One thing American conservatives
know how to do is circle the wagons and fight to the bitter end. They do this
on every one of their talking points, most of which are completely moronic and
serve mostly to broaden the constituency, not because the folks at the top who
pull the strings really care about such issues.
The ruling class among the Republicans doesn’t care about things like
guns or abortion or prayer or “family values” or whatever phony stupidity the
bulk of their party goes on and on about.
Rich people have always and will always have access to safe abortions.
All Roe vs. Wade did was to give this opportunity to people of lesser means. If
a rich person needs an abortion all they need do is hand their doctor a load
of cash and have him do it. The hyper-rich don’t care about personal firearms;
they have their own security apparatus to protect them.
These ridiculous tenets of the party and many
others are simply fictions of the party to make working class slobs feel like
they have a stake in Republicans politics.
More and more we are seeing that
to gain membership into the conservative club you have to bite down hard on
each and every one of the pillars in their platform. They believe that any sort of gun control is
tyranny; global climate change is a hoax; all abortion is a crime against god;
all government except the military is bad; taxes are tyranny; anyone who cares
about the environment is an extremist; and countless other insane postures that
they repeat often and loudly which makes them true. Conservatives actually have
propaganda mills that churn out on a daily basis the filth that you hear
repeated by conservatives as if it is the truth handed down by their god. Places with faux academic names like the
American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, The Discovery Institute,
and many more intellectually bankrupt centers that begin with a conclusion and
work backward to find shreds of evidence—usually false—to back up their loopy
narratives. It’s repulsive that these places
are often referred to as “think tanks” because “fiction tanks” would be a
better name.
Once the daily proclamations are
regurgitated from the fiction tanks they are picked up by the far-right media
outlets. Fox News starts beating the drum as soon as they rip the memo off the
fax machine and they harp on it until they receive something else to rant
about. That’s what they do; they repeat the conservative talking points for the
day and they attack their adversaries with any half-wit strategy that comes to
their mind. If what they report turns out to be a fiction they don’t apologize,
they don’t offer a retraction, they simply move on to the next bit of
propaganda they were served.
On the second rung from the
bottom of the conservative cycle of bullshit are the bloggers, a mostly insane
group of fanatics who have nothing better to do than sit around every day and
spew vitriol about the vile liberals. My advice to these crazies is to take a
day off. Go for a walk. Get some exercise. Try writing about something besides
politics at least once in a while. Instead, they keep at it day after day, year
after year taping out their twisted ideas for America, like Jack Nicholson’s demented
character in the shining typing the words “All work and no play make Jack a
dull boy” over and over again in what was the most frightening display of psychosis
ever depicted on film. These right-wing political bloggers bring to mind the
ancient Christian scribes in the total devotion and religious fervor they bring to their rather tedious duty.
The scribes toiled without questioning their work in much the same manner as
today’s bloggers except they also did so without the Pringles® and Pepsi® that comfort the right-wing pundits.
Below the bloggers (and quite
possibly below everything else in the food chain) are those who comment on the
conservative blogs and posts dear to conservatives. I always say that the level of discourse
couldn’t get any lower until the next round of arguments come in and I see that
the level has dropped precipitously. The
current right-wing rhetoric about gun control seems to have unleashed the worst
in people and has brought out the most vile, racist, and violent discourse I’ve
ever read in modern America. Every
half-wit conservative who doesn’t know the difference between “then” and “than”
has all of a sudden become a constitutional scholar specializing in those few
words that make up the Second Amendment.
Evidently our founding fathers meant that amendment to mean that our
government has no right to limit in any way the sale of arms of any kind.
Period. By the logic of conservatives
and the child killing lobby known as the National Rifle Association it would be
OK for someone to set up an assault weapons and ammunition stand like a cotton
candy booth but without the pesky regulations the cotton candy people suffer
through.
Facebook is another vehicle for
the right-wing’s relentless attack on common sense. One central theme of conservatives is that
business owners (job creators) are somehow better citizens than the rest of
us. In one particularly repugnant
article making the rounds a business owner decided to fire his employees who
voted for Obama (he identified them by their Obama bumper stickers) because he
said that Obama was bad for business and if these people wanted change he would
give it to them. Of course this person is yet another fiction but the fact
that this had any sort of positive resonance with people is disturbing. My response to this anecdote is to say that if
this is the way this guy conducts his business it’s no wonder he is losing
money.
The strategy of the Right is to
control what is being discussed. The next thing is simply to repeat something
enough times so that it seems like the truth to their acolytes. “Ronald Reagan
was the greatest president in history.” “Bill Clinton is a criminal.” “Iraq is
our enemy.” These all must be true. The next thing is to allow no dissension
among the rank and file. Even if some bit of bullshit they threw out as news
comes back at them they stick to their guns. On global climate change
conservatives have had to tread a little more softly because there is simply an
avalanche of science pointing in the opposite direction but they don’t admit
they are wrong; they simply change their opinion a bit. First they denied any
sort of climate change at all, and then they said that it wasn’t from man’s
activity on the planet. Conservatives have never admitted that the war in Iraq
was a horrible mistake; they simply moved on to the next fiction in their
propaganda arsenal.
