The GOP and the Alabamafication of America

Likely soon to be removed Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore

As noted before, I once lived in Alabama many years ago - George Wallace, who I once met - was still governor at the time - and in the years since I moved away, first to Texas and then back to Virginia where my family had settled, things have gone steadily downhill on the political front in Alabama.  Not coincidental, in my view, the decline in Alabama has directly correlated to the rise in the power of the Christofascists and Republican Party in that state.  Now, an editorial at Al.com looks at how the Republican Party and its demented "conservative Christian" base are poised to take the nation down a similar road if they are not stopped.  Here are op-ed highlights:

Dear America,

Here's where Alabama currently stands: Our governor is under investigation. Our House speaker is under indictment. Our chief justice is suspended from duty and awaiting trial, again. We're one of the poorest states in the country, living off the federal dole, and we sit at or near the bottom of most empirical rankings of quality of life. Our leadership is non-existent and our government is on the brink of collapse.

But don't think for a minute that you're better than us. Donald Trump is the Republican presumptive presidential nominee, and you put him there. You're closer to Alabama than you care to think. 

Maybe you still think this Trump thing is a joke. I am here to assure you it is not.Perhaps you think voters cannot be so politically masochistic. You are wrong.

Don't hope for a minute that those behind the scenes — you know, the Establishment — can fix this game. It is beyond their control.  The Worst Case Scenario is not a possibility. It is a probability.

I have seen it. The saying "stuck on stupid" does not begin to explain our predicament. This is more like doing a handstand in a tar pit.

And this Thing that has corrupted my state, robbed us of common sense, poisoned our decency, and made us loathe our neighbors — it is contagious and you are at risk. Call it the Alabamafication of America.

Let me share with you what it has done to us.  Six years ago we elected Robert Bentley governor because most voters were under the impression that, despite lacking other qualifications for the job, he might be a good man. He was so gracious that he promised not to draw a paycheck unless Alabamians reached virtual full employment. Also, he had once been Bear Bryant's dermatologist.  Since then he has abandoned all sense — and his wife of 50 years.

There were lots of warning signs, first of which was, on inauguration day, he told a congregation in Montgomery that if you aren't Christian you couldn't be his spiritual brother or sister. During six years in office, that piety did not prevent him from groping a senior political advisor and later talking dirty to her on the phone while his soon-to-be-ex-wife recorded the conversation.

Before Bentley, there was Alabama House Speaker Mike Hubbard, who stormed the Alabama Statehouse, deposing more than a century of Democratic control there. He pushed through what was, at the time, toughest-in-the-nation ethics laws and, according to prosecutors, broke them.  Not only is he accused of breaking the laws he passed, but since then he has argued in court that the laws he passed don't apply to him because the laws he passed are unconstitutional.

On Friday, the Judicial Inquiry Commission charged [Alabama Chief Justice Roy] Moore with abusing his authority by directing Alabama probate judges to disregard the United States Supreme Court's decision that same-sex marriage is a right under the Constitution. That action means Moore is suspended from the bench and will face a trial before the Alabama Court of the Judiciary and possible removal from office.  For the second time. . . . Moore doesn't only believe God's coming back, but he thinks until then, the Almighty given him power of attorney over his affairs.  

The saddest thing is, this state has so much potential. In person — one-on-one — our people are decent and selfless. We make great music. We cook good food. We tell funny jokes. We love our children and would sacrifice everything for their futures.

But growing up in Alabama is like growing up in a broken home. We expect better of others instead of demanding better of ourselves. Rather than holding our elected officials to higher standards, we lower our expectations. We can't get over our insecurities, and we're suckers for anyone who comes along saying we're better than somebody else.

Maybe you think Alabama is a joke. I'm here to assure it's not.  If you're not careful, America, this could happen to you.

Alabama truly did not use to be this dysfunctional and corrupt.  The decline of the state directly tracts the increased influence of the godly folk and the GOP's willingness to pander to them and engage in shameless self-prostitution to them.  Now, it is happening nationwide.

The GOP Blackmail Caucus

Paul Krugman provides a much deserved condemnation of John Boehner - and the Republican Party as a whole - in a column in the New York Times.  His historical review is an indictment of what the GOP has become and just how insane and extreme the party base.  As I have noted before, in my view today's unfettered GOP extremism traces directly to the rise of the Christofascists and their white supremacist first cousins.  The bulk of the insanity, goes to the former. Living in a fantasy world, they have altered the GOP from a party of reason and logic to one where the embrace of ignorance and rejection of objective reality are celebrated.  Here are column highlights:

John Boehner was a terrible, very bad, no good speaker of the House. Under his leadership, Republicans pursued an unprecedented strategy of scorched-earth obstructionism, which did immense damage to the economy and undermined America’s credibility around the world.

Still, things could have been worse. And under his successor they almost surely will be worse. Bad as Mr. Boehner was, he was just a symptom of the underlying malady, the madness that has consumed his party.

For me, Mr. Boehner’s defining moment remains what he said and did as House minority leader in early 2009, when a newly inaugurated President Obama was trying to cope with the disastrous recession that began under his predecessor.

There was and is a strong consensus among economists that a temporary period of deficit spending can help mitigate an economic slump. In 2008 a stimulus plan passed Congress with bipartisan support, and the case for a further stimulus in 2009 was overwhelming. But with a Democrat in the White House, Mr. Boehner demanded that policy go in the opposite direction, declaring that “American families are tightening their belts. But they don’t see government tightening its belt.” And he called for government to “go on a diet.”

This was know-nothing economics, and incredibly irresponsible at a time of crisis; not long ago it would have been hard to imagine a major political figure making such a statement. Did Mr. Boehner actually believe what he was saying? Was he just against anything Mr. Obama was for? Or was he engaged in deliberate sabotage, trying to block measures that would help the economy because a bad economy would be good for Republican electoral prospects?

We’ll probably never know for sure, but those remarks set the tone for everything that followed. The Boehner era has been one in which Republicans have accepted no responsibility for helping to govern the country, in which they have opposed anything and everything the president proposes.

What’s more, it has been an era of budget blackmail, in which threats that Republicans will shut down the government or push it into default unless they get their way have become standard operating procedure.

All in all, Republicans during the Boehner era fully justified the characterization offered by the political analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, in their book “It’s Even Worse Than You Think.” Yes, the G.O.P. has become an “insurgent outlier” that is “ideologically extreme” and “unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science.” And Mr. Boehner did nothing to fight these tendencies. On the contrary, he catered to and fed the extremism.

So why is he out? Basically because the obstructionism failed.

[D]espite all Mr. Boehner’s efforts to bring him down, Mr. Obama is looking more and more like a highly successful president. For the base, which has never considered Mr. Obama legitimate — polling suggests that many Republicans believe that he wasn’t even born here — this is a nightmare. And all too many ambitious Republican politicians are willing to tell the base that it’s Mr. Boehner’s fault, that he just didn’t try blackmail hard enough.

This is nonsense, of course. In fact, the controversy over Planned Parenthood that probably triggered the Boehner exit — shut down the government in response to obviously doctored videos? — might have been custom-designed to illustrate just how crazy the G.O.P.’s extremists have become, how unrealistic they are about what confrontational politics can accomplish.

Mr. Boehner is quitting because he found himself caught between the limits of the politically possible and a base that lives in its own reality. But don’t cry for (or with) Mr. Boehner; cry for America, which must find a way to live with a G.O.P. gone mad. 

The GOP's Betrayal of America

I typically do not read columns by David Brooks in the New York Times because he is, in my view, generally wrong and takes a regressive position.  But even the perennially wrong can on occasion get it right as Brooks does today in a column bemoaning what has become of the Republican Party and American conservatism in general and how the trend is harming the nation and betraying its founding principles and mindset.  While he looks at the the trends in the conservative movement, he fails to look at the real root cause in my view: the rise of fundamentalist Christians within the GOP.  Personally, I generally view religion as a scourge on the soul of mankind.  But that scourge becomes a raging cancer when the religion is fundamentalist - whether Christian or Muslim - because it focuses on hatred of others and anyone and anything that threatens its ignorance embracing tenants.  The good news, if any, is that the GOP is hopefully headed towards a eventual much deserved death.  In the process its devotees are likely also hastening the decline of Christianity in America.  Here are excerpts from the column:

Today there are some conservative commentators and Republican politicians who talk a lot about American exceptionalism. But when they use the phrase they mean the exact opposite of its original meaning. In fact, they are effectively destroying American exceptionalism.

These commentators and candidates look backward to an America that is being lost. Ann Coulter encapsulated this attitude perfectly in her latest book title, “Adios, America.” This is the philosophy of the receding roar, the mourning for an America that once was and is now being destroyed by foreign people and ideas.

Out of this backward- and inward-looking mentality comes a desire to exclude. Donald Trump talks falsely and harshly about Hispanic immigrants. Ben Carson says he couldn’t advocate putting “a Muslim in charge of this nation.”

During George W. Bush’s first term there wasn’t much difference between how Democrats and Republicans viewed the overall immigration levels. Republicans were about eight percentage points more likely to be dissatisfied with the contemporary immigration flows. But now the gap is an astounding 40 percentage points. Eighty-four percent of Republicans and 44 percent of Democrats are dissatisfied with the current immigration level, according to Gallup surveys.

As Peter Wehner, a longtime conservative writer who served in the Bush administration, wrote in the magazine Commentary: “The message being sent to voters is this: The Republican Party is led by people who are profoundly uncomfortable with the changing (and inevitable) demographic nature of our nation. The G.O.P. is longing to return to the past and is fearful of the future. It is a party that is characterized by resentments and grievances, by distress and dismay, by the belief that America is irredeemably corrupt and past the point of no return. ‘The American dream is dead,’ in the emphatic words of Mr. Trump.”

It’s not exactly breaking news that this is ruinous to the long-term political prospects of the party. 

But it’s also bad for the spirit of conservatism. American conservatism has always been different than the conservatism found on continental Europe and elsewhere. There it was based on blood and soil, here on promise.

American free market and religious conservatives have traditionally embraced a style of nationalism that is hopeful and future minded. . . .But this hopeful nationalism is being supplanted in the G.O.P. by an anguished cry for a receding America.

This pessimism isn’t justified by the facts. As a definitive report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine recently found, today’s immigrants are assimilating as fast as previous ones. They are learning English. They are healthier than native-born Americans. Immigrant men age 18 to 39 are incarcerated at roughly one-fourth the rate of American men.

It is one thing to think Democratic policies are wrong. It is another to betray the essential American faith and take a reactionary attitude toward life. This is an attitude that sours the tongue, offends the eye and freezes the heart.