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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Friday, May 19, 2006

Playing To That Hate-Filled Republican Base 

...the Republican party is in trouble. They know it, and they know that everybody else knows it. Their corruption, mismanagement, and malfeasence over the last decade or so of gathering power has begun to so completely disenchant the electorate that they can feel the power and glory slipping away, heralding the potential advent of a new Congressional Democratic majority that would pop the cork on a list of agressive, muscular, come-to-Jesus investigations that would make the German and Japanese war crimes trials after World War 2 look like casual laziness. What's a party to do in dire circumstances like this? Why, go back to the base, of course! That's why, just in the last day or so, we've seen raging debates over the degree to which the English language is the law of the land and whether we should amend the United States Constitution to outlaw gay marriage...

The base of the Republican party, that core that served as the foundation of their rise to power, has been an odd flock of ducks that has consistently challenged the "Big Tent" effort of the national party. They are not so much 'for' anything as they are 'against' many things. They are against Hispanic people who don't - or don't very well - speak English, even though many of them have in their past ancestors who probably never did fully acquire the language. They are against pathways to citizenship for these Hispanic people even though many of their own ancestors freely came to America without visas or waiting periods or green cards or guest worker programs. They are against gay marriage for reasons of personal belief, which would be fine in itself except for the fact that they want what should be a secular government to place into its very genetic code their objection to gay marriage. They are against stem cell research and abortion and the personal right to make end of life decisions and would be more than happy to codify those objections in our Constitution, too, even though the document is supposed to represent the blueprint for the operations of our national government and not every pet peeve that some crackpot cooks up. The only thing this base can said to be for is the legislation out of existence of those things they are against. The national Republican party has precious little foothold left with the population at large, so over the next few months we will be watching them use the power of the majority to play to that unhappy, hate-filled base. Immigration reform is leading the pack right now, mostly because we can talk about it while pretending that we aren't really talking about race. Immigration reform is a fashionable sort of racism; it allows us to make all sorts of noises about security and jobs and social costs even though not a single 9/11 terrorist came across the Arizona desert and even though major Republican contributors suffer night sweats over the loss of their cheap labor and even though there are millions of American citizens who run up the same kinds of social costs as those illegal immigrants we are so twisted up in knots about right now...

Robert Byrd is dead-center on the mark: there have been many runs made by Democrats and honest Republicans over the last several years to try to put some actual teeth in that yapping Bushco mouth with regard to engaging in actual bolstering of our security. Nothing came of it. Now, however, those polls that Gee Dub and his minions say they ignore are telling them that their only hope of getting back in the game and fighting off the prospect of being prodded out of the Capital into the rough tumbrels waiting to haul them away through those mean, jeering D.C. streets is to play to that base of theirs. So yesterday it was gay marriage, today it's stemming the hoards of brown people swarming across our borders, and tomorrow it will be...well, who knows. We can be assured, whatever it is, that it will be another crumb tossed to the base, complete with twisted ad's trying to drag down the Democrats. The thing to always to remember, cherish, and feature as often as possible is that Fred Phelps is part of their base...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:06 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Big Brother Lives In Black Jack 

…if you’re scouring the globe trying to find the perfect example of fundie craziness slipping its leash and running amok, Black Jack, Missouri, appears to be as good a place to start looking as any, if this bit of news is any measure. Now I’m not necessarily a big fan of – as our mothers used to call it – “living in sin”, but as the parent of a teenage girl it’s a stand I feel I need to take in any case. And, in the spirit of full disclosure and to avoid cheap, spiteful charges of hypocracy, I did in fact marry the girl with whom I was living in sin (the latter fact of which there is no need to mention to said teenage daughter; this is a “do as I say, not as I did” world we occupy)…

Given all that, however, I don’t believe that my personal beliefs need to be spelled out and codified in city ordinances. It isn’t the role of city government to legislate certain disputable religious beliefs in order to…well…do what, exactly? One can speculate long into the night about the background for this particular ordinance. It doesn’t stop the act of cohabitation, it only establishs sanctions on procreation beyond the only child level. Since the council intentionally turned it’s stuffy nose up at the prospect of rectifying this particular situation, one would suspect that there’s a certain amount of Bible-thumping going on in the background. Nobody’s talkin’, though, so we may never know what waterhead reasoning supports this particular ordinance…
Posted by: Jack K. / 4:03 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Playing "Bring It On" The Hugo Chavez Way 

...Congressional Democrats may be afraid to take on the listing, smoking hulk of what was once the George W. Bush juggernaut, but it's becoming perfectly clear to even the most casual observer that Hugo Chavez, the President of Venezuela, doesn't suffer from any such timidity. Of course, on the other hand, there are some differences in circumstances, given that those Democrats can only muster an air force comprised of corporate business jets and their only oil resource is found in their hair or on the palms of their hands, whereas Chavez has real-live by-God versions of those commodities. After the US announcement yesterday that sales of military technology to Venezuela were going to be suspended, it comes as little surprise that this was going to be Chavez's response...

...even though the fact remains that Venezuela's past agreements would prohibit selling F-16's to Iran, we're talking about contractual issues that put a normal understanding of contract law into a deep shade. The reasons for Bushco's 'Grenada-izing' of this particular nation are somewhat convoluted, having anchor-points in both the politics of oil and differing views of just who exactly is a terrorist, but it's clear that Chavez, even in the suggestion of injecting himself into Gee Dub's conflict with Iran (although late news suggests he may be backing off on the threat) understands what most of the rest of the world is coming to understand: the invasion/overthrow/nation-building days of the United States are over for the foreseeable future. On top of that, the emotional fallout from our current muddle in Iraq has put the American people in the sort of mood where military intervention is going to much harder to sell. Chavez seems to understand the geopolitical power of oil and the shield that this provides him against military action on our part. It's another part of the emotional fallout of Gee Dub's Grand Iraqi Nation-Building Adventure: other folks aren't much scared of "The World's Only Superpower" anymore...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:23 PM 0 comments

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