Tag Archives: conservatives

The $1.3 billion ideological football

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So, saw a tweet by Sarah Palin someone had commented on in my timeline, talking about President Obama giving $1.3 billion to the Muslim Brotherhood even though Congress told him not to. It smelled like horsecrap from the get-go, but you know what?

It took me going through five or six Google search pages before I finally found one story nestled amongst all the angry repostings at conservative blogs and right-wing “news” sites that actually explained what really happened: It was military aid to Egypt, which we’ve been giving for years upon years upon years…and the only issue was that the Obama administration loosened some “democracy” restrictions so that the money could go where it was supposed to.

Nothing shady. Simply that, technically, Egypt wasn’t democratic enough to qualify. But the thing is, through multiple administration’s we’ve overlooked political and human rights abuses in Egypt (and Israel…and Saudi Arabia) because it would be political, diplomatic, military, security and stability suicide to do otherwise in the Middle East. You don’t start slapping your key allies in a tricky region like that.

But somehow, all that gets twisted into Obama giving a fat load of money to a Muslim group.

This makes me fear for the future of this country that people eat this stuff up and repeat it online without questioning it for even a moment and making an effort to find out what’s really going on.

Does the truth make this $1.3 billion wonderful news? No. There are still reasons to be concerned if it’s the right thing to do, but that’s on top of a lot of other damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don’t decisions we make worldwide to keep peace, keep the economy going and all that.

Point is that as bad as the left has been at times, I have never seen anything in my lifetime as batshit crazy as the right wing since Obama took office. It’s downright frightening how quickly they cling to obvious lies and reject obvious and verifiable truths. Not even gray areas. Things you can actually look up and see they aren’t true, but the right wing continues to insist they are, so loudly and for so long that they become seen as truth by a good chunk of America.

I mean, if Obama had cut $1.3 billion in military aid to Egypt saying that he can’t reward them since they’re moving too slowly on reforms, the Republicans and Tea Party and all the rest would be accusing him of trying to destabilize the Middle East, back away from a key ally and hurt American-based contractors who ultimately supply many of the items that military aid would end up buying.

I criticized George W. Bush for a lot of things, not the least of which was entangling us in a terrible, costly war using patently untrue reasons to justify it. I mostly criticized him for obvious conflicts of interest, like putting people on a committee meant to protect children from lead exposure who had been paid by industry for years to debunk research on lead’s health impact…or giving Iraq contracts to Halliburton, a company his vice president was intimately involved with…or taking long and frequent vacations to Texas during one of the most unsettled U.S. periods (in terms of peace and security) of my lifetime.

I’ve got my beefs with Obama, too. Difference is that for two presidential election cycles now, he’s clearly been the candidate with his head screwed on the tightest and the one who’s most likely to give somewhat of a crap about most Americans instead of solely kneeling to the very wealthy ones. So, while I think he’s done a lot of things wrong and I’m not sure he’s always responded as well as he could to crises, I’m going to mostly side with him.

And when I do criticize him, it will be based on truth, not lies and conspiracy theories…just like I have with any other president.

Conservatives Hate Workers

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OK, admittedly, people on the right-wing of political ideology don’t hate workers. They love them for the labor they bring and the way they fill the pockets of the owners of businesses. They just hate them being able to make an actual living or have any rights.

Apparently, conservative working-class folks hate themselves if they follow the accepted wisdom of right-wing leaders and pundits.

Here’s why…

On the one hand, conservatives don’t want the government enforcing minimum wage standards or, many times, things like workplace safety or equal treatment (remember, women still make about 3/4 of what men do in terms of wages, even though they’ve been doing equivalent work for decades).

On the other hand, they also try to stamp out labor unions, making them out to be socialist plots or anti-corporate bullies. Therefore, workers can’t band together to protect themselves.

So, what they’re saying is that government shouldn’t look out for workers, and workers also shouldn’t have any private recourse (even though conservatives are always crowing about how we can make our own ways and succeed on tenacity and…oh…the private market always works for everyone’s benefit…bwah ha ha hah ha ha ha…)

Essentially, the right-wing folks want just enough government to put down workers and keep them in their place as wage-slaves, but not enough to ever put corporations in their place.

The reason government is involved in things like this is because of the propensity employers have for screwing over workers. For the same reason, government is involved in things like fair trade and corporate regulation because companies have a propensity for screwing over consumers and the environment.

Of Anecdotes and Ideologues

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No one loves an anecdote more than someone with a strong ideological agenda.

I mean, don’t get me wrong—most everyone likes a good anecdote. There’s nothing wrong with that.

But it’s like the lifeblood of an ideologue to have a ready collection of anecdotes to make their points and to show you that their beliefs are true and that you should agree with them and not question them. Or argue. Or point out completely obvious logical fallacies.

Whether liberal or conservative, religious or atheist, environmentalist or land baron…whatever. Stories are the key.

And that’s what anecdotes are, of course. Stories. But like folklore or fairy tales or any other story, they don’t equal truth. Truth may be in them. If they are tales of something that happened, the tale itself might be true in general terms. But tales don’t equal truth.

Yet that’s what people at the extreme end of a belief would have you believe. That’s why they whip out anecdotes like pedophiles give out candy to children to lure them into their vans.

For the conservatives, it’s so often the mythical “prosperous welfare cheat,” who in most stereotypical form is portrayed as black, female, parent to several kids, operating some under-the-radar business, driving a really nice car and living the high life in public housing while collecting food assistance, free healthcare and actual money from the government, too.

Never mind that if such people exist, they exist in numbers far too small to make an impact on the system. I know that conservative folks, especially the rich at one end and the blue collar/pink collar ones at nearly the other end, like to believe this is a real problem. It isn’t. Sure, there are lazy people on public assistance, but they don’t live any kind of “high life.” I’ve seen too many of them through my wife’s work in social services. Most people don’t want to be on the dole. It sucks and it doesn’t get you anywhere (though it might keep you alive).

Also, what the conservatives fail to point out when they trot out their often-racist welfare cheat anecdotes is that the vast majority of people on public assistance are white. In fact, many of them are Republicans and live in states with Republican majorities.

But why let facts and real truth get in the way of a good story?

I could go into the lovely anecdotes about abortion, “curing” gay men, how African-Americans and Latinos are more dangerous than whites and things like that, but why beat a dead horse when I’ve rolled out the gold standard already? And yes, I know liberals have their own misleading anecdotes, too. But you know what? Even their most outlandish ones are way closer to the truth than the conservatives’ are. Feel free to argue with me on that if you have some good examples, but I doubt you’ll get very far with me unless you abandon logical arguments.

Abstinence Only Education: The Ultimate Act of Futility

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Every time a conservative person, particularly of the religious persuasion, goes off on how important “abstinence-only” education is, an angel loses his dick.

Hey, the Bible says angels had sex with women at times, so they must have some junk under those white robes. And in this season when the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” tends to get a lot of play (every time a bell rings, a new angel gets its wings)…well, it seems an apropos image.

But back to the topic. Why the hell does this notion of teaching abstinence get so much play? Have all the members of the GOP conveniently forgotten that almost all of them had sex in their teens…before being married? Did they forget that many of their parents had them in their teens and got married primarily because those future Republican politicians and pundits were growing in a young womb?

I’m not saying we should be teaching the Kama Sutra in classrooms and letting teens watch pornos in school, but damn it, they need education about the risks of sex and how to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease. Even loudmouthed fucking Sarah Palin’s teen kid got pregnant while unmarried in the midst of Mrs.-Holier-Than-Thou-Rewrites-History-and-Can-See-Russia-from-Her-Backyard’s efforts to try to drum up a presidential campaign.

Considering how much sexually transmitted disease is out there, and how many STDs are becoming resistant (or already long since have done so) to most available treatments, it is downright criminal to be trying to keep teens from getting access both to knowledge and condoms.

Because you know what? Teens are going to have sex. If they can get a person who’s willing to have sex, they will have sex. I know that I would have, if only the nerdy girls weren’t turning me down for dates just as much as the more popular ones were.

Teens have been having sex before marriage forever. For. Fucking. Ever.

I want conservatives to point me to this magic period in history when teens didn’t have sex before tying the knot. And don’t go back to the 1940s and 1950s and tell me how pure kids were then and how they obeyed their parents and were stalwart bastions of virtue. They got married in high school or right after often because the girl was knocked up.

So, conservatives, let me give you a math equation: Rampaging hormones + penis + vagina = teen sex.

No amount of pushing abstinence-only education will change that. Shepherds back in biblical times were telling their kids to keep in in their robes, too, and they didn’t listen then. They didn’t keep them in their slacks and poodle skirts in the 1950s, either.

So, shut the fuck up already, accept reality and let’s shoot for healthier and safer activities. Education and condoms aren’t going to increase teen sex.

But they might decrease the amount of disease and early pregnancies out there.

God Is Good. Well, Not *THAT* God…

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In the aftermath of the terrible killings in Oslo, Norway, there is a clear take-away message that I’m getting, and I’m so glad that right-wing pundits, conservative nutjobs and Tea Party members, among others, are brave enough to share this insight:

If a Muslim kills folks, it’s clearly terrorism, and also proof that Islam is an inherently violent religion that is obsessed with taking over the world and crushing the United States to dust.

If a Christian kills a bunch of folks, it’s simply a sign he was slightly too aggressive in expressing his understandable bigotry and/or he isn’t practicing his religion properly.

Thanks for clearing that up, folks. I feel so much better now.

Revisionist History

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I expect all sorts of nonsense to spill out of Rush Limbaugh’s mouth.

I expect Republicans…particularly the crazy brand that we have to deal with right now…to practice revisionist history and paint events in distorted ways to support their agenda of enriching the rich and downtodding the poor.

But even so, this quote amazed the hell out of me with its putrid form of audacity and balls-out inaccuracy:

www.deusexmalcontent.com/2010/11/quote-of-day_26.html

What Is In Their Tea, Anyway?

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I know the mid-term elections are over, but this is the best breakdown I’ve seen of the Tea Party and all the Republicans who passively co-sign their “ideals” and let them run rampant, so it deserves to be shared even post-election.

By the way, before anyone mentions crazy liberals, let’s remember that the Democrats actually remain a largely centrist party and the whack-jobs on the left don’t drive the direction of the Dems nor end up getting such a voice in party policy. So far, the Dems know how to contain their crazies, while the GOP elevates theirs to star status.

Takes One to Know One?

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So, on the way back home with Little Girl Blue today, after a morning of doctor’s office visiting and donut gathering, I see a bumper sticker on a car in front of me that reads as follows:

Liberalism is a mental disorder

Now, I can pretty much assume that the driver was a conservative, and not simply a moderate, based on two pieces of evidence:

First, there is no “Conservatism is a mental disorder” sticker to balance it.

Second, there was a National Rifle Association bumper sticker on the car, too.

From this, I can also infer something else.

The driver lacks critical thinking skills. Which is why the Tea Party is so successfully pulling the Republican Party to the extreme right and dangerous ideological territory, because the Tea Party seems to have the most motivated and energetic extremists in the United States right now.

So, why am I slamming the person’s critical thinking skills based on the bumper sticker? Why am I assuming the person isn’t a moderate or close to moderate?

Simple.

Most things are on a spectrum. Liberal is one end; conservative is the other.

Just like obsessive hoarding and filthiness is on one end and excessive cleanliness and germ phobias is on the other. Both are mental illnesses. It’s the people in the middle who are more balanced and less troubled and able to function in the real world effectively.

So, by the same token, if liberalism is a mental illness, its counterpart on the other end is also a form of mental illness.

But why use one’s brain or look at the world in a balanced way when it feels so much better to be an extremist?

Crazies Coming Out of the Woodwork

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So, we get the guy now who killed the Black man at the Holocaust Museum, who apparently wanted to rampage all over Blacks and Jews. This after the whack-job who killed the doctor in church who provided late-term abortions.

And I still remember those angry conservative GOP rallies during the election season when people were shouting for Barack Obama’s death in some cases, simply because he had a funny sounding name, was black and was a Democrat.

And the loonies on FOX News, both the people who send in e-mails and the people on the air (pundits, hosts, guests, etc.) who espouse every kind of strange and outlandish conspiracy theory and latch on to the most minute things the Obamas do to try and convince America that the end is nigh.

Tell me, does anyone recall left-wingers going this nuts when the GOP came into power, whether after Carter’s defeat or the end of Clinton’s two terms? And when was the last time you heard about a raving liberal going on a killing spree for his or her ideology?

I’m not saying rampant liberalism is good. Too much left wing shit is still shit, just of another color and different smell. I perfer things somewhere in the middle, even if I like them to lean leftward a bit.

But really, please, can someone provide examples of recent left-wing killers and left-wing folks calling for people to be killed, tortured, etc.? And even if you can, can you convince me that there aren’t way more conservative, right-wing types who do this stuff?

Because the more I see of this, the more I think that being right-wing is be tended toward violence and hate, at least more so than left-wingers.