The last public ride of Arlen Specter, who died today, was facing the wrath of the nascent Tea Party deep inna heart of Pennsy Dutch country, where I grew up. He was among the first of the moderates to be run out of town.
“Specter startled fellow senators in April 2009 when he announced he was switching to the Democratic side, saying he found himself ‘increasingly at odds with the Republican philosophy,'” reads Specter’s obituary at the LA Times.
Looking back from 2012, “increasingly at odds with the Republican philosophy” doesn’t quite capture the Zeitgeist.
In 2009 Craig Miller of Lebanon, PA, confronted Specter, then a “new” Democrat, at a town hall meeting. It made great television and went nationwide, a GOP rally point for virulent opposition to the Obama administration’s plan to rework the health care system.
Miller was incoherent, then and in later television appearances. He couldn’t express, even in a basic way, the specific nature of his gripes other than to rage over alleged violation of the Constitution. However, his anger was very real. Three years on, it’s still visceral. It wilted and ultimately destroyed a gravely ill Arlen Specter who was unprepared for it. Craig Miller, and everyone else, deserved much better.
The outburst, infamous in the genesis of the Tea Party, was emblematic of the lack of Democratic leadership and its choices of wan uninspiring ruling class pols so used to being surrounded by sycophants and legal bribe-masters they can’t engage with people outside Washington in any way. After having been given the keys to power at a time so fraught in American history, they decided being empty unresponsive suits was most prudent.
With Hey Craig Man! I realized it was impossible to write any lyrical narrative that fit the tableau. The only things that worked were non sequiturs and balderdash about heevahavas, nudists, poozle, on your floor, outside your door, plus Pennsylvania Dutch-isms. There was nothing you could take away from the event except failure.
Paul Broun: God’s word is true. I’ve come to understand that. All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell. And it’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior. You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I’ve found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth. I don’t believe that the Earth’s but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the Bible says.
As previously said, if you count the number of Republicans who are profoundly anti-science, they now stack up like cord wood. And the Republican Party, in an affront to everything rational, puts such men on the House Committee responsible for oversight of science.
It’s no longer mildly amusing in a “look at the heevahava” way. It constitutes a menace, a conscious effort to overturn rational leadership.
When I was at Lehigh a man named Michael Behe was hired by the chemistry department. My thesis advisor was part of the search committee.
After Behe got tenure, he was able to get a book published on creationism. He called it intelligent design and the GOP right seized on Behe as a standard bearer for debunking evolution.
Here was a tenured academic in the science faculty at a respectable school who had allegedly disproved Darwin. Lehigh’s science professors had paid Behe no mind although quite a few people on the ground knew what he was pushing.
This became a disaster for Lehigh when Behe subsequently moved to the biology department. Today, Lehigh’s biology division publishes a disclaimer bluntly stating his creationism ideas have no basis in science.
But the damage had been done.
While Behe was hardly the only person to attack evolution, his legacy has played a substantial role in the GOP’s war on science, epitomized by its success in getting many Americans to question basic biology in the mistaken belief that their faith is under attack by science.
During the lengthy years of my education I never ran across a shortage of scientists who held belief in God. And I could write an essay about the way they occasionally expressed it.
Science is not capable of testing for whether there is God or not despite what people who don’t know anything about science may think. Science neither can prove nor disprove the existence of a deity yet much of the GOP antagonism toward science comes from fanning the idea in its base that science is an attack on religion.
I’m going to take a moment to relate a moment that has stayed with me all my life, taken as a freshman in a chemistry class during my undergraduate years.
One of my chemistry professors, now long gone, was discussing the characteristics of water. And I will convey the nut of it without going into the fine details of molecular structure.
Water, he said to the class, was a substance that was different from most, in that when it turns to solid, it expands.
Ice takes up more room than liquid water, is less dense — and so it floats; liquid water is not compressible as is ice, which turns back to liquid when you squeeze it. It’s why, among many things, we have the pleasure of ice-skating.
And since water is the solvent in which life’s chemical reactions occur, my chem prof said, this feature was one of the unique things that is important to life. It is why lakes and rivers do not freeze from the bottom up and become one entire block of ice during winter, and that’s essential.
So he added that this was something that affirmed his faith in a God because it is such a special thing. And he left it at that, not questioning anything else or trying to weave some complex explanation for an intelligent designer that other people should be persuaded to accept (although not being there and lacking a true science union card, others may miss such a distinction).
It was an expression of his faith.
God’s role, if it exists in water, cannot be tested for. It cannot be proven. And it cannot be rejected.
So my experience was that many scientists do have faith and it is not incongruent with their rationality.
On the other hand, this is why the modern GOP has become so contemptible. It takes ignorance of the way things are and wields it as a weapon to attack that which is scientific fact.
So if many in our country think that putting a modern Republican in power is a way to move the place forward, to help it deal with the very complex global problems with which it is currently faced, they’re one with entropy, which is the falling apart of everything, from order to disorder, until there is nothing left. That’s a tragedy and we should not delude ourselves that such actions, behaviors or opinions defend anything worthwhile.
I don’t see it as even a matter of science because I don’t know that you can prove one or the other. That’s one of those things. We can talk about theology and all of those other things but I’m basically concerned about, you’ve got a choice between Claire McCaskill and myself. My job is to make the thing there. If we want to do theoretical stuff, we can do that, but I think I better stay on topic.
If you count the number of Republicans who are profoundly anti-science, they stack up like cord wood. Every time you turn around — the last was this weekend — there will be some videotape of a Republican Party heevahava going on about the perfidy of scientists, the satanic deception of evolution, weird and offensive explanations of women’s reproductive biology, how one can pray the gay away, and the gigantic hoax of global warming
Indeed, the GOP lines the House Science committee with them showing only how the party is composed of extremists and nitwits, people who are toxic to progress and enlightenment.
This morning Ted Nugent accused the Obama administration of treason and referred to them as “enemies of America.” Tonight, the controversial Washington Times columnist and National Rifle Association board member will be the subject of a Discovery Channel special promoting “an inside look at gun culture” through his eyes.
“FUN” isn’t quite the word I’d use to describe anything Nugent. And it would be interesting to interview Discovery channel bigwigs over Nugent calling the administration “enemies of America” and accusing the president of “treason” right after advertising his show on “gun culture” on their network. Nugent knows who reads his words and he stops just short of advocating armed attack on the president and his administration.
Earlier this year Nugent received a visit from the US Secret Service after he issued public comments at an NRA convention appearing to threaten the president.
What is sort of depressing is the way Discovery’s presenting the special, and Nugent, as “a strong and vocal advocate for guns, hunting and all things America.??? I wasn’t aware that denigrating women in public life and engaging in violent fantasies about people you disagree with politically, both staples of Nugent’s rhetorical and on-stage arsenal, counted as “all things American.??? Nugent may declare, in promotional material for the show that appears on Discovery’s website that “Our American Dream is measured in ballistics.??? I’m not sure Discovery realizes how crabbed and depressing that formulation is. It would be unattractive for Discovery to work with Nugent under any circumstances, but if the network is going to do a special on him, it would be nice if they could find their way to a more limited characterization of him …
Actually, the modern Republican Party has made denigrating women, always famous leaders of the Democratic Party, and “engaging in violent fantasies about people you disagree with politically” a common hobby for many Americans. The Ted Nugent, or Psychopath Vote, is a strong constituent of the Tea Party/GOP.
“Well, it’s over. Or almost over, thank God. It looks like Obama will probably win, which I guess is good news, compared to the alternative – a Mitt Romney presidency would have felt like four straight years of waking up with a naked Lloyd Blankfein sitting on your face.”
“A decision that in reality takes one or two days of careful research to make is somehow stretched out into a process that involves two years of relentless, suffocating mind-warfare, an onslaught of toxic media messaging directed at liberals, conservatives and everyone in between that by Election Day makes every dinner conversation dangerous and literally divides families.”
Pretty much, although it doesn’t get at the huge splits and chasms that exist between the tribes of America.
I lost a friend recently because he and his upper class pals could not stop harping about the evil of the income tax, the 47 percent of the country — lazy moochers without the talent or work ethic to survive without entitlements — got out of paying it and how food stamps were bad.
A woman from Los Angeles who was a tree hugger, a liberal Democrat, and an anti-hunter, purchased a piece of timberland near Colville, WA .
There was a large tree on one of the highest points in the tract. She wanted a good view of the natural splendor of her land, so she started to climb the big tree. As she neared the top she encountered a spotted owl that attacked her. In her haste to escape, the woman slid down the tree to the ground and got many splinters in her crotch.
In considerable pain, she hurried to a local ER to see a doctor. She told him she was an environmentalist, a democrat, and an anti-hunter and how she came to get all the splinters. The doctor listened to her story with great patience and then told her to go wait in the examining room and he would see if he could help her.
She sat and waited three hours before the doctor reappeared. The angry woman demanded,???What took you so long???? He smiled and then told her, “Well, I had to get permits from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Forest Service, and the Bureau of Land Management before I could remove old-growth timber from a recreational area so close to a waste treatment facility. I’m sorry, but due to Obama Care they turned me down.???
Great stuff, gratuitously nasty to more than half the population, too. And now we ain’t pals.
“Politicians are much to blame for this, but we in the media have to take responsibility for the damage we do to the American psyche in the name of election coverage. At this very moment, there are people all over the country who are stocking up on canned goods and ammo for the apocalypse they believe will come if Obama is re-elected.”
The media isn’t responsible for the Ted Nugent voter, it just often covers them poorly, as if being a bigot is simply a difference in respectable opinion. It’s the property of the GOP. Taibbi knows it.
Laboratory of democracy, example #1. And some experiments yield results that are no good.
The current Republican Party has mainstreamed all the tropes of “The Turner Diaries,” the premier piece of race hate fiction in this country. I don’t say this lightly.
But after the last four years of the Obama presidency, it’s quite clear. One cannot ignore the mindless stockpiling of weapons in the absence of even the slightest moves toward gun control legislation, or even enforcement of exisiting rules.
And you would had to have been living in Antarctica to have missed all the common heroes of the right, portrayed as patriots, who generally and loudly profess to stand ready to revolt against the tyrannical government, warn of the alleged creeping menace of shariah law, people who wish and fantasize about the tossing out, reduction and destruction of others who’ve allegedly made the society corrupt — the blacks and browns (in “The Turner Diaries” called “mud people???) the millions of moochers, the poor, government bureaucrats and elites. The list of enemies of the good people of the place we live in is long.
Indeed, the entire survivalist moment, now calling themselves “preppers??? in an unsuccessful attempt to achieve distance from the old designation because of its association with neo-Nazis, is all of the extreme right.
There are no progressives or Democrats in the prepper patriot bunkers. No, the modern patriot drills in camouflage clothes and on gun ranges, honing shooting skills to stop crime, to make society more safe by peace through strength, but later needed when they must defend their families, stuff and bug out homes after society collapses.
Who will they be defending against?
Why, of course, all those on the enemies list: The non-whites who didn’t stockpile food, who lived on the government teat, those on the food stamp rolls (especially the food stamp EBT carders!) the corrupt and lazy progressives, any voters for the other side, a horde predicted to come boiling out of its urban warrens to take what all the good white people have.
The continued reality of this imagery, in political campaigns, as entertainment reality television, in daily news stories, in vanity press prepper civil war fiction (take a look at this mind-numbing collection at Amazon), is as morbidly depressing as a first, and only, reading of “The Turner Diaries.”
Only you can put the book back on the shelf or into the trash.
Americans are unable to come together to solve common issues of public concern because political elites–the Right is preeminently guilty here–have developed a concerted campaign to “otherize??? and marginalize those Americans with whom they disagree.
In all, the Right-wing media apparatus feeds conservatives a daily diet of misinformation, distortions, and hate speech in which their foes are described as insects to be crushed, mentally defective, traitors, and people not fit to live. Such rhetoric is not harmless political theater: seeds do indeed bear fruit.
In September, the conservative website the Free Republic published a hypothetical scenario about how the American economy will collapse and “urban??? riots by black people will need to be put down by white suburban vigilantes.
Devega excerpts from “a hypothetical scenario about how the American economy will collapse and ‘urban’ riots by black people will need to be put down by white suburban vigilantes.”
A new social contract has been created, where bread and circuses buy a measure of peace in our minority-populated urban zones. In the era of ubiquitous big-screen cable television, the internet and smart phones, the circus part of the equation is never in doubt as long as the electricity flows. But the bread is highly problematic. Food must be delivered the old-fashioned way: physically. Any disruption in the normal functioning of the EBT system will lead to food riots with a speed that is astonishing. This will inevitably happen when our unsustainable, debt-fueled binge party finally stops, and the music is over. Now that the delivery of free or heavily subsidized food is perceived by tens of millions of Americans to be a basic human right, the cutoff of “their??? food money will cause an immediate explosion of rage. When the hunger begins to bite, supermarkets, shops and restaurants will be looted, and initially the media will not condemn the looting. Unfortunately, this initial violence will only be the start of a dangerous escalation …
In order to highlight their grievances and escalate their demands for an immediate resumption of government benefits, the [black or brown] MUY flash mobs will next move their activities to the borders of their ethnic enclaves. They will concentrate on major intersections and highway interchanges where [white] non-MUY suburban commuters must make daily passage to and from what forms of employment still exist …
The results of these clashes will frequently resemble the intersection of Florence and Normandie during the Rodney King riots in 1992, where Reginald Denny was pulled out of his truck’s cab and beaten nearly to death with a cinder block.
This extremely deadly trick was developed by our war fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan, taking advantage of the significant effective range and firepower of our scoped 5.56mm rifles. Tactics such as the sniper ambush may not be seen early in the civil disorder, but they will surely arise after a steady progression of atrocities attributed to rampaging [blacks] MUYs.
The Tea Party promptly showed up in force to vent in the comments section:
Those who would actually need to invoke the Insurrecton [sic] Act would already have conducted the affairs of their offices in such a patently un-American, unethical, illegal, unconstitutional and treasonous manner (anybody we know?) that the elected official should uave already been arrested and put on trial. Only if for a protracted period the citizenry feels patriotically obligated to follow the constitution (the part about abolishing a corrupted government) to the point where knowing the US military will become involved, do it anyway.
This is the modern Republican Party, the party of Mitt Romney. If you think there’s little difference between the two current candidates for president or that voting in November is an exercise in holding your nose, you couldn’t be more wrong.
Yesterday, the serial liar known as Mitt Romney went back to his astonishing nitwit’s claim about the current US Navy, in relation to the battleship navy of WWI.
Today, the mainstream media stopped overlooking this idiocy from the Republican Party’s intelligence-insulting candidate for President. Only because Romney used it in his much-publicized speech on foreign policy and alleged US military weakness.
Still, we were interested in his assertion about the size of the Navy. Is the Navy really in the worst shape it has been in 96 years?
The Facts
The historical records of the Navy show that in 1916, the Navy had 245 ships. This was also the year that President Woodrow Wilson signed into law the Naval Act of 1916, which put the United States on a crash course to build a world-class Navy.
But take a look at the types of ships on the list. Yes, there are cruisers and destroyers but also:
In 1917, there were obviously no nuclear-powered carrier strike groups, no nuclear attack or ballistic missile submarines, no cruise missiles, no nothing associated with the modern US Navy. (Number of capital units in the modern USN: 11 supercarriers, 18 ballistic missile subs, nuclear attack submatines — lots, etc. Number of “capital,” ahem, ships in 1917 USN: 16 battleships and another 23 pre-bb antiques.)
Further:
To go further into destroying Mitt Romney’s weird comparison would be the same as wasting one’s time chatting with a cinder block. It’s as dumbfounding as everything else in the secret video. And while Romney’s vignette may have been effective with hedge fund wealth at the secret dinner, it leaves one wondering just how he came up with it.
Kessler:
This is an apples-and-oranges comparison. Romney’s line reminds us of a similar strained comparison he made last year … But in this case he goes even deeper back into history. After all, 1916 is not only before computers, it is before television — even before regular radio broadcasts.
Kessler adds the Romney campaign informed that the candidate got his argument from “now-retired Adm. Gary Roughead” from a 2010 speech.
Whatever. Stupidity is hardly rare and acquisition of it from someone else does not magically transmute the lead into gold.
Kessler consults John Pike of GlobalSecurity, yes — the same place I write and do media for:
John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, notes that it is difficult to make comparisons between ships that are even much more recent. “Today’s aircraft carrier has about 10 times the lethality of an aircraft carrier of 20 years ago …
“The current level of ships, 285 in fiscal 2011, is actually not even the lowest since 1916,” informs the Post’s fact-checker. “The historical list shows that the lowest ship force was reached during the Bush administration …”
And he, and I, have already spent way too much time on Romney’s ridiculous, and — as usual — factually challenged and inept, claims.
Is there anyone, at this point, who doesn’t understand why Mitt Romney needs to be treated with total contempt?
Pay attention to the lyrics, they scroll: “He’s big and rich and always lyin’/And if it don’t stop we’ll all be dyin.'”
Mitt Romney is very wealthy. Good for him. He could only have achieved his amazing fortune in America, the land of opportunity. The opportunity that made Mr. Romney rich is still out there for the taking.
If you still don’t understand why it’s hysterical, time to go elsewhere. Copy editors wept.
The rest insists the only people who vote Democratic are lazy non-white “bloodsuckers” who spend what little they have on lottery tickets.
It’s beyond offensive:
[The] backbone of the Democratic Party, the ones buying the most lottery tickets, are the ones who can least afford it. Duh. If these mouth-breathers promise not to vote, the GOP should buy them a lottery ticket.
“You might want to note that there is no demonization of the wealthy from Republicans, only Democrats,” he writes.
Yes, readers have noticed Ted. The GOP, those not in the 1 percent, and he ain’t, are the finest collection of bigots and shoe-shiners the rest of the country’s probably ever seen.
The “mouth-breathers” and “bloodsuckers” spend it all on lottery tickets and liquor. Stop attacking your betters, stupid lazy drunks!
