I voted here in San Francisco’s Noe Valley neighborhood about two hours ago. It took about an hour to get through the line, and while standing there I was chatting with the 75-year-old retired cop in front of me, and the young 30-something gay couple in front of him, who had their two little girls in tow.
Everyone was in good spirits as the conversation moved from the Obama-McCain contest to the farce that is Sarah Palin, and then on to non-political matters, like the road work being done on the next block. The conversation between the cop and the couple started to get animated toward the end of our hour in line as the three men began to discuss the current football season, wagering bets for this weekend’s games and making predictions for the Super Bowl.
And then, as we entered the firehouse that doubled as our polling place, as the couple and their daughters stepped out of line and up to the table to receive their ballots, I observed the cop in front of me. He opened his sample ballot, took out his pen, scribbled out his "yes" vote on Proposition 8, and filled in the ballot line for "no."
I don’t think he knew that I observed him. And since it was such a private moment I held back my tears of joy and my overwhelming desire to pat him on the back and say "thank you, sir." Instead, I left the polling place muttering to myself those two words you have repeated over and over during this election cycle, Andrew:
Four years ago my husband and I adopted a nine-year-old boy. He’d been taken from his biological family when he was three and shuttled through six different foster homes in six years. The three of us have worked very hard to create our family. Our son has added to our lives in ways we could never have imagined. We love him very much.
This year our son, who is now thirteen, came out to us. Our son is gay. We are fine with this.
The amazing thing about our boy is that he goes to school every day and lives his life true to himself. He’s a happy child. He writes poetry. He skips. He’s a track star. He excels at algebra. He loves the Stylistics. He has a blinding smile. Most of the kids at his school love him. But some of the boys call him “faggot.” Yesterday our usually sunny boy, all five-feet-four inches of him, came home staring at the ground, visibly upset. Some of the boys at school were taunting him with cries of Yes on 8, the California proposition aimed at eliminating the right to marry for those who want to marry another of the same gender. The boys were punished by the school, but the damage was done.
Who are these followers of Jesus Christ who would tell my son, taken from his family at three, and homeless until he was nine, that he cannot marry and have a family of his own?
Today my thirteen-year-old son joined me in the voting booth. As I voted for Obama my son put his hand on top of mine. He did the same thing when I voted no on Proposition 8. He was late for school, but I can’t think of a better reason.
Please Donate to No On 8. And if you live in California, please be sure to vote on Tuesday. Take nothing for granted. As the saying goes, pray as though everything depends on God, but act as though everything depends on you. In an election this close, your vote Will make a difference. So please…vote…so that love can have a chance in this world.
After the rally, we witnessed a near-street riot involving the exiting McCain crowd and two Cuban-American Obama supporters. Tony Garcia, 63, and Raul Sorando, 31, were suddenly surrounded by an angry mob. There is a moment in a crowd when something goes from mere yelling to a feeling of danger, and that’s what we witnessed. As photographers and police raced to the scene, the crowd elevated from stable to fast-moving scrum, and the two men were surrounded on all sides as we raced to the circle.
The event maybe lasted a minute, two at the most, before police competently managed to hustle the two away from the scene and out of the danger zone. Only FiveThirtyEight tracked the two men down for comment, a quarter mile down the street.
"People were screaming ‘Terrorist!’ ‘Communist!’ ‘Socialist!’" Sorando said when we caught up with him. "I had a guy tell me he was gonna kill me."
Asked what had precipitated the event, "We were just chanting ‘Obama!’ and holding our signs. That was it. And the crowd suddenly got crazy."
I hope nobody thinks this sort of thing is going to stop after election day. What you need to understand is they’re not trying to win the election anymore. I really believe that choosing Palin was for inciting the base for war on an Obama administration they had come to believe was a certainty. They know this time the fighting will be harder then it was to destroy Clinton because the democratic grassroots, if not the leadership, is organized and ready for it this time. Expecting it even. And maybe they’ve taken the measure of Obama in their private conferences and figured that he’s no Bill Clinton. So they’re stoking the gutter full of hate, because the gutter is all they have left to win with. That’s why it was Palin. People are shaking their heads wondering how McCain could pick the likes of her to be a heartbeat away from the presidency. But he didn’t pick her to be vice president. Her job is to be gasoline on the fire.
What we’re seeing now isn’t the last ugly gasp of a failed presidential campaign, but the start of the scorched earth after-the-election knife fight for the next four years, if not longer. I’ve been saying for years now that the shit doesn’t really hit the fan until the republicans begin loosing power. In the coming years, it won’t only be gay people getting bashed on the streets of America. Just so you know.
Welcome to the reality your gay and lesbian neighbors have been living with for decades now. You knew it had to be you next didn’t you.
Via Atrios… If this is true, then maybe it means that voters have finally become fed up enough with the republican strategy of winning elections by alienating Americans from one another, that they’re willing now at long last to punish them at the polls for it.
North Carolina Congressman Robin Hayes, reeling from recent remarks about "Liberals hating real Americans," has lost his lead in North Carolina’s 8th Congressional District race.
Hayes trails Democrat Larry Kissell 51-46 in a poll released Tuesday by Raleigh’s Public Policy Polling. In its last NC-8 poll in August, PPP had the incumbent Hayes leading by five points.
You can argue that the republican party has a lot to answer for, in terms of how badly they’ve damanged the economy, our moral standing abroad and the rule of law here at home. But all of that pales in comparison to this one fact: that for decades now the republicans have sought to deliberately make Americans hate one another in order to win elections.
As a young speechwriter for Richard Nixon, Patrick Buchanan once expounded upon the politics of polorization. "If we tear the country in half," Buchanan assured his boss in a perversely optimistic memo, "we can pick up the bigger half."
–J. Michael Hogan, Rhetoric and Community
And so they set about to do exactly that, inflaming bigotries and ugly passions to separate neighbor from neighbor, the better to split apart the New Deal coalition of working class urban and rural Americans, women and minorities, and replace it with a toxic wasteland of mutual hatred. And every election year that hatred had to be stoked a little bit more, and a little bit more, and a little bit more, to keep it alive, to keep Americans from voting for their hopes and dreams instead of their fears and hatreds.
The damage they have done to America goes far beyond the economy and the war. It is worse even, then the constitutional damage Bush has done while in office. Those things can be fixed, with effort, in our lifetimes. The hate they have deliberately sown amongst the amber waves of grain will take generations to heal. If the republican party is to be held accountable for anything this election night, let it be for that.
[Update…] Via Atrios… From Steve Benen at The Washington Monthly…
WHEN THE GOING GETS TOUGH, THE WEAK GET RIDICULOUS…. Recent polling shows Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R) trailing in her re-election fight in North Carolina against Democrat Kay Hagan, so it stands to reason that she’s getting a little desperate.
Sen. Elizabeth Dole’s latest advertisement suggests her Democratic opponent, Kay Hagan, is a godless heathen.
"A leader of the Godless Americans PAC recently held a secret fundraiser for Kay Hagan," the 30-second spot says, showing footage of the group’s members talking about their atheist beliefs on cable news.
"Godless Americans and Kay Hagan. She hid from cameras. Took godless money," the ad concludes. "What did Kay Hagan promise in return?"
At the very end of the ad, a voice sounding like Hagan’s says: "There is no God."
Seriously, Dole used a Hagan impersonator to make voters think she’s an atheist.
It’s hard to know where to start with an ad this deplorable. First, Hagan is actually a Sunday school teacher and an elder in her church. Second, the fundraiser in question was co-hosted by 40 people, one of whom is on the board of an atheist political action committee. Third, there’s nothing scandalous about non-believers.
And fourth, what the hell is "godless money"?
Hagan held a press conference this morning with her family and pastor to denounce the ad, and announced that if Dole didn’t pull the ad, she would seek a cease-and-desist order.
Even in a campaign cycle filled with sleazy, deplorable attacks, Dole has disgraced herself in a way few thought possible.
Possible? Possible? If you’d spent the last couple decades as a gay man, living under the kinds of attacks on your person that republicans just take for granted as normal conversation, you’d know goddamned well what the kook pews are capable of. There is no bottom in that gutter. That’s what you need to understand. There is no bottom.
That if you put someone on the teevee who reflected the views of the sizable chunk of the country they would have a big audience.
Brian Williams couldn’t do it. Neither could Joe Scarborough, Rita Cosby, Dan Abrams, Ashleigh Banfield, Deborah Norville or Alan Keyes.
But MSNBC’s new 9pmET show did. The Rachel Maddow show topped CNN’s Larry King Live in the ad-friendly A25-54 demo during the month of October. King still wins the Total Viewer crown and FNC’s Hannity & Colmes is #1 in both measurements.
All that ad money lost because you didn’t listen to my advice to provide companion programming for K.O.
And you bet your ass that if NBC was just a television network they’d have rushed to where the viewers were faster then the speed of light. But NBC isn’t just a television network. It’s a subsidiary of The General Electric Corporation. In addition to all those household appliances they make, GE also happens to be a major Defense Department contractor…one of those pieces of the military industrial complex president Eisenhower once warned the nation about. So what if nobody but other right wingers watch their extremist pundits? They get the message out, and NBC can make up the loss with their other programming.
Once upon a time, the major TV networks viewed their news divisions as something of a loss, or at best a break-even part of the whole. But they let them have a degree of independence because the airwaves were seen as a public trust, even by corporations like RCA. They still mostly skewed to the Establishment line, but there was enough respect for the place actual journalism has in a democracy, that reporting the facts usually won out over sticking to the party line. No more. The minute Rachel Maddow looks like she’s having a measurable impact on the Narrative the show will be pulled, just like they pulled Donahue and Moyers.
Welcome To Planet Earth Mr. Greenspan. And How Was Your Stay On Planet Rand…?
In my college years I succumbed to the rhetoric of Ayn Rand. So did a lot of folks, some well before me. Alan Greenspan for one, who was at one time a member of her inner circle. I became a Libertarian. Fiercely so. But to my credit I think, I never let my new found ideology interpret reality for me. Eventually Ronald Reagan showed me what sort of people make money synonymous with morality, and the kind of government we were likely to end up with with them in charge. So I shrugged…and left both Rand and her bastard child, the Libertarian party. Is it so insufferably arrogant of me to say that I’ve been waiting for the rest of them to wise up ever since?
For years, a Congressional hearing with Alan Greenspan was a marquee event. Lawmakers doted on him as an economic sage. Markets jumped up or down depending on what he said. Politicians in both parties wanted the maestro on their side.
But on Thursday, almost three years after stepping down as chairman of the Federal Reserve, a humbled Mr. Greenspan admitted that he had put too much faith in the self-correcting power of free markets and had failed to anticipate the self-destructive power of wanton mortgage lending.
“Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief,” he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
I had my Damascus moment twenty years ago you drooling moron and it was called the Silverado Savings and Loan Scandal. You could have seen then if you’d just taken a look at it, that what happens when financial institutions are deregulated is a mad rush to stuff other people’s, mostly working people’s money into their pockets. Self interest after all, is about Self, not about the institution you work for, let alone the communities they serve. It doesn’t matter if the whole shitpile collapses if you can get out of it with enough cash to live in the lap of luxury for the rest of your life, does it? If self-interest is all there is to it, then you’ve done pretty good haven’t you…even if thousands of other people had to loose everything so you could live high on the hog.
Greed is, contrary to Randian dogma, Not Good. Ambition is good. But ambition is self actualizing. You want to become something. Something better. Greed is just wanting what someone else has. There was a time when I believed that Rand’s attempt to redefine Greed as Ambition was just an artifact of her not knowing English natively. But no…she knew what she was doing. It was from the beginning, all about raping the working class for the benefit of the rich and powerful. Her revenge for the communist appropriation of her father’s pharmacy. If she couldn’t stick it to the Russian proletariat, she could at least help the rich here in America carpet their mansions with the life savings of working Americans. She raised a generation on her Greed Is Good religion. And when they got the power they craved, they put her ideas into practice. The only practice they could have been put to. The only practice they were ever meant to be put to…
Along with the rest of America, Rep. George Miller has watched the value of his retirement investments plummet in recent weeks.
"I’ve lost 30 percent like everybody else. This hits home with the Miller family, too," the California Democrat said in a recent interview.
In recent years, Congress has promoted the dramatic movement in corporate America away from defined-benefit pensions to 401(k)s with policies encouraging automatic enrollment and raising contribution limits. Under 401(k) plans employees contribute to their own investment accounts and assume the risks and rewards that go with them. Lately, with the crisis on Wall Street and across the globe, it’s been more risk than reward.
Earlier this month, Miller’s House Education and Labor Committee found that Americans’ retirement plans, pension plans and 401(k)s included, have lost as much as $2 trillion in the past 15 months– about 20 percent of their value. At a committee hearing Wednesday in San Francisco, Miller cited new research suggesting that the losses might be as much as double that.
And they almost got Social Security during the Bush administration too. Remember that? They were going to let individuals "invest" their retirement money. Basically, give it to Wall Street to play with. It was going to be better then Social Security…just like our 401ks were going to be better then real pensions. When the butcher’s bill for decades of Randian inspired market deregulation is added up, a lot of folks are going to be Real Glad they didn’t get their hands on that trust fund too.
In the coming years, as the folks who lined their pockets during the past few decades with other people’s life savings are made to pay some of it pack, there is going to be a lot of bellyaching from the high and mighty about class warfare. As though they haven’t been engaging in it themselves. Once upon a time the robber barons lived by the simple maxim that might makes right. If they thought of it at all in moralistic terms they saw themselves as a kind of Darwinism in action…survival of the fittest and all that. Then Rand came along and told them that anyone who isn’t rich is a leach on those who are. Capitalism, by which she meant the unrestrained greed motive of the rich and powerful, was not only the best economic system, it was the only Moral one. Now in the higher echelons of wealth, raping the rest of us isn’t merely something you do because you can. Now it’s your moral obligation.
But no amount of apologetics can make what is essentially a pillage and conquest based economic model work for very long, now that we’re not living in caves anymore. Cooperation is necessary. Trust is necessary. For there to be rewards for industriousness, there also need to be guards against perdition. The marketplace needs a cop on the block, or it simply degenerates into gang warfare and shear thievery and collapses. Preying on other people, trusting people, naive people, weaker people, is not made into a workable, sustainable economic model simply by calling it good. Greed is not good.
Video Only — A threatening letter has sparked a new controversy here in San Diego surrounding the gay marriage debate. Donors who gave money to the No on Prop 8 campaign say they received blackmail letters demanding money, and the Yes on 8 campaign now says the letters were sent by their employees.
In Nicholas Meyer’s Sherlock Holmes novel, The West End Horror, there’s a scene between Holmes and Oscar Wilde…I’m quoting from memory here…where Wilde tells Holmes that he has a perfect way of dealing with blackmailers when they threaten him with incriminating letters. "I publish them", he says.
Donate to No On 8, Here. Maybe you’ll get one of these letters too…suitable for framing…or posting online…
The database of contributors to the campaigns, for and against, California proposition 8 must be lagging a tad behind because my first contribution of $500 still isn’t in there. But just for kicks and grins I took a stroll though the listings of contributors from Maryland, and was gratified at the overwhelming support No On 8 was getting from my neighbors. Out of something like a hundred and thirty names, only about five or six were from folks who gave money to support cutting the ring fingers off same sex couples. None of them were names I recognized.
I dontated another $500 dollars to the No campaign today. That makes my stake in the fight an even thousand now. But everyone who donates money between now and midnight Sunday (tomorrow as I write this) gets their contribution matched…
Dear Bruce,
Thanks to the outpouring of support in response to the $1 million match grant announced on Thursday, we are nearly halfway there.
The Yes campaign is now dragging out the usual Homosexuals Want To Prey On Your Children scare rhetoric…some of which is being targeted at California’s ethnic communities. Box Turtle Bulletin has a post up on a Yes ad aimed at Chinese readers, that directly links same sex marriage and pedophilia. Also incest and polygamy. The hate mongering from the Yes crowd has turned what was a likely victory for same-sex marriage, into a dead heat, largely because the No side is being outspent and out organized…largely with the behind the scenes support of the Mormon church. The Latter Day Saints as they like to call themselves, account for 40 percent of the Yes money bucket.
They’ve been swamping California TV with ads that portray gay people, both directly and indirectly, as child molesters, and claim that same-sex marriage will give homosexuals the legal means to go into schools and conduct recruiting activity even in kindergarten. They’re also claiming that churches will be forced to marry same sex couples under threat of prison if they don’t comply. It’s like Watching Anita Bryant’s campaign all over again. All that’s missing is Jerry Falwell standing up in front of a room full of reporters saying that a homosexual will kill you as soon as look at you.
That’s why the polls have tightened. We could loose marriage in California…possibly for generations, if people don’t step up to the plate and give. Now.
I’m single. It’s looking now as though I’ll always be single. So why should I care. Because I still believe in love. Love hasn’t looked at me twice but I still believe in it. And I can see with my own two eyes all the happy, contented, loving couples out there and they deserve a chance to make a home together, grow old together, have a life together. So I’m in for a thousand. Before its over I’ll probably give more. If we loose California the bitterness will just go on and on and on and maybe I’ll never live to see the end of it. But at least I’ll know I was one of those who did something, took a stand for freedom and justice and love even when it seemed hate would win anyway. What is freedom worth to you? What is equality worth?
What is your safety worth to you? Do you consider yourself a danger to children? The Mormon church says you are. They are telling every one of your neighbors that you want to enter their kid’s schools and teach them to be homosexuals. Probably so you can have sex with them.
Do you want to put the neighborhood pastor in jail? The religious right says you do. They are telling everyone, every single person you will ever walk past on the street after this election is over, that you want to put their pastors in prison if they don’t marry same-sex couples.
Do you want to put your neighbors in jail along with them. The right wingers backing proposition 8 say you do. They are telling your neighbors that you will have them arrested if you aren’t allowed into their kid’s schools to teach them how to have sex with you.
Maybe you don’t care all that much about same sex marriage. But the hate mongering going on to get proposition 8 passed, if allowed to go unchallenged, could get you killed. Or someone you love. Maybe that someone in your arms.
We are not supposed to exist. But we do. We are not supposed to love. But we do. We are not supposed to have a share of the American dream of liberty and justice for all. But it is the human dream, and we are as human as they. We exist. We love. We dream. Now we take our stand, for love, for life, and in the doing so, tell the world that we believe in the righteousness of our love, and our dream of freedom. Because it is righteous. Because our dream does not need us to hate our neighbor to make it real.
Donate Here, to No on 8. If you do it before midnight tomorrow whatever amount you donate will be matched. Any small amount…any at all…can help make a difference in leveling the playing field.
If you donate between now and election day online (for any amount), and send me your confirmation email, I will draw, if you wish, an editorial cartoon on the topic of your choice. Or…alternately…a Mark and Josh cartoon on the topic of your choice. Or…if my cartoons don’t do it for you…you can have a signed 11 by 17 print of the image of your choice out of any of my photo galleries.
Mark Weigel reads a note from the kook pews, and takes it apart…line by line…
Another question yet to be resolved is whether Mr. Obama is a natural born citizen of the United States, a prerequisite pursuant to the U.S. Constitution. There is evidence Mr. Obama was born in Kenya rather than, as he claims, Hawaii.
What evidence? We have a newspaper announcement of Obama’s birth in Hawai’i from 1961, and we have a Hawai’ian certificate of live birth. Obama did have Kenyan citizenship until he turned 21; as the son of Barack Obama, Sr, it was automatic. And it did not negate his American citizenship.
There is also a registration document for a school in Indonesia where the would-be president studied for four years, on which he was identified not only as a Muslim but as an Indonesian.
Here’s the document. It does identify Obama as a Muslim and identifies Indonesia as his "nation of citizenship," but that’s what his parents wrote down on their seven-year old son’s school form. If Gaffney thinks this negates Obama’s American citizenship, he doesn’t understand the law.
If correct, the latter could give rise to another potential problem with respect to his eligibility to be president.
Completely false. The document lists Honolulu as Obama’s "place and date of birth."
Curiously, Mr. Obama has, to date, failed to provide an authentic birth certificate which could clear up the matter.
False. I’ll link it again. Unless Gaffney believes that the state of Hawai’i is forging documents for Obama, this is proof that he was born in Honolulu.
This is fever swamp, Vince Foster-was-murdered, Bush-blew-up-the-WTC stuff…
Yes…isn’t it. Oh…but look…it isn’t some babbling nutcase churning this stuff out from his parent’s basement…
Neoconservative pundit Frank Gaffney, former deputy assistant secretary of Defense, has bid adieu to polite society with this column on "the Jihadist vote."
Let me repeat that: Former Deputy Assistant Secretary Of Defense. These are the folks who have been running the country for the past, oh, Eight Years. The debacles that are Iraq, Katrina and the national economy starting to make sense now? Here…let me explain something to you… No…Wait… Let Them explain something to you…
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
This isn’t just the heart of the Bush presidency…it’s the heart of the republican grassroots. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore”… Actually…yes it is…
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. They are not entitled to their own facts. Lies have consequences. The erosion of trust has consequences. You can’t just keep on making things up and expect nothing to come of it… When stocks become worthless, markets fail. When the word of the people becomes worthless, democracy fails.
UPDATE: Later in the column Gaffney cites Pennsylvania attorney Philip Berg, who’s filed a frivolous lawsuit against Obama on this citizenship conspiracy theory. That would be this Philip Berg.
Now, it is time for world leaders to take the lesson learned from Iraq and issue a warrant for the arrest of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney; arrest them; take them to a neutral country; try them for the murder of over 2,800 people from more than 80 countries on 9/11/01 and, when found guilty, sentence them appropriately. Jurisdiction would be proper in any of the more than 80 countries whose citizens were murdered on 9/11.
I compared Gaffney’s nonsense to 9/11 trutherism for a reason.
UPDATE II: This is pathetic: a Toledo station runs a "local hero"-type story on Berg, which puts legal documents from Hawai’i on equal footing with his fact-free claims. It’s mind-boggling. On the one hand you have a government certificate that says Obama was born at 7:24 p.m. on 8/4/61 in Honolulu. On the other you have Berg’s claim, from his lawsuit:
Obama’s grandmother on his father’s side, his half-brother and half-sister all claim Obama was born not in Hawaii but in Kenya. Reports reflect that Obama’s mother traveled to Kenya during her pregnancy; however, she was prevented from boarding a flight from Kenya to Hawaii at her late stage of pregnancy (which, apparently, was a normal restriction, to avoid births during a flight).
Notice the distinct lack of quotes and sources? It’s because the "Obama’s African family members claim he was born in Kenya" story is an internet myth. They have never claimed that. There is no such story. Go ahead and try to find it.
An internet myth. Note that. It’s what the grassroots are saying. To each other. Among other things. Over and over. Obama is a Muslim. Obama has ties to al Qaeda. Obama is a traitor. Obama is a terrorist. So it is, that the republican grassroots take their collective consciences around behind the barn and shoot it. Anything to win, even if it means taking a running bellyflop into the gutter. But it’s not just Obama they are hurling bullshit shit at. They are taking a dump on the very flags that they are busy waving.
It’s one thing to oppose the other party’s candidate on the basis of their record. It’s one thing to oppose them on the basis of their beliefs. It’s one thing to oppose them just because you don’t like their looks, the cut of their clothes, or because the sky is blue. Fine. It’s your right. But when you spread lies you are not opposing the man. You are hating on democracy. You are giving it the middle finger. A democracy is the sum of its citizens. Corrupt yourself, and you corrupt your country. It’s one thing for the politican on your TV screen to do it, it’s one thing for the talk radio host you tune into every day to do it, but when You lie to your neighbor for political gain, you are shitting on America.
This precious democracy we all share, that was bestowed us with the blood and treasure of so many of our forebears, asks only that you treat its core value, the election, with care and attention, and give to it whatever honest consideration you can, to the best of your ability. We all make mistakes sometimes in the ballot booth. Some votes we cast we long live to regret. But the important thing is we try and are honest. With ourselves. With our neighbors. Disagree we may. Vehemently. Fine. So long as it’s honest. That is what so many good people in so many generations past have died for, so that we could do. Speak freely and honestly to each other. Persuasively. Bluntly. Calmly. Angrily. Whatever. But honestly. Because you can. Because people died to give you that freedom. That’s all American is obliging you to do every election year. Instead, you are feeding it poison.
America is dying from that poison. I hear you speak of your patriotism, your love of flag and country. Over and over again I hear it. I see you wave the flag. I see it on your front doors. I see it on your bumpers. I see you wearing it on your lapels. Fine. Swell. Whatever. You love America? Then Stop Lying. Stop. Your motherfucking lies are killing it.
[Update…] Here’s a link to Factcheck.org on Obama’s birth certificate, since the one Weigel linked to isn’t enough for the kook pews. As if…anything could be…actually… I’m sure they have a way of explaining away this too…
In fact, the conspiracy would need to be even deeper than our colleagues realized. In late July, a researcher looking to dig up dirt on Obama instead found a birth announcement that had been published in the Honolulu Advertiser on Sunday, Aug. 13, 1961…
Dig it. They went looking through the newspaper archives and found the birth announcement. Of course…it’s all part of the consperacy you see…
By All Means, Let Me Know How You Feel. I WANT To Know. Really.
There are many reason why I do not regard myself as a Christian anymore. Probably chief among them is I am no longer convinced that God even exists. But even so, fundamentalism notwithstanding, I think you can still regard yourself as a Christian nonetheless. If you think God worship is all there is to Jesus’ message, then you weren’t listening.
Forgiveness. Here is why I just can’t call myself Christian anymore:
Over at Box Turtle Bulletin, Jim Burroway posts that he received a phone call from a reporter saying that many proposition 102 (the Arizona anti same-sex marriage amendment) yard signs are being damaged.
I got a phone call last night from a reporter from Phoenix’s ABC15, telling me that a spokesperson for the ’Yes” side for Prop 102 says that more than a hundred of their campaign signs were vandalized. Obviously, everyone here at No on Prop 102 condemns such vandalism. While we are happy to engage in a vigorous debate on the issues, vandalism has no place in rational debate.
Oh…good grief. Look…if some people are willing to spread the open sewer that is their conscience out on their lawns for everyone in the world to see, then by all means leave the fucking things alone. Seriously. Leave them alone.
Photograph them. Document it. We are living through a moment in history, however these votes turn out. Document it. Document it. Document it. And later, if the thing passes, should these fine God fearing folks feel the need to pretend that they never supported it (and they will, many of them, never doubt it), remember how you felt seeing those signs waved in your face, remember how it felt to have your ring finger cut off while they praised God, and wave their signs right back in their faces. Yes…yes you did…
If you stick a knife nine inches into my back and pull it out three inches,
that is not progress. Even if you pull it all the way out, that is not progress.
Progress is healing the wound… -Malcolm X
It’s good to know the names on that knife in your heart.
Jesus would say that I have to forgive. I can appreciate how anger can turn into hate. I can appreciate how it can corrode your soul, turn it to rust. There is a reason why we have to forgive. Jesus was right. But there are some things I simply cannot forgive. Just…can’t. Ironically my Baptist grandmother was exactly like me in this regard. Neither one of us could let go of a grudge. It’s a dangerous combination I’ve lived with all my life: dad’s loaded gun temper, grandma’s ability to hold onto a grudge forever. If I didn’t have some small smidgen of mom’s endless capacity for love and sympathy I’d be some kind of absolutely legendary asshole. I have grudges from back in elementary school I still take out and polish every now and then.
Instead of loving your enemies, treat your friends a little better. -Edgar Watson Howe
Forgiveness. Hopefully after November gay couples in California will still have their ring fingers, and those in Arizona and Florida will still have hope. But if not, don’t ask me to forgive. Ever. I’ll laugh in your face.
I’ve said it before. Over and over. The shit doesn’t really start hitting the fan, until the republicans start loosing power…
LA CROSSE, Wis. (AP) — Some of the anger is getting raw at Republican rallies and John McCain is mostly letting it flare. A sense of grievance spilling into rage has gripped some GOP events as McCain supporters see his presidential campaign lag against Barack Obama. They’re making it personal, against the Democrat. Shouts of “traitor,” “terrorist,” “treason,” “liar,” and even “off with his head” have rung from the crowd at McCain and Sarah Palin rallies, and gone unchallenged by them.
Everyone is starting to notice now, the frenzy of hate the republicans are whipping themselves into. From Sullivan:
To some, a president Obama is simply unimaginable. From a McCain supporter in Wisconsin yesterday:
"We’re all wondering why Obama is where he’s at. How he got here. Everybody in this room is stunned we’re in this position."
There was always going to be a point of revolt and panic for a core group of Americans who believe that Obama simply cannot be president – because he’s black or liberal or young or relatively new. This is that point. As the polls suggest a strong victory, the Hannity-Limbaugh-Steyn-O’Reilly base are going into shock and extreme rage. McCain and Palin have decided to stoke this rage, to foment it, to encourage paranoid notions that somehow Obama is a "secret" terrorist or Islamist or foreigner. These are base emotions in both sense of the word.
But they are also very very dangerous. This is a moment of maximal physical danger for the young Democratic nominee. And McCain is playing with fire. If he really wants to put country first, he will attack Obama on his policies – not on these inflammatory, personal, creepy grounds. This is getting close to the atmosphere stoked by the Israeli far right before the assassination of Rabin.
For God’s sake, McCain, stop it. For once in this campaign, put your country first.
But Garrison Keillor was right…they’re republicans first, and Americans second. And they have a history of this, which goes right back to Kennedy. When King was assassinated in Memphis, they were calling him a traitor too…
And really the unsayable. But I’ve been thinking about this McCain-Palin Obama "palling around with terrorist" idea more lately. The saddest thing about many Republicans isn’t just that they disagree with liberals on race–it’s they are largely ignorant on race. When the McCain campaign cast the spell of diabolical jingoism, they have no idea of the forces they are toying with. We remember Martin Luther King’s murder as a sad and tragic event. Less remembered is the fact that ground-work for King’s murder was seeded, not simply by rank white supremacy, but by people who slandered King as a communist.
This was not some notion bandied about by conspiracy theorist, but an accusation proffered by men who were the pillars of the modern Republican Party:
As late as 1964, Falwell was attacking the 1964 Civil Rights Act as "civil wrongs" legislation. He questioned "the sincerity and intentions of some civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., James Farmer, and others, who are known to have left-wing associations." Falwell charged, "It is very obvious that the Communists, as they do in all parts of the world, are taking advantage of a tense situation in our land, and are exploiting every incident to bring about violence and bloodshed."
Falwell was not alone. These men didn’t kill Martin Luther King, but they contributed to an atmosphere of nationalism, white supremacy and cheap unreflective patriotism that ultimately got a lot of people killed. Confronted with Aparthied South Africa, men like Helms and Falwell used the same "communist" defense. While Mandella wasted away in prison, they dismissed the whole thing as a communist plot.
Let me be clear–This is the ghost that McCain Campaign is summoning. This is the Ring Of Power that they want to wield. The Muslim charge, the "Hussein" thing is nothing more than today’s red-baiting, and it is what it was then–a cover for racists. You may say I’m overreacting, and I really hope you’re right. 999,000 out 1 million times we’ll go on like normal and proceed to Election Day. But if some shit pops off, the thug and thug-mongers will not be able to throw up their hands and say "How could I have known?" Ignorance will not save them. Their stupidity is a scourge on us all.
Let me smack the subtext here out into the open: they’re trying to get him killed. As recently as a few days ago I was content to believe they just wanted to lay the groundwork for the scorched earth campaign against President Obama and a democratic congress. But that’s naive and anyone of my generation should know better…really…
I still remember vividly the day president Kennedy was assassinated. I was home from school, very very sick with a flu and a high fever. I was drifting in and out of sleep with the bed stand radio on, playing soft music. I woke up, to the sound of a man’s voice saying over and over again, "The president has been shot…The president has been shot…The president has been shot…"..
Two days before President Kennedy’s trip to Dallas, right-wingers began circulating around the city some 5,000 anti-Kennedy handbills. Entitled “Wanted for Treason,” these leaflets were designed to look like a police “wanted” poster, with front and profile photographs of Kennedy’s head.
The handbills shrieked:
“This man is wanted for treasonous activities against the United States:
1. Betraying the Constitution (which he is sworn to uphold):
He is turning the sovereignty of the U.S. over to the communist controlled United Nations.
He is betraying our friends (Cuba, Katanga, Portugal) and befriending our enemies (Russia, Yugoslavia, Poland).
2. He has been WRONG on innumerable issues affecting the security of the U.S. (United Nations-Berlin wall-Missile removal-Cuba-Wheat deals-Test Ban Treaty, etc.).
3. He has been lax in enforcing Communist Registration laws.
4. He has given support and encouragement to the Communist inspired racial riots.
5. He has illegally invaded a sovereign State with federal troops.
6. He has consistently appointed Anti-Christians to Federal office:
Upholds the Supreme Court in its Anti-Christian rulings.
Aliens and known Communists abound in Federal offices.
7. He has been caught in fantastic LIES to the American people (including personal ones like his previous marriage and divorce).”
On the very day JFK visited Dallas and died, the local newspaper, The Dallas Morning News, featured a full page, black-bordered anti-Kennedy advertisement prepared and paid for by persons affiliated with the John Birch Society, one of the most infamous right-wing extremist organizations of the 1960’s. The ad claimed to be the work of “The American Fact-Finding Committee,” in reality a nonexistent organization. Bernard Weissman, listed on the ad as the chairman of the Committee, however, did exist; he was the person who actually placed the ad. Weissman later testified before the Warren Commission. He was one of the few witnesses before that body who deemed it prudent to appear accompanied by an attorney.
The ad began with a sarcastic “Welcome Mr. Kennedy to Dallas,” a city which had been the victim of “a recent Liberal smear attempt” and which had prospered “despite efforts by you and your administration to penalize it for non-conformity to ‘New Frontierism’.” The ad then posed a series of belligerent, insulting loaded questions, including:
“Why has Gus Hall, head of the U.S. Communist Party, praised almost every one of your policies and announced that his party will endorse and support your re-election bid?”
“Why have you ordered or permitted your brother Bobby, the Attorney General, to go soft on Communists, fellow-travelers, and ultra-leftists in America, while permitting him to persecute loyal Americans who criticize you, your administration, and your leadership?”
“Why have you scrapped the Monroe Doctrine in favor of the ‘Spirit of Moscow’?”
Later that morning there were disparaging protests by right-wingers against JFK along the route of the presidential motorcade as it traveled from the airport to downtown Dallas. As the motorcade drove through the suburbs, with President Kennedy only minutes from death, an unfriendly-looking man in a business suit stood on a sidewalk in an aggressive posture holding a protest sign which screamed: “Because of high regard for the presidency I hold you JFK and your blind socialism in complete contempt.” (A photograph of this right-wing protester with his sign, taken by Dallas newspaper photographer Tom Dillard, is reproduced on p. 438 of Richard B. Trask’s Pictures of the Pain: Photography and the Assassination of President Kennedy (1994).)
In Dealey Plaza, at the time of the actual assassination, there was at least one right-winger present publicly expressing his scorn for the president. On the sidewalk near the Stemmons Freeway traffic sign, only a few feet from the slow-moving presidential limousine during the very moments rifle bullets were slamming into JFK’s body, a mysterious man stood wearing a suit and, unlike anyone else there, holding up an open, black umbrella on this warm, sunshiny day. (The “Umbrella Man,” as this enigmatic character soon was dubbed, is visible in the Zapruder film. He also can be seen in a famous still color photograph of the assassination taken by amateur photographer Phil Willis. The Willis photo is reproduced on p. 190 of Robert J. Groden’s The Killing of a President (1993).)
The identity of the Umbrella Man remained a secret for 15 years. Then, in September 1978, a man named Louie Steven Witt appeared before the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations and admitted that he was the Umbrella Man. He told the Committee that he been there in Dealey Plaza to heckle JFK, and that he displayed the umbrella because he was under the impression that brandishing an umbrella would irritate JFK. He testified: “I was going to use this umbrella to heckle the President’s motorcade. … Being a conservative-type fellow, I sort of placed him [JFK] in the liberal camp, and I was just sort of going to kind of do a little heckling. … I just knew it was a sore spot with the Kennedys. … I was carrying that stupid umbrella, intent [on] heckling the President.” Witt denied that the umbrella he had in Dealey Plaza symbolized the appeasement practices of English Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (who often sported a black umbrella), or that the umbrella was intended to suggest that JFK was appeasing Communism the way Chamberlain had appeased Hitler. This denial is not credible. Among right-wingers, it was an article of faith that JFK’s supposedly soft, weak-kneed policies against the threat of Communism were the equivalent of Chamberlain’s futile attempts to appease Adolf Hitler.
Not even Kennedy’s death at 1 p.m. at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas stopped right-wingers from publicly displaying their loathing of JFK. As William Manchester notes in his classic The Death of a President (1967): “At 3:05 p.m., when 80 percent of the American People were in deep grief, an NBC camera panned toward a group of spectators outside Parkland’s emergency entrance and picked up a young man with a placard that read, ‘Yankee, Go Home.’” (In a wealthy Dallas suburb, Manchester reminds us, “pupils of a fourth-grade class, told that the President of the United States had been murdered in their city, burst into spontaneous applause.”) -JFK Blown Away-Hooray! – D. Wilkes, University of Georgia
If you think the McCain campaign is playing with fire you are sadly mistaken. They Are of the fire. America, and the American Dream, lives or dies depending on how many of us are left, who still believe in it, and will defend it against the mob. Democracies don’t die at the hands of foreign enemies. They die when the mob overwhelms the dream of freedom and liberty and justice for all. The gutter cannot tolerate and will not willingly endure a world, where they have to witness what free men and women are capable of when the chains are cast off, and their dreams take wing. They will burn it all down if they have to, so they don’t have to know what humanity is capable of, that they might have been…
The recap: McCain was supposed to stop by Letterman’s show Wednesday. But Dave explained to his audience that McCain "was nice enough to call me on the phone and said that he was racing back to Washington." But part of the way through his late-afternoon taping, Dave learned that Johnny Mac was still a few blocks away in New York — taping an "excloo" with Katie Couric.
…
Dave’s anger gradually built through the show. He got truly incensed when he showed his audience the internal CBS News feed of McCain getting his makeup dabbed on before his Couric interview. "He doesn’t seem to be racing to the airport, does he?" Letterman said. Then he shouted at the television monitor: "Hey, John, I got a question! You need a ride to the airport?"
Okay…so he blows off a late night talk show host. Big deal…right? On the other hand, Mr. Straight Talk Express could have given Letterman a little…you know…straight talk. Something like, "I’m sorry to have to do this to you Dave, but with this terrible economic crisis developing I can’t really be doing late night comedy shows now. I’m going to be talking with Couric on CBS news instead…
Straight talk. Letterman would have accepted that. He might not have liked it, but he would have accepted it. But that’s not what he got, and if you think the busting he gave McCain that night was pique you are sadly mistaken. In her novel The Charioteer, Mary Renault wrote that "some events are crucial from their very slightness; because circumstances have used no force on them, they are unequivocally what they are, test-tube reactions of personality." McCain just flat out lied to him and the casually unnecessary nature of it shocked him.
You get the feeling that the sight of this…indifference…to telling lies…on the part of so many conservative moralists is starting, finally, to shock a lot of people…
Yesterday, we learned that not only does McCain own thirteen cars, but that the McCain fleet includes imports, a VW from Germany and a Honda from Japan. (His wife drives a Lexus, but that car is owned by her beer distributorship.)
And now it turns out that earlier this month he lied to Michigan voters about his car purchases, telling them "I’ve bought American literally all my life" during a September 7 interview with Detroit’s WXYZ-TV. Earlier in the interview, he had told the interviewer "Cindy and I own an automobile that’s American-made" which was about best an extremely misleading statement.
Q: Will privatizing Social Security be a priority for you going forward?
…
McCAIN: Without privatization, I don’t see how you can possibly, over time, make sure that young Americans are able to receive Social Security benefits.
I’m not for, quote, privatizing Social Security. I never have been. I never will be.
As Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler once tersely said, "This is the operative statement. The others are inoperative."
Your gay and lesbian neighbors have been witnessing this behavior on the part of the kook pews for decades. Decades. We’ve watched them grow in power from the backwater gutters to the heights of power. And they’ve never changed their spots. What’s happened is that the republican party has been utterly corrupted by them, by their holy war, by their Kulturkampf. It got them votes. It won them elections. But the price was their souls…
Bob Sith, the Southern Baptist Convention’s (SBC’s) National Strategist for Gender Issues, has recently misrepresented the scientific conclusions of Dr. Francis Collins (of the Human Genome Project) in the Baptist Press‘s Did God create Ray Boltz gay?. Here’s how he described Dr. Francis Collins’ conclusions:
…For example, in 2003, the International Human Genome Consortium announced the successful completion of the Human Genome Project, which, among other things, identified each of the approximately 20,000-25,000 genes in human DNA. The press release read: "The human genome is complete and the Human Genome Project is over."
While this accomplishment was widely reported, almost no one reported the words of Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the project. Collins, arguably the nation’s most influential geneticist, said, "Homosexuality is not hardwired. There is no gay gene. We mapped the human genome. We now know there is no genetic cause for homosexuality."
Somehow the major media missed that little tidbit. Collins and others acknowledge that genetics can predispose but not predetermine. This supports other studies that clearly document the possibility of change for people who struggle with unwanted homosexual desire.
Dr. Collins apparently never actually said this; this quote is taken from a OneNewsNow article by Jim Brown — Brown quoted self-identifed former homosexual Greg Quinlan, who appears to have made up the statement whole cloth. Bob Sith apparently quoted the statement verbatim — putting quotation marks around the statement that Jim Brown hadn’t put around the statement — without checking to see if the quote had any veracity. Apparently, it didn’t have any verasity at all.
David Roberts of the Ex-Gay Watch has been following the repeated twisting of Dr. Collins’ words for awhile. As Roberts documented in his post Major Geneticist Francis Collins Responds to NARTH Article, this isn’t the first time Dr. Collins words have been twisted by conservative Christians…
It would hardly be the first time the religious right has built carefully crafted deceptions with the material provided to it by science. Some weeks ago Jim Burroway debunked a beaut from the Family Research Council , purporting to show that statistics gathered by the CDC on domestic violence proved that same sex relationships were much more violent then heterosexual ones…
The third point the brochure is built on is this:
Intimate partner violence: homosexual and lesbian couples experience by far the highest levels of intimate partner violence compared with married couples as well as cohabiting heterosexual couples. Lesbians, for example, suffer a much higher level of violence than do married women
They base this claim on the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Violence Against Women Survey (PDF: 62 pages/1,475 KB) If you want to see how they construct this particular distortion, I encourage you to download the report yourself and we’ll go through it step by step. Believe me, it’s worth it because this is a classic example.
On page 29, you will find that when you only look at victims with a history of same-sex cohabitation and compare them with those with a history of opposite-sex cohabitation, then it’s true, gays and lesbians experience higher levels of intimate parter violence. But that’s not true for gay and lesbian couples.
To see this, go to the next page. Among women with a history of same-sex partnership:
30.4% were raped, assaulted or stalked by their husband/male partner
11.4% were raped, assaulted or stalked by their wife/female partner.
And among men with a history of same-sex partnership:
10.8% were raped, assaulted, or stalked by their wife/female partner.
15.4% were raped, assaulted, or stalked by their husband/male partner.
So here is what it all means. Many women with a history of same-sex partnership also have a history of opposite-sex partnership. Because of that, they are far more likely to report being raped, assaulted or stalked because it is the men in their lives who are doing the raping, assaulting or stalking, not the women. Same-sex cohabiting women were nearly three times more likely to report being victimized by a male partner than a female partner.
And here is where the statistic gets really interesting: 20.5% of women in opposite sex relationships were raped, assaulted or stalked by their husband or male partner. That compares to 15.4% of men who were raped, assaulted, or stalked by their male partners. In other words, gay men are safer around their same-sex partners than straight women are around their husbands or opposite-sex partner.
For decades now…decades…your gay and lesbian neighbors have watched the moralists of the religious right, in the name of virtue, in the name of fighting amoral secularism, in the name of decency and family values, in the name of the man on the cross who they claim to venerate as their holy savior, lie through their teeth every chance they get, and then lie again, and then lie again, and then lie again, Amen. We have watched their hatred of ecumenicism, their hatred of secularism, their hatred of the American Dream of liberty and justice for all and especially their vitriolic hatred of gay and lesbian people, eat everything within them that could ever have been good and decent and noble, rot every moral fiber that was ever inside of them, that might once have kept them from looking their neighbor in the face, and lying through their teeth. All that’s left of them now, are the slogans, and the bellicose religiosity. And the hate. If you ever need to know what hate will do to you, to your soul, and why you need to fight it more then any other enemy you will ever face, behold Sarah Palin. If you ever need to know why you have to look hate in the face directly, unflinchingly, and see it for what it is, and never, Never, grant it any excuse or pity, behold John McCain and the party that is now owned by America’s multitude of Sarah Palins.
These are not moral warriors. They say they are, but they are not. They are runts. Cowards. Not even rising to the level of gangsters, because a gangster knows what he is, and embraces it with a smirk. The culture warriors are hollow shells, who discarded virtue and morality long, long ago, at the first touch of shame. And the last thing on earth they want now is for the rest of us to embrace morality, reach for the higher purpose, be virtue. Because that would mean we’d have to hold them accountable for all their pathetic lies, all their squalid cheats, all the damage they’ve done to America all these years.
For decades we’ve watched this movement of cheats grow into a political powerhouse, and take the republican party down into its gutter. And we’ve been speaking out, trying to warn the rest of America what was happening. But in the end, people really can’t be expected to believe a betrayal of this magnitude without seeing it for themselves.
"Hey, John, I got a question! You need a ride to the airport?"
Morality. Values. The soul of a nation isn’t in its leaders, but in its grassroots. The soul is in the millions and millions of us who wake up every day and choose whether to cheat our way to tomorrow or try and make the best of it, as best as we can, as best as we can understand what the good is, and how to get ourselves there. It’s not making the grand gesture for Truth, Justice and the American Way. It’s not declaring your devotion to God. It’s flinching away from the easy lie, because for better or worse you still need to look at yourself in the mirror the next day. It’s not wearing your moral values on your sleeve, or putting a little halo around your head. It’s keeping a little nugget of pride deep down in your heart, that simply won’t let you cheat a friend or a neighbor, because the trust in their eyes matters to you.
Picture someone for whom cheating a friend is less important then winning an election and you have what the religious right has done to the republican party in a nutshell. They fought for the soul of the party. They got it. Look at what they did with it. Look at it. They have said for decades that they are fighting for the soul of America. Think of what they did to John McCain, the man who wouldn’t leave Vietnam without his brother soldiers, as an example of what they think winning means.
There’s a scene in the American TV mini series, The Winds of War, where Pug Henry tells Pamala, the English woman he’s busy falling in love with, that Goering’s decision to terror bomb London, while horrible, meant he knew he’d lost the air war. He couldn’t defeat the RAF, so he turned to bombing civilian targets as a way of breaking British moral. So while seeing London in flames made it look like Hitler had control of the air, and was winning, in fact Pug told her, it was a sign of desperation. It meant he knew he’d lost the battle for Britain.
That’s the way it is with thugs. It’s when they know they’re loosing that the fight really turns ugly. I’m thinking about that this morning as I’m reading about John McCain shoving dirt in the face of the corporate news media. Nobody in recent years has had such a sweetheart relationship with the press as McCain. The alternative media has written story after story of the corporate press sucking up to McCain. And now he’s rubbing their faces in dogshit. What gives here?
One theory is that they just know they can get away with it. The Republican Noise Machine has been so successful at gaming the press and demonizing democrats that the McCain camp knows it can do whatever it damn well pleases and the base won’t give a good goddamn what the press says about it. They all get their news from FOX, and even if FOX turned against McCain the base understands that Obama is the Antichrist, is related to Osama bin Laden and/or Saddam Hussein, and anyway is a Muslim and all Muslims belong to al Qaeda and anyway Obama is the Antichrist. John McCain can spit in Brent Hume’s face and Rupert Murdoch could endorse Obama and FOX news could run nothing but Obama campaign ads and the base will vote for McCain. The economy could crash in flames and the base loose their homes and their life savings and they’ll vote for McCain. Better sleep on the streets with a republican in the white house then the Antichrist.
So much, so obvious. But what of the swing vote? Without that swing vote the republicans can’t win, and they’re not winning that vote by playing so hard to the base. If anything, they’re turning it away.
Here’s my thinking: they know they’ve lost. McCain wouldn’t be antagonising the press, he wouldn’t have picked a fundamentalist nutcase for his VP, if the party insiders knew they had a chance in hell with the swing vote. And without the swing they loose. So they’re goosing the base. Again, so much, so obvious. But look at it. They can’t win with only the base on board. But what they can do, is whip it up into such a hysterical fit of passion that, hopefully, the democrats won’t be able to govern at all for the next four years.
I think what we may well be seeing now, in the choice of Sarah Palin, and in McCain’s openly spitting on the press that has been faithfully sucking up to him for the past decade or so, is the start of the next four years of scorched earth fighting. They know they’ve lost this election and they’re laying the groundword for the next four years of destroying the Obama presidency and taking back congress. They’re laying the ground work for the "McCain was stabbed in the back by the news media" propaganda they’ll be dispensing for the next four years, to keep the press cowed and submissive. And they’re poisoning the well to prevent any shred of common ground and common purpose developing in the next four years among Americans. They don’t want the wounds to heal…they want them open and raw.
So by the time election night 2008 is over, the base will hate the rest of the nation so deeply, the only thing they’ll want for the next four years is blood. Every time President Obama appears on their TV screens, they’ll see the Antichrist. Every time a democrat opens their mouths to say anything for the next four years, the base will know they’re hearing a servant of the Antichrist. If the democrats don’t get a big enough majority in both houses to govern, it’s going to be absolute poisonous ugly vindictive gridlock.
What the rest of us have to know is winning the election is only the start of the fight. If you thought Newt Gingrich’s war on congress back in the early 1990s was ugly, trust me you haven’t ugly yet. Ask your gay and lesbian neighbors how ugly they can get. I’ve said this before…things don’t start getting really bad until the republicans begin loosing power. That’s when it hits the fan.
The facts are hard to dispute; indeed, the historical record is now so stark that diehard Republicans are probably starting to wonder if there is a curse…. Democrats have outperformed Republicans by almost any measure of economic achievement (GDP growth per capita, unemployment, inflation, budget deficits)…. Thanks to the profligacy of the current administration… average Federal spending as a fraction of GDP… under Republican Presidents now exceeds that under Democrats over the measured period…. The pattern holds up when the span of historical analysis is extended farther back in time… using stock returns to measure economic performance…. (Data are available on my web page, at http://econ.jhu.edu/people/ccarroll/opinion/CapitalismAndSkepticism.)
An economist’s natural inclination is to say that there’s no point in pondering why Republican performance has been so dismal, because the question cannot be answered with the rigor demanded by professional respectability. But as the tenure of George Herbert Hoover Walker Bush shudders to a calamitous close, history seems to require that we try to give an answer.
That answer can’t be found by drilling down (so to speak) into the specific policy proposals of the two parties, which over the years have evolved in ways too arbitrary to permit any meaningful generalization. Nor are there any clearly identifiable differences in doctrine that should translate into a reasonable expectation of better economic performance under one party or the other….
Maybe capitalism works better when its excesses are restrained by skeptics than when true-believers are writing, interpreting, judging, and executing the rules…. Maybe… capitalism works better when it is being held accountable to some external standard…. [F]or better or worse, the defining manifesto of the latter part of the age was Milton Friedman’s Capitalism And Freedom. But that book’s power derived partly from its fierce independence from the orthodoxies of its time…. The book for the new epoch has not been written yet, but I have a proposed title: Capitalism and Skepticism…
I think what needs to be understood here is that the true-believers are merely the useful idiots. Yes, the republicans are awful for the economy. But so what. But they’re great for the billionaires. Look at it this way: under democrats blue collar workers and the middle class grow and prosper. Big business does well, but its CEOs don’t generally become super rich. They still get rich, just not buy entire third world countries rich. Under republicans, unions are busted, the middle class shrinks and many businesses, large and small, suffer. However, many other folks become fabulously wealthy. Even as the companies they once ran go belly up, and their investors loose their shirts, these people shoot into the ranks of the fabulously wealthy. You have to figure that from their perspective, things worked out just fine.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, and the fabulously wealthy may be a lot of things, but they’re not crazy. If they keep supporting the republican party despite its pretty consistant track record of wreaking the economy, there’s probably a reason for that. A healthy economy really only benefits the blue collar and middle classes. The uber rich need neither a healthy economy nor a healthy democracy to get even richer. In point of fact, healthy economies and healthy democracies usually get in their way.
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