Refusing to Give in to Fear

As regular readers  know, back in May of this year the husband and I and three friends spent a week in Paris and journeyed all over the city, including to points mere blocks from some of the sites that witnessed carnage last Friday.  I hear some saying that they won't be going to Paris any tie soon or may avoid going to Europe all together - which is precisely what the ISIS connected terrorists want.  They want to impose fear and they want to replace freedom and openness with fear and disrupted lives.   By giving into fear or by using fear mongering to exacerbate hostility to Muslims for self-promotion, those included to embrace fear and despicable Republican politicians are doing exactly what ISIS wants.  I for one would go back to Paris in a heart beat - I have a higher risk of being  victim of gun violence here in America.   A column in the New York Times looks at the phenomenon.  Here are excerpts:

Like millions of people, I’ve been obsessively following the news from Paris, putting aside other things to focus on the horror. It’s the natural human reaction. But let’s be clear: it’s also the reaction the terrorists want. And that’s something not everyone seems to understand.

Take, for example, Jeb Bush’s declaration that “this is an organized attempt to destroy Western civilization.” No, it isn’t. It’s an organized attempt to sow panic, which isn’t at all the same thing. And remarks like that, which blur that distinction and make terrorists seem more powerful than they are, just help the jihadists’ cause.

Think, for a moment, about what France is and what it represents. It has its problems — what nation doesn’t? — but it’s a robust democracy with a deep well of popular legitimacy. Its defense budget is small compared with ours, but it nonetheless retains a powerful military, and has the resources to make that military much stronger if it chooses. (France’s economy is around 20 times the size of Syria’s.) France is not going to be conquered by ISIS, now or ever. Destroy Western civilization? Not a chance.

So what was Friday’s attack about? Killing random people in restaurants and at concerts is a strategy that reflects its perpetrators’ fundamental weakness. It isn’t going to establish a caliphate in Paris. What it can do, however, is inspire fear — which is why we call it terrorism, and shouldn’t dignify it with the name of war.

The point is not to minimize the horror. It is, instead, to emphasize that the biggest danger terrorism poses to our society comes not from the direct harm inflicted, but from the wrong-headed responses it can inspire. And it’s crucial to realize that there are multiple ways the response can go wrong.

It would certainly be a very bad thing if France or other democracies responded to terrorism with appeasement . . . .

A much bigger risk, in practice, is that the targets of terrorism will try to achieve perfect security by eliminating every conceivable threat — a response that inevitably makes things worse, because it’s a big, complicated world, and even superpowers can’t set everything right. On 9/11 Donald Rumsfeld told his aides: “Sweep it up. Related and not,” and immediately suggested using the attack as an excuse to invade Iraq. The result was a disastrous war that actually empowered terrorists, and set the stage for the rise of ISIS.

[P]eople can and do exploit terrorism for political gain, including using it to justify what they imagine will be a splendid, politically beneficial little war. 

Oh, and whatever people like Ted Cruz may imagine, ending our reluctance to kill innocent civilians wouldn’t remove the limits to American power. It would, however, do wonders for terrorist recruitment.

Finally, terrorism is just one of many dangers in the world, and shouldn’t be allowed to divert our attention from other issues.  

Paris may have changed that calculus a bit, especially when it comes to Europe’s handling of refugees, an agonizing issue that has now gotten even more fraught. And there will have to be a post-mortem on why such an elaborate plot wasn’t spotted. But do you remember all the pronouncements that 9/11 would change everything? Well, it didn’t — and neither will this atrocity.

Again, the goal of terrorists is to inspire terror, because that’s all they’re capable of. And the most important thing our societies can do in response is to refuse to give in to fear.

The GOP's Guide for Women

Click image to enlarge

This image seems to sum up the world that Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan and the angry white men of the GOP want for women.  I especially like the last tip: "a good wife always knows her place."But is this really what women want? 

Reversing the Sixties: The 2012 Republican Agenda

There's a good column at Huffington Post that summarizes the over all GOP agenda at both the state and federal level. It is entitled"reversing the Sixties: The 2012 Republican Agenda" and lays the mindset behind the agenda - an agenda that ought to frighten not only women, but also gays and minorities of all stripes. It's as if the GOP wants to roll the clock back to the 1950's or earlier, forgetting in the process that those earlier periods in history were not so good for many in society and even among the "traditional families" reality and the fond reminiscences of today were actually often very different things. In this idealized world of yesteryear, gays would be back deep in the closet, women would be subservient to men, and blacks and other racial minorities would know their place. Here are some column highlights:

One of the most surprising aspects of contemporary Republican politics has been their across-the-board attack on women's health services and women's rights. Rather than an isolated misogynistic program, these attacks should be viewed as one part of a conservative agenda to role back gains made in the sixties.

Recently, MoveOn reported Top 10 Shocking Attacks from the GOP's War on Women ranging from changing the definition of rape to denying abortions in all circumstances to limiting access to contraception to defunding preschool programs and family planning agencies. It's not only the women's movement that's being attacked, but also the civil-rights movement, the consumer movement, the environmental movement, and the gay-rights movement. All the accomplishments of the sixties are under attack by Republicans.

Since the Reagan era, Republicans have been adept at mobilizing resentment based upon the notion of the "culture of victimization." In campaign after campaign Republicans have fueled the anger of lower and middle-class whites and redirected it to imaginary groups: liberal elites who promote "sixties values," black welfare "queens," promiscuous women who want abortion on demand, aggressive homosexuals who seek to convert others to their "lifestyle," and most recently illegal aliens who steal American jobs and benefits. Tom Frank described this process in What's the Matter with Kansas: within the Republican Party, economic conservatives distract social conservatives with inflammatory social issues in order to get their votes and keep them from noticing the life-threatening problems caused by conservative economic policies.

What we're seeing from the 2012 Republican Party is more than a strategy. . . . there is now an overriding "conservative moral logic." This is inherently patriarchal: "The idealized conservative family is structured around a strict father." Family values are the values established by the strict father. By extension, they are set by a Republican candidate such as Romney or Santorum.

Lakoff observes that conservatives project the "strict father" model onto all societal institutions. A proper church is governed by a strict father God, the Christian Old Testament God. The marketplace is controlled by a mythical strict father, whose invisible hand ensures that business transactions ultimately benefit society. The military is run by a strict father without interference from civilians. And so forth.

To incite their conservative base, the Romney and Santorum campaigns have turned away from the economy to family values. And they have focused on women's rights and health services. From their perspective men -- the strict fathers -- control reproduction.

The GOP objective is reverse the gains made in the sixties -- gains they link to "sixties values." Republicans plan to destroy the civil-rights movement, the consumer movement, the environmental movement, the gay-rights movement, and the women's movement.

It's all frightening and, if the GOP agenda succeeds, this nation will not be a welcoming place for many of us.

GOP: Ghastly Out Dated Party

As the Republican Party continues to stampede back towards the 11th Century, some Americans seem to be waking up to the reality that the GOP is totally out of touch with reality. Or at least any semblance of a modern day reality. At best, the GOP seems to want to return to the 1950's with all its glory: segregation, back alley abortions, bans on interracial marriage, gays force totally into the closet and subject to rampant discrimination, and clergy sexually molesting children and youth with impunity and little likelihood of being held to accountability. Obviously, the GOP's image of a golden age wasn't so golden for many Americans. Maureen Dowd looks at the GOP in a cutting column in the New York Times. Here are some excerpts:

IT’S finally sinking in. Republicans are getting queasy at the gruesome sight of their party eating itself alive, savaging the brand in ways that will long resonate.

“Republicans being against sex is not good,” the G.O.P. strategist Alex Castellanos told me mournfully. “Sex is popular.” He said his party is “coming to grips with a weaker field than we’d all want” and going through the five stages of grief. “We’re at No. 4,” he said. (Depression.) “We’ve still got one to go.” (Acceptance.)

The contenders in the Hester Prynne primaries are tripping over one another trying to be the most radical, unreasonable and insane candidate they can be. They pounce on any traces of sanity in the other candidates — be it humanity toward women, compassion toward immigrants or the willingness to make the rich pay a nickel more in taxes — and try to destroy them with it.

Newt Gingrich, a war wimp in Vietnam who supported W.’s trumped-up invasion of Iraq, had the gall to tell a crowd at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Okla., that defeating Obama — “the most dangerous president in modern American history” — was “a duty of national security” because “he is incapable of defending the United States” and because he “wants to unilaterally weaken the United States.” Who killed Osama again?

“It makes the party look like it isn’t a modern party,” Rudy Giuliani told CNN’s Erin Burnett, fretting about the candidates’ Cotton Mather attitude about women and gays. “It doesn’t understand the modern world that we live in.”

After a speech in Dallas on Thursday, Jeb Bush also recoiled: “I used to be a conservative, and I watch these debates and I’m wondering, I don’t think I’ve changed, but it’s a little troubling sometimes when people are appealing to people’s fears and emotion rather than trying to get them to look over the horizon for a broader perspective.”

Republicans have a growing panic at the thought of going down the drain with a loser, missing their chance at capturing the Senate and giving back all those House seats won in 2010. More and more, they openly yearn for a fresh candidate, including Jeb Bush, who does, after all, have experience at shoplifting presidential victories at the last minute.

Santorum, whose name aptly comes from the same Latin root as sanctimonious, went on Glenn Beck’s Web-based show with his family and offered this lunacy: “I understand why Barack Obama wants to send every kid to college,” because colleges are “indoctrination mills” that “harm” the country.

The barking-mad Republicans of Virginia are helping to make the party look foolish and creepy. A video went viral on Friday in which Delegate Dave Albo comically regaled his fellow lawmakers on the floor of the Statehouse with his own Old Dominion version of “Lysistrata”: he suggested that he was denied sex with his wife because of a Republican-sponsored bill that would have made ultrasounds, often with a vaginal probe, mandatory for women seeking abortions.

The Republicans, with their crazed Reagan fixation, are a last-gasp party, living posthumously, fighting battles on sex, race, immigration and public education long ago won by the other side. They’re trying to roll back the clock, but time is passing them by.

I'm glad Maureen gave the Virginia GOP its due recognition for being a leader in utter insanity and backwardness.

Southern GOP Ideaologues Drag the Party Downward

UPDATED: An example of the lunacy now gripping the GOP comes from Raw Story which is reporting on Tennessee Republican John "Chip" Saltsman, a candidate for Chairman of the Republican National Committee, who is defending a song containing a racially insensitive term as mere "satire." These people truly do NOT get it. The song:

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[A] musical parody of "Puff the Magic Dragon" entitled "Barack the Magic Negro," sung by Shanklin imitating black civil rights advocate Rev. Al Sharpton, first played by Rush Limbaugh on his syndicated radio show in March 2007.

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Today's GOP is a faint shadow of the once respectable national party it once was. Now, one has to be either a racist, far right religious fanatic, or incredibly selfish and self-centered, caring only about one's tax rates, to belong to the GOP. And the signs are that things are going to get even worse as ultra-conservative GOP members of Congress sit poised to be obstructionists to measures much needed to help turn around the sinking economy. Rather than looking out for the best interests of the country, the increasingly reactionary GOP members of Congress seem more consumed with punishing those they dislike - e.g., the United Auto Workers - egged on by the Kool-Aid drinking GOP base. David Broder looks at the phenomenon in a new Washington Post column. Here are some highlights:

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All the signs are that the stimulus spending will be opposed by congressional Republicans, whose shrunken ranks are increasingly dominated by right-wing Southerners who care not what their stance does to harm the party's national image. The spectacle of LaHood facing off in congressional testimony against those naysayers will dramatize a split that is crippling the GOP.

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The danger became apparent as far back as 2007. With Bush weakened by the Iraq war, Hurricane Katrina and the midterm election losses of 2006, a Southern-led revolt killed his immigration reform bill McConnell, unable to stem the insurgency, joined it. The price was paid in the 2008 presidential campaign. Despite his personal credentials as a sponsor of comprehensive immigration reform, John McCain was caught in the backlash of anti-GOP voting by Hispanics. It contributed to his loss of Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Florida and other states.

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The same thing happened this year when Bush supported a bailout for the Big Three auto companies. . . . . the defeat of this legislation at Republican hands will not be forgotten when GOP senators run for reelection in 2010 in states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania. It will also echo in industrial states such as Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, Illinois, California, New York and New Jersey, when Republicans try to challenge for Senate and House seats.

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As point man for Obama's stimulus spending, he [transportation secretary, Ray LaHood] now poses the dilemma for his own party in the sharpest possible terms: Will congressional Republicans again sacrifice their political interest to satisfy their Southern-baked ideological imperatives?

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Having formally lived in the Deep South, I do not see much hope for moderation by the GOP. States like Alabama where I once lived have moved further to the lunatic far right over the last 20 years while the rest of the nation has tried to move forward to modernity.