The Death of "Morning in America"

Republicans love to bloviate about Ronald Reagan yet the irony is that I doubt Reagan could win a nomination in today's GOP.  Despite his many drawbacks, Reagan simply was not sufficiently extreme and racist to be acceptable to the toxic base of the GOP.  A base that cannot see the common humanity of others, a base that seemingly wants a dictatorship, a base that revels in cruelty toward those deemed "other", and a base that daily discards revered American principals.  With another anniversary of Reagan's death close at hand, his daughter ponders what her father would think of what has become of America under today's GOP and Donald Trump.  She rightly believes that he would be repulsed. Indeed, any true patriot should be repulsed.  Here are column excerpts:

My father used to talk about a recurring dream he had in which he was walking into a beautiful white building with grand columns, knowing that it was his new home. When he was elected president, he said the image finally made sense to him. Once in the White House, he never had the dream again.

My strident protests against some of my father’s policies definitely got his attention, which was what I intended — but they also wounded him, which was not my intention. In his last years of life, when Alzheimer’s disease had stolen many things but not love, I was able to sit with him and tell him my regrets. I miss my father in deeply personal ways. I also miss the dignity that he brought to the task of leading this country, the deep respect he had for our democracy, and now, after so much time has passed, I miss how much he loved America.

People often ask me what he would say if he were here now. . . . I simply say he’d be pretty horrified at where we’ve come to. But as the June 5 anniversary of his death has drawn near, I’ve let myself imagine what he would say to the country he loved so much. 

I think he would remind us that America began as a dream in the minds of men who dared to envision a land that was free of tyranny, with a government designed and structured so that no one branch of government could dominate the others. It was a bold and brave dream. But, he would caution, no government is infallible. Our democracy, because it is founded on the authority of “We the people,” puts the burden of vigilance on all American citizens.

Countries can be splintered from within, he would say. It’s a sinister form of destruction that can happen gradually if people don’t realize that our Constitution will protect us only if the principles of that document are adhered to and defended. He would be appalled and heartbroken at a Congress that refuses to stand up to a president who not only seems ignorant of the Constitution but who also attempts at every turn to dismantle and mock our system of checks and balances. He would plead with Americans to recognize that the caustic, destructive language emanating from our current president is sullying the dream that America once was. And in a time of increased tensions in the world, playing verbal Russian roulette is not leadership, it’s madness. He would point to one of the pillars of our freedom — a free press — which sets us apart from dictatorships and countries ruled by despots. He didn’t always like the press — no president does — but the idea of relentlessly attacking the media as the enemy would never have occurred to him. And if someone else had done so, he wouldn’t have tolerated it.

He would ask us to think about the Statue of Liberty and the light she holds for immigrants coming to America for a better life. Immigrants like his ancestors, who persevered despite prejudice and signs that read “No Irish or dogs allowed.” There is a difference between immigration laws and cruelty. He believed in laws; he hated cruelty. [H]e would ask the people of this country to reflect on his own words from his famous speech, “A Time for Choosing,”delivered in 1964: “You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.”

Today's GOP and the Trump/Pence regime are sentencing the nation and in no small part, the world to darkness.  They must be stopped. 

What Happened to Responsible Conservatives

Once upon a time conservatives and Republicans put country first and were advocates for science, knowledge and education.   They even believed in the social safety net.  Those days are gone and today's hideous version of the Republican Party and the foul occupant of the White House now seem hell bent to turn America into something resembling a banana republic from the 1950's.  One cannot help but wonder what the hell happened.  In my view, two things: (i) the Christofascist take over of the GOP base, and (ii) the GOP's embrace of white supremacy.  To the Christofascists, science, knowledge and good education are a threat since they run the risk of enlightening would be adherence to a toxic dogma that the entire Christofascist worldview is based on fantasy.  As for the embrace of racism, the party is now obsessed with an us versus them mindset where "winning" requires that others lose, both in terms of civil rights and whose is viewed as a"real American."  As a column in the Washington Post reminds us, things were not always like this:

The past several days underscore why not only political progressives but genuine moderates are at their wit’s end with the Republican Party and what passes for contemporary American conservatism.

If conservatism in the United States has claimed to stand for anything, it is the idea that government authority should be limited. Conservatives regularly argue (especially when Democrats are in the White House) that the executive’s clout should be checked and that legitimate law enforcement authorities deserve our respect, particularly when they are investigating abuses of power.

The behavior of House Republicans in demanding former FBI director James B. Comey’s memos about his conversations with President Trump, which were subsequently leaked to the media, shows a GOP that has abandoned all principle. It is willing to do whatever it takes to protect a president who has no regard for the truth, the law or established norms.

Any doubts that Republicanism and conservatism have given themselves over to one man, his whims and his survival were dispelled by the GOP’s use of the congressional oversight process to undermine a legitimate probe into a hostile power’s interference in our elections.

As it happens, the actual memos are embarrassing to Trump and support Comey’s veracity. And if the Republicans’ obstructionist triumvirate of Reps. Devin Nunes of California, Bob Goodlatte of Virginia and Trey Gowdy of South Carolina had hoped to prove that Comey leaked classified information, the memos reveal exactly the opposite.

It should be stunning that the chairs of the Intelligence, Judiciary and Oversight committees are more interested in doing Trump’s bidding than in figuring out how Vladimir Putin may have helped to elect our current president. It’s possible to imagine that, somewhere, Ronald Reagan is weeping.

The ongoing frustration of many of us who really did respect conservatism once upon a time is not just about the movement’s capitulation to Trump. It is also triggered by the supposedly substantive side of the news: The only thing Republicans in Congress know how to do now that their corporate tax cut has proved to be unpopular is — to propose more tax cuts. There is an emptiness where problem-solving conservatism used to be.

In the period when democracy planted deep roots in Western Europe and was thriving in the United States, conservative parties were led by figures such as Dwight Eisenhower in the United States, Harold Macmillan in Britain, Konrad Adenauerin West Germany and Charles de Gaulle in France.

Applying the insights of this more responsible version of conservatism to our time would lead us to seek the best approaches to the very discontents that helped put Trump in the White House in the first place — for example, growing inequality. A 2016 Congressional Research Service report found that income inequality has been increasing since 1970. And between 2000 and 2015, incomes actually went down for the bottom 60 percent of earners. There are many causes of division and resentment in our country, and this is surely one of them.

We need a politics where the democratic left and right compete over who can most effectively and efficiently excise this social cancer from our body politic. Such a debate could be both instructive and productive.

Alas, except for a small, honorable cadre of writers and think-tankers, the American right has taken itself out of the game. Our politics will remain broken as long as conservatism confines its energies to cutting taxes and defending a reckless president at all costs.

Mass Shooters: Entitlement and Rage Nurtured by the Far Right

Not everything that is wrong in America today flows from the rise of the far right in the Republican party and right wing "news" outlets such as Fox News and Breitbarth deliberately fan the flames of hate and resentment on the part of the ugliest elements of the GOP base: white supremacists, Neo-Nazis, and Christian extremists/evangelical Christians.  All of these elements of the right wing base experience rage that they are not adequately respected, blame their societal isolation or lack of economic good fortune on others be it blacks, women, gays, immigrants, etc.  They are never the ones at blame regardless of their actions, be it dropping out of school, mistreatment of others or the embrace of ignorance.  Sadly, today's Republican Party is only too happy to play upon this rage and hatred factor and wittingly or not, nurtures those most threatening to society, including mass shooters who almost invariably are disaffected white males., many of whom are obsessed with guns. A piece in Salon looks at this connection between the white male mass shooters and today's political and social far right.  Here are excerpts:

Many mass shooters end up shot dead, either by their own hand or by the police. Unlike serial killers, they aren't generally available for post-crime interviews by psychologists or criminologists. But the Washington Post published a profile last week of Jesse Osborn, who survived his attempt to become a nationally famous school shooter on Feb. 14, 2016, when he was tackled by a voluntary fireman after Osborn's gun jammed during his attempted mass murder at an elementary school. He was 14 years old at the time. His rampage left two people injured and two others dead -- his father and a six-year-old boy. Osborn himself is alive and on trial for murder.

Osborn offers "extraordinary insight into the mind of an American school shooter." Those who have studied him report that Osborn shows little to no signs of remorse, and in fact seems proud of the will to dominate that led him to his crimes. He "considered himself the victim of an unfair world," Cox writes, and tried to manipulate psychologists by faking autism and schizophrenia, unsuccessfully, and claiming, again unsuccessfully, to be a victim of bullies.

But what struck me is how much Osborn — like many other mass shooters, including Nikolas Cruz, the shooter in Parkland, Florida — reminds me of the army of right-wing trolls that has grown online: The ones who call themselves "edgelords," who decorate their profiles with Pepe the Frog and who call Donald Trump their "god emperor." Like mass shooters, alt-right trolls are predominantly white men of various ages, but leaning young, fueled mainly by a belief in their own superiority and resentment that the rest of the world doesn't seem to respect it.

They are unapologetic in their sadism, relishing the pain and trauma they attempt to inflict on "libtards" and "snowflakes." Mass shooters get competitive about their body counts, and online trolls treat harassment like a game, where they "win" by maximizing the amount of abuse they dish out.

Mass shooters should be understood, it seems, as the radical edge of a larger trend of celebratory sadism spiked with right-wing politics -- a great boiling-over of rage from young and disaffected white men who believe they are victims and take great glee in trying to dominate, abuse and even assault others. This brings up extremely serious questions about the role the larger conservative movement is playing in allowing this toxicity to fester and grow.

In 2014, researchers published a paper demonstrating that online trolls showed high rates of what psychologists call the "Dark Tetrad" of personality traits, . . . "Machiavellianism (willingness to manipulate and deceive others), narcissism (egotism and self-obsession), psychopathy (the lack of remorse and empathy), and sadism (pleasure in the suffering of others)." [The piece correctly notes that the current occupant of the White House displays all of these traits.]  

Mass shooters and the alt-right intertwine directly in many other ways as well. A recent Southern Poverty Law Center report counted 43 murders at the hands of alt-right-aligned killers in the past four years. . . . Perhaps even more tellingly, the alt-right has made a habit of swarming after any high-profile mass shooting, targeting the survivors for re-victimization. Often within minutes of the first news reports, right-wing trolls will begin spreading rumors online that the survivors and family members of victims are "crisis actors," and may even encourage their followers to harass these people.

That we have seen an apparent surge in sadism, rooted in white male entitlement, is troubling enough. What makes the situation worse is the way the larger conservative movement has, almost habitually, run interference for not just alt-right trolls but, to some extent, the mass shooters who represent the most extreme expression of the same problem.

Whenever alt-right conspiracy theorists and white supremacists face actual consequences for their behavior — social media bans, public protests or just higher security expenses at public events — more mainstream conservatives, including Fox News pundits, have been willing to defend them, usually by declaring their "free speech" is being attacked by "snowflake" liberals.

Similarly, whenever there's a mass shooting, the conservative press snaps into action, seeking to minimize the situation and dissuade any effort to stop future mass shooters by disarming them.

In both cases, conservative pundits play a manipulative game, where they swear up and down that while they disapprove of the actions in question — whether it's bigoted harassment or mass murder — their supposed commitment to principles like "free speech" or "right to bear arms" prevents them from supporting even mild, common-sense efforts to rein in the bad behavior in question.

It's high time to understand mass shootings as not an anomaly, but as part of a larger ecosystem of viciousness that is growing in our culture, and has been shielded and fed by a conservative movement more interested in retaining power than confronting these larger social problems. Until we make these connections, and take actions are taken to counter the epidemic of white male sadism and rage, we can expect these terrible events to keep on happening.

The Republican Party Has Become Unrecognizable

Not to beat a dead horse, but I come form a family of (now former) Republicans.  I was once an activist in the Republican Party.  The party that existed in those days is dead and gone and what now parades under the name "Republican" has become something hideous and unrecognizable.  As I often said, when did the Party begin to morph into something horrible?  In my view, when the evangelical Christians and fundamentalist Christian, perhaps a majority of whom are racists, hijacked the Party with the aid of establishment types who thought they could control the unwashed and insane.  With the election of Der Trumpenführer and now Roy Moore, the death of the GOP of old is complete. Religious extremism, hatred of anyone deemed "other" - which includes anyone who is not a white, heterosexual right wing "Christian" - and a desire to bring back a combination of the Gilded Age and the Jim Crow era are what now define the Republican Party. Compassion is gone, decency is gone, along with any shred of actually being guided by the Gospel message of the New Testament. The only true deference made to the Bible is through cherry picking Old Testament texts to demonize others and justify hatred of others. I am not the only one horrified by this transformation.  Joe Scarborough, a former conservative Congressman, laments the death of the GOP of old in a column in the Washington Post.  Here are excerpts:

Who are you? I’ve got to say that I really don’t know anymore. It’s kind of a strange turn of events since we went to the same public schools across the Deep South, then attended the same state colleges, cheering wildly on Saturdays for our favorite SEC teams, and spent Sunday mornings together in the same Southern Baptist pews. We even went to Training Union on Sunday nights. Remember how our conversations always seemed to turn to politics? How we criticized Bill Clinton for playing so fast and loose with the truth? And how shamefully Democrats turned a blind eye to his fabrications and outright lies? Man, how could those Democrats sleep at night?

And what about how the guy we voted for, George W. Bush, running up the federal debt and launching ill-planned foreign adventures overseas? We swore that the next time Republicans got in power, we would pressure them to cut spending, attack the debt and put America’s foreign policy on a restrained and reasonable path.

We were united by the shared belief that politicians must put country above party, right? Right? What happened to you?

The guys I came up with in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and northwest Florida for more than 40 years would never boo a former American prisoner of war — especially one who refused to return home until the enemy released every one of his buddies in the prison camp. . . . why would you even think of booing a man, now fighting for his life, who showed that true grit in real life?

But boo Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) you did, at the behest of President Trump during a rally in Alabama last week.

Trump has been “physically mocking” the thumbs-down gesture McCain used to deliver the deciding vote against the Republican health-care bill in July. Did that mocking involve an imitation of McCain’s stiff arm movements? . . . .  McCain got the hell beaten out of him by the communists who held him in the Hanoi Hilton for more than five years.

At that same time, Trump was dodging the draft by claiming that bone spurs stopped him from serving his country in uniform. And yet this crippling condition didn’t stop the spoiled Ivy League student from playing football, tennis and golf. After four draft deferments, Trump graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1968 on the same day 40 U.S. servicemen were killed in Vietnam.

Meanwhile, McCain continued receiving the beatings that would forever leave him incapable of lifting his arms over his head. He kept enduring torture because he refused to leave his band of brothers behind.

Do you have that kind of character? If you booed McCain at last week’s rally, don’t bother answering. Someone has obviously failed you in your life . . . . And if you still go to church, you may also want to pray for all those around you who put tribal politics ahead of basic humanity.

Then maybe you should drive home and tell your children the story of John McCain’s sacrifice. If you can teach your children that lesson of heroism, there’s a chance they might grow up to have more character than the president you now praise.

 The challenge is to determine (i) how to try to change minds and (ii) in the interim, how to interact with people who seemingly are as morally challenged as the "good Germans" who through complacency and/or prejudice allowed Hitler and the Nazis to rise to power.  Going to church each week and feigning piety and religiosity is nothing more than hypocrisy writ large when one no longer cares about basic humanity or the lives of those in need. 

Anti-intellectual Religious Wing-Nuts Run the GOP

The so-called GOP establishment - namely, money men on Wall Street and pundits who like to contemplate their navels - like to think that they still run the Republican Party, but those days are over as evidenced by the rise of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.  Instead, the party is ow run by ignorance embracing religious fanatics, people the country club Republicans of my parents generation would have viewed with horror and deemed socially unacceptable. Why anyone in this segment of society has remained in the GOP is baffling to me. A piece in Salon looks at the evil posed by religion.  While the focus applies to Islam, the warning and call to opposition applies to virulent forms of Christianity now so favored by the Republican Party which has been taken over by religious fanatics and those who take pride in their ignorance.  Here are highlights:

Faith-inspired anarchy and bloodshed continue to spread around the globe, with no letup in sight.

January has proved especially sanguinary. Three days after President Obama’s State of the Union reminder to us all that he took out Osama bin Laden, al-Qaida (specifically, al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb) sprang back into action and launched one of its most lethal assaults in recent years, laying siege to a hotel in the West African country of Burkina Faso, killing 30, injuring 156, and taking hostage 176.

Yet here at home . . . . Those same faith-crazed seditionists are more entrenched than ever, and now pledge to “never, ever” return the Malheur facilities to the federal government. This they do without the slightest resistance from Washington – a matter that has irked Oregon’s Governor Kate Brown, who has called on the federal government to “move quickly to end the occupation and hold all of the wrongdoers accountable.”

In sum, these are times that try rationalists’ souls. Yet our politicians are offering precious little frank discourse on the one thing inspiring all the above-mentioned instances of murder and mayhem – religion. Which is to say, a congeries of ideologies mandating, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, belief in fantastic, often ludicrous, unverifiable assertions about the cosmos and mankind’s place in it.

Such anti-intellectual constructs would attract scorn and derision were they to obtain in any other sphere of human endeavor. Take science. If I were to proclaim, without offering a whit of proof, that the law of gravity does not apply to me, that I disobey it at will, that I have always disobeyed it, and that I demand all and sundry accept the veracity of my absurd proclamation, and respect it, cherish it, and even kill in its name, I would rightly be thought insane. 

Thomas Paine said, “The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a lunatic asylum.” He was right. I would, though, rephrase and update his statement: Those who, despite the torrents of evidence flowing forth from biology, physics and the other natural sciences, persist in believing the preposterous postulates of Abrahamic religions stand in urgent need of an intervention consisting of one treatment: forthright free speech from rationalists about their cherished delusions. We and our planet have ever less and less time to spare.

This question would be more amenable to resolution if the president would just come clean and state, flat-out, that the “killers and fanatics” of ISIS are implementing a literalist interpretation of the Quran, with strong emphasis on jihad and martyrdom, and that this poses a huge problem for us all today, one we need to discuss openly.

We need to have a candid conversation about this and recognize that there is a correlation between scripture and [the Islamic State] . . . . We cannot shoot our way out of this.” Shifting the blame from Islamic doctrine to a bunch of armed crazies amounts to a slap in the face of those, like Nawaz, who are trying to reform the religion from within.

The overarching problem is, yes, religion, and the determination of almost everyone in power to accord it respect. But posit a mass outbreak of atheism in the Middle East, and what would happen to ISIS? To the Sunni-Shia schism?

Such a turn of events is, yes, improbable. But as I proposed above, religion can be cured with rationalist free speech. We should begin therapy now. This means, for starters, the cessation, in public and private life, of respect for all faiths, including Islam. Nonbelievers should stop pussyfooting around the Abrahamic creeds’ manifold absurdities – including, inter alia, a metaphysical despot siring a kid with a hapless earthling virgin, the notion that our morality derives from a message supernaturally chiseled on slabs of stone, and that a member of our species soared heavenward on a winged ungulate – and let believers know what they really think, recalling, always, that they are helping them become the atheists of tomorrow.

For now, though, we do need Thomas Paine’s lunatic asylum. Potential inmates, to be sure, we have aplenty. But no matter how much damage the faith-deranged are doing these days, the rising tide of godlessness is with us.

We need to treat the deeply religious as mental patients in need of treatment and end all deference or politeness towards them.  Deferring to those who believe in myths and fantasies is no way to lead a 21st century superpower.   We are living in 2016, not 1016.

You Cannot Be a Republican and a True Christian

As I have noted numerous times before, the reverse Robin Hood policies of today's Republican Party and that party's willingness to throw the poor, the sick, the homeless and the less fortunate literally in the gutter is the antithesis of the message of Christ in terms of his directives as to what one should do with one's wealth.  Yet despite the polar opposites between the GOP's social agenda and the Gospel message of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and sheltering the homeless, who is it that flocks to the GOP standard?  The "godly Christians" who wear their religiosity on their sleeves and seem most defined by their hatred of others - i.e., gays, blacks, Hispanics, non-Christians, in short anyone who doesn't look and believe just as they do.  The hypocrisy and the damage being done to the Christian brand, if you will, is staggering.  Like the author, Anne Rice, I do not want to be called a "Christian" because the connotation is becoming so foul and negative thanks to this self-anointed folks.  A piece in Alternet makes the case that if one is a true Christian and follower of the Gospel message, it is impossible to be a Republican.  Here are excerpts:

No one in American life today proclaims their allegiance to Christ more conspicuously than those who have rejected most of what Christ actually taught: Republicans. The modern Republican Party’s hell-bent embodiment of nearly everything Christ warned against has become so serious that we have to call it out. You cannot be a Republican and a Christian.

Of course, it wasn’t always this way. There was a time, maybe even as recently as the early 1990s, when to support the Republican Party was not altogether evil. And further back, of course, things were even more different.  Republicans used to be: moderate, business-minded civic boosters and unapologetic patriots who were the linchpins and bulwarks of small towns across the Midwest, the enthusiastic backers of projects for the civic good . . . persons of compassionate conscience, inveterate doers of good deeds.

Even today, there are probably some Republicans who still fit that description. The problem is that they are for all practical purposes invisible in American public life, and if their party found out about them, they would be hounded out of it. If they dared to compete in the lunatic talent show of Republican primary politics, they wouldn’t stand a chance.

The reason that you cannot be a Republican and a Christian is that today’s Republican Party doesn’t appear to stand for anything but what Christ strenuously rejected, like organized violence, self-righteous division, and greed.

It’s not hard to tell the difference between who is and isn’t really a Christian, and Republicans, you’re not.

• In Christ, we’re talking about someone who said turn the other cheek (Matthew 5:39) and that all those who take the sword will perish with the sword (Matthew 26:52).

• We’re talking about someone who warned “judge not, that ye be not judged” (Matthew 7:1) and urged people not to look for a mote in someone else’s eye while they have a beam stuck in their own (Matthew 7:3).

• We’re talking about someone who said, “woe unto you that are rich!” (Luke 6:24) and, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” (Mark 10:25) Did Jesus ever have anything good to say about people who hoard wealth?

It’s ironic that they have sometimes been referred to as “values voters,” since their values are so devoid of value, at least from the Christian point of view. Their main interest in Christianity seems to be an expectation of being rewarded in the afterlife despite bad behavior while alive.

The impossibility of squaring what Christ actually taught with the words and deeds of today’s Republican so-called Christians is what makes this all fair game. These people are hypocrites. These people conveniently ignore most of what Christ actually said.. . . . many of them, given a chance, would re-crucify Christ if he came back today and taught the still-radical ideas he apparently advocated.

You can’t have it both ways. You have to choose, because, today, you cannot be both a Republican and a Christian.

As I said, if being a "Christian" means being like the Christofascist of the GOP base, please do NOT call a Christian.

GOP Senate Environment Committee Rants that Climate Change a Hoax

We had plenty of warning that batshit craziness would ensue once Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) became the chairman of the Senate Environment Committee and Inhofe has wasted no time in demonstrating that he's lost touch with objective reality.   Inhofe took to the Senate floor for a long speech about how he believes human-caused climate change is fake. Never mind that the consensus of scientists (other than those funded by the oil industry) is nearly unanimous.  Think Progress looks at Inhofe's lunacy.  Here are highlights:

Wednesday was a big day for Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK). In the morning, he officially took the gavel as chairman of the Senate’s Environment Committee. In the afternoon, he took the Senate floor for a long speech about how human-caused climate change is fake.

[T]he speech has everything. References to the oft-debunked “ClimateGate” stolen e-mail “scandal”, a poster of a Time Magazine cover from 1974 claiming an ice age is coming, and multiple references to former Vice President Al Gore. It has a mention of a survey of weather-casters who think global warming is caused by natural variation, but does not mention that weather-casters are not climate scientists. It even includes the claim that the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “started” the whole idea that climate change is happening . . .

Inhofe says he has compiled a list of 4,000 “renowned scientists” scientists who disagree (“this is all in my website,” he said). Inhofe’s list actually has 650 people, some of whom are television meteorologists, geologists, anthropologists, and even a man with no college degree. 

Conversely, one of the most recent peer-reviewed studies on the state of climate science showed that out of 4000 abstracts from peer-reviewed papers published in the past 21 years that stated a position on the cause of global warming — 97 percent of these endorsed the point that it was human-caused. In the video, Inhofe says this is “just not true.”

Don’t expect this speech to be the end of climate denial in the Senate. Indeed, Inhofe ended his speech by promising more of it, citing his new position as head of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

 The Republican Party that I grew up in is truly dead and gone.  Insanity, racism, bigotry and the embrace of ignorance are now the GOP norm.  As for Inhofe, he belongs in a mental institution.

Additional GOP climate change deniers

Are Today's Republicans/Conservatives Reactionaries?

Once upon a time conservatives respected education, science, and knowledge and did not daily deny objective reality if it collided with mythical religious belief.   Those were the types on conservatives I grew up with in the Republican of yesteryear.   Now, to be a Republican means joyously embracing ignorance, rejecting science, and sticking one's head in the sand in the face of measurable evidence.  What caused the change?  From my perspective, the rise of the Christofascists in the GOP.  Anything and anyone that doesn't conform to their fantasy world religious beliefs must be rejected and attacked no matter how negative the consequences.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the phenomenon.  Here are excerpts:

Evidence doesn’t matter for the “debate” over climate policy, where I put scare quotes around “debate” because, given the obvious irrelevance of logic and evidence, it’s not really a debate in any normal sense. And this situation is by no means unique. Indeed, at this point it’s hard to think of a major policy dispute where facts actually do matter; it’s unshakable dogma, across the board. And the real question is why.

Before I get into that, let me remind you of some other news that won’t matter.  First, consider the Kansas experiment. Back in 2012 Sam Brownback, the state’s right-wing governor, went all in on supply-side economics: He drastically cut taxes, assuring everyone that the resulting boom would make up for the initial loss in revenues. Unfortunately for his constituents, his experiment has been a resounding failure. The economy of Kansas, far from booming, has lagged the economies of neighboring states, and Kansas is now in fiscal crisis.

So will we see conservatives scaling back their claims about the magical efficacy of tax cuts as a form of economic stimulus? Of course not. If evidence mattered, supply-side economics would have faded into obscurity decades ago. Instead, it has only strengthened its grip on the Republican Party.

[W]e have evidence that the number of Americans experiencing financial distress due to medical expenses is also dropping fast.  All this is utterly at odds with dire predictions that reform would lead to declining coverage and soaring costs. So will we see any of the people claiming that Obamacare is doomed to utter failure revising their position? You know the answer.

And the list goes on. On issues that range from monetary policy to the control of infectious disease, a big chunk of America’s body politic holds views that are completely at odds with, and completely unmovable by, actual experience. And no matter the issue, it’s the same chunk.
The question, as I said at the beginning, is why. Why the dogmatism? Why the rage? And why do these issues go together, with the set of people insisting that climate change is a hoax pretty much the same as the set of people insisting that any attempt at providing universal health insurance must lead to disaster and tyranny?

Well, it strikes me that the immovable position in each of these cases is bound up with rejecting any role for government that serves the public interest.

And why this hatred of government in the public interest? Well, the political scientist Corey Robin argues that most self-proclaimed conservatives are actually reactionaries. That is, they’re defenders of traditional hierarchy — the kind of hierarchy that is threatened by any expansion of government, even (or perhaps especially) when that expansion makes the lives of ordinary citizens better and more secure.

[W]e’re living in a political era in which facts don’t matter. This doesn’t mean that those of us who care about evidence should stop seeking it out. But we should be realistic in our expectations, and not expect even the most decisive evidence to make much difference.

Ways Christian Fundamentalists Hold Americans Back

With the arrival of the holiday season one sees even more false piety and self-congratulatory religiosity from fundamental Christians. The hypocrisy truly goes off the charts.  It's enough to make one want to vomit.   But besides seeking to ruin this time of year for everyone who does not subscribe to the hate and fear based religious beliefs, these "godly folk" due much to hold back America - which shouldn't be a surprise since these folks seem at times to worship ignorance and to view logic and reason as some form of communicable disease.  A piece in Salon reminds us of some of these other foul gifts from fundamentalist Christians to the nation.  Here are some highlights:

Terrible Social Safety Net.   The Jesus Christ of the Bible is forever going on about the need to clothe and feed the poor, but the Jesus Christ of the right-wing imagination is just as quick to kick a homeless person as he is to give him a meal. One of the biggest projects of fundamentalist Christianity of the past few decades is to create a religious justification for slashing the social safety net. That’s why conservative Christians tend to ignore the hundreds of verses in the Bible about feeding the poor and focus instead on a single verse, 2 Thessalonians 3:10, which reads, “For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat.” . . . . conservative Christians have exploited the hell out of this verse to justify all manner of starving the poor and casting them out to sleep in the cold. 

Megachurch pastor John Hagee interprets the verse to mean that welfare should be ended. Rep. Kevin Cramer whips the verse out to justify starving SNAP-dependent children. And Rep. Stephen Fincher does the same, even though he wasn’t against taking millions in government aid himself, in the form of farm subsidies.

Creationism.  One of the most peculiar ways conservative Christians try to assert cultural dominance in the U.S. is to reject the theory of evolution and instead insist on some sort of Biblical literalism that suggests humans were created by God instead of evolved over time. Because of this, only Turkey has lower rates than the U.S. in the Western world of acceptance of the theory of evolution. Unfortunately, conservative Christians refuse to limit themselves to simply believing weird stuff. Instead, creationists are forever trying to find new ways to push their religious beliefs off as “science” in science classrooms, even though the courts have firmly told them they really can’t be doing this.

Battles Over Proselytizing in Schools.  Creationism is just a small part of a larger, ongoing hunger the Christian right has for access to children in public schools. The First Amendment should forbid exploiting the fact that kids are required to go to school to foist Christian beliefs on them, but the lure of all that captive audience means conservative Christians keep trying.

Convincing People to Vote Against Their Own Self-Interests.  The 2014 midterm elections were strange, in that nearly every time voters had a chance to vote directly on legislation–such as raising the minimum wage–they voted for the liberal side, but somehow Republicans still swept the elections. There are many complex reasons for this, but one of the most straightforward is that this is the problem with religiosity. Republicans thump the Bible hard and frequently, and that causes a lot of people to believe that a vote for Republicans is a “Christian” vote. The fact that Republicans refuse to walk the walk–attacking the poor to fluff up the coffers of the wealthy every chance they get–matters little. The religiosity is skin deep, but that’s all it needs to be to get votes.

The Modern Republican Party.  Many political observers are prone, at times, to wonder how it is that the Republican Party of the mid-20th century seems to have disappeared entirely. Gone are Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower or Gerald Ford, who while certainly conservative, at least seemed to feel somewhat beholden to things like “facts” or “desire to govern,” and instead it seems like every new crop of Republican politicians going into office is nuttier than the last.

This is almost entirely due to religion. The past few decades have been a stampede of religious fanatics into high office. The results are disturbing: Congressional panels convened to push the idea that contraception is some great moral evil, Congress forbidding the EPA from consulting actual scientists on science questions, anti-science fanatics heading science committees

Rape Culture.  Most of us are fully aware of how conservative Christian hostility to reproductive rights and gay rights is setting back progress, but it’s also true that Christianity plays a big role in making it hard to address the problem of sexual assault. Many conservative Christians eagerly spread the discredited myth that women make up rape in order to “cover up” for having consensual sex, which is what Rep. Todd Akin was doing when he claimed women cannot get pregnant from “legitimate rape.” But more than that, because of their hang-ups about sexuality, conservative Christians generally get wrapped up in the idea that the problem with sexual violence is less the violence part and more the sex part.

Witness, for instance, National Review writer Carl Eric Scott, when he writes about the problem of rape: He assumes that the problem is not forced sex, but consensual sex, and his “solutions” to the rape problem are all centered around trying to discourage consensual sex. . . . conservative Christians continue to confuse the issue about what exactly causes rape, by leading people to believe it’s just about too much sex when it’s actually about power and domination.

America - On the Road to Oligrachy

The far right members of the U.S. Supreme Court like to claim that they value tradition and similar claptrap as they work steadily to dismantle the progressive era.  These efforts work in parallel with the efforts of Republicans at both the state and federal level to aid the wealthy and destroy the social safety net.  Indeed, if there is any blue print that seems to back their agenda it is one for establishing an oligarchy or some modern day version of the Europe of old when an aristocracy controlled the bulk of power and wealth.  For everyone else, life was pretty brutal and often desperate.  A column in the Washington Post looks at this dangerous trend in America which is being further fueled by the the Supreme Court's inability to see the difference between supposed free speech and the buying of politicians by those like the Koch brothers. Here are excerpts:

An oligarchy, Webster’s dictionary tells us, is “a form of government in which the ruling power belongs to a few persons.” It’s a shame that the Republican majority on the Supreme Court doesn’t know the difference between an oligarchy and a democratic republic.

Yes, I said “the Republican majority,” violating a nicety based on the pretense that when people reach the high court, they forget their party allegiance. We need to stop peddling this fiction.

On cases involving the right of Americans to vote and the ability of a very small number of very rich people to exercise unlimited influence on the political process, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and his four allies always side with the wealthy, the powerful and the forces that would advance the political party that put them on the court. The ideological overreach that is wrecking our politics is now also wrecking our jurisprudence.

The court’s latest ruling in McCutcheon et al. v. Federal Election Commission should not be seen in isolation. (The “et al.,” by the way, refers to the Republican National Committee.) It is yet another act of judicial usurpation by five justices who treat the elected branches of our government with contempt and precedent as meaningless.

Notice how these actions work in tandem to make the wealthy more powerful and those who have suffered oppression and discrimination less powerful. You don’t need much imagination to see who benefits from what the court is doing.

Roberts’s McCutcheon ruling obliterates long-standing rules that limit the aggregate amounts of money the super-rich can contribute to various political candidates and committees in any one election cycle.

Those using the word “oligarchy” to describe the political regime the Supreme Court is creating are not doing so lightly. Combine McCutcheon with the decision in the Citizens United case and you can see that the court is systematically transferring more power to a tiny, privileged sliver of our people. 

I keep emphasizing the word “power” because the Roberts decision pretends that the concept is as distant from this issue as Pluto is from Earth. The philosopher Michael Walzer, in his book “Spheres of Justice,” made the essential distinction: “Freedom of speech, press, religion, assembly: none of these require money payments; none of them are available at auction; they are simply guaranteed to every citizen.

In his McCutcheon opinion, Roberts piously declares: “There is no right more basic in our democracy than the right to participate in electing our political leaders.” This lovely commitment escaped him entirely last summer when he and his allies threw out Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act. Suddenly, efforts to protect the right of minorities “to participate in electing our political leaders” took second place behind all manner of worries about how Congress had constructed the law.

Thus has this court conferred on wealthy people the right to give vast sums of money to politicians while undercutting the rights of millions of citizens to cast a ballot.