Hiding Behind Eisenhower: Conservatives Have Always Been Nuts

There is no fever to be broken, no moderate leader hiding in the wings, no hope of cooperation if only dems would stop being so darn partisan.

We fight the crazy motherfuckers they have always been and always will be, or we lose.

Martin Longman at Political Animal

The point here is that the conservatives have been like this forever. Nutty fruitcakes, scared of their own shadows, seeing the seeds of our destruction in everything from fluoridated water to the replacement of incandescent light bulbs.

Robert Taft was basically a McCarthyite:

As early as March 23, 1950 — four weeks after McCarthy’s famous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia — Taft gave McCarthy his firm support, telling McCarthy, “If one case [accusing a State Department official of being a Red] doesn’t work out, bring up another.” And added, for good measure, “Keep it up, Joe.”

Had these loons taken control of the party in 1952, it’s doubtful that there ever would have been a point that people could look back to fondly and say that Washington DC used to function– that there was a postwar consensus on anything.

Their rhetoric is old. Their tactics are old. Their beliefs systems have been warped forever.

For a while, though, they were sidelined.

That’s no longer the case.

Repug Extremists Will Never Quit Because What They Want is Impossible

It's not even a "return" to some pre-penicillin conservative paradise. It's a wingnut fantasy that never existed: every American man a white, straight, christian, self-made millionaire entrepreneur; every American woman a white, straight, christian, beauty-queen-turned-homemaker who gives perfect blowjobs and never expects anything in return; non-stop wars all over the globe pitting our brown and black cannon fodder against their brown and black cannon fodder, just because.

Don't worry; they'll come out of this congressional "chaos" stronger, crazier and more determined than ever.

Kevin Drum:

Look at this from a conservative point of view. They want things to move in a conservative direction. But compromise doesn't do that. In practice, it always seems to move things in a more liberal direction, with a few conservative sops thrown in that eventually wither away and die. This leaves them with little choice except increasingly hard-nosed obstructionism: government shutdowns, debt ceiling fights, filibusters for everything, voter ID laws, etc. etc.

 

SNIP

It's in this sense that our system of governance really is at fault for our current gridlock. Not directly because of veto points or our presidential system or any of that, but because these features of our political system allow conservatives to live in a fantasy world. They dream of what they could do if only they had the political power to do it, and they really believe they'd do it all if they got the chance. Thanks to all those veto points, however, they never get the chance. Full control of the government would disabuse everyone very quickly of just how far they're really willing to go, but it never happens.

We are living through an era in which conservatives are living a fantasy that can never be. But our system of governance denies them the chance to test that fantasy. So it continues forever. It will stop eventually, either because conservatives somehow do gain total political power and are forced to face up to its limits, or because it burns itself out through continual head banging that gets them nowhere combined with demographic changes that decimate their base. Probably the latter. It's only a question of how long it takes.

 No.  It's a question of how much irreversible damage they cause before that point.  

The End Game of the "Religious Freedom" Fraud

Forcing everyone to be religious. At taxpayer expense. It's already happening today, and not just in New Mexico. 

In Kentucky and the rest of the South, it's virtually impossible to win a civil case against a church or someone who is ostentatiously church-going, especially if you are not a freakazoid yourself.  Failure to attend church is taken automatically as evidence of anti-social if not outright criminal behavior. Solitary, elderly women have literally lost their homes and freedom to freakazoid relatives for the "crime" of not belonging to a church.

Kaili Joy Gray at Wonkette:

There is a war on religious freedom and religious liberty (both kinds!) in US America right now, as we all know. American citizens are being persecuted and criminalized and jailed just for trying to exercise their First Amendment rights. It’s pretty bad out there these days, so here is a real effed-to-heck story about a single mom whose religious liberty was trampled on, kicked in the groin, decapitated, and left to rot in the hot New Mexico sun.

The family court in Albuquerque, New Mexico, ordered a divorced couple to attend 10 counseling sessions, so they could learn how to be good parents to their 11-year-old twin sons, even while screaming “I NEVER LOVED YOU EITHER!” and splitting up their combined record collection. This is a thing family courts do to divorced parents who can sometimes forget to take care of their children because they’re too busy stalking their exes with their new fucktoys on the Facebook, or whatever.

But the counseling sessions Holly Salzman and her ex attended did not start with the basics of parenting, but rather, mandatory prayer:

“I walked into the session and the very first thing she said to me was, ‘I start my sessions by praying,’” Salzman said. “When I expressed my concerns that I didn’t pray she said, ‘well this is what I do’ and she proceeded to say a prayer out loud.” […]

There were handouts with quotes of Psalms and other religious quotes. Pepper also gave her homework titled “who is God to me?”

“Every session there was some sort of religion that was intertwined with the sessions,” Salzman said.

Now, a thinking person might wonder if the court (aka, The Government) can compel citizens to attend religious-based classes and participate in prayer, because of that whole First Amendment separation of church and state thing. And Holly Salzman was a thinking person, and she did wonder that. So she went to the court and said, “Um, yeah, I think this violates my constitutional rights, and you can’t make me do this.” But the court told her that yes uh-huh it can TOO make her go to this specific counselor to get proselytized, for the good of her children, OR ELSE. Or else what?

The single mother of two said she felt so “offended and disgusted” that she stopped going to the court-ordered sessions. The result was that the court took her kids away. […]

To get her kids back she had to finish the classes.

Court spokesman Tim Korte, while not commenting on this specific case, insisted that the court would never do such a thing:

The court does not refer parties to religious-based counseling. Some of the counseling organizations where individuals are referred may offer optional religious counseling, but the individual is not ordered by the court to participate in the religious counseling.

To be fair, the court-appointed counselor, Mary Pepper, MA, does not currently advertise her business as religious-based counseling. But she isn’t especially shy about being “a believer” and how she incorporates that into her counseling and thinks there’s no problem with her discussing religion in a court-ordered counseling session. Like so:

KRQE News 13 rolled undercover video and audio in the final three classes between Salzman and Pepper. There were several references of religion.\

“The meaning in my life is to know love and serve God,” Pepper told Salzman in one of the meetings. “If you want to explore how God was in your past,  how God was in your life and not in your life…  I know you don’t believe in God which is fine but I know at some points he was in your life in some way.”

Oh, it gets way worse - or better, depending on your view of freakazoids being hypocritcal law-breaking criminals.  Seems Pepper knows goddamn well that her taking tax dollars to proselytize is breaking the law, because for years she has been taking illegal cash under the table to hold her prayer-filled "parenting" sessions in secret.

Meanwhile, Salzman sucked it up and completed her What Does God Mean To Me? counseling with Pepper, and the court certified that she does indeed now know how to parent good and gets to have her kids back. While we’d suggest that the court undertake a more thorough vetting process of the classes it requires parents to attend, we certainly look forward to all the religious liberty activists descending on the courthouse in Albuquerque, with songs and signs and lots of outrage, to protest this blatant trashing of an American mother’s First Amendment freedoms.

 Not just mandatory prayer, but mandatory xian freakazoid only prayer.

Who You Callin' Extremist?

Tristero, at Hullabaloo:

Not a single elected Democrat has called for secession, as Rick Perry did. Not a single elected Democrat defied the Supreme Court to the extent of sending in the National Guard and provoking an insane confrontation with the local police, as Jeb Bush did during Schiavo. Not a single elected Democrat is so anti-reality and anti-science that they believe that if women are "legitimately raped," they will be protected from pregnancy as Todd Akin did.

Oh, sure there are leftwing extremists. Somewhere. But in the Democratic Party? Holding office or positions of power? Puhleeeze.

Adding: An unspoken assumption in this article is that there is a dichotomy between right and left viewpoints. In US politics today, that is an absurdly false dichotomy. The actual dichotomy is between the crazies (i.e. national Republicans and their rich enablers) and the reality-based rest.

Oh do I ever have my disagreements with Democrats (I'm an Independent), but I never doubt their grip on reality. I cannot say the same about Paul Ryan, Rand Paul, Chris Christie, Michael Huckabee, and the rest of the clown club. It truly is hard to take seriously someone who doubts evolution, human-based climate change, elementary economic theory, or basic civil rights.

Reversing Extremism

What appears to be a final conservatard/freakazoid victory is inevitable only if we let it happen without a fight.

Ed Kilgore at Political Animal:

Those of you who read my book on the 2014 midterms might find this argument from the esteemed political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson kind of familiar:

SNIP

They conclude with this sobering thought, which like most of their analysis I would emphatically endorse:

We are under no illusion about how easily or quickly our lopsided politics can be righted. But put yourself in the shoes of an early 1970s conservative and ask how likely the great right migration seemed then, when Richard Nixon was proposing a guaranteed income and national health insurance and backing environmental regulations and the largest expansion of Social Security in its history. Reversals of powerfully rooted trends that threaten our democracy take time, effort, and persistence. Yet above all they require a clear recognition of what has gone wrong.

Let's Steal Tea Party Tactics to Beat Their Ideology

David Atkins at Political Animal:

Responsible people should be pushing back strongly on the notion that the progressive faction is somehow as dangerous as the Tea Party just because it has the courage to stand up to what Wall Street-friendly corporate centrists want. The progressive wing is right on the policy, and tactically it isn’t drawing any red lines that Republican legislators wouldn’t be able to sell to their base if they cared to.

Unless, of course, the Republican base isn’t their voters but rather the top tenth of one percent of incomes. But then, isn’t confronting and exposing that reality what decent politics is supposed to be all about?

Read the whole thing.

Extremists

ummagumma.co:

What Part of This Repug Platform Do Your Repug Candidates Agree With?

Mitch McConnell, Andy Barr, Thomas Massie, Ed Whitfield, Hal Rogers, Brett Guthrie - do they support this perfect expression of the repug id or not? Make them answer.

What about your state house and senate candidates? Make them answer, too.

Charlie Pierce:

John Boehner, and Mitch McConnell, and especially obvious anagram Reince Priebus, who nominally presides over Bedlam, need to be asked every day which parts of the Texas Republican platform they support and which parts they don't. They don't get to use the crazies to get elected and then hide behind fake Washington politesse when the howls from the hinterlands get too loud. We allow ourselves only two major political parties. One of them is completely out of its fcking mind. This is a national problem.

SNIP

If you want to see the clearest symptoms of the prion disease that has devoured the brain of the Republican party, the state Republican party is your Patient Zero. And, before a whole bunch of people in the Beltway media playpen  begin minimizing this craziness because it pretty much shatters the whole idea of Both Sides Doing It without which most of those people can't get out of bed in the morning. This isn't four guys in camo in Idaho. This isn't a guy broadcasting on a short-wave from upper Michigan, or receiving the truth about chemtrails and the Illuminati through his teeth. This is the Republican party representing the state from which he got our last Republican president, and one of the biggest states in the Union. This is what it believes, as summed up with realit-based parentheticals by Hendrik Hertzberg at The New Yorker:

Let's proceed to policy. In the next of its forty pages, the platform demands, among other things: That the Texas Legislature should nullify-indeed, "ignore, oppose, refuse, and nullify"-federal laws it doesn't like. (Unmentioned is the fact that, beginning in 1809, the Supreme Court has steadfastedly rejected state nullification of federal laws.); That when it comes to "unelected bureaucrats"-i.e., pretty much the entire federal work force above the janitorial level-Congress should "defund and abolish these positions."; That the Seventeenth Amendment, which was adopted in 1913, be repealed, so that "the appointment of United States Senators" can again be made by state legislators, not by voters. (Admittedly, the Texas Legislature could hardly do worse.), That all federal "enforcement activities" within the borders of Texas-including, presumably, the activities of F.B.I. agents, Justice Department prosecutors, air marshals, immigration officers, agricultural inspectors, and tax auditors-"must be conducted under the auspices of the county sheriff with jurisdiction in that county."

Keep an eye on that last sentence. The Republican party of the state of Texas, a state which has 38 electoral votes and which will send 153 delegates to the 2016 Republican National Convention, has endorsed the exact theory of government that was promulgated by the gun-toting yahoos at the Bundy Ranch. And there's more.

...there are plenty of things that Texas Republicans plan to do away with entirely-or, to use their preferred word, things they would subject to "abolishment." (For Calhoun conservatives, I suppose, "abolition" has regrettable overtones.) A partial list: Personal-income taxes; Property taxes; Estate taxes;  Capital-gains taxes; Franchise and business-income taxes; The gift tax; Minimum-wage laws; Social Security ("We support an immediate and orderly transition to a system of private pensions"); The Environmental Protection Agency;The Department of Education and all its functions; "Unelected bureaucrats"; "Any and all federal agencies not based on an enumerated power granted by the United States Federal Constitution"; Congressional pensions; Supreme Court jurisdiction in cases involving abortion, religious freedom, and the Bill of Rights; The Federal Reserve; "Foreign aid, except in cases of national defense or catastrophic disasters, with Congressional approval," Obamacare (but you knew that already).

The Republican party of the state of  Texas, a state that went for Mitt Romney by over two million votes, would like to do away with the Federal Reserve, and any Supreme Court jurisdiction in any case involving the Bill Of Rights. And, yes, there's more.

Things that the Texas Republicans support: Withdrawal from the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank; "Traditional methods of discipline, including corporal punishment;" "Reducing taxpayer funding to all levels of education institutions," Returning to "the time-tested precious metal standard for the United States dollar."

Hold AynRandy Accountable for Embracing Extremists

You can't fuck the poxy whores of right-wing violence and pretend you never got the clap.

Unless you're a teabagger darling.

Washington Monthly:

None of this, of course, was particularly unusual for Jackson. So what on earth was Rand Paul doing on this conference call? And lest anyone of the False Equivalence tribe dismiss the incident as an example of the craziness that can be found in the “extremes” of both parties, let’s remember Jackson was a Republican nominee for statewide office in Virginia just last year. Is there anyone remotely “equivalent” to Jackson among statewide Democratic nominees anywhere? And even if you can scrounge up one, is there anything on the progressive side of the political spectrum remotely like the dozens of Republican pols who sound just like Jackson in their homophobia, Islamophobia, and crazy-talk about Obama every single day? And if there were, would any Democrat running for president do anything other than run away from these people as rapidly as they could, maybe attacking them for good measure?

No, no and no. And the sad thing is that we barely even notice any more that to an alarming extent the GOP is divided between these people and those who curry their favor and hasten to assure them they share their values and goals.