Rick Santorum is entirely cut from the nasty cloth described by Altemeyer. The more he is in the news, his words published nationwide, the more despicable he appears to those not exactly like him.
If you were asked to imagine a presidential candidate as horrid and horrifying as Rick Santorum more than a decade ago you likely wouldn’t have been able to match the reality. Conversely, it’s Santorum’s most insane bits which now put him, perhaps only momentarily, at the top of the heap for the psychopath vote. To paraphrase Shakespeare, they like Santorum because he’s so toxic he could poison poison.
The Alternet piece, in total seriousness, excerpts a bit taken from the Volkische Beobachter, the newspaper of Hitler’s Nazi Party, and asks readers to compare it with the utterances of Rick Santorum.
Hence, the right wing’s ongoing attempts to erase the separation of church and state, its crusade against Planned Parenthood, its strange obsession with gays. Consider the following political platform, which sounds almost as if it were taken from a speech by Rick Santorum:
The preservation of the family with many children is a matter of biological concept and national feeling. The family with many children must be preserved … because it is a highly valuable, indispensable part of the … nation. Valuable and indispensable not only because it alone guarantees the maintenance of the population in the future but because it is the strongest basis of national morality and national culture … The preservation of this family form is a necessity of national and cultural politics … This concept is strictly at variance with the demands for an abolition of paragraph 218; it considers unborn life as sacrosanct. For the legalization of abortion is at variance with the function of the family, which is to produce children and would lead to the definite destruction of the family with many children …
[When] you look at the numbers, it’s stunning how little this Republican primary electorate resembles the rest of the United States … They are much closer to the population of 1890 than of 2012.
From the New York Times, the piece continues: “[The nomination is] occurring in a different place, guided by talk-radio extremists and religious zealots, with only a vague resemblance to the states where it has taken place.”
This comes as no surprise. It’s easy to see the extremists are good at being horrible, particularly when financed by idiot billionaires who wonder why their old patriarchal jokes about women putting aspirin between their knees from Fifties aren’t funny anymore.
When I worked at the Morning Call newspaper in the late Eighties, editors wouldn’t allow such quotes into the newspaper, even if they were made by important townsmen at local meetings. People were gently saved from themselves.
Now this doesn’t happen. Perversely, there’s a big audience that loves hearing extremely angry white bigots be themselves.
It’s here in southern California in the guise of Los Angeles radio celebrities John and Ken.
Since they’re the biggest thing in radio in the Southland it remains to be seen whether it sticks. It probably won’t for it’s not like the radio men don’t do such things regularly.
John and Ken have a huge audience precisely because they cater to the other California, not the place I live.
California, as anyone with any sense will tell you, is two states.
The one that matters, with the majority and a polyglot, diverse population, is found in the coastal cities and towns.
And there is the second California, mostly really angry white guys and their families, living in the interior. That audience likes to hear radio that blames all problems on people of other colors — the Asians, the Latinos, the “crack ho’s,” the homos, the liberals — and suggests we’d all be better off if they were either all in prison or given sound beatings.
That’s the audience of John and Ken.
The Los Angeles Times recently ran a profile of the two, one suggesting they are more nuanced than your average bigots.
I know Times people, have met many over the years, and saw them again at the memorial for my friend, Don. They don’t listen to John & Ken and they all knew the stuff their paper printed on them, in trying to appear fair and balanced, to coin a phrase, was nonsense.
Broadcasting from a Democratic stronghold in a politically deep blue state, Kobylt and Chiampou have created one of the most popular local radio talk shows in the country by tapping into the contradiction that is California. Not a single Republican holds a statewide elected office. The Legislature is solidly Democratic … The angrier the Californians, the likelier they are to listen in.
For much of their tenure in Southern California, the New Jersey radio transplants have hammered away at illegal immigration. They spent weeks calling on Brown to veto the second half of the California Dream Act, which gives taxpayer-supported college grants to illegal immigrants …
They also gave out the cellphone number for Jorge-Mario Cabrera, spokesman for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, and urged listeners to give him a piece of their minds. More than 500 did, Cabrera said.
Transcripts of about 40 calls provided by Cabrera are filled with profanity. One man who called 42 times, Cabrera said, offered this sentiment: “You pig. I hope you die in your own vomit.”
The John & Ken audience is the same as the one ruling the GOP race.
Politically, John & Ken and their loyal fans have no power in California outside the ability to be spiteful and harassing. And if it weren’t for the newspaper, other media pieces and the occasional billboard, the majority of Californians wouldn’t know anything about them.
However, as in the small white idiot GOP caucuses in the heartland, as with the John & Ken fanbase, the loyalists are extremely focused. And this has been their time to show the rest of us what odious folks they truly are.
Over a year ago I started a tab on Ted Nugent, primarily to show how his special brand of stupid foaming-at-the-mouth incivility had traveled into the mainstream.
But today miscellaneous Ted Nugents, some far more well-dressed, are in the news daily.
Ted-style quote, still excessive and alienating as ever, has become the stuff through which the GOP rallies its own.
“We have a guy in the White House who is an absolute, America-hating punk,??? Nugent said. “And it isn’t really the punk’s fault. It’s we the people for bending over and letting the punk in the door.???
“How about a welfare program … (where) for every kid who gets a sandwich from the welfare program, there’s about 10,000 pigs buying bling-bling, dope and meth with my welfare money,???
“If we don’t fix the United States government this November, we will get exactly what we asked for,??? Nugent said, “and it won’t be the rabid coyote’s fault for getting into our living room – it will be our fault for not shooting him.???
“Prior to being elected President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln represented Sangamon County in the Illinois Legislature,” reads a Wikipedia entry on it.
Lincoln, as everyone knows, was fatally shot by John Wilkes Booth.
An amusing editorial cartoon of Ted Nugent standing before a portrait of Lincoln, from the Springfield, IL, newspaper is here. Click on it for a large version.
One imagined way of dispatching your enemies with ricin — dreamt of by Old Weird America extremists in the Eighties and passed down through the years.
DD is intimately familiar with Old Weird America.
I grew up in part of it, Schuylkill County, PA. There, fear of fluoridation and the existence of the occasional barn burner, invariably an unsettled young man who set fire to the obvious target, marked it in my youth.
That signature demographic has many subcultures. My first publisher, American Eagle, belonged to one of them.
American Eagle was a book maker run out of a house in Tucson, AZ. It was the creation of a fellow with advanced degrees from CalTech and MIT. He was also a theocrat.
Most of American Eagle’s books were devoted to publishing computer virus code. My book, a look into the old computer virus underground, Virus Creation Labs, was part of this collection.
But American Eagle, like other small US publishers devoted to the Old Weird America demographic, published one book, its last, that pitched directly to the most dangerous part of it.
It was called Civil War II and swiftly became one of the publisher’s best-sellers, catering as it did to the far right extremist’s view that Mexico and US Latinos would reconquer the American southwest and that the middle class was being destroyed by affirmative action and the US government.
Sound familiar?
It was a terrible read. Nevertheless, it was popular in the reactionary and violent far right underground.
If you liked Civil War II you probably had it on the shelf next to a worn copy of The Turner Dairies, America’s premier piece of raging bigot race war fiction, a novel in which “freedom fighters” bomb the FBI and Pentagon, eventual inspirations for Timothy McVeigh.
Around 2000, seemingly convinced the US government would collapse due to the Millenium Bug and other catastrophes, American Eagle’s creator left the country for Belize.
Between the start of American Eagle and it’s eventual end the publisher would occasionally write pieces on what life in a theocracy might be like, how one might start one’s own micro-nation on an island, or the greatness of Spetznaz knives. In one pamphlet or book he mused about a computer virus that would substitute the word “Sodomite” for every instance of “homosexual” or “gay” found in text.
Can you guess my book didn’t do well in this milieu? Wrong venue.
The point of this introductory is that this part of Old Weird America is always with us.
It had its own publishing arm with imprint names like Paladin Press and Loompanics, makers and distributors of generally always disgraceful and sometimes horrifyingly repugnant books. (I have one or two on my shelves, part of the research library on ricin and American samizdat lit on weaponry. These include the infamous Poisoner’s Handbook and Silent Death by “Uncle Fester,” aka the ex-con methamphetamine chemist, Steve Preisler.)
They all fed and feed to a dark undercurrent, present at gun shows in the hinterland, sometimes off in the corner, on the necessity of preparation for war and preemptively attacking your enemies — always the government, its various agencies, or your neighbors if they got in the way or weren’t the right color. And to be prepared for war meant having a library stocked with pamphlets and books on how to make improvised weapons — bombs, incendiaries, jellied gasoline, fire bottles, homebrew toxins, zip guns, fortifications, camouflaged pits lined with excrement impregnated stakes, booby traps, landmines, whatever you needed.
Old Weird America lives in its own world and is always paranoid.
People in it can’t be approached with reason. In fact, it’s often counter-productive and hazardous to do so. Nothing disturbs their cracked doomsday-is-coming world view.
They may be a crew of white guys who think no laws apply to them because they’re “free men,” far right Christians waiting for the second coming in which all unbelievers are to be sent to eternal damnation, gold bugs, neo-Nazis, survivalists, pro-lifers, census-resisters, people who think the income tax is unconstitutional and therefore illegal, or any combination of these.
They all share an apocalyptic dark vision of the future. And, invariably, they always think a civil war, or some manner of armed heavy combat between the government and the citizenry is imminent. And this is a battle for which they either plan to be well-prepared or intend to strike first. And they have written plenty of non-fiction and romantic man’s fiction about it.
The geriatric ricin beans gang nabbed in Georgia early this week come right from Old Weird America central casting.
It was June 9, and Frederick Thomas believed he was meeting with a dealer in black market weapons at a Lavonia restaurant, according to FBI affidavits.
“I ain’t worried about dying,??? said the 73-year-old Thomas, the accused ringleader of a North Georgia militia group now at the center of domestic terrorism charges.
A story grew clearer Wednesday through federal affidavits, interviews and court statements accusing Thomas, Roberts and two other men — Ray H. Adams, 65, and Samuel J. Crump, 68 — of planning to unleash the toxic agent ricin across Atlanta and other major U.S. cities, bomb federal buildings and take innocent lives. Documents say the men intended to launch their plot within a year.
At that meeting in June, Thomas talked about buying explosives, silencers and mines, and killing officials with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and Drug Enforcement Administration. It was a plan based on a novel by Mike Vanderboegh, a former militia leader and blogger, that detailed killing Justice Department attorneys, Thomas said, according to the FBI affidavits.
“Now, of course, that’s just fiction, but that’s a damn good idea,??? Thomas, a retired aerospace engineer, once told the others in the so-called “covert group …???
Documents allege that Crump planned to disperse the ricin in various U.S. cities including Atlanta, Newark, N.J., and Washington. In Atlanta, the documents said, the plan was to unleash the powdery substance on I-285, I-75 and U.S. 41.
A member of the Georgia ricin beans gang, pic from 2001.
The back of one of the most widely sold books of Old Weird America, one containing advice on ricin, The Poor Man’s James Bond by Kurt Saxon, reads:
“It is bad to poison your fellow man, blow him up or even shoot him or otherwise disturb his tranquility. It is also uncouth to counterfeit your nation’s currency and it is tacky to destroy property as instructed in [the chapter] Arson and Electronics …
“But some people are just naturally crude … It is your responsibility, then, to be aware of the many ways bad people can be harmful …
“Also, in the event that our nation is invaded by Foreign Devils, it is up to you to destroy them with speed and vigor. Or — and perish the thought — if our Capitol should fall to the enemy within, I expect you to do your duty.
“It is right to share with your enemies, the knowledge in this wonderful book …”
Succinctly, it sums up one of the many bleak philosophies of Old Weird America. And while I don’t know if anyone in the Georgia ricin beans gang ever read it, they certainly appear steeped in it.
Full disclosure: Your host was a source on quote on ricin for the AJC piece:
But could the group have made ricin?
“No, what they would have wound up with is dried castor powder,??? said George Smith, a senior fellow for GlobalSecurity.org, a public information organization on terrorism and homeland security. “They would not be able to make that into a weapon of mass destruction, and it’s not something even a lab technician can really do.???
As mentioned, self-published man’s romance fiction as tutelage for and on the destruction of your enemies and the tyrannical government has always been popular in Old Weird America.
It’s all uniformly dreadful and it’s no different with alleged inspiration for the Georgia ricin beans gang.
The authors and bloggers from Old Weird America are always pretty much the same — crippled stereotypes of Kurt Saxon and William Pierce, only dumber, but utterly convinced of their righteousness.
On his website, militia leader-turned-blogger Mike Vanderboegh writes about fed-up Americans responding to government violence with guns and grenades. It’s an attempt to warn the government that people are armed and angry, he says, just like last year when he urged those upset with President Barack Obama’s health care plan to toss bricks at Democratic Party offices …
In the introduction to ‘Absolved,’ first posted in 2008, Vanderboegh writes: “If this book is to operate as a ‘useful dire warning,’ then both real sides in my imaginary civil war … must be able to recognize the real threat to avoid it.
“In this, I am frankly writing as much a cautionary tale for the out-of-control gun cops of the ATF as anyone. For that warning to be credible, I must also present what amounts to a combination field manual, technical manual and call to arms for my beloved gunnies of the armed citizenry. They need to know how powerful they could truly be if they were pushed into a corner.”
Last year, Vanderboegh was denounced for calling on citizens to throw bricks through the windows of local Democratic headquarters.
Rick Perry would use Predator drones to secure the border. Herman Cain would use alligators and electrical fences. The unemployed and poor could be booed. Before we hit them with guided missiles. (Even Joe Arpaio blanched a little at this today when questioned by Martin Bashir at lunchtime on MSNBC. We can’t give people a death sentence, or something to that effect, he stammered out. Oh, no?)
Anyway, Mr. Rick has missed that boat by at least two years although General Atomics must have certainly been thrilled to hear him say it.
And drones for everything had a hand in inspiring Sleep Dealer, a foreign film with a great premise: Use of drone camera live streaming of people being Hellfire’d in reality entertainment shows in the US, use of Mexican labor to operate robots in America, and US multi-nationals buying up all water in Mexico, gouging for it, and using remote-controlled machine gun posts to kill people trying to steal it.
Sadly, over the course of 90 minutes or so the movie just wasn’t very good.
The trailer makes it seem better which may indicate it could have used a good editing.
Predator drone used in border patrol at 1:45.
Now, The National Anthem would be a great tune to use as part of the soundtrack for a dystopian reality-based movie along the lines of Sleep Dealer. Reality-based because you can’t satirize this country anymore. Anything you think might work at that is already happening.
Anyway, you’d pay to see my idea executed as a movie. I just know it.
The Alachua County Republican Party has canceled Ted Nugent’s appearance at Thursday’s Black Tie and Blue Jeans BBQ fundraiser, citing low ticket sales, which the party blamed on “Obamanomics.???
“We started hearing heartbreaking stories,??? Stafford Jones, the party chairman, said of the tales he and other party officials heard when they contacted usual supporters who hadn’t purchased tickets, which cost between $65 and $125 for single tickets and $680 and $1,000 for eight-person tables.
Jones said there was more excitement for Nugent, a rock ‘n’ roll musician and an outspoken conservative, than other speakers in recent years, but people are struggling.
“The problem is that, thanks to Obamanomics and ‘trickle-up-poverty’, nobody has any money,??? the party said in a statement announcing that Nugent wouldn’t be appearing. “It became evident that small business owners and working Republicans were hurting, tremendously, and simply couldn’t afford to come to Black Tie and Blue Jeans.???
In an interview, Jones said, “We’re spending billions of dollars in stimulus money that is just going into black holes — Solyndra is one.???
“In Nugent’s keynote stead will be former state Rep. Adam Hasner, a South Florida Republican who is running for the U.S. Senate and won’t be paid for his appearance …” it finishes.
Trickle up poverty is a GOP dog whistle phrase for the idea, one that really didn’t catch on (coming as it did from a Michael Savage book that didn’t sell like gangbusters), that unemployment is kind of, like, contagious. And that it’s the poor that have dragged the nation down, not Wall Street.
Therefore, from the tortured logic on display in the brief newspaper piece, the poor, Solyndra and Obama are responsible for the inability to pay pricey tickets to see a Ted Nugent rant in Alachua County.
Another unintentionally funny item from the Tennessean, this on a Stand With Gibson [Guitars] rally.
[Gibson spokespeople] also said one or two surprise guests might show up unannounced but wouldn’t give many clues as to who, other than to say it will not be Ted Nugent. (Not sure whether that was a rumor they were trying to squash or just an obvious pick for a conservative rally.) Organizers neither confirmed nor denied another reporter’s guess, Hank Williams, Jr.
Hank Williams, Jr. The reporter may have been making a not so subtle joke.
A hunting buddy of mine proposes the following plan to ultimately eliminate the Social Security congressional slush fund:
Anyone over the age of 45 will receive Social Security. Anyone under the age of 45 will not receive a Social Security check upon retirement. However, those younger than 45 will still be required to pay into Social Security to cover the benefits of those who are 45 or older. What they will get in return is that all of the money they accrue through investing in their 401(k), etc. programs will be tax-free when they retire.
Nugent, protestations to the contrary, is (from evidence gathered over the past couple years from his columns and TV appearances) brainless. It’s a trait which binds him to Rick Perry. They are kindred souls, he’s implied a couple times. And I certainly believe him.
Nugent doesn’t realize or chooses to ignore that for millions of Americans, Social Security is all they have. And that as the nation slides further into its relentless decline with less good paying jobs of any kind, this number is likely to increase.
Therefore millions of Americans, under the “Nugent hunting buddy plan” would still see money being taken out of their paychecks to cover Social Security for elders. But have nothing when they retired.
Which is genuinely a Ponzi scheme, a criminal malpractice. Perhaps that is the entire idea.
Mary Rathbun gets an $809 check every month from Social Security and an additional $100 in food stamps. The 74-year-old former nurse pays $550 in rent for her apartment in St. Helens, Ore. That leaves less than $400 for food, utilities and other expenses, including medical bills.
When Social Security was launched 70 years ago Sunday, it was meant to be a supplement for retirees, not a full pension. But today, 10.6 million people, or 22% of the 48 million who will receive Social Security benefits this year, live on that check alone, the Social Security Administration says.
Living on only Social Security isn’t a happy prospect. It means stretching every dollar, depending on a patchwork of family, charity and state programs to pay for what Social Security doesn’t cover — and sometimes doing without. Those living on nothing but Social Security are often single women and minorities. AARP, the senior advocacy group, says 25% of retired women, including 46% of unmarried Hispanic women, have no income beyond Social Security. AARP also says 33% of retired African-Americans live on Social Security alone.
Those numbers could grow as the baby boom generation enters retirement. Currently, 53% of people in the workforce have no pension, and 32% have no savings set aside for retirement.
Under the “Nugent hunting buddy plan,” homelessness, premature death, hunger and truly destitute poverty among the elderly would explode. You don’t even have to do any arithmetic. The explanation and numbers in the entirety of the USA Today piece would predict a truly appalling future for everyone but the most wealthy and their class of most enthusiastic attendants.
What would you expect in wisdom from a “hunting buddy”? Would you like to live in a country run by the heartwarming charity and homespun country savvy of the “Ted Nugent hunting buddy”?
A GOP to rig Pennsylvania for Rick Perry or whoever gets the GOP nomination is described at Poltico here.
It’s mostly about changing the awarding of electoral votes in the state so that winner no longer takes all. With that eliminated, the GOP candidate splits off electoral votes from the state’s interior under common realization that between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh (with the exception of Harrisburg and State College), Pennsyltucky is essentially a white southern red state with no urban centers in voting demographics.
It’s also a tacit endorsement on the use of voter polarization and the idea that an election should be to drive people further apart, to purge the undesirables, rather than unite under one country.
E pluribus unum. F— that shit.
It’s a problem the Democrats and Obama can’t do anything about. The extremists got into power in 2008 because of economic calamity, political weakness and the rage vote. Since then they’ve been using the advantage granted to disenfranchise voters inimical to them.
In Pennsylvania that is a clever plan, essentially one to create an electoral split of the state into two.
Practically speaking, it’s an attempt to use secession to create a 51st state for one day, the election.
Perry, whose grades at Texas A&M were far from sterling, also appeared to push back against those who question the intellect of an animal science major with a transcript peppered with Cs and Ds.
“Managing to balance between being a cadet and being a student, preparing for that life in the military while trying to focus on the variety of subjects that would prepare me for life after the military,??? Perry said of his life at Texas A&M. “It wasn’t always easy. Quite frankly, I struggled with it. I fully admit that.???
Jerry Falwell Jr., the chancellor of the school and the son of its famous founder, spoke admiringly of Perry at a press conference with reporters before the event, calling the governor’s flirtation with the idea of secession “gutsy.???
We must continue to kill them at every opportunity. Death and war are all they understand. We must give those to them nonstop by unleashing hell upon them at all times … Fund the military and slash the budgets of all other agencies, departments and programs … Americans must commit to this struggle for the long term. It will take years, possibly decades …
Nugent has never fought in a war although he is mighty fond of machine guns. He avoided Viet Nam through deferment and was not, in fact, a draft dodger.
The progressive professes that they know right from wrong but in fact deny Him that is right. How can this be, the Republicans and the Democrats today have failed to understand the Scriptures …
I believe separation of Church and State with its doctrine will be placed on center stage in 2012 with the Christians again showing their ignorance of scripture and the Biblical teachings. They will be supporting some Heathen claiming to be a Christian; all the while the so call Christian Voter ignores the Constitution and the essences of Romans 13:1-6 and what the civil magistrate should be doing.
The understanding of the Bible and God’s law is imperative if we are to know how to separate church and state, and knowing the true meaning of what a theocracy is. Neither the church nor the state can take away conscience or man’s right to property as given to him by God. All spheres of life are under God and owe their boundaries, as fixed, by Him and His sovereignty; this then becomes a true theocracy under Godly men …
As we drift away from God and His law we see 70 years later, the devastation done to the social fabric, the people and their freedom.
It remains for us to rightly divide the Word if there is going to be a correction and that correction will only come if God has mercy on us if we understand salvation is through Jesus Christ, and not the State …
Obama’s response thus far has been to offer compromises to a movement that does not compromise, and to argue facts with a movement that hates facts. Between now and November 2012, however, Obama’s audience isn’t that movement; it’s American voters. In a year when economic distress should doom his reelection chances, Obama’s best shot is to cast the election not as a choice between two competing visions of governance, but as a choice between democracy and theocracy. And a particularly nasty theocracy at that.
He won’t use that framing, of course …
The results were on painful display Monday night’s Tea Party debate. Our task for the next year is to remind Americans at every turn that almost all of us are not pure enough to have any place in the theocratic vision of the United States on display there …
The routine of another regretful Republican, Sarah Reidy, Facebooking:
“I am seriously thinking of logging off of Facebook until November 2012. I am embarrassed by how red meat our Tea Party has become. For years I have tried to prove the GOP isn’t the party of elitist, stereotypical people that lack compassion. When did creativity and growth become secondary to hate? Hearing the debate crowds go crazy over things like executions and the uninsured dying makes me sick and sad …”
[Pass your mouse over the link — “do we need another dumb texan“] Not entirely rhetorical. A lot of Americans would say yes.
The degree was in “Animal Science” which sounds legitimate until you view the transcript. Note all the watering down from a standard undergrad degree in biology or chemistry.
If the grades are any indication Perry needed the dilution.
As a young man he got a D and an F in two semesters of organic chemistry, a D in trigonometry, a C in physics, a C in freshman chemistry, a D in “feeds & feeding,” a D in basic accounting, a D in economics, a D in an animal anatomy class.
It’s a hopeless transcript, the record of someone who eked one out.
So where did he come up with Galileo? A staffer pre-debate?
In any case, for Perry’s demographic the transcript couldn’t be any better. Now it’s an asset, showing you don’t need no steenkin’ learnin’ to be president of the United States.
From a historical and practical viewpoint this is true. You don’t need any education to run the United States. One can lead it so even the most learned elite snobs have no effect.
Nothing so illustrated the deep failure plaguing the country and the collapse of intellect than Rick Perry invoking Galileo in defense of GOP disbelief in science and global warming.
You see, when DD was a kid I was assigned to read Bertolt Brecht’s play, “Life of Galileo,” in its original German in an advanced language class. This was in high school in backward Schuylkill County, PA, in the early Seventies. (The above illustration is obviously not the original Deutsch edition. It was the closest-looking thing to it I could find on the web.)
The play tells the story of Galileo’s clash with the Catholic church, one brought upon him by his use of a telescope and his subsequent belief in Copernicus’s view of the solar system. The church threatens Galileo and, fearfully, he recants these beliefs. They put him under house arrest.
It’s all very depressing.
Last night, Perry trotted out a short incoherent dodge implying his “scientists” — scientists the referees of the debate couldn’t get him to identify — had the truth — global warming was “unsettled” science.
Then he unexpectedly blurted out that even Galileo “got outvoted.”
It illustrated, too, why it’s impossible to debate the GOP. Even semi-intellectual arguments are of no use when the “refs” — Brian Williams and someone from the Politico — can’t enforce any rules to penalize or discourage the emission of outrageous balderdash. The Republican Party employs tactics which nullify reasoned argument. This gives them a significant and very real advantage.
And this is what Rich Perry also apparently specializes in.
The very idea that he would liken Galileo’s suppression by the Church to the GOP dogma/disbelief in science is flabbergasting. In the eyes of anyone with intelligence throughout the world, the conclusion would be that the United States could easily become an unstable pariah nation because of the nature of its potential political leadership.
Rick Perry insults anyone with a scientific education, even anyone with just a vague memory of old Galileo from grade school many years ago.
When the US has evolved to a position where someone like this can be the governor of Texas, or even aspire to the Presidency, it only provides ample proof the country’s system has so changed it richly rewards and promotes only the incompetent but forceful.
Perry could easily be President. The rage vote against a powerless to do anything President can work.
Relatively speaking it’s difficult to muster any confidence that people will be able to distinguish a serious qualitative difference in 2012 between a man who made speeches that never delivered on jobs and the economy and a different man who firmly projects the image of a strong, assertive guy from Texas who professes absurdly that, like Galileo, his opinion is suppressed.
