illegal" as if "illegal" were a quality that is genetically determined, like hair or eye color. As always we can divide those with this opinion into two groups: the sheep/fools/idiots who are too incapable of reflection to understand that they have been sold some snake oil and the scum who manufacture and sell the snake oil for fun and profit (e.g. Lou Dobbs). No person is born an "illegal" anything. Immigrants to America are those who have documents issued by the United States Government under a series of laws that favor wealth and power, white Europeans and suspect cronies of some dubious Americans and the corporate and governmental agencies who employ them. No one ever called Rupert Murdock an illegal alien even before he became a naturalized citizen in order to consolidate his media empire though he is certainly the most vile and destructive immigrant to American since Al Capone. Our laws make people, primarily black and brown people from neighboring countries, "illegal" and afford them little or no avenues to "legality". In fact, few of the parents and grandparents of those screaming about the threat of "illegal" immigration and none of their ancestors who came to America before 1879 would be "legal" under today's laws.

Plenty of people, governments and organizations are contemplating or have already instituted boycotts of Arizona on some level or other. The Arizona legislation has also energized the movement for immigrant rights while presenting President Obama with a dilemma that he doesn't need.

A poll released this week by the Northwest Health Foundation, public radio stations of the Northwest and the polling agency Davis , Hibbitts and Midghall finds that the citizens of Washington state, Oregon and Idaho finds that 61% of residents of those states support Arizona's immigration law. Another 58% would deny government benefits, including schooling, to the children of undocumented immigrants and think that those children should be deported "back where they came from" ignoring the fact that most "came from" right here and are citizens of the United States by birth. Those might seem significant majorities and lead one to cite the Federalists on the "tyranny of the majority" along with reminders that an even greater majority of residents in states from Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas east through the rest of the old Confederacy supported segregation in 1954. But the poll contains its own analysis of those attitudes. You see some 73% of residents of the three states polled also state that immigrants of all sorts are honest, hard working people. Even more people state that they have no contact of any kind with immigrants, documented or otherwise. These people who have such clear and strong opinions on immigrants are utterly ignorant of the people who are the subject of those opinions.

What comes out of the survey and information from other polling is that people are insecure in an economy destroyed, not by immigrants or poor folks, not by Al Qaeda or some Islamic fanatics but by bankers and businessmen, by the greed of executives motivated solely by profit. Yet rather than focus on the true predators in our midst, we're out with torches and pitchforks in great numbers after the people who sneak across our borders to do unskilled day labor in building our homes or to empty the bed pans of our neglected and ill elders.

British Petroleum has destroyed the livelihood of thousands if not millions, besides the 11 they initially killed, along our Gulf and Atlantic coasts in the name of saving, relative to their income, a vanishingly small amount of money. And yet we have the spectacle of Republican Representative Joe Barton apologizing to BP executive Tony Hayward in a flirtatious wave to the man as he endured a day's grilling by angry Democrats before spending a weekend relaxing at yacht races off the Isle of Wight. There has not been a more perfect display of the Republicans' true allegiance. They care nothing for the nation that suffers from their greed and malfeasance. They have no patriotism for they have reduced that to wearing a flag lapel pin and given it no more thought. Their oft spouted concern for the intent of the "founding fathers" ends the moment that the express intent of those same men runs counter to corporate interests.

No the Republicans are true fascists in Mussolini's sense of the seamless marriage of corporatism and government. Their only allegiance is to the people who pay their bills. Send Sarah Palin to Bloomingdales and pick up her bills? She'll spout any nonsense the script writers can ink on her hands. Drop an acknowledged million on Joe Barton's campaign fund and probably much more in unacknowledged perks and he'll apologize to satan for Christianity if you want him to.

Yet we allow these frauds and the scum who thump for them on Fox News to misdirect popular ire toward immigrants and the poor. No one questions these con artists when they pontificate about the injustice of passing huge national debts down to our grandchildren when the obvious answer is that they should accept the "personal responsibility" they so often trumpet and decide that we will pay higher taxes now to relieve that burden on our dear grandchildren. That's too hard to do. Besides, the corporations have legions of flacks who will trot out to disparage any attempt to fairly tax the rich and corporations, confuse the ignorant already, like the people in the Northwest survey, fearful for their continued livelihoods and squelch the true solution to our debt: pay the bill ourselves.

We are left with fear for our abilities to provide for ourselves, ignorance of the cause, confusion and ridicule of anyone who points out the real villains in the piece. Confused and ignorant we gather to the loud screeching of a Tea Party rally that becomes a lynch mob looking for someone who might be an undocumented immigrant. Sheriff Arpaio will provide security for the lynching and several Tea Partiers will bring the rope. Full coverage on Fox.

SUTIBLE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

So we now have health care reform legislation that provides for many good things in the effort to make health care accessible and a right for every American. The corporate sock puppets of the Republican Party continue to rail against it and have made destroying the reform an article of faith. Because blind, lock-step opposition to any program proposed by Democrats, especially President Obama, is the litmus test that every Republican must pass, those Republicans bent on keeping their positions (vide David Frum and the American Enterprise Institute) or advancing scramble to find ways to ingratiate themselves with the looniest, neo-fascist mob members (e.g. The Tea Party Movement) while simultaneously supplicating themselves to their corporate oligarch masters.

In my home state of Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna wants to be governor some day. He is a Republican who has rather good moderate, centrist credentials. Those are exactly the kind of credentials that will keep him from ever winning a Republican primary while Fox News is marshaling the Tea Party zombies. So McKenna has joined a gaggle of Republican Attorneys General who are suing to declare a key provision of the health care reform bill unconstitutional. The Provision they have chosen to attack is the mandate that individuals must buy private medical insurance.

First off, let me state that I think that McKenna is not just positioning himself to be acceptable to the Glenn Becks and Rush Limbaughs of the Republican Party. I think he's positioning himself as one of the adults in the case and trying to form a plausible legal argument while the neo-fascists from other states blather about nonsense on which even Antonin Scalia and his ventriloquist's dummy, Clarence Thomas, will be unable to hang a favorable decision.

After listening to a rather detailed interview with McKenna I suspect that he may be able to fashion a winning argument, one, at least, that will get a 5 to 4 decision striking down the mandate to purchase private medical insurance. In the time that it will take to get this suit to a Supreme Court decision many things will happen not least of which may be a new Justice on the bench. Some of the events intervening include the multiple provisions of the law that directly affect the lives of a majority of citizens, provisions such as students remaining on their parents' health insurance plans, a halt to recensions of health insurance coverage for the ill and a prohibition on denials of medical insurance for preexisting conditions, first for children. As those provisions take effect more and more people will come to like and depend on the reform law. Therefore, when and if the Attorneys General and Sonny Purdue's special hit man get a decision in their favor, the reform bill unravels and health care unravels.

Yet the reform will then have a constituency, a big constituency. Despite the false claims that the neo-fascists are not attacking the positive provisions of the bill, they will have done it in...not. Rob McKenna and the whole neo-fascist crew he's courting have gambled their entire future on destroying health care reform. They learned nothing whatever from running headlong into an epic defeat in Congress. Worse, even if they had the capacity to learn, their constituents, both the oligarchs and the mindless rabble, will not let them act on that learning.

The economy is improving. Better yet, the perception that the economy is improving grows stronger daily. As the economy improves President Obama and the Democrats gain strength because they gain the argument that the Republicans destroyed the economy and the Democrats saved it. If that perception continues into November and the Republicans keep goose-stepping rightward, the Democrats may retain their legislative majorities or even increase them.

So we get to the 112th Congress in January, 2011. The Democrats retain majorities in both houses of Congress perhaps even sending Scott Brown back to his pickup truck in Massachusetts and the health care reforms now have a clear majority of Americans pleased with the outcome. McKenna and the other ultra-rightist Attorneys General remove the only provision that guarantees insurance coverage to all Americans. The result might very well be the longed for and much more sensible "single-payer option" probably achieved through a universalization and broad expansion of Medicare. Thus McKenna and the loony ultra-right may achieve for us of the left what we could not achieve without their mindless opposition.

Should my preferred outcome manifest itself, look for Rob McKenna to claim credit. We already know that Republicans are more craven than your average politician in leaping, as if they were playing jump-rope, from one side of an issue to the other. I expect that Rob McKenna will try to salvage his political career in Washington by claiming that he knew it all along, that he guided the law suit specifically so that the courts would force Congress to enact the single-payer option.

A lot of speculative events would have to combine to bring about the result I've outlined but in the interim we have already had the insurance companies working hard to make our arguments for us. You see, one of the primary arguments for a government run, single-payer health plan was that it created competition for the insurance companies and forced better behavior on those insurers. Of course, the neo-fascist defenders of "free market" economics suddenly argued that in this one case competition would destroy rather than improve the market. Right-wing fanatics have never had a problem with being on both sides of an issue at once. Still, the brazenness of the insurance companies hasn't been on more transparent display than when, less than a week following signing of the health care reform legislation, they decided that they had found a semantic, quasi-legal way to circumvent the provision that they must cover children - in case you did not catch that: CHILDREN - with pre-existing medical conditions. Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sibelius, quickly issued a directive that the evasion that the insurers proposed using was not only incorrect but would result in vigorous opposition from DHHS. Yet the insurers in this announcement clarified the impression that they will not accept reform quietly and are working overtime to find ways to circumvent the reforms. So much for the arguments from the American Enterprise Institute and insurance trade groups that they need no oversight or competition to enforce their providing high quality medical insurance coverage.

So cautiously I look forward to insurance executives' greed, right-wing fanaticism, and mindless opposition to any Democratic proposals creating the atmosphere in which government run health care with not only be inevitable but popular and enacted into law.

Newt and the Pope: Responsibility has been Shifted

So first there was this issue with sexual abuse of children by a number of Roman Catholic priests in the Boston Archdiocese over many decades but that was just a function of the decadent, permissive society in America. And anti-Catholic propaganda. Don't forget that any negative publicity about the behavior of the Church of Rome is always just anti-Catholic propaganda regardless of how true and accurate it may be.

Then it seems that the same thing happened in Canada and it even had implications for the government of Quebec because they lack total separation of church and state. But that was simply infection from the decadent, permissive society in America which didn't have adequate border controls to prevent French or other Canadian Catholics from independently abusing children. Just more anti-Catholic propaganda inspired from south of the Canadian border even though it mostly occurred before the first story about such abuse appeared in a U. S. newspaper.

Then, horror of horrors, the same behaviors showed up in Ireland. Ireland! Saints preserve us! The Americans have infected the people whose monasteries "saved civilization"! And those horrible anti-Catholics have infiltrated the Irish press too!

And then some German choirmaster named Ratzinger seems to have physically abused choirboys. And those anti-Catholic newspaper people, clearly non-Aryan, not echt Deutsch, and probably under the influence of the Elders of Zion have constructed the falsehood that this choirmaster is the brother of Pope Hitlerjugend I, alias Josef Ratzinger, Benedict XVI.

And worst of all, those decadent, permissive Americans have reared up again, this time in Wisconsin to put forward the obviously contumacious and defamatory charge that Pope Hitlerjugend I himself, as Cardinal Ratzinger, covered up the abuse of deaf children by a priest. These anti-Catholics have gone so far as to dress up some hired shill to pose as the retired Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland to falsely confirm the pope's involvement.

Clearly there is a vast conspiracy of Jews, atheists, Protestants, apostates and (fill in the name of the group that you, as a good Catholic, hate most here) to defame Pope Hitlerjugend I.

So, let me get this right. The Roman Catholic Church covered up sexual and physical abuse of children for decades. Any insinuation that the current pope while Archbishop and then Cardinal of the Munich Archdiocese may have known about the actions of priests, choirmasters or his own biological brothers is clearly defamatory. The current pope, whose portfolio as one of the most powerful cardinals in the Vatican at the time, was the ultimate Vatican official overseeing complaints such as those of the magnitude of the Wisconsin situation against priests had no knowledge of these cover ups. The current pope who, as cardinal, engineered the exit from the Boston Archdiocese to a sinecure in Rome far from the reach of American laws and victim lawsuits of Bernard, Cardinal Law was unaware of any of these egregious abuses. And it necessarily follows, as day follows night, that any doubts about Pope Hitlerjugend I's story are biased and unwarranted attacks on his office and the Roman Catholic Church.

We can't call this "blaming the victim" exactly because the Roman Church has avoided doing so. They leave that to various radical Catholic lay organizations for the sake of plausible deniability. However, it is certainly an absolute evasion of responsibility and a craven form of misdirection.

Simultaneously with this continuing tale of a Roman Catholic Church we have a very similar tale in American politics. Former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich, perhaps the person who best typifies the cravenness, fraud, deception, vileness and lies what are the core of the Republican Party has gone the whole hog. Rather than taking the Vatican route of farming out blaming the victims of abuse, Newt has embraced that role himself.

The lunatics of the Tea Party Movement, whipped up to a frenzy by neo-fascists like of Michelle Bachmann, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Tom Tancredo, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, started making threats against and vandalizing the offices of Congresspersons who voted for the Health Care Reform Bill. They sent envelopes of white powder (hopefully inert) to at least one Congressperson, Faxed and phoned in threats against not only the Representatives but against their families and even grandchildren, all for having the temerity to extend a basic right to health care to all Americans. At this juncture one might think that a group of cool-headed adults might step forward to discipline the out-of-control children before someone really gets hurt. Falsely presenting himself as such a grown-up, Newt came forward to insist that the Democrats who enacted the bill were responsible for the frenzy.

Of course! It should be obvious to everyone. The victims of the lunatics he and his cohorts have been whipping into a frenzy since November 4, 2008 were at fault because they weren't Newt. I expect that his excuse for his adulteries with his employees resulting in his second and third marriages had nothing to do with his ego or psychopathology but rather with the fact that wives 2 and 3 wore provocative clothing or gave signals that they wanted him to violate his marriage vows.

People listen to Newt, this neo-fascist scum bag, because of his position and the cash that ultra-rightist plutocrats keep funneling to him to keep him in the limelight. Yet ultimately he's in the same position as the current pope. Gingrich and Ratzinger are both attempting, through propaganda that might even give Josef Goebbles pause, to misdirect the focus from their own immoral, dishonest and, in some cases, criminal acts to save their own skins. Their standard enemies receive their blame because their egotistical self-absorption cannot admit of the least fallibility on their parts.

And, frankly, I am pleased, even ecstatic in both cases.

Newt and Pope Hitlerjugend I both are bent on the marginalization of their institutions. They are moving farther and farther into the ultra-fascist right both in political and religious doctrine. They reflexively excuse their worst followers while refusing to reform in ways that might gain them broader power. The scandals in the Church of Rome will continue to multiply and fester. Over 30 years of right wing popes have skewed the curia and the College of Cardinals toward fundamentalist hard liners making serious reform of the church all but impossible. The fanatics and con men that Rupert Murdock and Roger Ailes promote on Fox News along with scum like Newt Gingrich, John Bolten, Dick Cheney, Bill Kristol and the Tea Party lunatics are dragging the Republicans so far to the right that they can't even see the territory of Conservatism any longer. Even some of those who watch Fox News are inevitably going to find this extremism distasteful.

Within the Republican's corporate controlled hierarchy the purges have already begun. I have not the slightest mote of sympathy for David Frum. He's an amoral ideologue with no loyalty to anyone but the person who pays his bills. Still Frum's fate this week demonstrates that the Republican's circular firing squad has loosed its first volley. That he is, so far, the only one not to kowtow quickly enough to evade the whizzing bullets indicates the absence of anyone amongst the Republicans who isn't somewhere to the right of Benito Mussolini.

Senator John McCain, one of the very few Republicans who can fool people into thinking he's a moderate even after he opens his mouth, has claimed that Democrats will get even less cooperation from Republicans following the passage of Health Care Reform than they got before passage. How he figures that Democrats will have less than zero cooperation and even more unreasoning opposition I don't quite know but I'm sure that the neo-fascist opposition will figure it out. President Obama this week challenged the Republicans to "bring it on." I sincerely hope that they do.

If the Democrats are smart (always an iffy proposition) and emboldened (which they now are) their next legislative priority will be Senator Dodd's Banking Reform Bill. I eagerly await the spectacle of Republicans tying themselves in knots to defend their masters in the biggest banks.

The Tea Party Movement is an arranged marriage of ultra-rightists, the lunatic Libertarian fringe and some confused and worried people gullible enough to be suckered in by Republican fearmongering. Quite a substantial portion of those folks didn't like giving taxpayer money to big banks and investment houses that had just fleeced them of their retirement funds. Some will be dumb enough to stick with the right wingers but a substantial number are going to walk, run or just drift away as the Republicans insist that this isn't the right time or way to reform the banking system. The status quo in financial markets is a disaster for the small investors, homeowners, parents trying to save for a child's college education and middle-aged folks looking hard toward retirement. I fervently hope that the Republicans will defend that status quo. Such blocking of financial reform will dissolve the Tea Partiers leaving only the hardcore fully brainwashed by Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. I only hope that the Democrats can time exposure of the Republican's suicide pact so that it falls after their lunatic fringe has picked slate after slate of unelectable ultra-rightists giving the Democrats say, 67 Senate seats and about 300 House members.

I wish I could say that I thought that the Roman Catholic Church could save itself. As an institution and as currently organized I wish it the same quick, dramatic, self-inflicted and painful demise I wish upon the Republican Party. Still it saddens me to say so because of the many, many decent, caring priests, nuns and brothers I have known to work and sacrifice for those in need of comfort and of the most basic needs for food, shelter, clothing and respect. I know that those people of sincere and deep religious calling are pained by and ashamed of the actions of their church hierarchy. Most are attached to their church in ways I respect even as I fail to understand them. Still I can feel that pain and shame and wish they did not have to go through it. I'm sure that they know far better than I that they are the source of any vitality in their church and sole hope for its survival if, it manages to survive rotting from both head and core. Pope Hitlerjugend I and his curia and College of Cardinals are the cancer that is killing their church just as Newt and his neo-fascists are the cancer killing the Republican Party.

Oiling The Cogs Of Cognitive Dissonance II

BBC listening provides me with a lot of material lately.

First, let me say that there are two uses for the term "holistic". The first definition simply means considering the whole. If we are discussing medicine - which we will be momentarily - the most benign version has the doctor considering interactions of medications, how diuretics might aggravate a patient's tendency to form kidney stones and the like. In that sense, holistic anything is wise practice and a clear boon. But the second definition is a popular one that involves a raft of New Age nonsense about auras, spiritual healing, crystals, copper bracelets, herbalism and the like. It is largely hype, sympathetic magic and con-artistry giving a bad name to those who would practice the first type of holism.

Let me also note that I have some qualms about lumping herbalism in with the other scams. As the existence of Taxol, to cite just one famous instance, proves chemicals naturally synthesized by plants can have beneficial effects on human diseases. Plants from lowly molds (e.g. penicillin) to trees (e.g. Taxol) have provided us with some effective treatments for human disease. That said, however, it give no pass to all the extremist herbalist nonsense put forward by con men looking to separate the gullible and the desperate from their cash. I saw this foolishness first hand some years ago. A very dear friend suddenly collapsed one day. She had a particularly aggressive and nasty cancer. Her doctors told her that this cancer was inevitably fatal. She might live 6 to 12 months longer, sometimes people survived a bit longer. Someone in her circle convinced her that a macrobiotic diet was the answer to surviving longer so she rejected conventional treatments with chemotherapy and radiation. The disease ran its course and she was dead in 11 months. The macrobiotic nonsense did nothing for her. It was a placebo. It neither hastened not slowed her cancer's progress. It was simply worthless though a macrobiotic counselor and "holistic health practitioner" made some substantial cash by peddling their worthless trash and nonsense.

What brings this subject up is a recent report by the BBC that the British National Health Service is considering discontinuing payment to holistic medicine con men in a money saving move. A double blind study found no effect of any kind on any medical condition studied by holistic practitioners' efforts.

The radio report brought together a person involved in the study for Britain's National Health Service  and a holistic practitioner from Germany. What struck me immediately was the German holistic practitioner's insistence that his form of medicine must be valid because it has a more than 200 year history. He also insisted that "school" medicine has a bad track record because 200 years ago it promoted treatments that have since been discredited. Both statements are independently verifiable and true. What he did not say is that the quackery of times past in large part involved exactly the quackery he practices today.

A dear friend of mine has an adult daughter who has a "practice" in Southern California, an area that's almost a cliche for its eager adoption of all manner of quackery and lunatic nonsense. His daughter is a very sweet woman. She styles herself, however, as a spiritual healer and is currently making a nice living by charging clients $150 per hour for "healing" them over the phone. It is flat out quackery that persists because the one positive thing that anyone can say about this con is that no one is poisoned as frequently happened in centuries past. The hurt is simply the extraction of cash from someone stupid enough to pay for foolishness that he or she believe has more than a placebo effect.

But back to our German con man/holistic healer. I would suggest that he cannot argue that his form of medicine is effective and valid because it has been practiced continuously since the 18th or 19th Centuries and in the next breath argue that "school" medicine is less effective and valid because medical practices of the 18th or 19th Centuries were unenlightened and have been shown to be quackery. The fact is that the very practices which modern medicine from Harvey and Pasteur onward have relegated to the dustbin are the practices that our German practitioner, my friend's daughter and others like them who are either dishonest or delusional perpetuate today.

I can't applaud the British National Health Service loudly enough for their decision to call a con a con and stop wasting scarce health care cash and resources on garbage. But don't look for that to happen in the United States. Two decades ago some very well connected con men bought Robert Dole, senator from Archer, Daniels Midland, as their front man in removing many of the restrictions the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had on these snake oil remedies. In the guise of speeding drugs to the market we limited the review functions of the Food and Drug Administration. Much as Phil Gramm shilled for rapacious bankers to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 giving us the multiple banking frauds whose destructive consequences continue to ripple through the world economy, so Dole shilled for Big Pharma (you didn't think he became a viagra spokesman because he was so sexy, did you?) in pulling the teeth from FDA regulations and attacking then FDA Administrator, David Kessler.

Thanks to Dole, the FDA can report that scams like "energy" drinks, cosmetics that can cause permanent damage while effecting unnecessary and minimal changes and snake oil "breathing" remedies are ineffective but can't remove them from the market until and unless they kill people. Thanks to Dole and his corporate sponsors we now have "pro-biotics", the current manifestation of the American fixation on laxatives, that correct the problems that the processed foods with which those corporations stuff us by stuffing us with the bacteria removed from the processed foods. In short, we have less protection from scams, more crap on the market and waste more money on it both in tax dollars and out-of-pocket.

With a reform of the American health care system now enacted into law, we need to take a long, hard look at the British National Health report and start shutting down some of these scams if for no other reason than to control our health care costs. The first step in the process of putting an end to the "holistic" nonsense is to stop assuming that simply because a practice has been going on for hundreds of years it has any validity whatever.

The Republicans of North Korea

Yes. I admit it. I an Un-American. I listen to the BBC. The BBC offers a look at the world beyond the United Kingdom. That view is not entirely free of prejudice but it is almost entirely free of limitations. Partly I presume that that larger view is a legacy of the British Empire on which the sun never set as opposed to America on which, to look at our Teapartiers and other neo-fascist lunatics, one would think that the sun never rose.

I have just finished listening to a report of a BBC correspondent who visited Pyongyang, North Korea's capital for my geographically challenged fellow countrymen. He attended an open meeting with college students in the North Korean capital. One young woman confronted the correspondent and asked in fluent, nearly unaccented English if she seemed uninformed about the world, malnourished, oppressed or ignorant? Clearly she was none of those things. What she was is part of North Korea's supremely entitled and privileged ruling class. Of course she was not ignorant. Of course she was not malnourished. Of course she was not uninformed about the larger world. And of course she was not oppressed because she is part of the elite that oppresses the rest of the nation.

Hearing that report I was struck by the correspondences between that North Korean student's view of her nation and its place in the world and that of our own Republican Party.

In the Republican view, they still have jobs and are very comfortably off thanks to their unconscionably enormous bonuses paid by companies they've driven into the ground at the expense of the less privileged classes. They need no "stimulus package" and, therefore, in their blinkered reasoning, no one else does either.

In the Republican view, they have health care or can afford it if they don't. They need no public option and in fact want to stifle the competition for the insurance companies which they run or on whose boards of directors they have lucrative sinecures. So what if some people they don't know die sooner of preventable diseases or have their families impoverished so their doctor friends can buy that new titanium putter and drive up the the golf course in the newest BMW?

In the Republican view, taxes, any taxes at any level, are too high because they want all of their money. Let the rest of the population make soup out of bark or grass or dirt. After all, the Republicans great-great-grandfathers pulled themselves up by the bootstraps of slaves or non-union workers or exploited immigrants to create the trusts, family foundations and dummy corporations from which the current generation draws a comfortable living.  Therefore, the rest of the nation, every single one of them, should be able to do the same even after the Republicans have repossessed those boots, straps and all.

The Republicans pooh-pooh the disintegration of society...except when they need to do so for fear mongering purposes to distract the attention of the hoi poloi. After all, things are quite civilized in their country clubs and gated communities and they can always hire additional armed security if things amongst the lower classes get more unruly. After all, why should they put their (great-great-grandfather's) hard-earned cash into things like education, health care, jobs programs and social services that only make the great unwashed...uppity and less suitable for service.

The terrible thing about these attitudes shared by the privileged ruling classes in North Korea and America is that the attitudes arise from a lack of empathy and willful ignorance. It matters not in which country these oligarchs live they share and retain power through a pattern of lies designed to maintain their own privileges regardless of the viciousness visited on their fellow citizens.

The Teaparty movement here in the United States is only the latest manifestation of the fact that lying loudly and long enough will always convince one third of the population of your rightness and confuse another third sufficiently to provide an opening for the oligarchs to regain or maintain control.

And oh, if you are worrying about your health, unemployment or mortgage payment those of us who profit from your predicament think it's really all your own fault, but never mind...look over here...there's the Super Bowl...er...Olympics...Final Four...er...some starlet not wearing panties is scooting across a limousine seat.

Miscellany, January, 2010

To paraphrase Benjamin Disraeli, "There are four kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, statistics and Fox News."

The people who are most violently opposed to abortion are those whose parents could have gotten the greatest benefit from the procedure.

Similarly, I completely agree with Barney Frank who observed a couple of decades ago, "Republicans believe that life begins at conception and ends at birth."

Religious fundamentalists and rabid sports fans are living proof that evolution doesn't hold true...in all cases.

Orly Taitz was not born in the United States. Her hair color and grasp of the law are equally honest.

The louder, more often and more emphatically you say you're a "CHRISTIAN" the less likely you are to be one.

If the people who believe in "The Rapture" are the people who will be populating Heaven, being left behind is going to be a picnic. Besides, I'll have my choice of cars.

If the neo-fascist ultra-right thinks Sarah Palin is a leader why haven't we just won by default?

I just adore protesters opposed to single-payer, universal health care who chant, "Hands off my Medicare!"

Shouldn't we ask the police officers murdered from October, 2009 in Washington State whether they think that the Second Amendment conveys an individual right to own firearms? Oops! My bad. They were shot so we can't ask them.

I have ancestors who served in the American Revolutionary Army including at Lexington and Concord. The current groups calling themselves "Minutemen" are an affront to all those who fought for American independence though they fit right into the traditions of Italian Black and German Brown Shirts.

Ditto for the Teaparty Movement.

The essence of Libertarianism is, "Do unto others, grab as much as you can for yourself and get out of there before you're caught."

Nobody needs to undermine the authority the Roman Catholic Church while so many of its priests, bishops and cardinals are doing such yeoman service in undermining it themselves.

Nobody does enough work or works hard enough to justify salaries, let alone bonuses of more than $1,000,000.00 per year.

Stupid us! We give sports, movie and rock stars multiple millions of dollars while they are still in their teens and twenties and then we are shocked (SHOCKED!!!!) when we find they're using drugs, alcohol and screwing everything that passes within reach. Exceptional talent doesn't mean that the person is any brighter than the guy mumbling to himself while dumpster diving.

Not everyone can be President of the United States nor should be. We just spent eight years under the administration of criminals and fools, hopefully putting that idea to rest.

The Bush family is living proof that the British Royal Family isn't the only one suffering from in-breeding.

That Newt Gingrich still speaks about "traditional family values" is irrefutable proof that the right-wing hasn't a single shred of integrity or honesty.

As a cynic and lover of irony, I am delighted that the party of Mark Foley, Larry Craig, Mark Sanford and David Vitter is the party of "family values".

Facing Satan

If we atheists didn't already have Pat Robertson we would have to invent him.

Actually, fundamentalism is the best thing that ever happened to atheism. It's far harder to rip apart a Prince of Peace or a god whose embodiment is love than it is to piss all over blinkered idiots whose god spouts war on unbelievers and hate generally. As I've written before here, fundamentalism is not religion; it's religiosity. That doesn't keep some of the people who are foolish or stupid enough to adhere to it from being pleasant generally and even decent under narrow circumstances. But narrow is the active word here.

I don't believe in either a Big-Imaginary-Friend-In-The-Sky or Satan. I believe that what good there is in the world comes primarily from people being kind and decent to one another in living this life as if it were the only one they will ever have (because I think it is). I also believe that the bulk of evil in this world - and there certainly is evil even without a satan - comes from people being hateful and selfish and narrow minded toward others while living this life as if it were a rehearsal gone wrong as they wait for some reward in another life that will never come.

But let's, for a moment, postulate  universe in which both that Big-Imaginary-Friend-In-The-Sky and Satan exist. If I were satan and wanted to drag as many fools to hell as possible, I can think of no better Pied Piper for the task than a neo-fascist hatemonger disguised as an avuncular fellow who professes himself to be a CHRISTIAN. You want proof? The 700 Club's name derives from the number of the Beast, 666, and Pat Robertson's official age in 1964, the year Barry Goldwater was defeated for the presidency and the year that Lyndon Johnson decided to make sure that Pat's father was defeated in his next senatorial campaign. That's right, folks, Robertson's own program identifies him as an agent of satan.

Want more proof? It's a "club", right? And what color are clubs in a pack of cards? Right! Clubs are black! And satan is the prince of darkness and darkness is black. It's right there in the name.

Ridiculous?

According to Pat Robertson today, January 13, 2009, "Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French ... and they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, 'We will serve you if you'll get us free from the French.' True story. And the devil said, 'OK, it's a deal,' . Ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after another."

How would Pat know it's a "true story"? He couldn't...unless he was there! He has admitted it. In 1804 Pat Robertson himself was in the meeting between the rebellious black slaves of Haiti and satan. Now, we know that Pat certainly is not black...of African descent, I mean. So if he's not a former Haitian slave that only leaves one other presence in the meeting...satan. There you are, boys and girls, proof positive or certainly good enough for Pat Robertson and Glenn Beck, that Robertson is, himself, satan and no other.

You want more proof?

Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere and not because its people lack industriousness or invention. It is poor for a variety of reasons that range across the natural, personal and political spectrum over two centuries. Someone who controls such things must hate Haiti, right? But Jesus loved the poor. Jesus comforted the poor and afflicted so whoever is harming Haiti must be working counter to Jesus. And who is the adversary of everything CHRISTIAN and religiose?

Whoever said, "Richard Dawkins" should just close this blog now. You don't get it.

No, silly, it's satan again. Satan has visited on Haiti this massive earthquake. It killed the Archbishop of Port au Prince, didn't it? Or would Robertson say that's simply because he was a Catholic? I'm not sure on that one. Still, obviously this is satan's handiwork and satan himself, Pat Robertson, is trying to throw everyone off the track.

Or, perhaps we could look at things a little differently.

Isn't it possible that the Haitian slaves of the 18th and 19th Centuries felt that slavery was an injustice counter to every decent Christian religious principle? Isn't it possible that they were inspired by the revolutions in America and France to seek their freedom and independence? But then again, isn't that another proof that Pat Robertson is satan? After all, who but satan would ascribe to satan a yearning for freedom and independence? Or is it, perhaps, that Pat Robertson is really saying that in 1775 a group of delegates from colonies met in Philadelphia and made a pact with the devil. John Hancock, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and the rest said to satan, "We will serve you if you will free us from the English." and the devil said, "It's a deal." Perhaps that is what Robertson is saying, after all, he was there. He would know.