September 06, 2007

IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

RIGHT WING FANTASY LAND

If right-wingers had a theme park along the lines of Disneyland, I wonder what it would look like. It would probably have elements of the Creationist Museum we've heard about that has dinosaurs and humans coexisting, even though dinosaurs preceded humans by millions of years. It would have everyone segregated by race. Those dark-skinned people, cursed by God you know, have to be kept separate from the morally upright white people. Women of age would be barefoot, pregnant, and illiterate. Educated women tend to get "uppity," you know. Gays wouldn't be allowed at all, of course, unless they were being flogged or stoned to death.

Another version of right-wing fantasy land touts the "accomplishments" of people like Ronald Reagan and, heaven help us, George W. Bush. Today's Fresno Bee has a letter so over the top I thought maybe it was parody. Our scribe claimed that Bush inherited the Clinton/Gore "recession" and his tax cuts just did marvelous things in turning around the economy. We're told that Bush reduced the deficit (what!?) and that it's only "partisan hatred" that blinds people to his "accomplishments."

Here in the real world we know that Bush lied us into a war. He's got the blood of hundreds of thousands on his hands. He has sanctioned torture. He has weakened our civil liberties or ignored them altogether. The gap between the rich and poor is a chasm and getting wider. He has ignored the threat of global climate change, which may destroy all human life on this planet. If there are future historians, I don't think Bush will get good reviews unless the historians are from the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell's 1984.

THE RIGHT WING HOBBESIAN VIEW OF PEOPLE

Thomas Hobbes was a political philosopher who said, in essence, that people are no good. There are a few good people, those people who are rich and powerful and at the top, and then there are the rest of us. Thomas Hobbes would have fit in perfectly with today's Republican Party that plays to the worst and most primitive instincts in people. Conservatism isn't about hope; it's about cynicism and fear and hatred of the "other." It's about finding a scapegoat, anything to distract attention from the people running the show. This article by Richard Belzer is at www.huffingtonpost.com:

Conservatism is in its last throes if you will, twisting in the wind, dying like communism did because neither philosophy works by definition -- they both operate from the fraudulent premise built around contempt for and control of the people.

In the coming months and years history will not absolve them. These multimillionaire radio and television personalities who stoke and taunt "Joe Sixpack" with cleverly and sometimes not-so hate speech, railing about the danger of gays taking over and turning everything and everyone gay; Hollywood liberals seem to be among the most evil people since Sodom and Gomorrah, African-Americans are attacked in veiled terms that are usually not as veiled as they think, playing on people's fear of losing their job, demonizing foreigners seemingly from everywhere, scoffing at the notion that there is no class system in this country. All the while looking down on rubes and suckers who vote against things that are in their self interest and very survival to help further a cynical, mean-spirited political movement that has become a dangerous parody of the most astoundingly inept, impotent bully wannabes who can count among them physical and intellectual cowards who knowingly and smugly perpetrate lies that have literally cost untold lives.