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"The problem isn't the captain--it's the ship"

Gary Kamiya is my favorite Salon writer. His recent commentary, "The Republican Shipwreck," makes some keen observations:

....the [current] economic meltdown was only one of the disasters for which the GOP is largely responsible. The war that was going to establish American hegemony forever turned out to be one of the worst foreign-policy blunders in our nation's history. The GOP's free-market idolatry led to the gravest financial crisis since the Depression. Its ideological insistence on cutting taxes for the richest Americans ran up a record deficit. Its embrace of torture and denial of due process assaulted the Constitution and eroded America's moral standing. Its doctrine of the "unitary executive" concentrated unprecedented power in the hands of the executive branch. Its anti-scientific denial of global warming endangered the entire planet.
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[President Ronald] Reagan expanded entitlements, grew the federal government -- including a $165 billion bailout of Social Security -- and raised taxes.... [He called] the USSR an "evil empire..." but usually behaved pragmatically. When is ill-conceived intervention in Lebanon failed, he wisely pulled U.S. troops out.
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The dirty little secret of modern conservativism is that Bush is more like "Reagan" -- the mythical Reagan, that is -- than Reagan himself ever was. Bush actually did what Reagan just said he was going to: He cut taxes for the wealthy, handed over the keys to the economy to corporate interests and deregulated everything in sight. His most glaring and destructive imitation of the mythical Reagan was his catastrophic decision to invade Iraq... [T]he Iran/Contra scandal that tainted his legacy wouldn't even make the Top Ten list of Bush's misdeeds.
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Americans are desperate to fix their economy, end a ruinous, endless war and restore a sense of common purpose to civic life.
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American conservatism no longer has any purpose except perpetuating its own power and concentrating as much wealth as possible in the hands of the already wealthy. Its internal contradictions can no longer be glossed over. It poses as the guardian of tradition and morality, but its obeisance to an amoral free-market ideology is far more destructive of tradition than the regulated capitalism championed by liberals. It preaches small government, but insists that abortion rights, recreational drug use and gay marriage fall within the purview of the state.

Kamiya states that if the next presidential nominee of the GOP is Sarah Palin or another Republican similarly devoted to the GOP's current base and the worldview of an American culture war, the Republican Party may go the way of the Whigs.

The melding of far-right movements

From Frank Schaeffer's commentary, "The Anatomy Of Republican Cataclysm and Democratic Victory"

Since the 1970s and in particular the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling on abortion, the vocal minority of the far right of the Republican Party has fused with the far right of the evangelical movement. The evangelicals (and I spent my life as one until 1985 when I dropped out), are not a monolithic block. The evangelicals just like everyone else, are all over the map ideologically and politically. However, as with the fringes of the political parties the evangelical movement has its own far right and ultra-fundamentalist wing. These folks have taken over the power centers of American Protestant evangelical religion.

The so-called mainline denominations have been in retreat since the 1950s and all the sound and fury has been coming from fundamentalists of various denominational affiliations. To understand what has happened to the Republican Party you have to understand that the fundamentalists have, by and large, taken over the evangelical movement which itself then fused with the Republican Party.
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It has taken an economic collapse, more than 4000 American war dead in an unnecessary war (Iraq), a second war we seem to be losing (Afghanistan), a meltdown of our educational system, the besmirching of our name internationally, eight years of being "led" by a born-again president who turned out to be literally unfit to govern, to finally wake the American people up to the fact that turning your government over to people motivated by fundamentalist religious conviction and/or motivated to appease fundamentalists, is an extraordinarily bad idea.

Combine all of the above with the fact that another cranky and in a way even weirder and more dangerous extreme right minority, the neoconservatives, has been cynically using and abusing the religious Republican fringe and fundamentalist base for their own purposes, and you complete the picture of disaster. The aim of the neoconservatives has been to extend and empower what they view as the imperial "destiny" of United States as interpreted through the lens out of American exceptionalism.

The neoconservatives are too worldly to believe that God has ordained American exceptionalism but they are happy to tell the rubes whatever they want to hear. The neoconservatives are our American equivalent of the old-style European empire builders such as Napoleon, who were glad to use popes or priests to bless their secular conquests when it was useful.

Read more of this interesting perspective here.

"Bachmann: Democrats Not 'Normal American People' ... Hayes: Stability In Iraq Depends On Jesus"

From Chris Rodda's article, "Bachmann: Democrats Not 'Normal American People' ... Hayes: Stability In Iraq Depends On Jesus"

...the first thing that pops into my head when seeing the names Michele Bachmann and Robin Hayes is the Congressional Prayer Caucus, the prayer group founded by Congressman Randy Forbes (R-the not real part of Virginia), whose members, which include Bachmann and Hayes, typically fill the lists of co-sponsors of any legislation designed to demolish the wall of separation between church and state.

Violence, assault by Proposition 8 supporters

This footage was recorded 10/23/08 in Oakland, CA, on a public street corner near Lake Merritt. The Face of Proposition 8 from Theremina on Vimeo.

Frank Schaeffer on the Christian Right w/in the GOP

From the article:

It is ironic that McCain hammered the final nail into the coffin of the Republican Party by trying to reach out to "my" religious conservatives once again. He did this through nominating Sarah Palin. The only reason he chose her was because Palin is ideologically pure on the culture war "issues" that have motivated the far right: abortion, prayer in schools, gay marriage, a concept of a "Christian America," the usual "End Times" Christian Zionism, etc., etc. And the only reason McCain thought this would work is because in the early 1970s through the mid 80s my late father (Francis Schaeffer) and I, along with many others from Dobson to C. Everett Koop to Falwell et al. preached a new religion: national salvation through religiously correct politics. For a while it "worked." Just ask Rove.

Obama gets it

Obama gets it, as revealed by this in Matt Bai's article in The New York Times Sunday Magazine:

[L]ast April [when] speaking to a small gathering of Bay Area contributors, [Obama] said that small-town voters in Pennsylvania and other states had grown “bitter” over lost jobs, which caused them to “cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.”

“That was my biggest boneheaded move,” Obama told me recently.... “How it was interpreted in the press was Obama talking to a bunch of wine-sipping San Francisco liberals with an anthropological view toward white working-class voters. And I was actually making the reverse point, clumsily, which is that these voters have a right to be frustrated because they’ve been ignored. And because Democrats haven’t met them halfway on cultural issues, we’ve not been able to communicate to them effectively an economic agenda that would help broaden our coalition.”
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“I mean, part of what I was trying to say to that group in San Francisco was, ‘You guys need to stop thinking that issues like religion or guns are somehow wrong,’” he continued. “Because, in fact, if you’ve grown up and your dad went out and took you hunting, and that is part of your self-identity and provides you a sense of continuity and stability that is unavailable in your economic life, then that’s going to be pretty important, and rightfully so. And if you’re watching your community lose population and collapse but your church is still strong and the life of the community is centered around that, well then, you know, we’d better be paying attention to that.”

“To act like hunting, like somebody who wants firearms just doesn’t get it — that kind of condescension has to be purged from our vocabulary. And that’s why that whole ‘bittergate’ episode was so bitter for me. It was like: Oh, this is exactly what I wanted to avoid. This is what for the last five or six years I’ve been trying to push away from.”

anti-Muslim propaganda film Obsession possibly shown to Indian students

From Chris Rodda, author of Liars For Jesus: The Religious Right's Alternate Version of American History Vol. 1 and Talk2Action.org contributor:

A teacher in Mifflin County, PA has reportedly shown the fear mongering, anti-Muslim propaganda film Obsession, recently distributed to 28 million swing state voters, to her class at Indian Valley High School, warning the students that if Barack Obama is elected, some of what they saw in the film would occur here in the U.S.

More here.

Michele Bachmann hearts McCarthyism

Hat-tip to MUG:

[W]e watched this interview on MSNBC with utter dismay. During the segment, Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann calls for nothing less than a witch hunt in the U.S. Congress to find out who is a patriotic American and who is not. She manifestly has no idea of American history and blithely tosses out this recommendation without a second thought. You can sign the Censure Bachmann petition but even better, kick in some cash for her opponent, Elwyn Tinklenberg, and get rid of a dangerous idiot from Congress.

Alan Flacks' "The Flacks Report"

I've known Alan for nearly a decade now. I don't know him extremely well, but we've occasionally discussed everything from parks issues to Democratic club workings over the years. He is, according to his blog, The Flacks Report,

a consummate Upper West Side gadfly for years and a fixture at meetings of the community board and political clubs, including the Three Parks Independent Democrats, where he is the house nudge. He puts out a regular e-mail newsletter called The Flacks Report: dispatches from the West Side to in-boxes in Albany and Washington bearing information about the latest judicial selection or Democratic club meeting.

Don't eliminate marriage for anyone

Donate to "No on Prop 8" today.