A Country Gone Nuts

People who refuse masks and vaccination, who still claim the election was stolen, who see nothing wrong with voter-limitation laws, who consider climate change a hoax, who stormed the Capitol, who believe the stormers were anti-Trump, who’re high-fivin’ white-guy Tucker Carlson’s “replacement” ravings, who fear transsexuals in bathrooms, who insist Trump never lied, who accuse Hillary Clinton of child-trafficking and cannibalism, who think if we stay long enough in Afghanistan we’ll “win,”

Who “do their own research” about science, who say ignoring pandemic social behavior is about “freedom,” who think black people killed by police asked for it – even an unarmed child with his hands up, who are convinced undocumented immigrants are allowed to vote, who insist there’s never been or no longer is racism in America, who say the only racists are non-whites, who don’t mind the Republican Party becoming overtly white-supremacist, 

Who elect people to Congress who harass and lie and block but produce little of value, who drive into crowds of demonstrators (now legal in Florida), who consider Black Lives Matter a terrorist organization, who imagine Christianity is under siege and that it’s only white people who face discrimination, who fear “Sharia law” while legislating based on their personal Bible interpretations, who say the ACLU is a Communist front and that Democrats want communism, who demand we consider America a Christian nation, who call Kyle Rittenhouse a hero, who believe Democrats want to take away their religion and guns and free speech and create open borders, 

Who think it’s easy to distinguish between good guys and bad guys with guns and background checks are fascist, who are convinced vaccines are mind-control, who’ve concluded Dr. Fauci is an evil liar, who reckon the “wrong kinds” of people are voting, who impeached Bill Clinton for lying about sex but deem the impeachments of Trump political hit-jobs, who believe there’s a “deep state” in cahoots with an international Jewish cabal, who reject proof that Russians interfered with Trump’s election and colluded with his campaign,

Are the same ones insisting if assault-style weapons are banned “the government” will track them down and haul them to reeducation camps or gas chambers, and that the Second Amendment was created, expressly, to provide citizens with the muskets to stop it from happening. And that the recent spate of mass murders, added to the mounting all-time total, is reasonable, unpreventable, maybe a bit unfortunate but not-worth-doing-anything price we should be happy to pay for keeping ourselves armed against, well, that thing that will never happen.

Except it did when Trump brutally cleared peaceful protestors so he could wave a Bible at us and later sent troops to Portland and Seattle against mostly peaceful demonstrators but it’s fine because it was people seeking justice which is communism and it showed them who’s boss and wasn’t the thing they’d been arming themselves for because government gassing non-violent citizens is okay because Trump is on our side and they deserved it and also inciting deadly insurrection against the Constitution.

Half of our country is nuts. We may disagree about which half, but, surely, we do agree this ever-widening, bridgeless divide is incompatible with democracy, and that we’re nearing the impossibility of finding our way back. If half the country doesn’t check every one of the foregoing boxes, they check plenty more than a few.

If there is a way back, it won’t come from Cruz, Hawley, Jordan, Nunes, Gozar, Gaetz, McCarthy, Graham, Greene, Boebert, Cotton, Barasso, Thune, Paul, Kennedy, Hyde-Smith, Cornyn, Gohmert, King, Scott, Ernst, Blackburn, or any of the rest who prefer dissimilation and cries of “socialism” instead of producing useful ideas.

But it could, in fact, come from Pelosi, Murray, Ocasio-Cortez, Porter, Sanders, Warren, Whitehouse, or the others whom Trumpists love to hate and dismiss with prejudice, but who are offering serious, fact-based proposals, like them or not. In Congresses past, their ideas would initiate constructive, good-faith debate; leading, if you can imagine, to workable compromise. If Republicans were to stop fearing their Fox-, Newsmax-, OAN-indoctrinated supporters and rise above taking orders from their corporate sponsors, perhaps they’d remember their job is to legislate for the good of everyone. Ticking, is the clock.

Meanwhile, on Mars, NASA flew a self-driving helicopter carrying a tiny piece of the Wright brothers’ first airplane. If that doesn’t cause you to admire science, what will? How many members of the design and build team are immigrants or first-generation or non-white? Lots. Its name, “Ingenuity,” came from an Alabama high-schooler named Vaneeza Rupani. Makes a person think.

Finally, for now, one word on the Chauvin verdict: just.

No Asylum

I run lukewarm and cold over Thomas Friedman, but a recent column is absolutely right. As I've said many times, this country needs a thoughtful (if that's too much to ask, I'd settle for sane) conservative party. I really hate that, heading toward a really important election, we're forced to deal with the sickness that's become the Republican party. I hate that we can't have meaningful discussions of significant issues, arguing both sides earnestly, motivated by a shared commitment to finding solutions. Instead, we're putting up with a party taken over by its lunatic fringe. At a time when the issues facing us are as serious as they can be, one side of the equation refuses to engage.

Instead of honest consideration of ways forward from unemployment, crumbling infrastructure, failing education; instead of looking for balanced ways to solve debt, we're forced by teabaggRs to deal with voter suppression, science denial, and troglodyte views of women and their rights. We're having to deal with people to whom the whole idea of democracy and the compromises it entails is as foreign as that Kenyan Muslim in the White House. And it's killing us.

Says Friedman:

...But what’s even more troubling is that we need more than debates. That’s all we’ve been having. We need deals on all four issues as soon as this election is over, and I just don’t see that happening unless “conservatives” retake the Republican Party from the “radicals” — that is, the Tea Party base. America today desperately needs a serious, thoughtful, credible 21st-century “conservative” opposition to President Obama, and we don’t have that, even though the voices are out there.

[...]

Imagine if the G.O.P.’s position on debt was set by Senator Tom Coburn, the Oklahoma Republican who has challenged the no-tax lunacy of Grover Norquist and served on the Simpson-Bowles commission and voted for its final plan (unlike Ryan). That plan included both increased tax revenues and spending cuts as the only way to fix our long-term fiscal imbalances...

[...]

Imagine if the G.O.P.’s position on immigration followed the lead of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Rupert Murdoch, chief executive of the News Corporation. Bloomberg and Murdoch recently took to the road to make the economic case for immigration reform. ... Murdoch added, “give them a path to citizenship. They pay taxes; they are hard-working people. Why Mitt Romney doesn’t do it, I have no idea, because they are natural Republicans.”

[...]

Imagine if the G.O.P. position on energy and climate was set by Bob Inglis, a former South Carolina Republican congressman (who was defeated by the Tea Party in 2010). He now runs George Mason University’s Energy and Enterprise Initiative, which is based on the notion that climate change is real, and that the best way to deal with it and our broader energy challenge is with conservative “market-based solutions” that say to the fossil fuel and wind, solar and nuclear industries: “Be accountable for all of your costs,” including the carbon and pollution you put in the air..."

[...]

We are not going to make any progress on our biggest problems without a compromise between the center-right and center-left. But, for that, we need the center-right conservatives, not the radicals, to be running the G.O.P., as well as the center-left in the Democratic Party. Over the course of his presidency, Obama has proposed center-left solutions to all four of these challenges...

The point -- one I've been trying to make for a long time -- is that when one party has lost all interest in or ability to compromise, has based all its ideas on discredited or false premises, proudly refuses to accept science and expertise as any sort of basis for discussion, not even as a starting point, would rather lie about its opposition than speak truthfully about its own ideas, cares more about imposing its religious beliefs than talking shared concerns, there's no real discussion at all. The left gets to point out the stupidity of the right and gets to ignore any problems with its own positions; and the right... well, the right focuses on distracting and confusing its electorate over its own insanity. Having the aforementioned Murdoch on their side when it comes to the propaganda part eliminates the need to explain themselves, to tell us why their pigheadedness and theocracy won't take us down the road to ruination as it did last time.

The only way it will change is if their voters make it happen. Which means, as obvious as a heatwave, that it won't. Ever. Because by the time people wake up and demand it (assuming that they'd have retained some ability to push their way through the fog of ignorance they've been fed until it felt like knowledge to them), it'll be way too late. And I have a real bad feeling that November will be the beginning, the re-beginning only briefly interrupted, of the end.

I suppose there's irony to be appreciated, from above the 50,000 foot level. As transformative as the election of Barack Obama was thought to be, it, in fact, provided the perfect avenue for hatred to run unabated through the Republican party and to be harnessed cynically by people who couldn't care less about the long-term implications of choosing that path. Following the Foxorovian model that says no lie is too venal, no trick too cynical or deception too unethical when the goal is to regain power, the party of teabaggers took the opportunity to feed on their people's worst instincts, to exploit human frailty and neediness to its maximum and then beyond; and so, rather than signaling a new era of cooperation and rising above partisanship and the politics of hate, the election, exactly because of what it was, became its own opposite: the destruction of the hope it was thought to portend.

No other candidate could have generated so much hope; no other candidate could have fueled so much hate. No party other than today's Republicans could have been willing to exploit it so shamelessly.

I'm Not The Only One

Here's commentary from P.M. Carpenter, who holds a PhD in American history:

A moral abomination

There no longer exists any doubt that Mitt Romney intends to win the White House by conducting the most dishonest, unscrupulous and reprehensible campaign ever devised, in mere whimsy. The unethical stench of this man is not only breathtaking, it's meteoric. I have never seen anything like it, never heard anything like it, never imagined anything like it.

All you American political history books, move over; there's a new king of demagoguery in town, and future history will never see his malevolent depths of dishonor again.

What triggered this outburst? Today in St. Louis, just today, in just this one day, mind you, this despicable wretch of a man called President Obama's economic policies a "moral failure of tragic proportions"...

[...]

It's only June, and Mitt Romney has already exhausted all the hideous possibilities of a Dorian Gray mentality that would make even Oscar Wilde blush. Moral. That's this pathetic, vile little pol's new favorite word. Moral. Here's a man who leads a party that endorses torture as well as unprovoked war, and coddles the rich while showing indifference to the poor. Moral.

Combine Gray with Elmer Gantry and you'd still come up short of the "moral" abomination that calls itself Mitt Romney.

There's more, also echoing my thoughts on the extremism of the current R party. Here's an article with the following title:

My break with the extreme right

I worked for Reagan and wrote for National Review. But the new hysterical right cares nothing for truth or dignity

It includes such commentary as:

I ... founded a conservative college newspaper, held positions in the Reagan administration and at several conservative think tanks, and published five books that conservatives applauded. I’ve written for umpteen major conservative publications – National Review, the Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, among them. But no longer. That was the old right. The last thing hysteria promoters want is calm, reasoned argument backed by facts. And I’m horrified that these people have co-opted the name “conservative” to scream their messages of hate and anger.

To repeat: our country is increasingly in the grip of a political party gone nuts, one wholly uninterested in facts, in democracy, in working for the common good. And its latest leader is a liar of proportions hitherto unseen in American politics. It's not just me saying it: it's the vestigial remains of a tradition of thought and compromise that once characterized Republicans, and still, evidently, characterizes true conservatives, of which virtually none remain in the R hierarchy. This rank dishonesty and placing of party power above public good, this abandonment of facts and deliberate rejection of expertise, is as obvious as a barberous attack on a gay kid.

And yet...

And yet, the average Republican voter seems quite okay with this sorry state of affairs, only too willing to believe the lies of Romney and his screamers, all too easily deceived, gratefully uninformed. Happy to recline into their particular perversion of faith as a substitute for the hard work of thinking, and into prejudices as justification for it all.

God help us.