The Lie of the Year isn't President Obama's whopper about the Affordable Care Act

Politifact.com has "awarded" its Lie of the Year dubious honor to President Obama for saying you keep your healthcare if you like it.

The Right Wing Media has picked this up and made a whole lotta hay with it.

But this time they're wrong.

The President's lie was a lie, all right, and even though it only directly affects a very small percentage of Americans it also affects his credibility with everyone else.

However, the Lie of the Year is vastly more pernicious, even though no one ever says it explicity.

It's the Republicans' lie that Republicare is better than Obamacare for any but 1% of Americans.

Republicare is what we get if the Republicans repeal Obamacare. Forty-six times in that last several years the Republicans have voted to repeal Obamacare in its entirety (in the House of Representatives), and 46 times the Republcans' health bill contained exactly nothing to replace Obamacare with if it succeeded.

So Republicare is simply America's high profitable healthcare system as it was before the Affordable Care Act became law.

And Republicare was a disaster that killed many people and drove many others into bankruptcy. The Affordable Care Act, warts and all, is infinitely better than a Republicare, in which you might pay into your healthcare insurance provider for 40 years only to get dumped as soon as you get really sick and start reducing that insurer's profits.

Republicare is the most billionaire-friendly healthcare system on Earth. But for us non-billionaires, the idea that it's preferable to the ACA would only make sense to someone completely blinded by right wing ideology.

And that's why Republicans NEVER talk about what we'll get if they get what they want. They want us to look at the ACA without regard to the only alternative they've given us: nothing.

And Nothing is what Republicare is.

Why did the Republicans think President Obama would cave in they precipitated an economic crisis?

Part of being a partisan ideologue--a key part--is gut-level contempt of your opponents. You're strong, they're weak. At best they're crafty. But they lack your own moral fiber, your warrior spirit, your nobility. They're all hat, no cattle.

This constantly leads partisans to underestimate the opposition. It's why the Japanese High Command decided to attack us at Pearl Harbor.

Partisans tend to be heedless of consequence. Their own inner song fires them up. They're driven by belief, not estimation.

And they see pragmatism and a willingness to compromise as lack of principle. They cannot grasp the concept of someone being willing to compromise because of their principles.

So they figure Obama is spineless and will always cave. It never occurred to them that he might compromise for the sake of the nation--and, later, under different circumstances, refuse to compromise--also for the sake of the nation. You've seen how they caricaturize Libruls as unpatriotic, selfish. lazy. Someone like this would indeed knuckle under in the face of Republican masculine aggression.

Especially considering the extraordinary level of harm the Republicans will do to the nation if the President doesn't cave and they carry through on their threat to cause a national credit default.

There are plenty of Republicans who aren't partisan ideologues. And there are certainly Democrats who are partisan ideologues. The difference is that the Democratic Party's partisan ideologues aren't in charge of their party. No Drama Obama is as cool under fire as any President we've had. Leftist ideologues think he's a closet Republican in fact--something no right wing ideologue has any idea of, since they get all their information from ideological media.

On the other hand, while the last Republican candidate seemed cool and collected--his ideological character showed in the fact that he was so certain of victory--despite every major poll saying otherwise--on election night he didn't even have a concession speech prepared because he was so certain of victory. That's the blindness of the ideologue.

And who's in charge of the Republican Party now? Seems like Ted Cruz, with John Boehner trying to stay ahead of him and not get Primaried. Boehner is not a radical Republican, but he is deeply committed to keeping his job, so all his ranting and calumnies serve to show how the crazies are running the asylum on the right hand side of the aisle, such that even the non-crazies have to act crazy just to hold onto their gigs.

This is what happens when you only listen to people who already agree with you and then attack someone who appears to have read Lao Tzu....

Propaganda pays off

Talk about getting bang for your buck. Read down the comment threads on articles about the current government shutdown crisis-and you'll see that the massive, multimillion-dollar propaganda campaign carried on year after year at the behest of a few thousand billionaires and multimillionaires...has been amazingly successful.

We know a lot more about the human mind than we did even a few decades ago. And amoral people with a vast sense of entitlement have paid skilled operatives to use that knowledge to get many millions of Americans to believe a long list of "facts" that are not factually true.

However, those lies are woven into a pandering, emotionally self-satisfying narrative that makes more "sense" to the average Republican voter than ambiguous, messy reality does.

Reality doesn't stand a chance.

The result is people like the commentors here who absolutely believe that they know more about the Constitution than the Supreme Court and the constitutional lawyer who's our President, more about civics than civics teachers...these are people who believe the political things they believe with same fervor that the more fervent Fundamentalist Christians or Muslims or Jews or Hindus or Buddhist apply to their religious beliefs.

You will also see that this propaganda campaign has inoculated them against reality--given them bogus counter-arguments but even more important, gotten them to believe that Democrats are the enemies of America, and therefore they need not listen to a single word any Democrat says.
When you talk with them in person you can see their faces close up, at which point nothing you say will be processed in their cerebral cortex--it all gets shunted down to the emotional centers in the middle of the brain.

The irony being that their leaders are their actual enemies--enemies who've convinced their victims that they're their friends, in a massive Stockholm Syndrome.

Thus the .1% have become the most successful parasites in Nature--parasites whose victims eagerly present themselves to them to get sucked dry, and then turn angrily on those who are trying to save them.

Apart from the moral horror, it's quite impressive to watch.

Two Colorado districts recall Democrats who voted for gun control

What these recall elections reveal most of all is that their advocates' logic & facts are neither logical nor factual--but instead reflect a simplistic, emotionally powerful narrative that's pure propaganda--propaganda spoon-fed to them by their worst enemies, who they mistake for their best friends.

Their worst enemies aren't their boogeymen, the dreaded Gun-grabbin' Metrosexual College boy California Libruls all in cahoots with Uppity Drug-Dealin' Blacks. Their worst enemies are actually the hyper-rich corporatists whose insatiable thirst for More has grabbed away the rank-&-file Republicans' economic security...& then told them that owning an AR-15 with an extended magazine will make up for that.

But an extended-magazine AR-15 can't change the fact that the incomes of the richest 1% have soared into the stratosphere over the last four decades, while most everyone else's has stagnated or gone overseas. However, modern economics are incredibly complicated. Guns are simple, concrete, satisfying. President Obama was right--these people are over their heads trying to deal with modern life but are too proud to admit it, so they do indeed cling to their guns & their tribalized version of Christianity.

They think the rich, conservative politicians & pundits who look like them are like them. That's tribal thinking at work, & as every con artist from The Music Man to Wayne LaPierre knows, it works like a charm.

These NRA members have been played.

What's wrong with income redistribution?

The Republican Party and its talking heads on TV and radio denounce the Democrats daily for advocating "redistribution of wealth." Democrats want to steal money from the makers and hand it over to the takers (psst: especially Black and Brown "takers").

Next time you hear a friend or relative soapboxing about this, ask them a simple question:

How do they account for the fact that since 1979, the inflation-adjusted income of the richest 1% has soared at 26 times the rate of folks in the middle class?

Sure looks like wealth redistribution to me--only not by Democrats.

But Republicans tend to flatly deny statistics like the one I cited here, gotten from financial journalist Ali Velshi on his new AlJazeera news program. And if you say you got it from AlJazeera, well, that's like saying you got it from Sadam Hussein.

But how about the Congressional Budget Office (CBO)? The right wing quotes the CBO part of the time and then denies its validity the other part (when they don't like the figures).

But for what it's worth, check out the CBO's report "Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007."

For example:


The share of income going to higher-income households rose, while the share going to lower-income households fell.

"The rich get rich and the poor get poorer..."

See what sorts of mental gymnastics your right wing friends and acquaintances and relatives go through as they try to fit the facts into their anti-Democratic Party narrative.

Despite the simple fact that there is a class war going on all right, and you can see the results in that chart. It's the 1% against the 99%, and they've won and we've lost.

So far.

 

The hidden contradiction in the GOP's denunciation of President Obama's response to the Egyptian coup

It's easy to say that the President is weak and waffling about the situation in Egypt. Just as it's easy to say that the Arab Spring has failed, and that its failure is somehow President Obama's fault.

The hidden contradiction stems from the fact that the people saying that are generally the people who want our foreign policy to be dictated by Israel's current right wing government headed by Benyamin Netanyahu.

And Israel's current government wants us to be doing exactly what President Obama is doing--not fully supporting anyone, not fully withdrawing from our current commitments to Egypt.

As for the Arab Spring failing--that's just shortsightedness. How long did our Colonial Spring take to succeed? From the first protests to becoming fully independent, it took us at least 35 years (to the end of the War of 1812). Giving the Arab Spring a couple of years to succeed makes no sense at all. And it should be obvious that things will never return to the old status quo there.

Interestingly, left wing ideologues are also very unhappy with President Obama's cautious approach. Ideologues Left and Right love the simple, bold approach based on principle, without taking consequences into account.

But the Leftists don't hate President Obama because he's black, while a majority of the Rightists do. And this provides a perfect example. Given their slavish devotion to Israel's Netanyahu government, they should be praising President Obama for--in this case--doing exactly what Netanyahu wants him to do.

Yet they just can't help themselves--they're compelled to denounce the President for whatever he does, even when he's carrying out conservative plans, such as the Affordable Care Act.

Another argument for supporting the Egyptian military's brutal crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood is the fact that in the last few days Brotherhood supporters responded to the Army crackdown, in part, by attacking a dozen Christian churches around Egypt. Right wingers talk about Muslim persecution of Christians, and they're factually correct. So shouldn't they support President Obama supporting the force in Egypt that's protecting Egyptian Christians from Muslim extremists?

Al Quedatalk--a perfect example of Republican lying about what the President is saying

The Republican leadership desperately needs President Obama to be weak and feckless when it comes to Al Qaeda.

The GOP brand has depended for many decades on the narrative "Conservatives strong, Liberals weak." In addition, the Party's deeply racist Southern core has depended for 250 years on imagining that all Negroes--in particular Negro men--are incompetent in positions of responsibility.

Problem is, President Obama nailed Osama bin Ladin and has been pursuing Al Qaeda diligently around the world.

But the GOP leadership realizes that for many if not most people, an emotionally compelling narrative trumps mere facts.

And so we have the spectacle of the Republican leadership consistently misrepresenting what President Obama has said and done regarding Al Qaeda.

The President says we've busted up Al Qaeda HQ, greatly hampering their ability to mount the kind of spectacular attack on us that 9/11 exemplified. He also says that their ideology has metastasized, such that there are many regional Al Qaedas now in existence--in part courtesy of the last Republican President attacking the wrong country and thus validating Al Qaeda's own narrative to Muslims that America is at war with Islam, and also courtesy of the incendiary things so many Republican leaders have said about that religion in toto, to be quoted endlessly by Islamists.

The Republicans say the President said Al Qaeda is finished and there's nothing to worry about now. He never said that, he never implied that, and his actions belie that. But this baldfaced lie is consistent with both the emotional anti-Liberal narrative and the White Southern anti-Negro narrative, and so it's believed by the GOP's more thoughtless voters.

Most Republicans insist that their judgments are color blind. True?

A recent AP poll found that 79% of registered Republicans expressed overtly racist beliefs. Of course if you believe that blacks actually are inferior, you won't believe you're PRE-judiced. You'll believe you're POST-judiced.

That is, if blacks really are inferior, a person who believes blacks are inferior isn't racist, and those who claim he is are just prejudiced against whites and/or "playing the race card."

I bring this up because I was just reading down the comment thread on the U.S News website about the 2nd Zimmerman juror who said he "Got away with murder."

If you skim down it a ways you'll see a lot more than the fact that nearly all who see themselves as conservative believe that George Zimmerman was totally justified in every single thing he did the night he shot Trayvon Martin dead. You'll see innumerable expressions of racist beliefs so hate-filled that I'd have thought I was on a Ku Klux Klan website.

These expressions were not needed to argue the facts of the case or how Florida's Stand Your Ground law exonerated Zimmerman. Or even simple self defense, though it should be obvious from the judge's instructions and the jurors' interviews that Stand Your Ground was integral to the case despite the defense team not citing it (because they knew the state of Florida would do it for them).

So these expressions were gratuitous expressions of hatred and contempt for blacks, not much different from what Southerners have been saying for hundreds of years in order to justify what they did to blacks.

Of course nobody said "I think blacks are inferior to whites." But..I don't even want to repeat what they said here. Just skim down the thread.

And after skimming down the thread, you should also understand why 95% of blacks vote Democrat.

Along with the vast majority of Americans who object to racism.

And you should also see why today's Republican Party is seen as primarily a regional party representing the Southern states along with their rural Midwestern and Southwestern satellites.

I was just reading a comment on another article--one in the NY Times--by a professional woman who with her husband moved to the Raleigh-Durham Research Triangle in North Carolina. Both had gotten great, well-paid jobs. They settled in and planned to make their careers there. But within a year or so the lady reported that they pulled up stakes and left the South despite the great jobs they had there, because both we so disgusted at the pervasive racism and misogyny.

Many Northerners just don't realize just how bad it is down there.

Zimmerman was not found "innocent."

This is a point the right wing Constitution-thumpers don't seem to get: the American criminal justice system, taking into account human fallibility and evidentiary problems, is designed to let many guilty people go free in order to ensure that no innocent people are proven guilty.

This is what "innocent until proven guilty" means.

So the jury may well have felt that Zimmerman was guilty--just not past "a reasonable doubt."
That's a heckuva long way from thinking he was innocent.

And there's the added problem of the "stand your ground" law, written up by the NRA and obediently put into the books in states controlled by the NRA's political arm, AKA the Republican Party. The "stand your ground" law makes it so difficult to convict anyone of murder that police departments hate it while criminal gangs love it.

So the jury may have obeyed Florida's "stand your ground" law's dictates while feeling that this law is bad law. In states that rule out citing "self defense" if you initiated the altercation, Zimmerman would have been found guilty of manslaughter. That's what juror B29 was trying to say, I believe.

ObamaCare vs. RepublicCare

Given how America's political system works, the only alternative to ObamaCare is RepubliCare.

But while the GOP and its friends have spent over $400 million telling you how awful ObamaCare is, they haven't spent a cent telling you what their alternative is.

I can tell you what it is, though:

1. Repeal ObamaCare in toto.
2. There is no "2."

So RepubliCare is for-profit medicine by the medical-industrial complex, for the medical-industrial complex, by the medical-industrial complex.

RepubliCare is overcrowded emergency care facilities being used by the poor as their primary care. RepubliCare is your health insurance that you paid into for forty years getting canceled as soon as you really need it.
RepubliCare is private health insurance for those whose employers don't provide health insurance plus freelancers plus retirees, which provides excellent care for millionaires, while the rest find it's either too expensive to buy or whose deductibles are so high it's useless.
RepubliCare is the most expensive per-capital healthcare system on Earth, with the worst outcomes for most people compared to those of other developed nations--the healthcare system growing in costs so rapidly that it's consuming the American economy--the healthcare system every responsible economist said is unsustainable and running us over a cliff in short order.

ObamaCare has plenty of shortcomings--mostly due to compromises made at the behest of those who are now trying to kill it. But it's a dream compared to the nightmare of RepubliCare.

So--the next time your Republican friends, family and acquaintances want to talk to you about how awful ObamaCare is, make them do so not against some imaginary ideal but against the reality of RepubliCare.

Responding to the GOP's condemnation of Lberals/Democrats

I read this succinct diatribe in a major publication's comment thread recently:

 

The Liberal Democrats seek political power by the creation of strife.
_____
They attempt to turn black against white.
_____
They attempt to turn man against woman.
_____
They attempt to turn rich against poor.
_____
They attempt to turn labor against small business owners.
_____
They attempt to turn debtor against creditor.

Here's my response:

Yes, despotic movements always claim that all discontent is due to "outside agitators." Morsi in Egypt. The Mullahs in Iran, Southern whites back in the '60s, who were sure that "their" cullud folk were perfectly content until them Jewish college boys from the North came down to rile them up
.
Meanwhile the Republican Ministry of Propaganda seeks to distract us from:

1. Their war on blacks, spearheaded by their 22-state coordinated program to suppress the black vote, along with a 40 year campaign to "get tough on crime" that puts blacks in jail more often and for far longer than whites apprehended for comparable crimes, then disenfranchises all those black men for life

No wonder they've given up on the black vote.

2. Their war on women who are young &/or single &/or educated &/or not white Anglo &/or not fervent fundamentalist Protestant/Catholic &/or urban, via a national campaign to keep women ignorant about reproduction and fertility control options, keep them from getting HPV vaccinations in time for them to help, keep them from getting abortions even if they've been raped regardless of their age, keep them from getting birth control if they're underage.
No wonder a majority of women consider the GOP the party of old paternalistic white men--white men who adore "their" wimmen, just like they once adored "their" cullud folk.

3. The war on the poor and the middle class, seeing the former's real wages drop and the latter's stagnate for 30 years while the income of the .1% skyrockets in the same timeframe while corporate "welfare" also skyrockets while education and assistance for the neediest is continually cut back to the point where medical care for the poor approaches that of a third world country.

4. The war on small business by the GOP and it big business patrons. Walmart enters a town and dozens of small businesses die, with no net increase in employees there. Farm subsidies that favor a short list of huge agribusinesses hugely while doing nothing for other farmers. Helping big corporations outsource their pollution to all the small businesses and individuals around them. The special breaks and loopholes for big business written into so many bills in the dead of night. The GOP talks "small business" but it's smoke and mirrors.

5. The war on debtors. The GOP's machinations have turned the average college grad into a debtor who may not be able to repay his college loans until he’s middle aged, creating a generation of anxious, compliant workers–workers who can’t escape the burden even if they go bankrupt. Predatory home loan operations where buyers are lied to about the loans by the lenders, and then hundreds of thousands are foreclosed on illegally–going on to this day–while the loans are sold to pension funds and other investors as safe according to bought-and-paid-for ratings agencies, combining to implode the American economy in 2008–and not reformed to this day due to GOP rules manipulation in the Senate.

But Goebbel’s Rules of Propaganda state that you should always accuse the opposition of doing what you yourself are doing so they’ll be distracted into defending themselves instead of going after you. As the entry I'm replying to demonstrates.

The Democrats are no angels, as consulting FactCheck.org and PolitiFact.com will tell you. But those same sources will show that they’re pikers next to the GOP.

The Republican Party is not like the Taliban!

http://blogs.post-gazette.com/2013_Rogers_Cartoons/070913_Muslim_Brotherhood.jpg

The Republican Party has not become like the Taliban. But it has become like the Muslim Brotherhood.

Both are paternalistic, theocratic, ideologically rigid, and reject the fundamental concepts of democracy. Both just use the mechanisms of democracy--whether they're in the minority, a small majority, or a large majority--to impose their different versions of Shariah Law on the rest of the population, secure in their certainty that God is on their side--and forgetting Lincoln's fervent wish that he could be on God's side instead.

The Republican Brotherhood gets itself elected through appeals to independents' fiscal conservatism, along with leveraging the corporatists' propaganda and patronage war on government regulation, piggybacking on aging White Southerners' continued hatred of the federal government for taking away their slaves over a century ago.

They get elected on fiscal/small government conservatism, but then when they gain power they immediately squander any spending gains with huge giveaways to their corporate patrons and ignore their "small government" mantra by imposing theocratic regulations of people's private lives, particularly where abortion is concerned.

They betray their authoritarian bent with things like laws and regulations requiring medically unnecessary vaginal probes--digital rape, in other words--and forbidding doctors from even mentioning the possibility of abortion.

And of course the Republican Brotherhood betrays its theocratic bent by trying to criminalize abortion every way they can.

But also, like the Muslim Brotherhood, they're crafty. They continually howl about abortion being murder--but then they let the "murderers" off the hook. That's the women and girls getting the abortions. If the Republican Brotherhood was true to its own beliefs they'd be trying to get getting an abortion declared premeditated murder, subjecting women getting abortions to the death penalty in death penalty states.

And they'd be doing the same to couples getting in vitro fertilization, since that entails discarding many embryos.

But the know America's women would promptly toss them out of office, so they reserve their wrath for the abortion providers--which also betrays their paternalism. Them wimmen just don't know what's right, doncha know? So we'll go after them men doctors who are leading them astray...
A majority of Americans have had it with the Republican Brotherhood, but the Brotherhood has now gerrymandered the states it controls so that even though they'd have lost their House majority in the last election if all congressional districts were apportioned on a nonpartisan basis, they retained control. Now they're exercising minority rule--the antithesis of democracy.

Likewise the minority of Republicans in the Senate are using every trick in the book to control legislation and appointments, and to cripple the Obama Presidency in every way they can, regardless of the effect on America.

The Republican Brotherhood functions as a primitive tribe, one whose beliefs are not to be questioned, with anyone who disagrees considered a traitor or an enemy.

Hence their rage at so-called Rinos--that is, people who would have been in the Republican mainstream before the party got commandeered by the aging, undereducated Southern whites who are now its backbone.

Within a few decades it will become a regional party unable to elect a President.
Meanwhile we have to contend with their persist efforts at voter suppression and gerrymandering and promiscuous filibustering.

And their efforts to regain their paternal control over women's lives and insert themselves between women and their physicians, effectively seating themselves in the doctors' offices.

The GOP should now be called the Republican Brotherhood

Has anyone noticed how the Republican Party--in Texas & elsewhere--has come to resemble the Muslim Brotherhood more & more?

Of course neither a Muslim Brother nor a Republican Brother would recognize this. But what the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt did the moment it gained power & what the GOP is doing in Texas & other states it controls are similar on the process level: that is, gain power by demagoguery & promises of moral & economic reform; then, when in power, ignore economic reform while focusing on (1) rigging the game to consolidate their power & (2) enacting the rigid rules of Shariah Law, one by one.

The Christianist version of Shariah Law starts with abortion, which Christianists regard as murder--even when the mother's life is at stake, even in cases of rape, even in cases of incest when the mother is, say, a 12 year old girl.

Of course if abortion is murder, then any woman who gets an abortion is guilty of capital murder--a death penalty offense in Texas. Along with any woman who gets in vitro fertilization in a desperate effort to have a child, since it always involves discarding many fertilized embryos.

So every time a Christianist talks about abortion as murder, ask them what they're doing about making it capital murder to have an abortion? After all, if it's murder the doctor performing the abortion is just the hired gun. The murderer is the pregnant woman...or girl.

The only justification a Christianist Republican could have for not making it a death penalty offense to get an abortion is if they regard wimmen as incapable of informed consent--like the Muslim Brotherhood does.

Democrats need to flush the Republican Brotherhood out in the open. Make them campaign to make getting an abortion a capital offense--which it most certainly is IF it's "murder." Or to admit that they're lying demagogues when they use that kind of language--unless they believe women should be equated with children in the eyes of the law...

The GOP's "Hastert Rule" tells you everything you need to know about today's GOP

For years now the Republican Party leadership in the House has worked under a simple rule: if the House is majority Republican, no bill will be allowed to come to a vote unless the Speaker of the House is sure that a majority of Republican Congressmen will vote for it.

Speaker Boehner just reaffirmed this (there have been exceptions in the past), as a no-exceptions principle.

This matters. It means that what a majority of American voters want doesn't matter. And that what a majority of House Representatives want, working as representatives of their districts, doesn't matter either. All that matters is whether the bill being considered is considered good for the Republican Party.

This is baldly and unapologetically putting Party before Country. I'm sure that both parties want to help their parties. But usually, when there may be a conflict between Party and Country, at least the Democrats try to rationalize it. The GOP doesn't even bother. The Hastert Rule (named after the GOP Speaker of the House who formulated the rule) means the GOP's Prime Directive with ALL legislations is "What helps the GOP?" Period.

Fitting for the party whose rank and file members mostly believe that "compromise" is a dirty word.

The GOP needs radical surgery to restore its honor--and its Presidential aspirations

America needs a major conservative party along the lines of what the GOP was like before it sold its soul to get all those racist Southern Dixiecrats--the kind of people who now call themselves Tea Partiers and claim that their concerns are strictly fiscal.

We need a conservative party because at least a third of Americans are conservative by nature, just as around a third are liberal by nature, and another third are moderate pragmatics by nature. For a many years the two major parties were either liberal-leaning or conservative-leaning, with their beliefs moderated by the compromises needed to attract enough moderates to win elections.

But today the Republican Party has abandoned that tack. It has become an extremist organization that wins through extremist demagoguery and a string of ever-dirtier vote-rigging tricks--radical gerrymandering, voter suppression (especially black voters), abuse of the Senate rules, lavishly funded propaganda campaigns aimed at not just defeating Democrats but at fostering fundamental hatred and distrust of the federal government.

The consequence is that today's Republican Party is no longer conservative--it's reactionary, dominated by aging Southern white revanchists still fighting the Civil War, still hating the federal government for the same reasons they hated it in 1861.

The only way we'll get a real conservative party again is through the reduction of this GOP to a regional party. Its Southern white base is so radicalized they can't be reasoned into the 21st century, and their gerrymandered grip on their House seats is so strong they can't be defeated in their rural redoubts--at least not until America's demographic shifts shrink these redoubts to the point that they can't command a House majority. Such a party won't be able to elect presidents--or shape the Supreme Court as a consequence. Or get a Senate majority.

Only when it becomes clear that a Tea Party-dominated GOP can't elect a president will moderate conservatives have a shot at getting their party back.

What to tell your Uncle Harry the gun nut about the 2nd Amendment at the next family reunion

James Madison wrote the 2nd Amendment to make it ambiguous on purpose, to make it noble-sounding when in fact it was a compromise demanded under the table by the slave states led by Virginia. The Brits had attempted to confiscate American individual arms, but that wasn't a big deal when the 2nd Amendment was written, because America had been a separate nation for over a dozen years and thus the Brits had no say in who had guns here.

Who did have a say was the South, and the white oligarchs depended on white militias to keep black insurrections in check. But Madison couldn't come out and so this because the non-slave states would go ballistic.

So he had to come up with an ambiguous, pretty-sounding compromise that gave the slave states what they wanted--to keep their boot heels on black necks, while at the same the non-slave states could accept the 2nd Amendment as something all rugged frontiersman-y that fed into American mythmaking.

In other words, things haven't changed much from then to now. Look down this thread and you'll see that white Southern men are still obsessed about black men--particularly the one in the White House.

"plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose"

(the more it changes, the more it stays the same--Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, 1808-1890)

For a clear, well-written article about all this see The Hidden History of the Second Amendment, from the UC Davis Law Review, published in 1998.aAvifrom the from thestory ofabout thisaboutoclear, wello...See More

 

The NRA disrespects the 2nd Amendment. That's right. Disrespects it.

It's a pity the gun maker's lobby--misleadingly calling itself the NRA--and the one third of its live members (as opposed to the million dead ones they keep on the rolls to make it look larger than it is)--have no respect for the 2nd Amendment, which was interpreted by the Supreme Court's current right wing majority as conferring a right to bear arms for individuals and a right to regulate those arms by governments. That second part is clearly stated in the first half of the 2nd Amendment.

Thus according to Heller the federal government can require the national registration of all firearms, require universal background checks, make straw man purchases a felony, ban unusual and dangerous firearms such as assault weapons, RPGs, flame throwers and machine guns, and more.

Rejecting half of the 2nd Amendment is worse than rejecting all of it, because it couples rights with responsibilities. Rights without responsibilities leads to chaos, just as responsibilities without rights leads to tyranny.

Thus the NRA and its shills are acting like spoiled five year old boys who want all the rights of grown-ups but none of the responsibilities of grown-ups.

They should show some respect for our Constitution. Their disrespect for it is downright unpatriotic. They call themselves conservatives when in fact they're anarchists.

Can you serve two masters? When it comes to gun control, Republican pols are having trouble doing so. Hence the filibuster.

Until we get public financing of elections, every politician must serve two kinds of master: voters and patrons.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the gun regulation debate. Especially with universal gun registration, supported by over 90% of voters and even over 2/3 of NRA rank and file members--but opposed by the gun makers, major patrons and congressional job-killers of those who bring down their wrath.

The solution? Prevent a vote. That way the general voting public won't notice that your first loyalty is to your patrons, not your voters. Heck, most Republican districts are so radically gerrymandered you can't lose to a Democrat anyway. So what even Republican voters want doesn't matter all that much.

And of course when one side is being promoted by a multibillion dollar industry and the other by a few grieving parents and a few politicians with a conscience, voters are more apt to hear the blaring bullhorn than a few teary pleas.

In addition, from time immemorial the rich and powerful have always had a core of shock troops--their bully boys--to go out and defend their interests. In Tehran it's the thug militias who go out and club and shoot protesters against the mullahs. Here it's more peaceful but still has that flavor: that is, the million or so gun nuts--not to be confused with most gun owners--the gun nuts who believe they have a right to own military ordnance without the government knowing they do and without any meaningful protections from crooks and psychos having almost equally free access to firearms of all types.

It's an unequal fight. The one positive sign is the growing disenchantment of Republican voters watching even their opinions being flouted flagrantly by the people they voted into office. 

...and a few Republican senators who are manning up and denouncing the threatened filibuster, including John McCain.

The problem you face talking to Uncle Harry the gun nut

If you want to understand what happens when you try to reason with a gun rights zealot, you need to

remember that Gary Larson cartoon "What dogs hear."


It shows a man lecturing his dog about getting into the garbage. Of course all the dog recognizes is his name.
Similarly, in an argument with a gun nut (as opposed to a responsible gun owner), all your arguments sound like to him is "enemy tribesman speaking, therefore is all lies."

Then when he responds, mostly with stuff from the NRA's Fake Fact Factory, to you it sounds mostly like nonsense that anyone could refute with a few minutes' research of nonpartisan fact checking organizations such as factcheck.org and politifact.com.

But the gun guy would reject anything from those sites because it doesn't support his tribe--what we imagine to be the Republican Party, but now reconstituted as a primitive tribe--100% of the time.

The fact that the fact checkers challenge liberals daily for their own exaggerations and misrepresentations means nothing to Republican tribesmen, because everyone and everything is either friend or enemy, and anyone and anything that isn't 100% friend is 100% enemy.

And they don't actually know how to think. They were raised to take in ideas worshipfully, in church. They really have no idea what analytic thinking is. It just looks like defective worshipful thinking to them.

Add to this the fact that they usually know a lot more about guns and how they operate than liberals do. They use their superior knowledge of guns as further proof that no one who doesn't agree with them has anything useful to contribute, and that they're speaking ignorantly.

So you won't even get a foot in the door, metaphorically speaking, unless you educate yourself about guns. It doesn't take long--it ain't rocket science,  folks. And it's worth it just for the confused look they get on their faces when you show you see through their malarkey (they frequently lie about guns to liberals, figuring that they can get away with it).

Don't give up on gun control

Gun rights zealots believe they will always win--and that the rest of us will always lose. They have nothing but contempt and active dislike for anyone and everyone who advocates any form of gun ownership control, no matter how minor. If pressed, they claim their right to own any kind of gun they choose is based on the Constitution's 2nd Amendment having the purpose of enabling citizens to go into armed revolt against the government, using firearms comparable to those used by our military.Their message to gun control advocates is despair: "You are incompetent to talk about guns, your proposals are unconstitutional, and we OWN Congress (and every state legislature). Give up. We will always defeat you. And you deserve to be defeated, you contemptible worms."

They are that far out.

Equally far out is their defense of crazy people and criminals being able to get guns. Of course gun rights zealots say the exact opposite when they speak in generalities. But gun rights zealots are, as a group, self-centered and emotionally immature. So they see anything we could do to keep guns out of the hands of nuts and crooks only from the perspective of potential limitations to the zealots' rights to own guns--and to keep government agencies from knowing that the zealots have guns, and knowing which guns those are.

So they oppose changing the current federal privacy and mental health laws, which currently make it nearly impossible to institutionalize crazy people who don't think they're crazy--which is most of them. And they oppose universal gun registration, which would let us track straw buyers who are the source of most of the guns crooks possess.

Don't confuse gun rights zealots with gun owners in general, most of whom support at least some forms of gun control--especially universal background checks.

The only thing gun rights zealots support to deal with these all-too frequent massacres and gun homicides is more guns in more hands, which they say is the only way to more safety.

Of course every nation is an experiment in governance that other nations can study.America has more guns per capita with fewer controls than any other nation with comparable demographics. Comparisons prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that our path--more guns, less regs--leads to four to eight times as many homicides (not just gun homicides) as comparable countries, and the more gun controls, the fewer homicides. It's that simple and that plain. The rate of violence is comparable to that of comparable counties--the difference with America is that here that violence is vastly more likely to result in death.

The gun makers know this, but they have proven repeatedly is that all they care about is profit. Their shills, who lead the NRA, tread a well-worn path after every massacre:

1. Loudly denounce gun control advocates who dare to use the massacre to try to get gun control legislation enacted--denounce them as exploiting the suffering of the victims and their families for political gain. Demand a period of weeks to "respect the victims" before launching any discussion about the massacre, which gives the NRA time to marshall its forces and lobby legislators.

2. Try to slow-walk such discussions--the more time that elapses between the massacre and the discussion, the more time the NRA has to prevent--or gut--any legislation that does ensue.

3. Loudly insist that the ONLY solution to gun violence is more guns in more hands. Claim that the expired assault weapons ban didn't work (a baldfaced lie--it did to a a degree, hampered by the gun lobby gutting the bill). Claim that when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns (a baldfaced lie--other countries that restrict guns have their criminals using knives mostly). Claim that massacres happen everywhere (they do--but they do several times as often here, and more are killed in each massacre here on average).

4. Trot out anecdote after anecdote showing how having a gun protected someone. This works because most people are innumerate and thus don't understand statistics (along with most abstractions).

5. Send forth the gun control zealots to overwhelm every newspaper and blog forum that mentions gun control, after stirriing them up with wild accusations.

6. Constantly try to change the subject from gun regulation to gun confiscation, despite the fact that no politician in America talking about gun confiscation.

7. Constantly try to change the subject of gun control to the subject of violent mental illness. It's a valid subject but not instead of gun control--it should be as well as gun control

8. Deny that there's any such thing as an assault weapon--important since the bulk of gun maker profits come from selling assault weapons, despite the fact that they're marketed to gun buyers as assault weapons, using military commando mission atmospherics.

9. Depend on the fact that the million-odd gun rights zealots wake up each morning thinking about guns, and typically associate gun possession with virility, so this group will ceaseless promote their position, while most people only think about guns for a few days or weeks after each massacre.

10. Continue to lobby to suppress any attempt to study gun violence by government agencies (a sucessful effort for decades).

11, Continually talk about video games and violent movies as the cause of massacres, ignoring the literally millions of young men who play such games and see such movies all the time and never commit acts of physical violence, also ignoring the difference between "shooting" cartoon people with a computer mouse vs. shooting human-shaped targets with real bullets fired from a real gun on a real target range.

12. Continually frame the debate as one between patriotic Americans and people advocating foreign ideas that violate the Constitution (talk about Constitution constatnly), bordering on treason. Use inflamed and inflammatory rhetoric, including denouncing the President for having Secret Service protection for his children when he doesn't want that for yours.

13. Try to wear down the other side on every front. Constantly belittle  gun control advocates for being ignorant about firearms and gun violence research (ironic since the NRA has prevented the government from studying gun violence).

Gun rights zealots typically know a lot more about firearms than gun control advocates. I'm not as ignorant about firearms as most gun control advocates, but even so I've found myself having to do hours of research to get up to speed enough to really debate with these guys.

And once I was up to speed I found that gun rights zealots--and the NRA--habitually and knowingly lie to the rest of us in order to advance their desire to own firearms of any type they like without impediments. I only discovered this after I'd done my homework. It was not obvious at first. This was especially interestting because gun rights zealots represent themselves as the most moral, patriotic, upstanding citizens. But in my experience they routinely practice taqiyya (an Arab term "honorable lying to Infidels") with those outside the gun community. If the NRA asserts something, you can safely assume it's a baldfaced lie unless proven otherwise.

For example, NRA membership claims include tens of thousands of members who are no longer alive, along with members whose membership was a freebie including with a gun purchase or gun show admission. It includes a million or so gun rights zealots along with three million or so gun owners whose views differ strikingly from those advocated by the zealots and the NRA leadership.

So when you debate with gun rights zealots, take note of the claims they make, and when you find out they're lying, and exactly how, consider the likelihood that they knew they were lying when they said that to you--and let them know, calmly but inexorably.

That is, use the techniques my spouse used to use when she worked as a collecor for a computer peripherals manufacturer. She never got mad but she never let people off the hook--and she took note of every promise they made, and used that in subsequent conversations, so as to draw the noose progressively tighter and tighter. And of course she never called them liars. She just pointed out what they said, what was factual, and asked them to account for the disparity.

That's the twofer. Never get mad--never relent.

It looks as though the gun makers and their eager shills will mostly win the current fight going on in Congress. But remember how many fights homosexual rights advocates lost before they started winning. Most political victories stand on the shoulders of innumerable losses.

And this is important.