I Know What's Wrong with America

This week's 9-11 lie from George W.'s former speech writer Marc Thiessen is just the latest case. For close to eight full decades, the Right has steadily poured a deathly poison into Americans' eyes and ears. The result is that today we're sickened almost to the killing point.

There's a word for this. It's treachery. That's what a lie is, and take note: Treachery stems from the same root as treason. It means--please take these synonyms slowly, mull them over one by one--betrayal of trust, faith, or allegiance; perfidy, disloyalty, and treason.

Propaganda--let's be frank--lying in politics--is nothing new. What is new is today's lethality, systemization, ubiquity, and respectability. They aren't playing for partisan gain. They're playing for keeps.

And what is new is the credulity, ignorance, and apathy of the American public. Face it. We're a lot less educated and a lot more easily stampeded now than we once were. One such malady would be bad enough, but afflicted with all three? Baby, we just don't stand a chance.

For malicious lethality, I give you "baby killers," "the homosexual agenda," the hyped-up hoardes of "criminal, leprous immigrants," the "death panels." In fact, I give you the far Right's vicious Balkanization of all the American people into just so many expendable parts.

Journalist and blogger David Neiwert has aptly named this phenom "eliminationism." Unarguably, its inevitable consequences are the murders of Dr. Tiller, Matthew Shepard, Stephen T. Johns and thousands of nameless GLBT people, African Americans, immigrants, and desperate poor whose assassinations didn't make the national headlines. Not to mention the chance for millions of uninsured Americans to see a doctor, get a prescription, or have a life-saving surgery. Or prosecution of the Robber Barons of Wall Street. Or indictment of the last Administration for war crimes and theft on a galactic scale.

For systemization and ubiquity, I give you hidden corporate funding and uber-wealthy patrons. I give you Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the Trinity Broadcasting Network, Clear Channel, and the rest of talk radio, all full- or part-time propaganda arms of the Republican Party, all heirs of the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan, and HUAC.

Add to far Right media the thousands of ultra-conservative nonprofits deputized (and given tax breaks) to incite us to lethal rage by telling lie after lie after lie. Citizens United, for instance. Focus on the Family. Eagle Forum. The 700 Club, and the numerous (tax-exempt) national curriculum coordinators for far Right, Christianist, activist home schooling. Front groups like The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition.

It's not just the far Right media impact or its voter recruitment, registration, and "education" consequences. It's also taxpayer subsidized direct mail avalanches of lies, distortions, and invective unleashed deliberatly for decades to whip up the base (and steal its money).

To these, add the astroturf websites and organizations, the tweets, and even the bumper stickers. Then from the total, subtract competing organizations as media consolidation, deregulation, and the Second Great Depression purge the airwaves and the presses of counterpoint, of fact.

Critical to understanding all this is grasping that there are thousands of heavily funded far Right organizations. If the far Right was once a "fringe," today it is pretty much the center of our culture. Its devotees occupy every sector of government, church, and culture, and just recently occupied even the White House.

Most of these organizations have innocuous or even positive names designed to confer credibility and respectability on ideas that nauseate and repel people of integrity. Americans for Truth, for instance, all about the "homosexual agenda." And FAIR, which the Southern Poverty Law Center long ago unmasked as one of at least ten manufactured virulent propaganda tools created by veteran racist Tom Tanton.

Such groups exist specifically to flood the media, to bury the gullible millions in "talking points" intended to whip up moral outrage, pit the well-off against the desperate, spur voter backlash and ultra-right lawmaking, and meanwhile to distract us all from the orchestrated Republican hosing of the American middle class.

This isn't made up. It's real. You know it to be true if you drew breath at all in the last 10 years.

Daily Media Matters e-alerts attempt to correct the rain of lies, but its circulation pales by contract to Rupert Murdock's reach.

For respectability, I give you United States senators, judges, sherrifs, Members of Congress, state legislators and governors, bishops, clergymen, physicians, heads and staffs of federal departments and agencies, professors, teachers, high school principals, librarians, and pharmacists.

It gets worse. The states are bristling with armed militias and so-called "patriot groups" poised to slaughter anyone they perceive as "not us." It will take only a spark. To provide it, talk show hosts incite murder every day. Murder, rebellion, whatever it takes.

Even so, and fully aware of what's at stake, "respectable" pundits and news anchors let the lies pass. Those who don't actually amplify the treasonous far Right Jihad on America (e.g., Lou Dobbs) either don't bother to get the facts themselves or are silent, baldly complict (e.g., Wolf Blitzer, Andrea Mitchell). Their jobs depend on their playing ball. After all, their corporate masters are heavily invested in a fascist America, because corporatism is a main tenet of fascism.

For eighty years or more, the American people have been systematically goaded by ever more concentrated poisoned prods into a brimming rage--over largely invented actions, omissions, and words attributed to this pro-Constitution, egalitarian Democratic President or that Democratic Justice or just to Lib'ruls in general.

But somehow, nobody's talking about how the heat is mostly over made-up, imaginary affronts to imaginary values (family values), imaginary traditions (the, um, unconstitutional "Judeo-Christian" nation), imaginary heroes (Ronald Reagan,fiscal conservative. George W. Bush, fighter pilot).

The War on Christmas? The "illegal takeover"? "Welfare Cadillacs"? The "Myth" of Global Warming? Liberals Appease the Enemy? See Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, and before them, see Paul Harvey, Joe McCarthy, and that high-toned FDR assassination cabal.

If you want to know what's wrong with America, or why the two parties can't cooperate, start right there.

The Left may not be spotless, but there's NO comparison, either quantitatively or qualitatively, between the Left and Right when it comes to corrupting the American cerebellum. In fact, one of the magic carpets under which this all hides is the lie of equivalence: "They all do it." Well, no. Doubt it? Go on: Name one Left counterpart action, organization, or person for every indictment in this rant. You can't. There is no counterpart to Fox. No counterpart to Limbaugh, or Lou Dobbs, or Pat Robertson.. Sen. Coburn. Sen. Santorum. Alan Keyes. None. Nada.

Again, there's a word for this.

This poison--certainly known in advance to be toxic waste--is both source and foundation of the unprecedented paralysis in Washington, DC that already threatens our capacity as a nation to respond to huge and growing national security, fiscal, environmental, and infrastructural threats.

The same polluted swill is also both source and foundation of the "Birthers," the Tea Partiers, the milititant Christianists, the Sarah Palin groupies, the wanna-be Joe the Plumbers (another hoax). This is the amniotic cesspool in which the whole dim-witted, fact-phobic, fear-drunk, anti-poor, anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti-pigment, anti-sex, anti-environment, anti-gay, anti-labor, anti-humanist, anti-Constitution American Right has been steeped for 80 years.

Why's nobody talking about how all this is mostly over made-up stuff?

It would be funny except that America held such sacred promise.

It would be funny except that my dad lost his eye defending that promise.

It would be funny except that millions of people have already died, and millions more will follow, because those who perpetrate these hoaxes are who profit most. profits of perpetual war and the swindles of Wall Street. I give you Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, the Neo-Cons all, and Paulson and Greenspan and Rice and pharma lobbyists and Dobbs-Limbaugh lapdogs.

For sure, the redneck hard-hats and the truck drivers who make up their conservative base won't profit. They're every bit as expendable as you or me: Remember W's repeal of the Davis-Bacon Act for Gulf Coast states right after Katrina? Remember what you learned from The Shock Doctrine? Remember for-profit, paid-per-capita prisons stuffed to the rafters through hard-Right propaganda and the not-coincidental suddenly intense war on Mexican immigrants? Remember "privatization," the plan that replaces public control of our infrastructure, water, utilities, hospitals, highways, and energy, and replaces them with with private ownership of water, utilities, the military, energy, hospitals, etc. Can you say ENRON? HCA? Blackwater/Xe? Hello?

So it turns out that the garbage we've been forcefed all these years isn't just false. It's also a boondoggle. Turns out that all this Rightwing raving isn't about (the bogus) "homosexual agenda" or the (made-up) illegal takeover, or the "emasculation" of the 'Merkun male at all.

It's about corporatism and privatization. It's about perpetual war for perpetual profit, and a "free market" stripped of regulation and stripped down for plunder. I give you Halliburton, KBR, Xe, Pepsico, Monsanto, the Carlyle Group, and the Wall Street con men. Even our far Right state legislatures, like Arizona's, and avowed racist lawmakers like Russell Pearce are penny-ante demagogues, pawns in a way bigger chess match and too stupid to know it.

There's a word for this. It's called treason. Yet the Legislative and Executive branches are either immobilized or co-conspirators, and our highest Court--that tool of the Right responsible for empowering W and Dick and legitimizing their Reign of Plunder--just took it over the top. When the US Supreme Court ruled recently that restricting corporate funding of political candidates is unconstitutional, they unleashed a corporatist muck tsunami that very well may choke us all to death.

For 30 pieces of silver, a platform, and a megaphone, men and women like Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia, John Roberts, Sarah Palin, John McCain, Jon Kyl, Mitch McConnell, Rush Limbaugh, John Boehner, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin, Tom Tancredo, Karl Rove, and a host of lesser infidels have sold their mortal souls.

They've sold ours, too, and any hope our children ever had for the American Dream.

There's a word for this. It's treason.

Whites Only, Men Only

Listening to Southern Senator Jeff Sessions blast USSC nominee Sonia Sotomayor for applying empathy and personal life experience in her role as a judge is a first-rate immersion in GOP intellectual dishonesty.

I agree with the definition given at that link, which says in part:

Intellectual dishonesty is dishonesty in performing intellectual activities like thought or communication. Examples are:

the advocacy of a position which the advocate knows or believes to be false or misleading

the conscious omission of aspects of the truth known or believed to be relevant in the particular context.

Rhetoric is used to advance an agenda or to reinforce one's deeply held beliefs in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence

The conscious omission of relevant aspects of the truth, and the advocacy of a position the advocate knows to be misleading are mainstays of the rhetoric of the Right. I hear examples of these things all the time and in fact would argue that these are policies of Fox News.

In this case, Sessions's argument that no judge ought should employ his or her life experience or powers of empathy on the bench depends for its impact on the unspoken contention that white men never apply empathy or life experience in their judicial decisionmaking. Much of early American legal history is nothing but the result of white male experience applied in empathy to other white males. What else can we calk the arguments that only white male landowners should be entitled to vote, that African slaves were only 3/5ths human, and that women, like dogs and horse carriages, were chattel, the possessions of men?

All these positions have at one time or another been embedded in US law. Not coincidentally, those were times when neither people of color nor women were at the bar, let alone on the bench.

And so it is clear that the problem eating at Sessions isn't the application of empathy and experience to judicial decisionmaking. His problem, in intellectually honest terms, has to do only with whose empathy and experience will be applied.

I hope that American women and people of color are listening carefully to the senators debate Sotomayor's nomination and are noting that Senator Sessions is calling this the conservative, Republican perspective. Their message is that if they have their way, none but privileged white males--and those who annihilate their own life differences in order to be as much like privileged white males as possible--ever need apply.

We The Un-People Salute SCOTUS

So, now that the California Supreme Court has ruled that a disinformed majority of voters may declare that some of the people are second-class citizens without equal constitutional rights, what's next? Can any majority now withhold anything it pleases from any minority? If not, exactly where was the line drawn?

Until today, I had blissfully supposed that the courts protected minorities from the tyranny of the majority.

But no. After forty-plus years of sitting in the back of this bus, not by choice, I've begun to get it that in the US of A, the Constitution is not for me.

This was an incredible ruling. The only other legislative catastrophes of comparable dimensions (in my lifetime) have been DOMA and the obstinant refusal of US states to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment.

Funny how they all cluster around WSEX on your radio dial. Meaning around the enforced alignment of your gender identity with your biological sex, and the social ramifications that follow from that.

It's the quaint but pervasive notion that homosexuality is a mis-alignment of biological sex with [inherent] gender roles that makes homophobia just another manifestation of sexism. This, then, makes the watchful among us wonder who benefits from keeping queers down.

So anyway, back to my rapidly disappearing legal personhood.

What's next? Does this not mean that he who has the gold (to fund voter propaganda and finance voter turnout) will win the civil rights lottery? If he who has the gold rules, look out, people. The Baptists, the LDS, and the Vatican are not paupers.

And does this decision not invite a 100 Year War of the Propositions in every state?

What would that mean for us at a practical level? Should we plan to move like ping pong balls whenever the majority in state we’re in votes to declare that we’re second-class persons? Will I have to re-file my taxes with each and every reversal? Married. Not married. Married. Not married. And what if I’m in the hospital when a vote comes down? Would Catherine have to leave the room?

People can’t be partly equal. And state-based solutions obviously can’t work.

Rightwing Ideology: The Other Bioterrorism

In their comments on "Why Would Any Genuine American Ever be a Rightwinger?" both AvenueFog and Morning Angel offered interesting observations. AvenueFog suggests that it comes down to perceptions of right and wrong. Morning Angel suggests that the answer lies in my post of June 17, "Should This Man be Our Next President?" I agree with both, but after having closely followed the rise of the Far Right in the US since the mid 80s, I see perceptions of right and wrong as only a small part of the story.

In earlier posts this week, I've offered some working definitions of "conservative" and "Rightwinger," and laid out the twin absurdities in the doctrine of "original intent"--i.e., that what the founders "believed" is knowable and matters. Read these if you haven't, because they will help make the following a little clearer.

Because we've undergone nearly 40 years of relentless on-message propaganda designed to discredit the great Liberal ideals on which the country was founded (fact, not opinion. See American Revolution, French Revolution, Enlightenment, etc.), and because W has directly attacked the Constitution many times and many ways in the last 7+ years, I say the Far Right isn't about moral positions. I say that the Far Right is the enemy of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights themselves.

What the Far Right so dislikes is the fact that our Constitution explicitly empowers judges to correct legislative excesses and to interpret the meaning of the Constitution for each era. This Far Right's antipathy to constitutionally mandated judicial review is behind Bush's claim to a "unitary presidency" and behind the special pleading in that favorite conservative epithet, "activist judges" (special pleading means reserving for one's side that which one will not grant to the other. E.g., in the formula "only liberal judges are activist. Rightwing judges are never activist," highminded purity and adherence to the mythical "founders' intent" are characteristics of Rightwing judges alone.)

Why the antipathy? Because in the latter part of the last century, US Supreme Court judges have interpreted the Constitution and the Bill of Rights in favor of minorities' claims to equality; women's claims to autonomy and free will; and the priority of the common good over the rights of the individual (as in environmental protection and gun control rulings). Liberals and progressives see these interpretations as the slow but steady march toward universal human rights. Conservatives and Rightwingers see them as full frontal assaults on white male supremacy and on the primacy of material possessions: property ownership.

Gay marriage, for instance, is a question of the constitutional meaning of equality--equal rights, equal protection under the law--a question of morality based on biblical interpretation, and a phenomenon inseparable from gender relations. Though they might not be consciously aware of it, Rightwing foes of gay marriage sense correctly that it destabilizes male supremacy. Let me repeat. It doesn't destabilize egalitarian heterosexual marriage. It does destabilize ideals of male supremacy and therefore those heterosexual marriages that reinforce male supremacy (not all do). How? Because homosexuality inherently demonstrates the fallacy of immutable social roles based on biological sex, it undermines doctrines of male supremacy and female inferiority simply because it exists.

Similarly, questions of the morality of homosexuality exist ONLY within a religious context. Therefore, legislative and judicial findings of the equality of LGBTQ persons to heterosexuals will inherently run afoul of fundamentalist belief. When they do, the Constitution itself guarantees advocates of LGBTQ equality of person, equal protection under the law, and the right to be free of somebody else's religious dogma. Unless Rightwingers can replace 230+ years of legal tradition with nonsense about "original intent" and "judicial activism," there will be legalized gay marriage. It's just a question of time. Ergo, gay marriage (equality for LGBTQ persons, actually) is among its top priority issues.

What I'm saying is that Rightwingers are fundamentally opposed to universal equality. That's not to say that some aren't also sincere religious fundamentalists whose objections are "faith based." It's to say that there's no daylight between fundamentalist religion and secular fundamental belief in white male supremacy. They are of a piece. Show me a form of religious fundamentalism that isn't profoundly sexist and racist, and I'll modify my views. Until then, I rest my case.

This thumbnail sketch of what I see as the nature of the division in America (actually, it's in many ways a global division, too) ought to suggest that the Far Right is not interested in compromise or bipartisanship. It isn't. As arch-winger Grover Norquist famously remarked (it's interesting that he chose a violent sexual metaphor) "Bipartisanship is another name for date rape." (An aside: That we are in a mortal war about sex privilege is underscored when the Far Right attempts to smear its opponents with questions about their masculinity or heterosexuality. If you doubt it, linger awhile on the Free Republic website and pay attention to the language. Or listen to John McCain's "jokes." (Follow the rhetoric, find the target.)

The only things that stand in the way of US Rightwingers intent on imposing their social, political, and economic doctrines are the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. That is why I do not believe Rightwing ideology can ever be consistent with the ideals that make America uniquely America. Our nation was born out of and is forever grounded in the great Liberal ideals, making who we are anathema to the Far Right.

Unfortunately for us, Bush 43 has inflicted a series of grave wounds to both (separation of church and state, equality, balance of powers, consent of the governed, privacy, etc.). Harsh and demonizing Rightwing propaganda since the 1970s(and Rightwing media control, of course) has muddied the water for a goodly number of Americans.

We're dealing with the breakdown of an ancient, heavily layered problem formed of a mix of secular and religious socio-cultural ideas better suited to a time when male physical power made all the difference between a village's life or death. When that's no longer the case, anxieties about role and meaning can and do amplify to the point of hysteria. (See The Chalice and the Blade for a more nuanced version of this analysis.)

One thing is clear: One way to deal with anxiety of crisis proportions is through sumbolism and surrogates: domestic terrorism (illegal detentions and spying), permanent predatory wars of domination, "legitimized" torture, and money, sex, idealized violence (extreme fighting), rapacious environmental practices, and WMD as avatars: the economic, social, and foreign relations ideologies of the Far Right. They're the other bioterrorism.

Scary, isn't it?

Get busy. The US Supreme Court is on the line in this election, and as it goes, so goes the nation.