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.

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.

The GOP's Lie du Jour: no God in Demo Platform

We should expect a shocking new revelation about those terrible Democrats pretty much daily from now through the election.

Yesterday's shocking revelation was that the word "God" doesn't appear in the Democratic Party platform. As proof that this went against the Founding Fathers' zeitgeist, they presented the Constitution--oops, no God there anywhere--so they presented the Declaration of Independence as our "founding document."

Oops again. The word "God" never appears there either. But what does appear is language that clearly refers to God--"endowed by our Creator."

So it appears that I'm splitting hairs to make a point, since the absence of the word "God" is actually irrelevant, since the reference to religious faith is there.

Well. So are the Republicans, because the Democratic Platform did include language talking about "faith" which clearly referred to God.

And so here again, for the umpty-zillionith time, the Republicans say something that is technically not a lie, but which is in fact a knowing, bald-faced lie--because the substance of the Republicans' charge is false.

If you care about substance, you will agree that this is yet another proof that the Republican Party has chosen lying as its main vehicle to advance its fortunes.

The Democrats are, as a whole, more secular than the Republicans, as a whole. Before the takeover of the Republican Party by erstwhile Southern White Democrats in the 1970s, there actually were many Republicans who were either nonreligious or whose religion wasn't the fervent Bible-thumping flavor of religion that now characterizes the Republican majority. Now they're either Independents or conservative Democrats.

But while Democrats are less fervent than today's Republicans, the vast majority of Democrats still profess to believe in God, and their party's platform reflected their faith--their calmer faith that doesn't say "You're going to Hell if you aren't not just a Christian but my kind of Christian."

In that sense many Republican Christians resemble Muslim Salafists, who say the same thing about hundreds of millions of their fellow Muslims that Fundamentalist Christians say of their fellow non-Fundamentalist Christians.

Also, this latest Republican lie also shows the Republicans' preference for symbols over reality. They never ask whether their own platform embodies Christ's instructions to us about what we should do with this life--in which case the Democratic Platform is far more Christlike than the Republicans' "I've got mine Jack you're on your own" platform.

But for the Republican Party, symbol trumps substance. Goes hand in hand with lying trumping actual policy discussion.

And the Libertarian pick for president is....Barack Obama. Seriously.

That's right. Good Libertarians should vote for Barack Obama this November.

Get your jaw off the floor and I'll explain why.

Libertarians favor personal freedom & limited government, right?

Well--the best way to not get those two items is to let either major party gain control of all three branches of government. Because both parties agree on one thing at least: "to the victor belong the spoils." And by "victor" I don't mean you if your side wins. I mean your party's patrons--the individuals and groups whose political donations make it possible for your party's politicians to win.

This is why independents--including Libertarians--frequently vote for the governor or president of the other party from the one controlling the legislature--especially if the party controlling the legislature also controls the judiciary.

Both major parties have demonstrated that they cannot govern themselves--and that they are far more beholden to the individuals and special interests who are their patrons rather than their rank and file voters.

So a good Libertarian realizes that neither party runs by Libertarian principles. The Republican Party talks a more Libertarian game than the Democratic Party does, but it doesn't walk the walk. The GOP from 2000 through 2008, eight long years during which it enjoyed effective control of all three branches of government, increased government size enormously and the deficit enormously. That wasn't George Bush II's fault. In America the Chief Executive can't pass laws, though he can veto them. It was the Republican leadership's fault, most of which is still in place, since both parties have jiggered the laws to greatly favor the incumbents.

George Romney is closer to a Libertarian than Barack Obama. So what? Obama's domestic policies don't matter if Congress is GOP-controlled, and Romney's policies don't matter much either--just his right hand, needed to sign bills sent him. Does anyone doubt that he'll sign anything the GOP Congress sends him--as Bush II did for nearly his entire time in office?

If you think a Romney victory wouldn't lead to a massive expansion in government and a reduction in personal freedoms, you're dreaming.

I'm not making a prediction. I'm just pointing to what the Republican Party did from 2000 through 2010 federally and what it's done in the states it gained full control over in 2010. First order of business in the states, after running on a jobs, jobs, jobs theme? Pass anti-abortion laws and fire state employees.

Federally, Congressman Ryan alone has introduced dozens of anti-abortion bills to Congress and has consistently endorsed banning abortion even in cases of rape and incest--reflected in the fact that the Republican Party's official platform--that you can read yourself--says the same thing: banning all abortions, even in cases of rape and incest. Congressman Akins' mistake was in saying to the general public what the GOP actually believes but only wants its fervent evangelical base to hear.

Fiscally, the Ryan-Romney budget inflates the deficit enormously. Neither Ryan nor Romney are willing to specify exactly which loopholes they'd cut, even after persistent questioning by reporters. Given past actions by the GOP, you have no reason to believe they won't say which because they won't cut any loopholes that benefit any Republicans. And that's pretty much all of them--all that might alter the deficit at least.

No responsible, nonpartisan economist says we can close the deficit without raising taxes on the rich and the middle class as well as reducing government expenditures. It is Libertarian to pay as you go. Not to tax and spend. Not to borrow and spend. Congress won't spend less unless Obama's there to veto Congress's borrow and spend mania. The Tea Party congressmen promise they'll fix this. They won't. That's already happened with the Ryan budget, enthusiastically endorsed by the Tea Party Congressmen.

Voting for Obama is the less of two evils in November for Libertarians.

Here's FactCheck.org's current article on how Romney can't keep his tax promises.

Voter fraud

From a comment on an Economist article about Republican vote suppression activities:


"Millions of US residents do not possess the franchise to vote and experience shows that, their inelligibility [sic] notwithstanding, many spurious votes will be cast either by them or in their names."


This is precisely the lying, legalistic, pseudo-rational verbosity Republican officials use to cloak their caveman "morality," i.e. "Heads I win tails you lose."

In fact, "experience" shows the exact opposite. In every state controlled by the Republican tribe, and federally when the Republican tribe has controlled the White House, many millions of dollars have been spent in an effort to find any examples of voting fraud.

They have failed--failed spectacularly. However, having learned well from Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, the fountainhead of their communications strategy, they simply claim there is widespread voter fraud through their various sock puppets--AM radio talk show hosts and the fake pundits on their fake TV "news" channels.

Instead of evidence they simply repeat it as if it were a fact, over and over, every day of every week, and the weak-minded in the millions then accept it as fact, as shown by national polls. And roughly half the nation is weak-minded enough for this to work on. It helps that a significant portion of these weak-minded people are also racists. Kind of goes with being weak-minded, after all. Since those being denied the vote by the Republican Tribe's vote-suppression campaign are first and foremost blacks and Latinos, it gives racists a chance to express their racism that gives them--in their own minds at least--plausible deniability.

The only thing their hunt for the phantom voter fraud turned up was the ACORN scandal in which paid voter registrars registered nonexistent voters so they'd get paid more. However, this was not voting fraud--nonexistent voters don't vote, in contravention of the Republican Laws of Physics. But to this day weak-minded Republicans invoke "ACORN ACORN ACORN" like primitive tribesmen chant the names of their enemies as they dance in the firelight before going off to war.

The Republican Party used to be a political party, but its gradual takeover by the closest thing America has to the Taliban has turned it into a tribe, complete with tribal beliefs like this one.

Makes them quite easy to dupe by the corporatists pulling their strings, and as no cost to the corporatists, since all their God Gays and Guns blather (plus their nudge nudge wink wink racist agenda) costs the corporatists nothing. Meanwhile the tribe's anti-illegal immigration wishes get nowhere nationally because that would cost the corporatists something.

conservatives vs. reactionaries

Conservatives look forward cautiously. Reactionaries look backward longingly.

That's the difference, brought into sharp focus by this year's election politics.

And I've seen the Republican Party slowly morph from a conservative party into a reactionary one over the decades since people like Dwight D. Eisenhower led the party--and created the national highway system, a bold vision we now take for granted.


Look at this election year. The GOP campaign is against President Obama--not for Governor Romney. It's "Repeal and replace" against ObamaCare, with virtually nothing about the "replace" part--because past that bumper sticker slogan there's the added two words that are understood by most people as being "with nothing."


The GOP speaks to our inner child--the three year old boy who doesn't want to be told what to do. Who just wants to be left alone (until he needs something). 


This is an abiding dream. In fact it's how the United States was first organized, under the Articles of Confederation. The Federal government had almost no authority within the nation's borders. Didn't work out, did it?

It looks to me like that's what the GOP wants us to return to. It's certainly what their patrons, the CEO+Investor class, want.

But we don't have to go back to the 18th century to see how that would work in today's world. We have only to look to Europe. Aren't the Republicans demanding that we adopt their setup, with the EU plus NATO? Each state has vastly more autonomy than those of the US, and the banks call the shots economically.

How's that working out for them?

The fact is that against our present economic and potential military competitors abroad, and against the power large corporations can bring to bear against not just individuals but even whole states (Exxon alone is a more powerful economic entity than a lot of states--half of them?), the individual doesn't stand a chance.

Back in the 18th century we had virtually no trade with other countries--just a few luxury goods, basically. The young republic was self-sufficient. Nobody could invade us, as the Brits found out--and they were one of the most powerful nations on Earth at the time. But General Atlantic defeated them, ultimately. Though even then if the Royal French Navy hadn't intervened at a critical juncture we might have lost that war.

Now we have trade all over the place. China snuck a monopoly on rare earths production under Bush II's nose, and now we have to pay through the nose for a vital ingredient without which our cellphones wouldn't work. China has also gotten a near-monopoly on solar panels through government-subsidized production + low-wage labor that has bankrupted industries in "free" countries. Now we get to pay for that freedom. Not to mention foreign oil, which forces us to care what Arabs do.

Multiply these webs of interdependencies by thousands and you get today's world.

We could achieve autonomy today by returning to the self-sufficient, rural, agrarian, low-tech USA of 1776. For a start we'd have to get rid of most of our population living in cities--having so many people requires a high-tech urban society to maintain. So we'd have to do what Pol Pot did and exterminate them, starting with all races and cultures that aren't Anglo whites. That would thin the herd, but we'd have to get rid of more to achieve true self-sufficiency. Maybe all Anglos who are liberals and independents.

That would also free us from all Green-type regulations and restrictions. With a population of just a few million we could pollute at will without damaging the environment appreciably.

But that's not going to happen. So here we are in a world we can't control by ourselves, since we have to have the cooperation of other sovereign nations, and since the physical universe doesn't care whether we like environmental regulations or not. We'll have to deal with the consequences of collapsing fish stocks, salinization of irrigated croplands, collapsing porous aquifers, and above all the possibility of outrunning our drinking water resources--especially given the unsolved problem of water table pollution from both industrial livestock production and fracking.

As if that's not enough, what about political alliances? If China invades Taiwan, do we just shrug and tell Taiwan "You're on your own, pal." Or how about if a radicalized Egypt invaded Israel? How about if the Euro collapses, which is a definite possibility. We're inextricably intertwined in world financial markets, and economic turmoil in Europe could whack our economy regardless of whether Romney or Obama wins. How about a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan? And what do we do about the informal alliance of Russia, China, Brazil and some others semi-against us?

We can't secede from the planet. We have to form alliances with people we don't like to avoid consequences we don't want. We can't order around other countries. We have to make nice, make connections--and honor prior agreements a new administration doesn't like. We're still dealing with the agreements Bush II unilaterally abrogated during his terms in office.

In every area the instincts of reactionaries lead us astray--and contrary to the instincts of actual conservatives. This isn't a perfect analogy, but it's something like the difference between the conservative Islamic government of Turkey and the reactionary Islamic government of Iran. Turkey's no saint on human rights but it's way better than Iran, and it's doing very well economically, while Iran is circling the drain.

The philosophy of "I'm against whatever you're for" doesn't work. Time after time the Republicans    declare their opposition to something they'd favored, even invented...until President Obama advocated it.

Best example: the universal healthcare insurance mandate, invented by conservatives because they didn't want healthcare moochers not getting health insurance until they needed it, which would invalidate the concept of insurance. But whatever you think about the universal mandate, it's a matter of record that conservatives cooked it up and its first application was by Governor Romney, albeit on the state level. But the principle of a universal mandate is the same on any scale, even if you think states' rights red herring trumps it at the national level.

Eisenhower was a conservative. He was absolutely not a liberal. But he had forward-looking ideas, like the national highway system. Bush I was a conservative. He didn't advance on Iraq until he had his ducks lined up. He raised taxes when it became clear that the alternative was even worse. He was conservative, not an ideologue, not rigid. Reagan also raised taxes and was pretty good at forging alliances. Bush II was a reactionary, trying to be the un-Clinton, the un-Bush I. In that sense he succeeded wildly...at America's cost.

Let me add that the Democratic Party's unquestioning embrace of illegal immigration, infinite population growth, and the minority-ization of America's Anglo culture are no improvement on the GOP's reactionary stance. There should be a word for the loony opposite of "reactionary." Whatever it is, that's that the Democrats have become--just not as whatever-it-is as the reactionaryism of the GOP. Which is why I'm still voting for Obama this November, but without the wide-eyed enthusiasm of some.

Was Reverend Wright wrong?

Republican propagandists adore Reverend Wright, who famously said "...God damn America," with the implication that he said it with Barack Obama sitting in the congregation, grinning and giving the Rev a big thumbs-up at this remark while concocting his plan to gain the Presidency and destroy America.

And the Republican rank and file obediently follow the lead of the Ministry of Propaganda. It never occurs to them to wonder why an ex-Marine who served his country honorably might come to feel this way.

Moreover, if anyone dares to try to understand why the good Reverend might feel that way, such a person is an America-hater too and thus needn't be listened to. 


It's a tidy universe they live in. One in which America is the America of those sentimental 1930s MGM movies where everyone knew their place--where Mr. Moto's Negro assistant was scared of ghosts and Scarlett O'Hara's Negro maid was devoted to Massa's needs. 


Those movies never showed what happened to a Negro man who might try to vote in any Southern state. Nor did they show the countless legal restrictions on blacks, along with the less legal ones, and not just in the deep South.


Laws against blacks marrying whites weren't declared unconstitutional until Reverend White was 26 years old. 


I grew up in that America myself, in a community that had zero black residents, going to public schools that were all-white except for one Asian guy in our high school. 


I remember seeing a 1941 movie by an acclaimed director (Preston Sturges) in which a small-town sheriff praises someone by saying "That was mighty white of you," a common Southern phrase of the day.


As was the saying "If you're white, you're all right. If you're brown, stick around. If you're black--step back."


That's the America Reverend Wright was born into and grew up in. 


But it wasn't like all the countries where such discrimination was an accepted part of the culture. America always espoused loftier ideals. America was the land of equality--of equal opportunity, the truest meritocracy in the history of mankind.


Reverend Wright was intelligent and charismatic (look up his Wikipedia entry to see just how). He knew first-hand about the crevasse between our ideals and his reality. True, he didn't grow up in the segregated South, so his experience wasn't as intense as it could have been. But it was enough.


It was also enough for any American who didn't look and act like the people in those idealized movies. Cripples. Mental defectives. Homosexuals. Orientals. Indians. Indians (the other kind). Unusually smart people (outside the magnet schools of the biggest cities). Jews (hard to imagine discrimination against Jews today but it was actually intense). White immigrants who weren't Anglo & spoke with a strong accent. 


And "career girls." Sandra Day O'Connor graduated from a prestigious law school with honors but no law firm would offer her anything but a typing job.


So when Reverend Wright rails against his nation and we recoil at his railing--we need to take a moment to consider his America and not just ours. 


And also remember that Barack Obama's cultural blackness was acquired as an adult. He grew up in a white family, lived in Indonesia, Hawaii, no real black community experience. In some ways he felt like a shell. 


I'm sure that had a part in his marrying someone with an authentic black American life experience, and going to a large mostly black church officiated by an authentic American black pastor--one whose life and many plaudits reveals a man who doesn't hate America...but who does hate the disparity he experienced in his life between American ideals and American reality.


Explaining is not the same thing as excusing. Equating the two is what demagogues do to suppress debate. So I'm not excusing Reverend Wright's Angry Old Black Man schtick by trying to understand how he got there. 


I am condemning condemning Reverend Wright's wrongs thoughtlessly. Which is exactly what nearly all of the Republican rank and file are doing, at the behest of the GOP's Ministry of Propaganda, whose spinmeisters know better but are not burdened with a conscience, apparently.

Repbublicans are for Freedom and the Constitution...right?

These are the most common tropes you hear from Republicans--from the politicians and the pundits and then from the rank and file: Freedom and the Constitution--followed quickly by them accusing Democrats of being for the Nanny State and thus against Freedom...and for ignoring the actual words and original intent of the Constitution.

This is funny.

In 1776 the conservatives of the day were loyal to the Crown, of course. Tories. If they participated in the fighting, it was on the side of the Redcoats. They considered the Articles of Confederation and its successor the Constitution to be rebel documents of no worth.

Yet now they deck themselves out in the Revolutionaries' military garb and rave about how wonderful the Constitution is. They're attaching themselves to the side of history that won, not the one they were on.

And the Freedom they talk about--when you look at how that noble talk plays out in legislative detail--is the freedom of the rich to do whatever they please with the rest of us, without the constraints of government regulation or oversight. Defined that way, freedom for the rich is slavery for the rest.

But conservatives see it as freedom for themselves because they think they are like the rich, just not yet, not quite. They think the rich share their culture and their values. This is self-flattering and kind of sad as well. But most of all, and this is truly odd, they define freedom as lack of responsibility: "Nobody tells me what to do." This is the way a five year old boy defines freedom.

Of course the rich don't need government protection. They're perfectly capable of protecting themselves in their gated, guarded enclaves, and in their business actions, buttressed by phalanxes of lawyers. But they won't have total freedom until our protections from them are removed--until we're naked and defenseless. And that's the Republican dream,which about half the country shares.

After all, what are police departments (and the FBI, and the SEC, and the IRS etc.) but creeping Socialism?

In the antebellum South, the house slaves would ape the manners and attitudes of Massa, and hold themselves superior to the field slaves out in their huts. And as slaves they were better treated...slaves.

Romney wasn't a high school bully

I know a lot about high school bullies, because I was "different" and thus got a lot of attention from such people. Romney doesn't fit the mold for the sort of bullies I got to know a lot more about than I ever wanted to know.

However, Romney does fit the mold of someone who's a real Alpha Male, a leader, and in particular a conservative leader. He wasn't tormenting the homosexual boy--there's no sign that he physically hurt him--Romney was simply enforcing conformity to the values he believes are universal American values, which didn't include boys wearing what Romney and his buddies saw as effeminate hairdos.

And he was demonstrating his leadership skills in organizing a posse to go out and enforce this conformity--much like the morals police of Iran and Saudi Arabia do in their countries, as when Saudi morals police prevented firemen from entering a burning girls' dormitory to save the girls from a fire which wound up killing over a dozen of them.

But that was preferable to have male firemen seeing the girls not covered by burkas.

It's ironic that the most anti-Muslim Americans are the ones who are most like them.

As for Romney's bullying incident, I've seen conservatives denying it ever happened, or, alternately, claiming that what we did back in high school doesn't matter.

I shouldn't have to detail things you could do in high school that would matter now, so it's not a categorical matter-of-no-concern. The question is whether the incident in question matters today. If it happened, which I think it did from what I've read, some conservatives will secretly admire him for it, for the reasons I've detailed here.

And they can deny he's a bully because it really doesn't fit the mold of the typical bully, who isn't interested so much in enforcing social conformity as in using someone's "difference" as a pretext for expressing his sadism--his desire to be important and to matter to others by harming them and making them fear him.

They can sense that this doesn't describe Romney. Even his ruthless destruction of political rivals (usually through surrogates while he smiles and acts all reasonable-like) shows no signs of his taking pleasure at the destruction. He's just clearing obstacles to his God-given right to rule us.

It's also worth noting that morals police in some Islamic countries also regard themselves as moral, honorable people, working to help build an ideal socieity--one in which everyone toes the line.

An article in Slate about Romney's own Morals Police incident added something interesting: in a comparable circumstance, George W. Bush stood up for the different-looking guy. You can see it here.

That's doubly interesting. One, it gives some credence to Bush II actually being a Compassionate Conservative in some ways. Two, it says something nice about a conservative. I haven't read many articles in conservative magazines that say something nice about a liberal.

And it does highlight something unusually heartless about Romney. No, that's not it. He's obviously a nice guy to those within his inner circle. Perhaps it's that his personal priority stack puts Order on top, much as I get the impression it does for Supreme Court Justices Alito, Thomas and Scalia. That certainly isn't evil, and it's not stupid either. It's just a worldview that craves a reality much like Main Street in Disneyland--clean, smiling, orderly, everything in its place...and no one getting out of line in any way....

every hair in place.

Now here's a little irony: in Mormon theology, Satan is envisioned as a control freak whose original goal--before the war with God that got him booted from Haven--was to build an utterly orderly Earth in which no one would sin, ever, in the slightest, because he'd be a sort of omnipresent Morals Police who'd grab every hand lifted in anger, making the world a smiling, pleasant place.

Just one where no one but Satan would have free will.

So the first Mormon with a shot a becoming President of the United States seems to have an interesting role model drawn from his own religion...

Disclaimer: I'm not criticizing the Mormon faith here. I'm only pointing out a curious resonance between Mitt Romney and his religion's Bête Noire.

What makes the Tea Party tick?

CSPAN's Book TV --which you probably watch if you're over 60--had a pair of sociologists on last weekend who had done a study and a book about local Tea Party activists. You can read about it on Amazon here.

The researchers struck me as being objective and thorough. And they added that they liked the people they met personally. So their conclusions didn't reflect any personal animus.

Here's what they found:

1. Tea Partiers are all anti-Federal government, anti-federal deficit, anti-taxes.

2. They mostly run small businesses themselves, and they like businessmen--very much including wealthy corporate businessmen, who they think of as small businessmen like themselves, only who made it big. 

2. Around 2/3 are Evangelical Protestant Christians; the rest are non-fervent. This is an internal schism, with the fervent Christians considering the somewhat more secular ones (who are also more urban & more educated) as being practically RINOs.

3. They're nearly all middle-aged and older whites.

4. Groups they dislike openly:
    a. Young people in general, who they consider lazy ingrates, entitled, disrespectful of traditional American culture and values, and disrespectful of their elders.
        So they greet all the talk about cutting student loan rates with hostility.
    b. Muslims. Not just Salafist and Wahhabist fundamentalist extremists, but all Muslims.
    c. College Professors, who they consider out of touch, infecting their children with loony pie in the sky social ideas--and also teaching their children disrespect for traditional American culture and values. This has a whiff of Town  & Gown antipathies from back in the day.
    d. Illegal immigrants--particularly from Mexico and parts south
    e. Legal immigrants--particularly ones from non-Anglo countries like Mexico and parts south
        --In general they have the same view of immigration that Mexican law does: that it should be prohibited where the numbers and cultural makeup of the immigrants would change the character of society.
    f. Homosexuals.
    g. Atheists.
    h. Democrats, who they see as the party of young people, Muslims, college professors, illegal immigrants, and legal immigrants--in short, anyone except for middle aged and older Anglo whites.
    i. ObamaCare--although they like its provisions when asked about them individually and when they aren't identified as part of ObamaCare, and although many Tea Party types are on MediCare and are collecting Social Security, and know these are government programs. But they believe they paid for them, while the groups listed above are freeloaders who are just mooching off them.
    j. Anyone who supports abortion rights. They don't see it as a women's rights issue, because they see fertilized eggs as little men and women whose rights completely override those of the hominid baby bags they're inside of.
    k. Liberals.
     l. Environmentalists.
    m. Overpopulation Jeremiadists like me.

5. Groups they dislike implicitly:
     a. Blacks. Even in meetings where they don't think outsiders are present, nearly all Tea Party types won't talk about this openly, and Tea Party leaders--both grassroots and self-appointed ones working for the Angry Billionaires' Club and GOP operatives--hotly deny that there's the slightest whiff of racial animus in the Tea Party.
        Their feelings are rather nuanced. If a black were the Republican presidential candidate and a white were the Democratic one, they'd vote for the black, and mostly without hesitation. In the pre-1970 Old South, they'd talk about "our Colored folk" affectionately if paternalistically, contrasting them with the "uppity Negroes" who'd been "influenced by outsiders." But if someone espouses values the Tea Party types don't like, and that someone is black, like Obama (actually half black, but even the President doesn't call himself mulatto or mixed race), they'll get an extra dose of opprobrium, all of it attributed to policy stuff though.
    b. Members of religions that are not evangelical Christian, to the degree that the religion differs from evangelical Protestantism. Though they seem inclined to give Catholics who are Anglos a pass due to the abortion issue. Many of them do not consider the Mormon religion to be a Christian religion.

They'll still vote for Romney, in part because they believe President Obama is not a Christian, due to Reverend Wright's infamous condemnation of America from the pulpit, which they in turn condemn without regard to the life experiences Reverend Wright had had that led him to that oratorical moment. The fact of Romney's LDS faith had dampened their enthusiasm for him. It won't keep them from voting for him but it might keep some from campaigning for hims as enthusiastically as they would have for, say, Wealthy Lobbyist Sentorum.

In short, Tea Party types are Anglo-American tribalists, who feel embattled at every turn, who focus on economic issues in public by and large because that's the only way they can have unity within their ranks, but a majority of them expect politicians they help elect to pass and enforce socially conservative laws--against abortion and homosexuals for example. In practice this is what has happened--often ahead of taking action on economic issues. So to a degree the third of Tea Party types who aren't ardent social conservatives are being duped.

So are independents who vote for Tea Party-affiliated candidates in hopes of getting elected politicians who will  "mind the store" and focus on economic issues. Instead they've gotten anti-abortion jihadis.

Liberals, by the way, have the same problem when they elect candidates who then focus on causes they can't do anything about--like my local and very liberal city council spending hours on a resolution to urge the President of the United States to add a Department of Peace to his cabinet instead of acting on local issues--issue they could actually do something about.

And just as Tea Partiers have zero empathy for the Occupy movement and Democrats / Liberals in general, in my experience the reverse holds true as well, with many, many liberals not giving Tea Partiers any credit, not acknowledging that they could be responding to real problems, even if they disagree with the Tea Partiers' solutions.

The Tea Party movement is both an authentic grassroots movement and an example of AstroTurf pseudo-populism. that is, corporate special interests have been quick to adopt/co-opt the Tea Party movement and Fox News has worked tireless to organize Tea Partiers and give them a platform--as long as and to the degree that it will help elect Republicans who will vote the way Grover Norquist and his paymasters want them to vote. This doesn't mean the Tea Partiers were just sitting in their homes watching reruns of Lawrence Welk before this. And it doesn't mean they've all been co-opted successfully. It does mean that the effort is being made by well-paid operatives, and that it has had a degree of success.

And at the same time Liberal politicians have helped by campaigning on the behalf of citizens of other countries who are here illegally, on the behalf of granting special favors to every ethnic /racial group in this country except for Anglos, and on the behalf of public employees, even the ones who are compensated far better than their private sector counterparts.

Because of that, efforts Democratic politicians made to appeal to Anglo blue-collar populism are wasted effort mostly, because those pols aren't willing to change their stances on those issues, which are key ones for Tea Partiers.

And it leaves Democratic-leaning independents like me frustrated. We understand where the Tea partiers are coming from. They have an authentic Anglo-American culture, and it is being changed substantially by immigration from Mexico in particular, due to the huge numbers and the peasant demographics of those immigrants. Many public employees have been getting too much for their work. And it's long past ime for special legislative favors for anyone who isn't an Anglo to end.

At the same time the Tea Partiers hostility to the environment, to science, to highly educated people, to other ethnic groups, and above all to their eager embrace of precisely the people who have created their economic problems, all turn off independents like me. Their lack of skepticism towards their ostensible friends in high places, coupled with their rigid opposition towards anyone and anything they think is outside their tribe, make them perfect tools in the hands of the corporatists.

Just one more example of how tribalism is really the worst political problem of our era--and the most intractable.






  

   

Today I've been watching the Republican Ministry of Propaganda doing their best to Swift Boat the President. This is the permanent Republican campaign strategy for races at all levels: identify the Democratic opponent's strongest virtues and try to negate them with a well-funded blitzkrieg campaign. They always do this, so it's no surprise that they're doing it now--especially since the Democrats had the effrontery to point out that Candidate Romney had stated that he wouldn't go after Bin Ladin.

No one forced Romney to say that. Now he's trying to pretend he didn't. Or at the least that President Obama has no right to bring it up.

This from the party that diverted an aircraft carrier from its homecoming--and the reuniting of its 5,000+ crewmen with their loved ones--in order to provide--at taxpayer expense--a campaign visit to the carrier with President Bush II tricked out in naval aviation gear and landing on the carrier (as a passenger), then making a speech exulting in our victory in Iraq, backed by a giant Mission Accomplished banner hung on the carrier's superstructure, lest any dolts watching might miss the point.

Of course the real issue is that the pollsters tell us a solid majority of Americans trust President Obama to manage our foreign policy far more than they do Governor Romney.

And the Democrats' ad coupled Romney's preference to abandon the hunt for Bin Ladin with his willingness for Detroit to go bankrupt.

Now Romney did mean "managed bankruptcy" when he said "let Detroit go bankrupt" but Romney's solution would still have resulted in General Motors and Chrysler being liquidated, because no one but the U.S. government was willing to pony up the cash needed to keep them alive, and Romney was against the government bailing them out.

The fact that President Obama's solution did the union workers a favor at the expense of bondholders--contrary to bankruptcy law--is something conservatives can argue, but it's beside the key point: Romney would have left America with one major auto company; Obama left us with three.

There's a link between Romney's disinterest in finding Bin Ladin and in rescuing Detroit: in both cases he takes a business investor's pure spreadsheet-based viewpoint. He didn't see the ROI in either case (Return on Investment).

I get the impression that larger issues are kind of invisible to Romney. He's never shown an interest in foreign affairs or in the world of ideas. He is indeed a businessman. And there's nothing wrong with that. But he doesn't seem to be anything else.

If that's so, then his presidency will be a Republican dream come true: a fiscal conservative who's more than happy to let Grover Norquist's Congress pass him bills to rubber stamp, regardless of content. I predict that if he gains the White House and the Republicans retain control over the House and their veto over the Senate doing anything, Romney will never veto a bill sent to him by the GOP--he won't even threaten to veto one.  He is nothing if not eager to please Republicans. And, like Bush II, completely indifferent to the approximately 50% of the country that won't be voting for him.

Liberals and Conservatives don't talk to Centrists

If you read thousands of comments on political articles in mainstream publications, you will find precious few addressed to centrists. Mostly it's liberals and conservatives berating and belittling each other--as if all voters are either liberal or conservative.

At least 40% of voters are centrists, and the number rises with every election. Yet we're completely ignored in the primaries, given only passing notice in the actual elections, and almost never addressed directly.

It's amazing. To these guys we're like the dark matter in the universe--unseen and unknowable.

If they think of us at all, they see us as pallid, wishy-washy, indecisive creatures, painted in diluted water colors.

They have no idea that the words "moderate" and "centrist" aren't the same.

There are moderate centrists, all right. There are also moderate liberals and moderate conservatives.

And just as there are radical leftists and rightists, there are also radical centrists.

Radical centrists follow their ideas to their logical conclusions. The difference between them and their radical counterparts in either wing is that radical centrists don't see the world in black and white terms. They see their ideas as trying to conform to reality, and if it turns out they don't match, they change their ideas. Whereas radical leftists and rightists are rigid idealists who don't ultimately care about the reality outside their ideas.

Radical and moderate centrists both support nonpartisan redistricting. But radical centrists support free abortion on demand for everyone everywhere, while moderate centrists make the usual noises about how terrible abortion is and the less the better, while making it strictly a choice between pregnant female and her doctor.

Radical centrists support abortion on demand not because they're radical feminists, but because they realize the world is in an overpopulation crisis. In other words, their extremism derives from the times and places and circumstances in which reality itself has become extreme, not because their eyes are whirling with ideological fervor.

I realize it's largely a waste of time to say all this, though, because political partisans just want to joust with each other, in their bright, clear, world with a bright red line drawn down the middle. We muddy the waters and disturb their neat boxes and categories. So I can understand why they'd rather not deal with us--or simply assume that if we're not totally with them we're totally against them.

So neither group of partisans understand how radical centrists could support abortion but be against illegal immigration. Neither understands how we can see the value in the Left, and Right, and the Middle.

If you are a centrist, though, keep trying to punch through their blindness to anything but each other. Unlike real dark matter, we can force them to recognize us.

After all, we decide every national election. Not them.

Bush II who?

Fascinating how Republicans rhapsodize about Reagan (despite the fact that he'd be considered a RINO today) while the last GOP president--for two terms no less--is an official Nonperson.

And yet Romney, Gingrich and Santorum all endorse Bush II's overall tax and economic policies, along with his Ready! Fire! Aim! foreign policy, firm belief in big government intrusion into our bedrooms with no respect for states' rights (contrary to GOP mantras about same), and contempt for science and economics when their findings don't support GOP Billionairian theology. They should give credit where its due--and so should their followers. 

Especially since the overall policy similarities give us a horror movie-quality foreshadowing of what a Republican-dominated Congress, Presidency, and Judiciary would have in store for America. 

Of course my non-Republican conclusion is that Republicans don't want to talk about Bush II precisely because a Romney presidency would be Bush II Redux. Right down to both of them claiming to be "outsiders." Now there's unintentional humor for ya.

Romney would kill medical care reform, just like Bush II would; he'd hang onto the tax cuts for the rich that Bush II got--and which, instead of trickling down, has cost America at least 3/4 of a trillion dollars so far and counting; he'd endorse the government rape of women trying to get abortions (or should there be a different word for inserting a foreign object into a woman's privates against her will at the behest of male-dominated legislatures and male governors?). And he'd enrich himself personally and substantially through implementing his policies--just like Bush II did. And Bush II and Romney both worked hard to mimic what regular people who weren't born rich were like--Bush II with his fake ranch, Romney through his, um, family anecdotes (they're regular Motor City folks because his wife has two Cadillacs--and she doesn't "feel" rich!).

Bush II is one of your own. He's not just your past--he is, if the GOP has its way with us, our future. And he still actually rules one of the three branches of government, through his radical corporatist appointees, who are likely to rule that roost for decades to come, regardless of who wins in November.

So come on, guys, give credit where it's due. You aren't the party of Reagan--who raised taxes repeatedly and avoided foreign entanglements. You're the party of Bush II. Own it.

Mightily ticked-off Republican women

On the Tavis Smiley show former hardcore Republican Congressman and lifelong solid conservative Joe Scarborough said his even-more-conservative-than-him "Pro-Life" wife who's never voted for a Democrat for President in her life...won't be voting for any of the GOP candidates this time around, due to what she perceives as the Republican war on women.

The last straw for her was Reichsleiter Limbaugh's multi-day verbal sexual assault on a Georgetown U. grad student, followed by GOP TV's staunchly defending Limbaugh's accusations (if not his amazing stylings) across its various programs, followed by every GOP candidate wannabe and the congressional leadership refusing to directly denounce those stylings, instead resorting to copouts like "Well, I wouldn't have said it that way and let me tell you how Obama has failed the country" or "What does it matter what entertainers say?" or "there goes the Lib-er-ul Elite Media again, criticizing a conservative for what they excuse Lib-er-uls saying all the time," followed by Reichsleiter Limbaugh's own apology-by-blaming-everyone-else.

The Party Faithful who are men may be buying all this, but many conservative women voters are seething.

And those women haven't failed to notice that President Obama has a flawless marriage/parenting Family Values record, including two daughters he's obviously devoted to...and even brought his mother in law with him to the White House.

Remember in the '90s when Clinton was running for re-election and the Republican pitch was that personal character was everything you needed to know--when it was Clinton vs. personally squeaky-clean Bush I? I remember being told by party faithful at church that I mustn't vote for a cad like Clinton.

But now that the Democrat is the squeaky clean one and one of the four remaining GOP contenders is Newt...suddenly personal character is irrelevant.

Only a lot of Republican women haven't forgotten that stuff, and still think it matters. And the depiction of Obama as a foreign devil actually intending to destroy America just doesn't comport with the family stuff they see. And Michelle Obama has been an outstanding first lady--both confident and supportive--and not too full of herself either.

Obama's obvious emotional stability and deliberative approach to major problems suits the tastes of many GOP women on the process level. They don't want a hothead in the White House. Or a zealot, actually. That's not conservative, in any real sense of the word.

Not to mention the fact that now they've heard both Obama and Romney sing...

It's about freedom of religion

The GOP has revived the same principle the Puritans upheld when they emigrated to the New World: freedom of religion.

Only the Puritans interpreted "freedom of religion" as "freedom of me to impose the standards of my religion on you." Thus it isn't good enough for a Republican fundamentalist pharmacist to not use the day after pill. It's against his religion to let you have it too--even when a doctor wrote the prescription.

And it isn't good enough for Catholic-owned businesses that employ non-Catholics to encourage the Catholic employees not to use birth control. The Catholic church demands the right to discriminate against employees who want their medical insurance to cover birth control pills (which are also needed for some medical conditions that have nothing to do with birth control). Somehow it violates your religion if I don't abide by its rules.

In all of these cases, the Republican Party interprets freedom of religion exactly as the Puritans did.

Suppose I owned a private business and belonged to a Christian Identity church that preaches that Negroes are racially inferior to whites, and thus I declared it my Christian duty not to employ qualified Negroes?

Suppose I owned a private business and belonged to a Salafist Muslim congregation and demanded that any female who worked for me wear a burqa to, at, and from work? (That's the fullbody covering required in Saudi Arabia.) My conscience requires that I not employ whores--that is, women who fail to wear burqas. Or I might just say no woman can work for me--their only place is in the home.

By their principles, the GOP must support these business owners' right to impose their religion's notion of morality on their employees.

And if my conscience demands that I use birth control to avoid adding to world overpopulation--apparently that doesn't count. Is it only the conscience of GOP-approved religions that count? Is that it?

The GOP retort is that women who want birth control are free to buy it themselves as long as they don't ask their employer to provide it, against his conscience (and it's always his conscience, not hers, isn't it?). And if the woman doesn't like it she can go work somewhere else. This is very Libertarian--there's no such thing as society. Just proud, manly individuals. And their consciences that you are required to abide by.

Of course the GOP believes we are a society when its values are concerned--hence all the legislation that gets implemented in our bedrooms and in our private lives. Thus alcohol is legal, marijuana is not--even though alcohol is clearly more dangerous by any measure. But when the values aren't GOP ones suddenly we're all individuals and "society" is just another word for "Com-yew-nist."

In this case society has agreed collectively that private businesses are not to discriminate by race, creed or religion, except for churches--not businesses run by churches, but by the churches themselves.

That includes ante'ing up for birth control pills and the like--and Republicans generally went along with this until just now. In fact 28 states require this explicitly, and the numerous Catholic organizations in those states complied without a whimper.

So why does it suddenly become freedom of my religion to exclude contraception coverage from my private health insurance that you help pay for? I'm not asking you to use condoms with your own wife. And why is this an issue now in a presidential election year, when it wasn't earlier?

In every country where the Catholic Church gains enough adherents (in America, largely through illegal immigration, which the Church staunchly promotes), it demands that the nation's laws obey Catholic dictates. Evidently the Church thinks it's approaching that tipping point here. Just a few tens of millions more illegal immigrants can seal the deal.

And the fact that 98% of Catholic women use birth control against Church orders makes this even better. A church that can't get its own adherents to adhere to its medieval family planning policies expects the general public to.

Really?

Lastly, before the Catholic church presents itself as a prime source of moral instruction, one might suggest some internal housecleaning first...

Catholic Church coloring book

Sympathy for the Mormons

Mitt Romney during his mission for the LDS Church

I know a lot of Mormons, and seeing the Republicans desperately searching for ABR (Anyone But Romney) makes me feel for Mormons.

The Mormons, politically, are the perpetually jilted suitor. They are, as a group, the most Republican-voting of any religion which has significant numbers. Their lifestyle is the most Republican of any statistically significant group--that is, living in keeping with the values Republican leaders preach (even if they themselves don't practice it--not to mention their patrons). They talk the talk. They walk the walk. And yet the people they most love...don't love them.

A considerable number of fellow Republicans believe that Mormons aren't Christians--that they belong to a cult, like Scientology, and that every Mormon on Earth, regardless of how he leads his life, is doomed to burn in the literal fires of Hell for all eternity once he croaks.

Even if Mitt Romney had the far right track record he doesn't, and even if people liked him...they'd still be searching for ABR. Because he's Mormon.

The GOP forms a new civil rights organization

AP--Washington, D.C.: The Republican National Committee today announced the formation of a new civil rights organization: the ABLU (American Billionaire's Liberties Union). According to RNC Communications Director Sean Spicer, "All real Americans know that our billionaires are the main source of all that's great about this unique country. Yet foreigners like Democrats and Kenyan secret Mohammadens have conspired against America's Billionaires, oppressing them and demonizing them. 


"But billionaires are emotionally fragile. If we criticize them, expect them to follow the same rules as the rest of us, even tax them like the rest of us instead of letting them run their corporations out of mailboxes in the Cayman Islands...they will have emotional breakdowns and quit being the job creators. And then what will happen to their factories in China? 


"The ABLU will stand up for this oppressed minority, and strive to keep America structured entirely for their benefit. And then we'll all benefit from trickle down economics, with the crumbs occassionally falling from their groaning tables like manna from heaven for the rest of us.


"Our ABLU motto is "We hold it to be self-evident that all men are created equal. But some men are more equal than others." 

There are great Republican candidate out there...

Just none who are running.

Why not?

Because they don't think they can beat Obama this time around.

Nobody Republican in the public eye will say so--they'll say Obama's doomed because no president gets reelected with unemployment this high (can you say FDR?), and then launch into a litany of his deficits as a president and as a human being.

But 'andsome is as 'andsome does.

If Republicans were really sure of his defeat, those hotter candidates would have tossed their hats in the ring. Candidates that excite Republicans. The current crop doesn't.

This doesn't make Obama a shoe-in in November. The Republican core strategy is to make him the subject not their guy, and a loose assortment of billionaires are going to flood the airwaves with a superslick campaign of ads and pundits for hire and a TV channel dedicated to pretty much nothing but his defeat, hoping to make him so hated, so much the personification of everything that's gone wrong in voters' lives, that they'll take a chance on the not very likeable candidate who emerges from the current tussle--still almost certainly Mitt Romney.

And the guys who aren't trying to get the GOP nomination know this. Yet they aren't running.

They're voting with their feet.

Defend Life!

On every anniversary of the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision, anti-abortion zealots demonstrate in front of the Supreme Court. Many carry signs like the ones shown here, printed up by the Catholic Church's militant social engineering organization the Knights of Columbus.

I doubt anyone who carries such placards is aware of the irony of what they're doing. Especially since nearly all of them would call themselves conservatives.

Conserve-ative. Someone who's centered on conserving.

All this is a tribute to the fact that some of our noblest instincts, instincts that evolved on a planet radically different from the one we live on today, are now instincts that betray us.

And it's a tribute to the fact that most people's reasoning abilities aren't much better than that of an adult crow.

If you hang a treat from a branch on a string, most adult crows can figure out what to do to get the treat without having to experiment. They look at the setup, fly up to the branch, and pull the string up with their claws and beak, and soon have the treat. 

But if you toss the string over a higher branch, so the crow would have to pull down on the string to bring the treat up towards them, they can't handle that kind of two-step logic.

Likewise, these people who want to "defend life" see sonograms of a fetus that certainly looks like a human being, and they want to save it.

But tell them that the human race is expanding at the rate of over 140 people a minute (after deaths are subtracted), on a planet that isn't expanding, and whose ability to sustain us is actually shrinking, so that only by supporting Communist China's One Child policy and promoting its adoption worldwide can we even start to stave off world disaster...you can see their eyes glaze over.

You might as well show a spreadsheet to a chimpanzee and expect them to understand it.

We developed the instincts the "defend life" people express when the human race had shrunk to around 1,600 fertile females plus probably an equivalent number of males, after a Sumatran volcano explosion 80,000 years ago had pumped so much guck into the atmosphere that photosynthesis nearly stopped for several years and the world's animal life was starving to death.

Back then we needed a fierce will to survive and have kids and protect them against all odds.

Today's situation demands that we deny these powerful instincts.

But most people don't even try. They deny that there's an overpopulation problem, or that it applies to us, or that if there is magical new technology will solve it, or if it won't, God will reach down and solve it, and if He won't it doesn't matter because Earth doesn't matter--only Heaven. And God told us to stop abortion--it's right there in the Bible!

Actually the Bible only confers any rights at all on children when they're a month old--thus OK'ing not just abortion but infanticide. But that's in the Old Testament. In the New Testament...nothing about abortion. Just stuff about being nice to people, which anti-abortionistas assume includes fetuses, which no one in biblical times would have imagined. It's applying contemporary ideas to biblical terms.

Elaborate justification of anti-abortionism abound, of course. You can read one here. And you can read a detailed debunking of such stuff here. Starting with the easily verifiable fact that the word "abortion" appears nowhere in the Bible.

This isn't a problem for Catholics, because they don't use the Bible as their final word on God's instructions for us. They use the Pope's official pronouncements, which routinely override what's in the Bible. What's remarkable is how they persuaded Christian fundamentalists to accept the Pope's pronouncements.

Bottom line: when I see people like the two nice young ladies in the photo holding their Knights of Columbus "Defend Life" signs, I see a pair of very nice crows unintentionally--but effectively--promoting the destruction of the only place in the entire Universe that's available to the human race for life (along with the animals and plants we share this planet with). 

David Brooks wuvs the Mittster

Yesterday David Brooks wrote a NYT column saying, basically that we shouldn't not vote for Mitt Romney because he's rich, because he's very, very hard-working, and because his ancestors were also very, very determined people. 


Actually, 80% of the column was about Romney's virtuous forbears. Brooks didn't address the question of the means Romney's hard work employed, or their ends--whether/to what extent he helped build the economy vs. parasitizing it, and what all that money's doing in the Caymans if not to avoid taxes (investing in the Caymans is a bit problematic. I've been there. It's three tiny islands with scuba diving, virtually no agriculture, and a huge number of companies located there (it's a tax haven)--or, more accurately, these companies' headquarters are little post office boxes that receive mail addressed to the company. Well-paid Caymanian gofers check these post office boxes daily, then forward any mail to wherever the company actually is (somewhere that actually tries to tax companies, like America). 


So his whole column was a straw man argument. I've never heard anyone for or against Romney claim that he wasn't hard working, or that his ancestors weren't. Here's my response:


David Brooks makes a convincing argument. I'll vote for Romney this fall.

Hannah Romney, that is. Or one of the Mileses. Or George.They all sound like good presidential material.

Unlike the descendant Mr. Brooks is thumping the tub for.

Wholly aside from questions about his business dealings, his conduct & statements during his current presidential campaign disqualify him.

All politicians lie, unfortunately. Including President Obama. So Romney being an opportunistic liar isn't enough. And at least he isn't a complete dolt, or a religious zealot who puts his faith at the center of his campaign, or an ideological wack job, or an adversarial firebrand who's an idiot's notion of a smart guy.

Nor is it his conservatism. If Eisenhower were running I'd certainly consider voting for him. And though Mitt Romney has changed many positions, they're all been within the Republican spectrum. So he isn't completely inconsistent.

No, it's the nature and promiscuity of his lies that lie at the core of his disqualification for the presidency. It's both his scripted, telepromptered and unscripted remarks. They reveal a towering sense of entitlement, crude misrepresentation of how our economy works & what the president is and isn't responsible for--& Romney's no fool, so he knows he isn't stating conservative principles that disagree with Obama's--he's just lying about the issues, the opponents...everything. Obama shades the truth. Romney steamrolls it.