Republican Tricks
Hi everyone, It’s that time of the month again and I’m buried in deadlines and edits so I asked a friend of mine, Bobby Bright, to write a guest blog for me. He’s quite opinionated so if he steps on anyone’s toes, I’m sorry,
Hello all you wonderful people, I’m Bobbi Bright, standing in for Dee. I promised Dee I wouldn’t write about
religion so I’m going to write about the next best thing. The most devious, misleading, intolerant, self serving, organized group in America today—Republicans. No, not the stupid rank and file republicans who voted the worst president in history, George Dubya, into office twice. They’re just dupes, pawns of the nefarious, so called, brains of the party. As Dubya, the titular head of the party, rode off into the sunset in disgrace after eight years of chaos, and self-destruction; who’s should assume the mantel of spokesman for republican party, but that tower of mis-information, the man Al Frankin called ‘that Big Fat Liar,’ Rush Limbaugh. And how about Sarah Palin? Does the word bimbo comes to mind for you too?
Just for the record, I know there are some good, big-hearted people in the republican tent, my friend Dee is one, though he claims to be an independent, having left the party in the nineties for philosophical reasons. I’d like to direct a question to the ordinary republicans, the ones who got swift-boated or scared into voting for George W. Bush. If you make under a hundred thousand dollars a year, wtf are you doing in the ‘me first’ party. Are you crazy? Do you think this party is going to raise you into prosperity?
Enough about republicans in general. This vent is more about ignorant, arrogant people who think they can twist, turn and rework a kernel of truth to their advantage. Republican strategists love to blow a little point up into a big point while ignoring comparable larger points that might lead to them. Health Care is a prime example. How many times have you heard these pretend paradigms of fiscal responsibility harp about the trillion dollar health care program. Folks that’s a trillion dollars of which four hundred billion is accounted for over ten years. That’s sixty billion dollars a year for a program that will help all Americans. 
Not unappreciative Iraqis, not Afghans, but Americans. For those who don’t know, the hard costs of the useless Bush war of choice is almost double the health care cost at one hundred ten billion a year.
That’s what gets my blood boiling. These hypocritical savers of our purse strings are blowing two billion dollars a week in a foreign war that has killed or maimed forty thousand of our youth while bemoaning a two billion dollar cash for clunker program that will help consumers, car dealers, auto manufacturers, the economy, banks, cut oil dependence and toxic emissions. And you want to know something? Estimates show the Bush war will ultimately cost three trillion in ancillary costs. That’s three billion, million folks. I could go on and on, but I keep getting off the point.
Republican leadership seldom does anything on principal. Mostly, they work for advantage. They see people with a different point of view as the enemy and when they think the enemy is vulnerable they strike. To them, the uppity black man from Illinois is the enemy and as worthy a goal as it might be, they see Health care as his Achilles heel—and they’re going for the jugular.
These wild under informed people showing up at August town hall meetings across the country at the urging of right wing blogs and commentators are an example. The misinformation they are disseminating to this hapless group is despicable. Outlandish rumors that reform will promote euthanasia, cut Medicaid, or bring about a government takeover of health care are being purposely spread alongside equally ridiculous claims that Obama is a Muslim, and was really born in Kenya instead of Hawaii.
I’m patiently waiting for the day when a major republican politician stands up and admits that recent Republican policies have been disastrous. Policies that cost the country three trillion dollars on an useless war, brought the country to the edge of ruination by failing to monitor rampant greed, thereby costing the taxpayers two trillion in remedial programs and ultimately cost the taxpayers eleven trillion in lost net worth.
Hmmm. That’s sixteen trillion dollars. Health care reform kinda pales in comparison. Doesn’t it?
The McCain-Palin Brownshirt Rallies
The McCain-Palin Brownshirt Rallies
It appears as if the Republican Party is on its way to massive losses in a few weeks, and based on the spectacle of what has now come to constitute a McPain-Palin Bloodlust rally, it justifiably couldn’t happen to a more despicable lot of characters.
Drowning in a sea of flop sweat, McPain and Palin have now resorted to the ugliest kind of campaigning. Their rallies are over-the-top hatefests set to inflame and rabble-rouse. They certainly have the rabble all right, and they certainly are prone to rousing.
Never mind that the only way McCain could ever pull this out was by attracting Independents. Now he simply takes refuge in fanning the hatred amongst the base, making the wildest of charges against Obama and throwing a series of rallies just short of lynching parties.
These malevolent exercises in execration have all the civility of the Brownshirts running amok in Jewish neighborhoods in the 1930s. They have become the stuff of feature stories in national papers.
McPain and Palin have urged the crowd on, and merely smiled and waved as their false charges against Obama have been met with blood-curdling screams of “Kill him!”, “Terrorist!” and “Treason!”.
How long before they start setting Obama afire in effigy?
Some might say it is just the usual rightwing lunatics being the loyal cultists they always have been. That’s the problem. These rallies have become so incendiary, it isn’t hard to imagine one unbalanced lunatic taking it upon himself to eliminate the problem. The problem being Obama.
Just in the past six months we have seen two prime examples of the legacy of rightwing hatred, not to mention talk radio. First we had the cultist who worked himself into such a rage in Tennessee that, in his own words, since he couldn’t get to any “liberals” in positions of power, he decided to simply go to a Unitarian church where a children’s play was in progress, and put his shotgun to use on a few local progressives.
After all, if they had been Republicans, if they had been real Americans, they would have been at a real church, not the Unitarian variety. By the time he was done exercising his First and Second Amendment rights, two innocents were dead and two more wounded. Police found his library consisted of books by Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly.
This was followed by the fellow who became so angry at “liberals” that, the price of gas being what it is, he simply drove to the headquarters of the Democratic Party Headquarters in Arkansas and shot the party chairman dead. Never had met him, didn’t know him from Adam. He was a Democrat and that was reason enough to end his life.
Look at some of the faces of rage at these McPain-Palin hatefests and ask yourself who next will be on a mission to deliver justice to “that one” .
Back in the day I remember attending a debate where a Republican mocked the Democratic representative asking him if Michael Dukakis was really the best the Dems could do.
The Democrat debater, paused, a pained look crossed his face, and then he stated, “probably not”. He went on to note that much of the best had been eliminated not by ballot but by Smith & Wesson.
He went on to note that JFK, Medger Evers, Fred Hampton, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, Allard Lowenstein, George Moscone, Harvey Milk and others all may have presented a better effort if they had been allowed to live to give it a try.
When was the last time a NeoCon was murdered for his beliefs. Not just last time, any time? What does that tell you?
What irresponsible and criminal behavior the McPain camp is engaging in right now. It is akin to yelling fire in a crowded venue. It even led lifetime Republican and Bush speechwriter David Frum to note:
“Those who press this…line of attack are whipping Republicans and conservatives into a fury that is going to be very hard to calm after November. Is it really wise to send conservatives into opposition in a mood of disdain and fury for the next president, incidentally the first African-American president? Anger is a very bad political adviser. It can isolate us and push us to the extremes at exactly the moment when we ought to be rebuilding, rethinking, regrouping and recruiting…A big part of Obama’s appeal is his self-command. It’s a genuinely impressive quality. Let’s emulate it. We’ll be needing it.”
And now even Cindy McCain has turned into an insulting hissing piss-bull. Hey Blondie, it’s bad enough that you never leave John-Boy’s side, as if you’re his service dog, or at least his assisted-living attendant, but the last thing the country needs is hearing from the beer baroness constituency.
This is all tied into a larger picture I have discussed here lately. The Republican party’s attempt at dumbing down America. How perfect that they recruited Sarah Palin as part of the effort. The woman who can’t remember the name of one magazine or newspaper she reads.
It is extraordinary that the GOP has spent the past eight years trying to make “elite” a pejorative. Only when the head of your party is dumber than a bag of rocks (Is our children learning?) do you have a vested interest in making stupid-good, smart-bad.
The elite used to signify the best the country has to offer. The Elite Eight in the NCAA basketball tournament. The Navy Seals…elite. The Blue Angels…elite. Advanced learning classes…elite. Magna (inappropriate term) laude…elite.
But the Orwellian newspeak folks that allow the environment to be ravaged under the (no laughing) “Clean Skies Initiative”, are simply up to their tricks as usual.
When your party has been exposed as ideologically bankrupt, criminally incompetent and often immoral, the best you can do is try and put lipstick on the pig.
Just like Chairman Mao’s indoctrination classes. Re-educate the populace to think that learning is an evil, that education is corrosive, that using the full capacity of your mind is intellectualism, a taint to be avoided at all costs. Thinking will just get you into trouble.
That’s why even conservative columnist David Brooks, whom has been in the tank for John-Boy and Sarah since the get-go has seen enough. Said Brooks on Wednesday:
“Sarah Palin represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party. When I first started in journalism, I worked at the National Review for Bill Buckley…He thought it was important to have people on the conservative side who celebrated ideas, who celebrated learning. And his whole life was based on that, and that was also true for a lot of the other conservatives in the Reagan era. Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas. But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I’m afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.”
A “top level Republican party official wrote Jay Carney of Time Magazine last week regarding this trend as it relates to Palin and noted:
“She really is what Bush pretends to be — she ‘s a true anti-intellectual. We don’t need to read or even learn because that just fills our heads with confusing ideas and facts and figures. We feel. Bush plays at this anti-elite stuff but he’s Harvard/Yale/Andover, all of that. She is really a celebration of a glorious know-nothingness that is truly dangerous. She’s terrifying and represents a streak of the Republican party that is a permanent minority. It’s not that she is an idiot that bothers me. It’s that she celebrates non-learning and anti-knowledge. She celebrates ignorance. Terrifying.”
Said Joe Klein of Time Magazine:
“But seriously, folks, I’m beginning to worry about the level of craziness on the Republican side, the over-the-top, stampede-the-crowd statements by everyone from McCain on down, the vehemence of the crowds that McCain and Palin are drawing with people shouting “Kill him” and “He’s a terrorist” and “Off with his head.”
“Watch the tape of the guy screaming, “He’s a terrorist!” McCain seems to shudder at that, he rolls his eyes… and I thought for a moment he’d admonish the man. But he didn’t. Yes, yes, it’s all he has. True enough: he no longer has his honor. But we are on the edge of some real serious craziness here and it would be nice if McCain did the right thing and told his more bloodthirsty supporters to go home and take a cold shower. But McCain hasn’t done the right thing all year. His campaign is appalling, as the Times editorial board said today–and more, it is a national disgrace.”
Said conservative columnist George Will:
“Time was, the Baltimore Orioles manager was Earl Weaver, a short, irascible, Napoleonic figure who, when cranky, as he frequently was, would shout at an umpire, “Are you going to get any better or is this it?“…that is the question about John McCain’s campaign…the McCain-Palin campaign’s attempt to get Americans to focus on Obama’s Chicago associations seem surreal — or, as a British politician once said about criticism he was receiving, “like being savaged by a dead sheep.”
Said conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan:
“I’ve come to the sad conclusion that McCain’s brand was just that. His real core is about power and ambition, divorced, when necessary, from principle or patriotism. You learn who people really are when they are asked to do the right thing when it might hurt them, not when it helps them anyway. We just learned something that has always been true about McCain. It isn’t pretty.”
It is ironic, but so typical that John McCain, the man who falsely presents himself as Mr. Bipartisan, Mr. Work-Across-The-Aisles will have done such a criminally irresponsible job of dividing the country, inflaming petty hatreds and potentially inciting violence, when President Obama takes over.
As one columnist pondered, “Sometimes, I try to imagine what it will be like for John McCain when this campaign is over, and he realizes how completely he has destroyed his character and his honor. I cannot imagine that it will seem worth it come December.”
As that aforementioned Times editorial noted (and keep in mind they endorsed McCain over all his other rivals):
“Senator John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin have been running one of the most appalling campaigns we can remember. They have gone far beyond the usual fare of quotes taken out of context and distortions of an opponent’s record — into the dark territory of race-baiting and xenophobia.
(Palin’s) demagoguery has elicited some frightening, intolerable responses. A recent Washington Post report said at a rally in Florida this week a man yelled “kill him!” as Ms. Palin delivered that line and others shouted epithets at an African-American member of a TV crew.
We certainly expected better from Mr. McCain, who once showed withering contempt for win-at-any-cost politics. He was driven out of the 2000 Republican primaries by this sort of smear, orchestrated by some of the same people who are now running his campaign.
In a way, we should not be surprised that Mr. McCain has stooped so low, since the debate showed once again that he has little else to talk about. But surely, Mr. McCain and his team can come up with a better answer to (our) problems than inciting more division, anger and hatred.”
It seems appropriate that McCain addressed a crowd the other day by calling them “my fellow prisoners”. Fact of the matter is, he is still in that bamboo cage. The fact that he has been re-fighting the Vietnam War ever since is proof. He left physically but never arrived home.
We liked to think he hadn’t been broken by his captors. Now we know better.
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“I think McCain is down to seeds and stems,” – Rick Hertzberg
This Blog was contributed in it’s entirety by FILMEX
Price of Honor: Muslim Women Lift the Veil of Silence on the Islamic World
While women can be mistreated by individuals in any society, Islam, at least extreme Islam, sanctifies the systemic abuse of all women.
“A man loves first his son, then his camel, and then his wife”
Arab Proverb
This book, written in 1995 by Jan Goodwin, describes the sometimes gruesome position many women find themselves in just by living in many predominantly Muslim countries. It lays out a theory wherein the rising popularity of militant, extreme, Fundamentalist Islam is the main reason for the deterioration of the rights of Muslim women, as these Islamists increase they’re power base at the expense of women’s rights. Goodwin goes on to say that there is little or no basis in the Koran (the Islamic Holy Book) for the deteriorating position of women in many Muslim countries. The scope of women’s disenfranchisement varies from mild to severe from country to country as Goodwin addresses conditions in the ten countries she visited. It also varies according to the beliefs of branch of Islam to which the woman’s family belongs, Fundamentalist being the most oppressive. She also describes how this creeping tide of militant fundamentalist Islam in a danger to mainstream Islam and moderate Muslims. Though life in moderate or mainstream Muslim societies is very hard on most women it borders on slavery under extreme societies.
“There is no fun in Islam”
Ayatollah Khomeini
In the Peoples Islamic Republic of Iran, Khomeini lowered the marriage age for females from eighteen to thirteen (ya hear that Jerry Lee), but permitted girls as young as nine, even seven in some cases to be married if a physician signs a certificate agreeing to their sexual maturity. (pedophilia heaven). However, to the Ayatollah’s credit, he drew the line at seven, stating that it is forbidden to have sex with girls under seven!
“If a man and woman are alone in one place, the third person present is the devil”
Prophet Mohammad
“Under the law as it stands in Pakistan, women who have been raped can be charged with adultery or fornication. The proof required for zina (sex outside of wedlock including rape) is that there be four Muslim adult males of “good repute” present who can attest to the act of sexual penetration. No male witnesses of good repute, of course, are likely to stand and watch a rape in progress without trying to stop it. And because of this requirement it becomes impossible to punish the rapists. Instead the victim is prosecuted. Her legal complaint of rape is considered a confession of illicit sexual intercourse.”
“The majority of Muslim women find their lives controlled by their closest male relative. They are the daughters whose future marriage partners continue to be determined by their fathers. They are the brides who must be virgins on their wedding nights in a culture where, if they are not, honor killings are common and often carried out by the girls own brothers”
Muslim Irony
Fundamentalists restrict women from working, leaving the house unescorted and unveiled, being clergy, driving, reading the Koran, marrying an infidel, going to school after the sixth grade if at all and more.
The Irony of this treatment is in this Quote: “Such restrictions on women are necessary. They are to protect women’s honor and they are also a symbol of our enormous respect for women”
CONCLUSION
This book and several others like it document the ugly, onerous, abhorrent living conditions perpetrated on many Muslim women by Muslim men in the name of Islam. In fairness, The Author has on numerous occasion stated there is no basis for this treatment in the tenets of Islam. In Islam, especially the fundamentalist version religion is power. The Clergy gain power by elevating their male adherents, as do the adherents, over the females. They also gain power by espousing enmity toward a common enemy as Khomeni did toward the U.S. This is the politics of Theocrats. (The last three sentences are my observations)
As for the book, I highly recommend it. It’s 358 pages is well written, easy to read, compelling and chuck full of insights. The author, Jan Goodwin, did a tremendous amount of research, visiting and living in some ten countries, interviewing hundreds of, sometimes shy and reluctant, women to publish this very comprehensive book. Many of these women gave interviews, even though it endangered them. A couple observations I came away with is that the exception of Saudi Arabia, the holy seat of Islam, the quality of women’s living conditions increased with the wealth of the country or in large countries the area. Also it seemed to me that for the average Muslim male, appearances took precedence over the welfare of his womenfolk.
There are so many other things I would like to bring out, like how many Muslim women are malnourished by getting only leftovers, while doing three times the work of her counterpart but you really need to read the book.
Silly Things 