The GOP wants to excuse this based on the prevailing opinion that we need to reduce the deficit, but the whole thing is ridiculous. There are stupid cuts all over the place, but let’s get down to the science.
While Waxman may have accused Republicans of presiding over the “most anti-science” Congress in history, Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) tells Mother Jones that his colleague’s characterization doesn’t even go far enough: “This is the most anti-science body since the Catholic Church ostracized Galileo for determining that the earth revolves around the sun.”
Mother Jones, emphasis added
I wish it were possible to collect information about all the wrongdoing of the GOP into one diary, but even a series of books would probably find such an endeavor impossible. Even fully covering a specific topic is, realistically, far beyond the scope of any single diary. In trying to provide an aggregate summary of any currently relevant topic, the best I can give is a brief overview of the most recent and egregious Republican transgressions.
Today we address in brief (kind of) the GOP’s war on science.
We tend to think of morality as being what is good and right, but of course that’s not necessarily the whole definition. More specifically, it can be defined as conformity to conventional and generally accepted rules of right conduct. Which makes sense, naturally. Society – the majority – supposedly determines cultural/national mores. Yet I don’t understand, then, how it is that the Republican party is so widely viewed as the party of morals and values. Whose values?
Only about 15% of American believe that abortion should be illegal in all cases, yet pro-forced birth Republicans pretend to speak for what is right and moral in regard to reproductive rights, and people seemingly let them get away with it. They represent clearly, in my view, immoral viewpoints on a plethora of topics and issues, and yet somehow it’s Democrats and liberals who are more frequently perceived as having loose morals? Republicans generally support revoking a woman’s right to choose what happens to her own body, promoting or overlooking institutionalized racism, cutting spending for public works and programs that help disadvantaged people, opposing fair pay, preventing LGBT marriage and equality, dissolving unions, privatizing pretty much everything, preventing a large percentage of the population from having access to health care, letting corporations run wild at the expense of the public, maintaining and in some cases even strengthening the death penalty…
Thursday night, Democratic Representative Jackie Speier of California delivered an extremely personal speech on the House floor. Although her words were poignant and powerful, they were words which she shouldn’t have had to speak… words which revealed personal information she ought not have felt the need to divulge. It speaks to the callous, unfeeling nature of politics, particularly Republican politics, that Rep. Speier felt she needed to bring a bit of humanity — and in this case, her own humanity — to the table on the fly, in order to make a political point.
Her emotional words on Republican Rep. Mike Pence’s plan to de-fund Planned Parenthood came after another Republican representative finished reading graphic passages from a controversial book by an anti-abortion activist. What she had to say ought to have shamed many in attendance…emPHAsis on ‘ought’.
I can’t exactly claim to have my fingertips on the pulse of the nation. I don’t travel, and I live in one of the reddest states in the union, meaning that for the sake of my own sanity I try not to draw too many political conclusions from what people around here think. I don’t even have cable anymore because I can’t afford it, so I usually miss the news, too. All I really know is what I read, and I’ll admit that probably means that my knowledge is pretty limited these days. Still, certain themes have become pervasive enough on the national scene that even I would have trouble missing out on them. One trend it would be all but impossible to miss is the general dissatisfaction voters seem to feel with both Obama and Democrats in general, and in the wake of that, the growing number of pundits, reporters, columnists, and average Joe’s (the plumber?) prophesying doom for the Democratic Party this November. We already know that incumbents are at a disadvantage this fall, but if perception is reality, then many Democratic candidates may be kind of… well, flat out screwed.
So just for the fun of it, let’s have a look at some numbers, some facts, and how we got here.
The label “Republican woman” has always seemed, to me, to embody a certain amount of inherent self-loathing. The same goes in my mind, I suppose, for “African American Republican,” “Hispanic Republican,” “gay Republican,” and the list continues… Truly, the only people I believe have any real business being Republicans these days (and by that I mean, the only ones who should find conservatism to be in their own self-interest) are rich white dudes who don’t want to pay their fair share of taxes, or maybe even poor white bigots who have nowhere else to go because they would meet the sort of people they hate at every turn under the rather diverse “big tent” of the Democratic party. But nowadays the blatant self-loathing certain groups of Republicans are displaying is becoming increasingly pronounced. Two examples I’ve come across in the last week, which I just couldn’t help commenting on…
Good news for the LGBT community. Traditionally, many gays and lesbians who choose to have/adopt children have not had the option of taking long leaves from work to care for them. While the Family and Medical Leave Act — which allows workers to take up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave annually to care for loved ones or themselves, and has been applied to heterosexual adoptions — has been in place since 1993, these protections have not previously extended to gay and lesbian couples seeking to start families. Now the Obama administration is changing that, based on a new interpretation of the law.
Republicans have an uncanny knack for fostering and enabling one of the nastiest tendencies in all of human nature: Victim blaming. This they facilitate, while simultaneously denying all culpability for their own mistakes and transgressions. The level of hypocrisy they so frequently exhibit flies in the face of decency, and is on occasion nothing short of mind-boggling. Flagrant and galling though it may be, I sometimes wonder whether their outrageous displays of unctuousness are entirely conscious. It ofttimes seems that their misplaced holier-than-thou attitudes are born out of habit more than anything else. Perhaps if one goes so long believing in the absolute virtue of one’s actions, one eventually succumbs to near pathological delusions of infallibility. These sorts of egotism and egocentrism are indisputably hazardous, and they give rise to authoritative stances and ideologies that become unduly convinced of their own faultlessness.
It is in the GOP’s interests to eschew all guilt of misconduct, while also throwing blame onto every vulnerable target in sight. From blaming Katrina victims for their misfortune to lobbing accusations at the victims of predatory loans for the subprime mortage crisis to claiming that the Democratic leadership in Congress should take responsibility for the death threats hurled against them — and not to mention the numerous historical examples of Republican callousness and hypocrisy of which I am too young to have clear memories — the GOP has a lengthy pattern of placing the blame for tragic occurrences on those who have been wronged. Still, even my awareness of that convention does nothing to lessen my shock at some of their more appalling finger-pointing.
And this case is really beyond the pale.
Today’s weather was bearable, for February in Michigan. The temperature was around 27°F and the air was calm when Al and I headed out for our walk. Our neighbor, Beau, who you met in an earlier diary, must have been craning his neck to see us as soon as possible. He practically sprinted out of his house before we even reached his driveway. Something was obviously up.
I’ve known Beau for a few months now, ever since he moved here from Mississippi. I know him well enough to recognize when he’s wearing a smug grin. It didn’t take long to find out what had put it there.
RNC Chairman Michael Steele must have a real way with words — he certainly knows how to charge for them, and he isn’t shy about it. Apparently he’s doing regular speaking gigs and charging up to $20,000 a pop. Wow! But we’ve always known Steele had a witty, “beyond cutting edge” style all his own, so it’s really no wonder that he would charge people to listen to his words of wisdom. I mean, when you’ve got the prescience and insight to call that ghetto Obama stimulus package “bling bling,” you really set a high bar for yourself. (Ain’t he hip-hop and fresh and straight dope, y’all? What a guy!)
