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.

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 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 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

 

Media Bias Proven--and Proven--and Proven

I was discussing Fox TV vs. MSNBC TV with a Republican friend. I said Fox was much, much more biased than MSNBC; my friend said the opposite, which I scoffed at.

My friend dug up a recent report from the Pew Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

It proved that MSBNBC was much, much more biased against Romney than Fox TV was against Romney. So I had to eat my words.

Well, except for the mental reservation that MSNBC's negative tone about Romney could be based on fact, while Fox's negativity about Obama could be based on propaganda.

Also, this study wasn't about bias per se. It was about tone--negative, positive, neutral. It did not deal with other crucial elements of bias, such as truthfulness and proportionality (blowing up the important of true but relatively minor issues with the unfavored candidate, while minimizing the importance of negative facts about the favored candidate. These things weren't covered.

I heard the same study cited this morning on one of the local right wing radio stations--Huckabee's show in particular.

But--what no one on the right mentioned was the fact that this same study covered the mainstream media--major newspapers, TV news, radio news, and major mainstream Internet presence--and that the mainstream media, overall, showed exactly zero tilt towards either candidate.

No bias at all--other than that the ratio of positive to negative stories varied up and down in accordance with public opinion polls. This substantiates my belief that the mainstream media is biased in favor of gaining audience, which is necessary to gain advertising. So they'll chase anything that grabs eyeballs. Romney's 47% speech? You betcha. Obama's spectacular loss of the first debate? You betcha--equally.

The Republican Universe (Republiverse) works like a religious cult, just as North Korea's government does. A key feature of every cult is to get you to shun contact with information sources that aren't in line with the cult's propaganda.

Thus not an hour passes on any of the right wing media--radio, TV, internet, whatever--without you being reminded that the mainstream media is totally biased--in the tank for Obama--and that therefore you can't trust them. You can only trust the right wing media.

This study that they're quoting proves that this is flat-out-false.

And while MSNBC is super-negative about Romney, Fox is only better by comparison. True, only 3% of Romney stories on MSNBC were positive on MSNBC. But only 6% of stories on Obama were positive on Fox. And unlike Fox, MSNBC's negative messages on Obama aren't reinforced by a very large, well-financed national network of right wing radio stations.

I'm not justifying MSNBC's tack, and it's also true that MSNBC's defense--that its news programs are unbiased, that only its pundit shows are biased--is false. I watch the "news programs" on both Fox and MSNBC, and both run the party line in terms of what stories are put forth and what aspects are emphasized. Even MSNBC's early morning right wing program--Joe Scarborough's--pits his against a liberal co-host and numerous liberal guests.  Fox, similarly, has a few liberal punching bags on its shows.

Fox and MSNBC are dedicated to their side, from one end to the other.

Lastly, being on one side does not equate with lying on behalf of that side. The Pew study cited didn't deal with that. Nor did it deal with things like incitement to murder, which Fox's Bill O'Reilly virtually did several years ago in his campaign against a gynecologist who provided abortions in the midwest. That campaign only ended when the gynecologist was murdered, in the church he attended, during a service, by an anti-abortion terrorist.

I've never seen MSNBC go that far.

No parity in this election

I've been duking it out with an assortment of Rommey supporters on Amazon.com's Jackie Evancho "Dream with me" CD forum, on a thread titled "The Redford movie!"

Kind of curious to have a vigorously combative political thread on a forum devoted to the first major label CD of a soprano who sings classical crossover music--nothing remotely political about this singer's life, music, or political activities (none except for campaigning against the annual Canadian baby seal slaughters).

But her fan demographic includes the same kinds of older white males who call in to CSPAN programs to fulminate about them dayum Democrats, so there you are. The thread started with a Russian-American fan worrying that Evancho acting in a film by Robert Redford would damage her career since Redford is a Communist (!!!). It has evolved as place to send all political statements so the other threads on the forum won't get politicized, and they generally aren't, so it works. Yay.

I bring it up here because it has provided me with an interesting assortment of conservatives and a few more liberal folks to debate with. The conservatives include, at one extreme, the kind of people who look through or past you when they talk to you and fill their sentences with words like Socialist Marxist Obama's birth certificate college transcripts United Nations plots dictator take our guns away...you know the type. At the other end are some literate conservatives who fill their entries with links to articles with at least some semblance of credibility.

But the latter type is in the minority, and for the rest, what most strikes is the fact that for them everything every Democrat has ever said or done is a lie or a crime, and everything ever Republican has ever said or done isn't just true but Truth and an expression of virtue. The only exception is a suspicion that Candidate Romney won't immediately act to ban abortion nationally and make it a felony to do or have one.

I've also noticed that when I write something that criticizes both Democrats and Republicans, they completely ignore my criticisms of Democrats and act as if I'm as doctrinaire a leftist as they are rightists.

They're utterly credulous about their side's daily talking points--it all becomes Instant Gospel.

And it's all woven into a narrative they'll line out at the drop of a hat, blaming the Democrats 100% for the Big Recession, the national debt, our trade deficit with China, Iran's nuclear weapons program, and everything else.

President Obama gets zero credit for being a good father and husband. Zero for killing Bin Ladin and innumerable Al Qaeda officers mostly via UAVs striking deep in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere. Obama's intelligence is dismissed as affirmative action/teleprompter reading. They talk endlessly about Ayres/Wright/Pelosi/Reid/Barney Frank/Holder yada yada, because they need to focus their wrath on people as talismans of evil. Political ideas are too abstract--individuals must be constantly named--invoked, really, in a kind of mantra--and demonized.

I also know some real live Republicans at church who are like this, but most aren't. They'll still vote for   Governor Romney, even though they wouldn't dream of lying constantly like Romney does--but even the milder ones completely overlook his constant lying.

And that, folks, is what we're up against. Eisenhower would be aghast. One after another, lifelong moderate Republicans take a hike or at least opt out of campaigning for the craziness that is Republicanism today. Think General Colin Powell or Judge Posner or Justice O'Connor. They aren't campaigning for Obama, but they just can't take the nuclear glow-in-the-dark crazy of today's GOP.

Is this what happened to Germany in the 1930s? The gradual slide into tribal ideology, into an extremism that's so black and white, and which justifies anything short of physical violence if it helps My Side win? I don't think it will go that far but after spending a day with the crazies, as I did today, it makes me wonder...

It is not a parity of lying. The Right's lies are crazier, more extreme. There's no law of nature saying both sides must be identical in their devotion to demagoguery, and they aren't. It's the Republicans that have gone off the deep end. I feel personally betrayed because it would have been easy to be a Republican back when the Republican party was conservative. It is not now. The word "conservative" has become decoupled from its denotation. It now means "reactionary."

I'd love for us to have a parliamentary system with a liberal, a conservative, and a moderate party, eternally vying with each other to serve America best.

We all need out dreams, eh?

If President Obama weren't a pragmatic moderate, he'd...

Some observers have pointed out how this is a race between moderates: a pragmatic moderate conservative pretending to be a hard-core right winger running against a pragmatic moderate liberal who the pragmatic moderate conservative is painting the pragmatic moderate liberal as a hard-core left winger.

However, I think movement Republicans are more worried about Romney's honesty than they need to be. Obviously he'll do whatever opinion polls of Republican voters tell him to do so he can get reelected, so as long as a majority of Republican voters want him to simulate a hard-core right winger he'll be happy to oblige. The man is nothing if not flexible.

In particular, since several moderate Supreme Court justices are highly likely to quit or die during the next two presidential terms, Romney will for sure nominate justices like Alito and Roberts, thus guaranteeing the outcome of all cases coming before the Court for the next twenty years--and enabling the Right to beat back liberal legislation even if Romney were followed by a highly liberal Democrat backed by a highly liberal Congress.

But he and his party are lying about Obama's left-winginesss. Lying of the bald-faced variety.

If Obama were a liberal ideologue, he'd have done the following things in his first term:

1. Signed an executive order banning discrimination against homosexuals in the military on his first day in office.

2. Signed an executive order ending enforcement of laws against illegal immigrants not accused of/convicted of felonies.

3. Insisted on healthcare reform being based on conversion to a single-payer system.

4. Campaigned vigorously for strict gun control laws.

5. Reduced government cooperation with religious institutions via "faith-based initiatives."

6. Campaigned to raise the gas tax to promote buying fuel-efficient vehicles.

7. Campaigned to overturn the anti-homosexual law misnamed the "Defense of Marriage Act."

8. Nominated far more liberal Supreme Court justices than Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan (and would have made sure one of them was black). The number of times Sotomayor has recused herself (unlike Scalia, who never does) by itself proves her moderation.

9. He wouldn't have used all those Wall Street pros for his economic brain trust.

10. He would have pursued criminal prosecution of the Masters of the Universe who engineering the 2008 financial meltdown.

11. He would have campaigned against the Republicans in Congress from day one instead of consistently seeking compromises with them.

12. He would have gone for government takeover of bankrupt banks, manufacturers instead of bailing them out (for which none of them are the least bit grateful, of course).

13. He would have promptly withdrawn from Iraq and Afghanistan.

14. He would never have authorized drone-based assassination of innumerable Islamofascists in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere.

15. He would have bargained with the Somali pirates who captured an American vessel instead of authorizing the assassination of the pirates who were holding the captain.

16. When we located Osama Bin Ladin, he would have initiated extradition proceedings in Pakistan's legal system instead of sending in the SEALs to kill him.

17. A liberal President would never have made a bargain with the Greed Over Principles party that extended the Bush Tax Cuts for the Rich, regardless of the terms of that bargain.

18. And if he were the right wing's stereotype of "liberal" he'd have no respect for the institution of marriage, and (like so many Republican politicians) he would have buzzed through several marriages by this point, and cheated on his wife repeatedly, and had relationships with other men as well, because, well, you know those liberals.....

Right wingers might say he didn't do any of these things because he knew these efforts would not have been successful for the Democratic Party overall or could have simply been defeated by Republicans in Congress, and that he would have done all these things if he thought he could have, and he will do such things in he's re-elected.

They can only say this if they don't understand what the word "pragmatic" means (and in general they don't, really); and if they can read Obama's mind, which they firmly believe they can. These people are nothing if not confident about their godlike powers of discernment; they'd stoutly deny any such thing, of course, but in the next breath continue telling you what Obama thinks and believes, regardless of what he's done and said.

As for the "second term" monster in the closet right wingers talk about (exploiting his remark to the Russians), of course all second term presidents are less constrained than they are in their first term. However, second term presidents with a Congress of the other party that can't / won't send him bills to sign can't do anything about their legislative proposals, regardless of which term they're in.

And it's extremely unlikely that Obama will get a friendly Congress. The diligent, comprehensive efforts of the GOP at the state level to suppress Democratic votes will see to that if nothing else; not to mention the billions their billionaire patrons can now spend on propaganda campaigns both above and below the belt.

Lastly, a second term President rarely wants to behave such as to guarantee that the next President will be of the other party. He's always working on his legacy. A legacy of putting the other party in power? No pragmatic president would risk that.

The Economist endorses Mitt Romney

The last issue of The Economist endorsed Mitt Romney for President. The Economist tends to be economically quite conservative / pro-business without all the Social Conservative baggage of the American conservative movement.

This was my comment:


The Economist's encomium for Mitt Romney seems to reveal a basic ignorance about the difference between parliamentary politics and the American system.

In parliamentary systems the prime minister is the CEO of the party that controls the legislature. So the PM speaks with the one voice of the government.

In the American system Congress can be and often is controlled by the opposing political party. And the American Congress can thwart most of what the President proposes--and vice versa. Hence all the talk about governmental gridlock.

Enter Mitt Romney. Currently Congress is controlled by his party: the House by an unstoppable majority, the Senate by a minority that can stop anything the majority does.

There is very little chance that this control of Congress by the Republicans will change this November--in fact they stand to gain a majority in the Senate.

Any consideration of the American presidency MUST take place in the context of Congress. He doesn't get to run the country by himself.

And if we get a Republican president coupled with a Republican Congress, Romney's unlikely to oppose his own Congress--no more than Bush was--especially considering the ideological fervor that currently controls the GOP. So even if Romney as Governor of a state with a Democratic legislature worked as a "let's all work together" smart moderate, that's not what we'll get from a President Romney riding the tiger of a Tea Party Congress.

Not to mention the fact that despite Romney's obvious intelligence, the things he's said during this campaign--both from a teleprompter and spontaneously--represent the most beetle-browed, knuckle-dragging, factually challenged reductionism and misrepresentation of facts. I'm not talking about political differences. I'm talking about him saying things are factually false--over and over and over.

And if we take him at his word...well, it's hard to believe a conservative European publication such as the Economist would back him, since he condemns Obama for taking ideas from--gasp--Europe. As if that's the worst thing you could say of an American president.

Is a blatant jingoist Europhobe really what you want for us? Or do you think he's just lying about that? In which case do you want a blatantly opportunistic, demagoguic liar--who accurately reflects what the Tea Party Congress believes--as our president?

Seems like the most small-c conservative thing you could wish for is a pragmatic moderate like Obama for 2012.

Why corporate welfare provokes so little outrage

If I burgle your home when you're out and riffle through all your drawers looking for cash but only find one dollar, you'll still remember what I did to you for the rest of your life. Though the cash stolen was negligible, the invasion of your privacy and implied threat to your safety will still have quite an impact.

If I persuade you to invest all your money with me and I take it, as Bernie Madoff did, you'll certainly remember the one who ruined your economic life, as long as you live.

But what if I don't invade your home to steal from you, and I don't take all of your money. Suppose instead that I stole only one dollar from you--and from every other household in America--but that I did it by siphoning the dollar out of the taxes you pay.

I'll have stolen as much from Americans as Bernie Madoff did, but by spreading the theft around so broadly, and took it from you so quietly--you might not ever know I did it, or only find out decades later--it's hard to get worked up, even though the scale of the human crime is as big as Bernie Madoff's.

And that's what Wall Street's Masters of the Universe do. Their labor--called "investment" for tax purposes--is legally taxed (because they bribed Congress to make it so) at about half the rate of high-income managers in manufacturing and service provider sectors. Their assets are squirreled away abroad in places like the Cayman Islands, which is often--even usually--illegal, but takes large, sophisticated teams of forensic accountants to track down the malfeasance. Whereas IRS computers routinely catch most of the tax cheating done by average people. And successful GOP efforts at not just deregulation but defunding of regulatoratory agencies has hamstrung efforts to hold rich cheats to account.

I could go on, but the upshot is that by both legal but unethical and hard-to-nail-down illegal efforts, folks like Governor Romney take a dollar out of each of our pockets without disturbing anything in our homes or concentrating the loss in a few people who may squawk about it.

It's just a buck. Nothing to be annoyed about.

Right?

How is the Republican Party leadership like a standard Hollywood horror movie?

                                                              -    -    -
In a standard Hollywood horror movie, the directors' primary goal is to isolate the good guys--or at least the non-monsters--so the monstrous guy/creature can pick them off one by one. So, while everyone is the audience is silently yelling at the screen "Don't go down to the basement alone!!!!" ...sure enough, Sally goes down to the basement alone...and gets picked off. Followed by Joe in the Attic, and Martha in the garden in the dark, and Mike in the deserted corridor, and so forth.

That's just how the Republican Party leadership works--it gets Americans to go down the hallway alone.

It has convinced over half the country that government is the problem--that, if left to its own devices, giant corporations will create jobs (and so they will--in China), and, unfettered by those villainous government regulators, wealth will spring out all over the place and shower down upon the worthy.

If has also convinced a majority of Americans that the experience of the rest of the world with unfettered corporate forces is irrelevant. That the practices of the Republican Party in the 1950s and 60sd is irrelevant--even though it represented a time of unparalleled egalitarianism and business growth and very high taxes on very high profits.

And it has also convinced a majority of the American people that all regulation is over-regulation. That only other people get sick. That all government benefits go to people who aren't white Anglos, while all tax burdens come from white Anglos. That the highly successful efforts of big business to shift all risk and environmental costs of their operations to taxpayers--is just good business, and that expecting businesses to shoulder the actual expenses of their operations is so-shul-ism.

They want us to go down that corridor alone.

***

Gratitude

This weekend I was treated to another example of the extreme--yet unacknowledged--cognitive dissonance between the average Republican party member and that party's leaders and patrons.

Today I've been watching the Mormon church's 180th General Conference. As you should know, Mormons are overwhelmingly Republican, and Utah possibly the most conservative state in the union.

General Conference is a biannual telecast from Salt Lake City, in which a succession of church officials offer advice as to what Mormons should do and not do.

The current head of the church is President Monson. In his Sunday AM talk he quoted the Roman stoic philosopher Epictetus, saying basically that we shouldn't gripe about bad luck but should be grateful for good luck.

On the other hand, yesterday I listened to a PBS radio show called "This American Life"--an episode titled "Crybabies." Its prologue dealt with manufactured outrage, a staple of right wing politics (and of left wing politics, to be sure--but wielded far less effectively). Then the first chapter investigated why Wall Street's movers and shakers--almost uniformly Republican--feel exactly zero gratitude for we taxpayers bailing them out, such that while we deal with over 10% unemployment (more if you include underemployed and discouraged workers), Wall Streeters have enjoyed record profits and bonuses.

The Wall Street workers interviewed stated uniformly that their success was due entirely to their superior intelligence and drive--it had nothing whatsoever to do with any supposed bailout--and, moreover, that President Obama was out to destroy American Business, and they were promoting any and all efforts to demolish him.

The segment went on to note that the wealthy of Haiti had exactly the same attitude about Haiti's travails and the elites' successes.

It appears that the fabulously wealthy almost invariably ascribe their success to their genius--not luck or corporate welfare--and they were the quickest and loudest to protest if anyone did anything to reduce their profits by the slightest increment.

Hence Christ's comment about a rich man having the same chance of getting into heaven as a camel of getting through the eye of a needle.

Anyone can do a few minutes' research and find rich people who are the very souls of virtue, and who came by their fortunes honestly. But I'm making a sociological observation, and statistically I'm right.

Which takes me back to President Monson's talk. I know many Mormons who live by the precepts church leaders like him have laid down. Yet they vigorously support party leaders who have nothing but the heartiest contempt for them and their principles.

Why don't they demand that their political leaders live by the principles they themselves live by?

Are Republican politicians' speeches responsiblre for followers' violence?

Whenever I mention Republican misdeeds to my Republican spouse, I get "well, Democrats do it too, and just as much or more."

Democrats say the same thing when the shoe's on the other foot, of course.

Neither is a legal defense, folks. If my next door neighbor is a murderer (true, by the way, a few years ago), that doesn't give me a hunting license. I shouldn't have to say this, but both sides use this eight year olds' defense so often I felt the need to mention it.

So here I'm just going to talk about recent Republican behavior. I'll worry about the Democrats' comparable sins when they're out of power again.

It's not enough to read the First Amendment, because over the centuries the Supremes and Congress have sculpted it a lot. A whole lot.

From my readings it seems to boil down to this: political speech is the freest speech of all, with the strictest limitations on legal action. It goes far beyond "yelling 'Fire!' in a crowded theater." I get the impression you'd have to be calling for the president to be assassinated at a rally where he was present, and leading the charge, for it to be illegal.

So while it's technically slander to call a Congressman a "baby killer," for example, it's regarded as permissible hyperbole.

My guess is that nothing the Republican leadership/pundits/media hosts are saying is illegal. Or very little, at least.

But there's a second question: does it in fact, legal or not, incite illegal action? This is a sociological question. I think it's obvious that it can.

For example, Fundamentalist Muslim religious authorities have issued fatwas inviting good Muslims to murder novelists they don't like. They've also issued elaborate justifications for suicide murder of innocent civilians, starting with the fine-sounding phrase "it is permissible to..."

Or I believe it has been found not permissible for antiabortionist websites to publish abortion providers' names/home addresses/photos of family members/addresses of schools the children attend, along with check marks through the faces of ones who have been murdered. So it is possible to go over the line legally.

The sociological argument is that morality is social more than individual. If someone hears the government delegitimized, targeted politicians or other demonized, sees this echoed across numerous websites and media outlets--and all of this reinforced by the highest officials of one's party--that sets the stage for vigilantism, and for the vigilante feeling that his actions are actually moral.

Look at the racial lynchings in the South that went on for over half a century. Families would go on picnic outings to see Blacks strung up, even tortured to death. And the townsfolk would be downright festive about it...then go to church on Sunday and congratulate themselves on what fine Christians they were.

Anyone in business learns that the boss has to watch what he says, because his position gives his words what the Polynesians would call mana. And when the House minority leader calls passage of the healthcare reform bill that Teddy Roosevelt had called for "Armageddon," that's legal but irresponsible. Especially when one out of five Republican voters apparently believe Obama is the literal Antichrist.

So while for the average American "Armageddon" sounds like quaint exaggeration, it means something else to those one in fivers.

I conclude that the Republican leadership--not to mention their allies in the media--have been more than irresponsible. They are intentionally stirring up their masses.

I draw this conclusion not just from what they're saying, but from what the listeners are hearing. The average Democrat lives in a world of shades of gray, and is rarely a Christian fundamentalist. The Republican base is largely fervently religious, believes in Good and Evil--do you realize that the best-selling novels in America are the Left Behind series, which focus on describing how Christ and his heavenly army are going to torture Democrats (i.e. Unbelievers--and that includes members of mainstream Christian churches) to death?

You can't understand the scary implications of what the Republican leaders are saying until you hear it through the ears of their more avid followers.

Evil Republicans

When we Democrats talk about those evil Republicans we're making a big, big mistake. We have to make a clear distinction between the Republican Party leadership and most rank and file Republicans.

I know a lot of Republicans personally, and I've known many of them for decades. Nearly all of them are honest, upright people you could trust with your last dollar. They might not make the best companions for a trip to the Burning Man festival, or to watch some sex/drugs/rock&roll-drenched, plotless avant-garde movie with. But they might be great to go scuba diving with (and I speak from personal experience), or to see a well-made, mainstream PG-13-rated Hollywood movie with. Or to be in a baby-sitting co-op with.

True, they do generally oppose most Democrats on a variety of social and fiscal issues. We are in different parties for real reasons. But few rank-and-file Republicans are out to rob us blind--unlike the GOP leadership.

And when we lump them all together, we reinforce the Republicans' sense of tribe--that America=the Republican tribe, while the Democratics en masse=an occupation of "our" country by people with alien values who hate America and whose leader and representatives must be opposed in every way possible.

When we reinforce this us vs. them mentality, we don't get healthcare reform. We don't get Wall Street reform. Or if we seem to, we get gutted versions of what we really need.

If not for this, there are many issues we could cooperate on, and they'd be more willing to reform their own party. Wouldn't it be great for everyone if the GOP became less like the Party of Palin and more like the Party of Eisenhower?

The first step for Democrats is ceasing to tar all Republicans with the same brush. Always refer to the Republican leadership when that's appropriate. Find the areas of common ground that we share. Republican voters don't want lying, demagoguic leaders shilling for special interests any more than we do. Help them realize our tribe is America, not any political party.

George Washington's farewell address warned the American people about "factions." Prophetic words.

Affirmative action, GOP style

Federalists (nearly all of them Republicans) praise the Electoral College because it implements federalism. Federalism has states picking presidents, not us. The enemy philosophy is apparently populism, where the people pick the presidents (as in most democracies).

Federalists must despise Abraham Lincoln, who prayed "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." Federalists would have Lincoln saying "that government of the states, by the states, for the states…"

Federalism gave us the U.S. Senate, in which each California senator's vote represents 60 times as many people as one Wyoming senator's vote. It also gave us an electoral system in which three California voters have less say in picking a president than one Wyoming voter.

Smaller states tend to be more conservative than larger ones (Hawaii and Texas notwithstanding), making the Electoral College an affirmative action program for Republicans. In the last election it took 104 Democrats to produce the same number of electors as 100 Republican voters. In a close election—such as in 2000—that's all the Republican Party needed (along with an activist Supreme Court).

But the real irony is that the Electoral College no longer preserves states' rights. Now only the priorities of a few "battleground states" count. The rest—including California—have become little more than ATMs for both parties, with up to 49% of voters in such states feeling disenfranchised.

What worked in 1798 has become dramatically out of date.