We tend to laugh
at the lunacy coming
out of the Tea Party movement, the clownish costumes, the misspelled
signs, and we scoff at the legislation coming from the Tea
Party-Republican House that has a snowball’s chance of ever becoming
law, but we should be wary of the distraction – what is slipping into
our national discourse by stealth while we laugh?
One thing that’s
slipped in is the
attitude of otherwise deliberative Republicans changing into tea party
jokes. For instance, Right Wing Senator Jon Kyl outright lied on the
Senate floor when he declared that over 90% of Planned Parenthood
services were for abortion and by implication, taxpayer money going for
abortions. He could not have NOT known that only 3% of
the group’s work involves counseling on abortion and, even then, no
taxpayer dollars are used for the abortion itself.
Walking it back
the next day an aide
explained that Kyl’s remarks were “not intended to be factual,” at
which comment comedian Stephen Colbert explained, "You can’t call him
out
for being wrong when he never intended to be right." So outright lying
is all right now? Senator Kyl is not to be censured by the Senate for
acting like a jackass on the Senate floor? No, on the contrary, he’s
applauded by his base, and has coninuous visibility
by way of the video clip of his performance on
the Senate floor declaring what is essentially a lie.
He has become a media attraction.
By lying .
By being an example of what you can get away with on the Senate floor
and therefore getting your pet talking point lots and lots of
visibility.
The only positive
thing to come out of that fiasco is that we all know
by now what percentage comprises Planned Parenthood’s abortion
counseling and who pays for it -- not the federal government.
Correction: WE know it now, but not necessarily those "regular people"
who just listen to Jon Kyl. (Senator Kyl, left)
I’ve been aware
for some years now
how uncomfortably similar to me the crowds of teapartiers are -- not to
legitimate protests like the ones in Wisconson against union busting
but to mobs as mobs, especially after they've been accepted by so
many as "regular people" to whom we should listen since their
complaints are legitimate.
Screaming? Yelling insults, ridiculing
leaders, name calling, declaring outrageous things like Health Care
Death Panels, accusing the president of being a
KenyanFascistSocialistCommie -- these are all now legitimate? This
rhetoric is now acceptable political discourse? How did that slip under
the door?.
Worse, legislators in the Senate, the heretofore “grownups” in the two
houses of Congress, are beginning to adopt the Tea Party’s sophomoric
tactics themselves, while pursuing blatantly cruel legislation,
using the excuse “cutting the deficit,” the lie of the century. The
teapartiers appear to be getting away with it, so the right wing
politicians rush into the new paradigm. It seems like a good
idea. It's become, in fact, the latest style in politics.
In my own red
state of Utah, Bob
Bennett, a moderate Republican, was driven out of office by a sudden
and
overwhelming hatch of teapartiers whose candidate of choice was Mike
Lee. Lee was running on the charge that the federal government is
largely unconstitutional and it made sense to THEM.
After the Lee success, the Tea-Party
swarm is targeting Lee’s senior colleague, Senator Orin Hatch.
Already embarrassingly Right Wing, Hatch has jumped on the Tea Party
bandwagon, adopting their rhetoric, attempting with great fervor to
wrest the reins from the hands of any teapartier
who would dare run against him in his reelection bid for his umpteenth
term as senator. Look! he says, I am the biggest teapartier of them
all! Oh please, Senator, retire already!
But look, this
tendency is spreading.
Senators and
representatives on the
Right are outdoing wild-eyed freshman Tea party representatives whose
high-decible voices have so rambunctiously taken over the House. They
see this as the coming Republican Wave, the dead-end Ryan budget its
“defining moment.” Now they can say anything, write anything, and they
get invited to talk their talk on TV where news shows have become
barn-burning, eyebrow lifting, WTF Right Wing talking points.
How many times
last week has the
media paramour, Donald Trump, with his “double, lattice-like,
combover,” (tecnique here) turned up on TV shows
to spew absolute,
breath taking crap, to raise the show’s viewer ratings? In the polls
Trump
actually shows up as a viable candidate in a matchup with President
Obama for the presidency. Who could miss him? I'm
constantly
deleting
popup
ads
sporting his face on my computer monitor. Has vaudeville now
become the rule in
governing? Could we possibly be saddled with this loon as president?
Has the
political tone become so psychotic that we’d go that far off the rails?
Take the McCarthy
era and the mass
psychosis arising out of the House UnAmerican Activities heari
ngs.
Granted, this wasn’t a one-man operation and the hallucinatory Red
Scare was already well started by then, but Joe McCarthy made sure he
was its face
and he was a modern day example of lying and character assassination if
there ever was one. He was so good at it that anyone hoping to stay in
office or keep his character intact was careful to steer clear of him,
and never confront him. (McCarthy, right.)
I was working in New Jersey’s Fort
Monmouth at the time of his second set of hearings, the one with the
military in his sights and the first to be televised. I would guess
fully a third of the office
workers there were mesmerized by Joe McCarthy’s bizarre rantings of
covert communism in the government, even in the presidency, certainly
in Hollywood and the writing and acting professions (Good bye, Charlie
Chaplin).They'd followed the radio broadcasts, but the TV coverage was
new and very exciting for them. There were
those around me who lionized the man. Break times were full of dark
mutterings against “taking the Fifth” by Pinkos being investsigated, of
covert Reds who
should be taken out and shot.
After reviling so
many with little or
no evidence, causing at least one
suicide, and impugning the patriotism and character of both political
opponents and members of the military, then threatening to smear a
young lawyer having nothing to do with the case, Joseph Welch, the
attorney representing the army said, ""Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have
you left no sense of decency?" (video here) McCarthy
was eventually censured in 1954 by the
Senate, 67 to 22. But not before ruining hundreds
of lives and careers,
and casting a pall not only over individuals but entire professions.
Moreover, McCarthyism was instrumental in spawning the suspicion and
fear of communism that gripped the country up through the early 1970s.
Remember the FBI surveillance of the civil rights movement? The Vietnam
era anti-war demonstrations? The Women's movement?
This
kind
of
mass
hysteria,
jumping
like fleas carrying the bubonic plague from person to
person and group to group, is easy enough to grow and put a crimp in
our democracy. I have faith in President Obama to head them off, but he
can't do it alone. He has a nation, indeed a whole world, to keep track
of, and we need to have his back. Deliberate incitement today could
morph easily, almost imperceptibly, to an age of unreason tomorrow.
We have already seen how it sends vengeance seekers out with guns to
kill people they don't approve of. It could, as many people feel, mark
the end of the Republican party since it seems to be its seed bed, but
it could just as well change the country's political discourse into a
raquet-ball game, bouncing ideas and opinions and facts and threats
back and forth furiously in a deep well, accomplishing nothing. It
could be the Political NewSpeak -- say it loud, say it often, lie a
lot.
Let's not let them get away with it.
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On spring
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Online Sources for bulbs and plants
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Van Bourgondian
Breck's Bulbs
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