Only in today's Republican Party could a candidate as demonstrably unfit - and I would add insane - as Ben Carson be at or near the top of the polls of GOP voters. I like many are now wondering how the man ever got through medical school and practiced medicine at a top rated hospital. With every passing day it seems new lies are being exposed and more lunacy is coming to light. Yet despite all the damning disclosures, the Christofascist element of the GOP base in particular clings to supporting Carson and acts as if the exposure of the man's nonstop untruths is all some liberal plot. Somehow, Carson is absolved from having stated the lies in the first place. The Republican Party has indeed become an insane asylum being run by the inmates. Here are highlights from a piece in Salon that look at the unfitness of Carson:
Ben Carson has had a very strange couple of weeks. Let’s take a
moment to review precisely what the arguable front-runner for the 2016
Republican presidential nomination has undergone since the CNBC debate
in late October. At that debate, he was challenged on his relationship
with a shady nutritional supplement company that sells fart pills
to very sick people. Carson denied any relationship existed, despite
the many paid speeches and promotional videos he did for the group. In
the days that followed, it was revealed that Carson thinks the Great
Pyramids of Egypt were built by Joseph to store grain – a biblical literalist view that is supported by precisely zero historical or archaeological evidence.
But hey we’re not done yet. . . . This string of scarcely believable events culminated on Friday with a Politico report that Carson’s oft-repeated claim to have been offered a “full scholarship” to West Point was untrue.
All this follows months and months of other weird Carson behaviors –
his repeated and inappropriate invocations of the Nazis and slavery to
attack policies he doesn’t like, his Bible-based tax plan, his “book tour” in the middle of the campaign, his insistence that a Muslim should not be president, his ignorance of basic economic matters, his plan to have the government investigate “propaganda” on college campuses, and the fact that his “campaign” increasingly resembles an elaborate direct-marketing scam. And that’s only a few select tiles from the rich mosaic of Ben Carson’s strangeness.
One
might think that a candidate with this many warning lights and trouble
signs would have crashed fairly quickly, or never even taken off in the
first place. But the Republican Party and its voters have declared war
on the very concept of competent, reliable governance, which has
provided space for “outsider” candidates who are manifestly unfit for
the office of the presidency to seize the GOP electorate and retain a
firm hold on it. Now that he’s at the top of the GOP 2016 polling, he’s
facing a great deal more scrutiny, and people are starting to wonder
whether Carson will survive as a front-runner for the presidential
nomination.
The obvious impulse for conservatives is to rally around Carson and
protect him from the nasty liberal media and its pernicious biases. The
derpier corners of the conservative media are already doing exactly
that, arguing that media scrutiny of Carson’s past is motivated by racial hatred and part of a broader scheme to attack black conservatives.
But when you look at the entire Ben Carson experience to date, what’s really needed is more scrutiny,
and more and better explanations for why, exactly, he thinks he’s ready
to serve as president. Carson rose to prominence based on his inspiring
life story and his willingness to be harshly critical of President
Obama. But, as Paul Waldman notes,
the more we hear from Carson on policy matters and issue of national
importance, the more it becomes clear that he frequently has no idea
what he’s talking about, is “impervious to evidence,” and is unwilling
to entertain the notion that his convictions may be wrong. His policy
platform is stuffed with grandiose and insane proposals that are
completely untethered to the reality of how governments work and violate
principles of basic mathematics, but he argues that he’ll accomplish
them anyway because he believes in himself.
It feels safe to assume, given the mood of the Republican electorate,
that Carson won’t have too difficult a time enduring these unwelcome
probes into his background and bugnuts worldview. Donald Trump’s
enduring popularity in the Republican primary already stands as a
stinging indictment of the direction the GOP has taken.
I honestly do not know how any sane and rational person can remain a Republican when the party has become so insane that someone like Carson can rise to the top of the polls. I did not think it possible, but Carson is beginning to make Michelle Bachmann look sane. Few things are more dangerous than an idiot who thinks he/she is a genius.
The idiocy and arrogance of Ban Carson continues to be on display as even the right wing Wall Street Journal called out Carson for his wrongly claiming the Founding Fathers "had no
elected office experience" even though many had held elected positions in colonial assemblies and other offices. What is perhaps most disturbing about Carson is his arrogance when caught in a lie of false statement that even political neophytes understand to be untrue. A piece in Talking Points Memo looks at the disturbing phenomenon. Here are excerpts:
It's one of those things you learn when you first get a feel for
politics: the things that count, that get stuck in people's minds and
affect real outcomes are not necessarily or even often the most
important ones. They're ones that resonate with basic, familiar or
humorous parts of our common experience - like pyramids. I doubt very
many people remember that Ben Carson also said that he believed that
Satan encouraged Charles Darwin to write The Origin of Species,
a claim that is at least as nuts as the pyramids comment and frankly,
quite a bit more evil. But pyramids is different, even though it's
completely irrelevant to basically anything. Everybody knows about the
pyramids. . . . . you don't need to be a genius to know that
of all the places you might try to store grain, inside a rock would be
one of the most challenging.
But there's something else that I think is important about
the pyramids flareup for understanding Carson and his candidacy. For his
supporters, one of Carson's greatest attributes is his soft-spoken
humility. Yet what we really see in Carson is a compounding mix of
ignorance and arrogance.Some of Carson's views are rooted in his
religious subculture. They may seem odd or even crazy to people outside
of that subculture. But they're different beliefs, not ignorance per se. But that's not the case with imagining that pyramids are hollow and used for grain storage.
It's not the case with claiming that none of the country's founders had
experience in elected office - a demonstrably ridiculous claim. It's not
the case with claiming that half of Medicare spending goes to fraud.
The exception that proves the rule came earlier this week when Carson
conceded he really wasn't familiar with US-Cuba immigration policy - a
very striking gap in knowledge for a contender for the GOP presidential
nomination.
When you watch Carson navigating the public square you see someone who
is remarkably ignorant about huge swathes of human knowledge and
particularly information about US government and public policy. But you
also see someone who's quite confident he's very knowledgable. So
he's both remarkably ignorant and either stunningly unaware of his
ignorance or totally indifferent to it. You might even say he is militantly ignorant. In all aspects of life, that is a dangerous combination. And the combination is almost always rooted in arrogance.
The key is having some realistic grasp of what you do know and what you don't know.
That not only helps you avoid big mistakes and embarrassing gaffes,
it also helps you learn. Because you can't learn about things you think
you already know.
One of the things that stood out to me about the pyramid debacle was "secular progressives" are welcome to ridicule his theory
about the pyramids. But Carson really has no 'theory'. He says that the
ancient Egyptians stored grain inside solid rock. That makes no sense. . . . the issue here is less ignorance than arrogance, something which,
paradoxically, many of Carson's supporters believe is a bad trait he
lacks.
To me it is not surprising that the Christofasicts love Carson. The reason is simple. They embrace ignorance daily and more or less celebrate the fact that they do so as they utter nonsense about the Bible being "inerrant" or the "devine word of god" even though its was first written by ignorant herders and many of its claims have been proven untrue by science. Both Carson and his supporters are very, very scary.
If one looks at so-called establishment Republicans floundering in their pursuit of the GOP presidential nomination there is an air of desperation. They are peddling the same old GOP policies that have not worked since the 1980's even as the world has changed radically and the country's demographics have changed significantly. Moreover, much of the party base has descended into utter insanity and now embrace ignorance, white supremacy and religious extremism that is anathema to the once stereotypical country club Republicans. A piece in Politico by Michael Lind, author of Up From Conservatism: Why the Right is Wrong for America, looks at how the GOP went off the rails and argues that it is time for the party to throw away the 50 year old playbook and embark on a new course. Here are highlights:
There
is an air of desperation out there on the GOP campaign trail. It’s impossible
not to sense it in the kinds of things being said by teetering establishment
Republican candidates like Jeb Bush and John Kasich, both of whom started off the last debate virtually
pleading with base voters to come to their senses about Donald Trump, who is
barely identifiable as a conservative by any standard measure of ideology.
What happened to the conservative movement?”It’s an
excellent question. And maybe it’s time we stopped blaming the lack of traction
experienced by establishment conservatives like Bush, Kasich, and Chris
Christie on things like personality and debating skill, and started talking
again about that thing known as “the conservative movement.” Maybe the real problem is less Jeb’s
awkwardness, or Kasich’s personality, or Christie’s New Jersey bravado, than an
issue that runs much deeper. The establishment candidates in this year’s
Republican primary nomination campaign are out there reciting all the formulas
that worked for Ronald Reagan
. . . . Yet the old-time conservative
religion doesn’t seem to fire up the congregation
[N]o one is quite sure what the Republican Party’s vision is or should
be any more—least of all those hapless “establishment” presidential candidates
who are flailing away out on the trail. Today, the greatest obstacle to
majority status for the Republican Party may not be demography. It may be a
superannuated conservative ideology that is increasingly disconnected not only
from the values of the larger society but from the values and interests of
Republicans themselves.
Today’s
legacy right originated 60 years ago as “movement conservatism.” It was born with the founding of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s
National Review in 1955. In 1964, movement conservatives captured the
Republican presidential nomination for Barry Goldwater. They lost the general
election that year, but in 1980 and 1984
the White House was won by a leader of their movement, Ronald Reagan.
Yet
by the 1980s, movement conservatism was running out of steam. Its young radicals had mellowed into moderate statesman. By
the 1970s, Buckley and his fellow conservatives had abandoned the radical idea
of “rollback” in the Cold War and made their peace with the more cautious Cold
War liberal policy of containment.
Indeed,
it’s fair to say that the three great projects of the post-1955 right—repealing the New Deal, ultrahawkishness (first
anti-Soviet, then pro-Iraq invasion) and repealing the sexual/culture
revolution—have completely failed. Not
only that, they are losing support among GOP voters.
This is nothing less than a failure
of conservatism itself. After Buckley, Reagan and Goldwater had jettisoned much
of their earlier hard-edged conservatism, there should have be an intellectual
reformation on the American right in the 1990s. And there were a number of candidates for a redesigned conservative
ideology.
But
instead of fading from the scene and opening the way to new thinking,
old-fashioned Buckley-Goldwater-Reagan movement conservatism came back, in an
even more radical form in the 2000s,
catching me (by then an ex-neoconservative) and others by surprise.
When George W. Bush was elected,
like many others I expected him to combine the “kinder and gentler” domestic
policy of his father with the realist foreign policy symbolized by his father,
Jim Baker and Brent Scowcroft. Instead W. doubled down on all the elements of
the old “conservative movement” policy and left utter wreckage in his wake.
Reagan had wrecked the budget with his tax cuts for the rich, but later in his
two terms he presided over numerous tax increases. George W. Bush pushed through budget-wrecking tax cuts for the rich
again, invoking the same supply-side theory that had been discredited in the
1980s.
Following
9/11, George W. Bush not only invaded Afghanistan but also invaded and occupied
Iraq, which had nothing to do with the Al
Qaeda attacks and posed no serious threat to the U.S. or its allies. The country is still paying for that
mistake more than a decade later, and its reverberations have robbed
neoconservatives of most of their credibility.
The original conservative movement
of Buckley and his allies was called “fusionism” because it sought to fuse
three strands: free-market economics, militant and militarized anticommunism,
and social traditionalism. Once conservatives wove this into a comprehensive
political vision. But as time went on
that vision started to come apart, and in the hands of different right-wing
groups each strand grew more and more radicalized and unrealistic.
[I]t is this incoherent package of
ideas that is being recycled by Republican presidential candidates today, more
than three decades after Reagan effectively abandoned it after winning the
White House. . . . . Thus you have the spectacle of insiders like Jeb Bush,
Kasich and Christie trying to sell
policies that were unworkable even in the Reagan years and since have become
far more radical and therefore less palatable.
The reformocons are the Gorbachevs
of the right. They want to reform the system without questioning its
fundamental premises. What the
Republican Party could use instead are a few Boris Yeltsins, willing to abandon
the old orthodoxy altogether and start afresh.
It’s
about time. Today, we are nearly twice as far
from 1962, when Milton Friedman published Capitalism and Freedom, than
Friedman was from the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932. When he
founded National Review in 1955, William F. Buckley, Jr. was closer in
time to William McKinley than to Barack Obama. The particular synthesis of free market economics, hawkish foreign
policy and social reaction that defined movement conservatism was the product
of particular circumstances half a century ago.
A piece in Salon looks at an issue that I believe is far more important than many want to concede: America's refusal to honestly look at and admit the ugly elements of its past, a past that includes slavery, Jim Crow, the mass extermination of Native Americans, the stealing of Hawaii, brutal child labor. The list goes on and on. Yet many, especially those on the far right, want to remember nothing of the ugly past and instead celebrate the myth of American exceptionalism. Refusing to face and admit the failures and horrors of the past set the stage for the same horrors to be repeated in one form or another. Look no farther than the anti-transgender campaign in Houston and its echo's of Nazi propaganda to see how the past continues to haunt us. What I see as the most frightening is the right's effort to rewrite and sanitize America's ugly past. Here are some excerpts from the column:
Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House one spring day in
1865, bringing an end to the noble Southern cause that his great
adversary, Ulysses S. Grant, described as “one of the worst for which a
people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.” But
despite appearances the Confederacy had not been defeated, and today’s
Republican Party represents its values almost perfectly. For reasons
that are both obvious and deeply perverse, people in small Northeastern towns
celebrate the Rebel flag their own ancestors shed blood to defeat.
Eight hundred thousand died in that war and slavery came to an end, at
least as a legal institution under that name. But with the defeat of
Reconstruction it was transformed into a long-term system of white
supremacy whose persistent effects, and whose very existence, must be
repeatedly denied or minimized or greeted with a puzzled shrug.
Why
are black people still overwhelmingly poor and poorly educated? Why are
they far more likely to live in substandard housing in poorly served
neighborhoods, far more likely to be victims of crime and to be shot by
police? One of our two political parties, the one that has been
increasingly dominated over the last three decades by the
great-great-grandchildren of the Confederacy, is pretty much built on
the premise that those problems can only be black people’s fault—
or, in the more beneficent view, can be blamed on diabolical white
liberals who led the innocent black folk astray with “free stuff.” They
certainly can’t have anything to do with the fact that African-Americans
were enslaved until 150 years ago, had few or no political rights until
50 years ago, and throughout their history on this continent have been
redlined and ghettoized and marginalized and covenant-excluded and
financially exploited by an endless array of swindlers and usurers and
predatory lenders.
Those things, we are constantly and nervously
assured by red-faced men on television as they project their own fears
and anxieties onto Black Lives Matter protesters or Quentin Tarantino or
whomever else, are in the past. In the discourse of the American
right, the past can only be one of two things: A) a story of glorious
patriotism and heroism, or B) something that did not happen or does not
matter. We don’t need to summon Faulkner in order to observe that police
brutality and the shootings of unarmed black men are not in the past,
and neither is our society’s worsening economic inequality, which
includes a shocking racial disparity. According to a U.S. Census Bureau survey, the
median white household in 2011 held just over $111,000 in total wealth.
For the median black household, that number was barely $7,000 – 16 times less, or 8 cents in black wealth for every white dollar.
What I was looking for was an acknowledgment of the facts. And I think
the reason that I was looking for an acknowledgment of the facts is that
I understand the failure to acknowledge the facts as, in some way, an
apology for what happened. And from there it’s a thin line between
apology and acceptance, between acceptance and complicity, between
complicity and active engagement. I suppose it’s that sense that if we
don’t recognize the facts for what they are, we make it possible, or
more likely, that those kinds of facts may repeat themselves.
[W]hat the difference is, in general terms, between that and what we
see in the Ukraine [in the film] with a group of characters gathering,
you know, in Nazi uniforms for a re-enactment, or a burial of Ukrainian
and German war heroes? What is the difference between that and a
re-enactment of the Civil War? It’s a desire for a particular community
to find connection and legitimacy with the past. And in finding
connection and legitimacy, the danger is that you reinforce the
conditions that continue to work their unhappy consequences.
“And
we have to understand, equally, that this is not just historical
material. I’ve been very involved in the last years on the issue of
torture, for example. And I think that the amnesia in the United States
about engaging with the fact that the country turned to torture once
again after September the 11th — I think it’s going to have enormous
consequences going forward. Even though it may not be perceived as
having consequences within the United States, outside of the United
States it was a huge moment for those who hold the United States to a
higher standard because it is the world leader on human rights. It
becomes too bloody easy to wheel it out and say, ‘Look, if they can do
torture, then I can do torture.’”
If the past is not really past – the past of “extraordinary rendition”
and “enhanced interrogation,” the past of Auschwitz and the Krakow
ghetto, the past of American slavery and its endless repercussions –
then it is still with us, and still shaping our behavior. As Sands makes
clear, willful historical amnesia can be found in all parts of the
world, but America has developed it into a poisonous and intoxicating
high art. Our powerful national identity is rooted in the mythological
notion that we are different and exceptional, free of the depressing
chains of the past that hold other nations back from greatness. At this
point in our history that belief is literally driving us insane.
Sands talks sadly about his friend Horst, the child of Nazis who does
not want to know what really happened, and who drifts ever closer to
denying that it happened at all. “Things unsaid have long-term
consequences,” says Sands. “You think by pushing things under the carpet
that you sort them out and they go away. But you’re doing the opposite,
and they only get worse.”
Frank Bruni has a column in the New York Times that looks at the hate and bigotry, and most importantly, outright lies that triumphed in Houston last week. What is chilling is the fact that the anti-gay forces utilized the same type of tactics used against Europe's Jews in the 1930's and during World War II. Tactics that resorted to vicious lies and efforts to make Jews into "the other" and thus worth of discrimination and ultimately extermination. Leading the anti-gay charge in Houston were, of course, the "godly folk" who have inflicted so much harm on so many over the centuries. Here are excerpts from the column:
I USED to be a child molester. Not in actuality. In the popular imagination. In public debate.
That’s
how gay men were once portrayed — not just as sexual deviants but as
sexual prowlers, sexual predators, their eyes lecherously trained on the
young, the vulnerable, the recruitable.
Hatemongers spread this slander to argue that we mustn’t be teachers, shouldn’t be coaches, couldn’t be trusted.
I
flashed back on that when residents of Houston voted last week against
an anti-discrimination law that did all sorts of unimpeachable things
because it supposedly did one thing that scared the bejesus out of them:
enabled men in dresses to sneak into women’s restrooms.
This
specter was invented by opponents of the law, who were fixated on just a
part of it: its inclusion of transgender people among blacks, gays and
other classes protected from being fired or denied access to public
accommodations because of their very identities.
And we’ll someday cringe about this, just as most Americans now cringe
about the verbal garbage that was thrown at gay people, the lies that
were told, the lies that were believed.I recently ran across
some research that made reference to a 1970 survey in which 73.5 percent
of Americans agreed that “homosexuals are dangerous as teachers or
youth leaders because they try to get sexually involved with children”
and 71.1 supported the statement that “homosexuals try to play sexually
with children if they cannot get an adult partner.”
Transgender people indeed puzzle many others — including me. I readily
admit that I can’t relate, not specifically, to the feeling of having a
gender at odds with certain anatomical signifiers . . . .
But
I’m not too myopic to see or too forgetful to remember that many of the
straight people who now support and even fight for my equality and
dignity understand me no better. They’ve never fallen in full-bloom love
with someone of the same sex.
And I do relate to the awful, shameful, fury-making feeling of having who you are reduced to a caricature.
Don’t
you? If you’re female or black or Latino or Jewish or Muslim, the
likely answer is yes, and it compels you to look at what happened in
Houston with sadness and a resolve that it not be repeated.
[T]ransgender people — and their bid for inclusion — were trivialized and
cast aside. Either way, they’re experiencing a chill that they’ve known
too long, a sting that they shouldn’t have to suffer, a slap that could
be of life-or-death consequence for a teenager struggling to come to
terms with his or her difference and questioning the warmth of the
world.
And
transgender people aren’t raising their voices and risking rejection by
the voters of Houston for a mere lifestyle. They’re embracing something
infinitely more profound than that.
We’ve
come so far and yet not far enough. That’s one big lesson from Houston,
which is going to cast a long shadow. It won’t be the last battleground
on which the “bathroom myth,” as it has come to be known, is deployed.
I
can see this myth creeping into the 2016 election, a weapon wielded
against candidates who are trying only to be fair and decent.
I
marvel at the cynical political calculations behind it. I wince at how
densely packed with willful misunderstanding it is. I shudder at the
license it gives to cruelty and at the wounds it inflicts. How slowly,
and how uncertainly, will they heal?
We cannot let the merchants of hate prevail. Years ago AmericaBlog had a great side by side comparison of the Christofascist lies against those made by the Nazis against Jews. It was chilling. Change the word "Jew" for "gay" and the wording was nearly identical. Sadly, that page is no longer online. Perhaps it needs to be brought back least we forget where the "godly folk" found their blue print for demonizing gays and those who are transgender.
Conway Springs Middle School - things are rotten in Kansas
In a recent post I noted how a new study has documented that children raised in religious homes are less kind and less generous than those raised in secular homes, thus disproving the myth that religion is a positive force for better social behavior. Events in Kansas show where these children get their nastiness from: their parents and churches. After seeing disturbing anti-gay behavior in his classes, Tom Leahy, a teacher at Conway Springs Middle School, showed the movie Love Is All You Need? in which same-sex relationships are conventional and a young girl is picked on for being heterosexual. The film culminates in the fictional heterosexual protagonist killing herself as a result of the bullying. As one might expect, the "godly folk" went ape shit and demanded Leahy's resignation. Leahy has decided that he will not cooperate and will force the school system to face the situation head on and hopefully in the process show the ugliness of the "godly Christian" crowd and the hate and bigotry that define them. Here are highlights from The Raw Story:
Kansas schoolteacher says he has changed his mind about resigning after showing a graphic anti-bullying short film to his history class, which led to vociferous complaints from parents.
The Wichita Eagle reported that Tom Leahy, a teacher at Conway
Springs Middle School, was expected to hand in his resignation after
showing Love Is All You Need? to
three eighth-grade history classes (which would normally contain
children aged 13 to 14). The 19-minute satirical film depicts a society
in which same-sex relationships are conventional and a young girl is
picked on for being heterosexual. The film, directed by Kim Rocco
Shields and produced in 2011, culminates in the fictional protagonist
killing herself.
Leahy has been on leave since 21 October and was expected to resign
at a Conway Springs school board meeting on 9 November. Yesterday, he
cancelled a joint press conference with the school superintendent and said he did not plan to resign .
He told the Eagle: “There’s a lot of people who don’t want me to give
up on this. People I don’t even know … I’d like to have the chance to
tell [the school board] my side of things.”
Leahy said he decided to show the film after some of his students
demonstrated disturbing anti-lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender behavior during a history class exercise in which different groups were
asked to draw up a bill of rights for their fictional “colony”. He
said: “I was expecting fairly positive kinds of colonies … But it just
kind of got twisted around … Then the issue of gay v straight came up,
and a lot of them were not allowing gays into their colony and stuff
like that … There were some hard feelings. Kids were getting upset.”
According to Leahy, parents’ complaints were made to the school
principal and superintendent, focusing on the graphic nature of the
film’s ending and a scene emphasising the Catholic church’s
inflexibility.
On being contacted by the Eagle, superintendent Clay Murphy said he couldn’t comment directly because it was a personnel matter.
The hypocrisy of these parents, of course, is that their little darlings see all kinds of graphic violence all the time on television and in movies. The real issue is that this movie challenges the religious faith fantasy world these folks live in and shows that their self-proclaimed piety is a lie and that they are actually modern day Pharisees. If you want to find someone truly decent and moral, more often than not, you will not find them in the church pews, especially in right wing and "conservative" denominations.
