Abortion Barbie Reaches a New Low for Republican Gut-ter Politics

Wendy Davis's R opponent in the 2014 campaign for Texas governor recently reached a new low for Republican gut-ter politics (and get her politics) with his tasteless Abortion Barbie smear. If you've wondered how low the Rs will go, the As low as necessary answer of an earlier Reagan/Bush era seems in the post-Rove epoch to have morphed into an As low as possible current strategery.

This AB ad campaign shows an unprecedented disdain for a woman's ability to choose, or even have a conscious thought process in choice, with its implication that women give no more thought to that choice than they would to a child's toy. In light of recent statements from their side of the aisle, apparently a lot of male Republican politicians don't give women credit for any conscious thought process, even apart from this very weighty decision that I personally would bet very few if any women make lightly. I imagine the conversations among R males that sound like Of course you can't expect a woman to make the right decision about abortion when most of them can't even figure out what they're doing behind the wheel and other variations on that theme. The AB campaign represents the latest restatement of an old right-wing chestnut we've heard over and over again for the last 40 years: An abortion is too important a decision to be left up to a woman.

On another level, though, AB also represents the latest R appeal to gut-level politics, aimed straight at the mob-mentality reptile brain of the target. When the salesman wants to sell something, especially if that something has a sizable percentage of snake oil, he doesn't want the target to think about it -- if he can get the targeted voters to loathe and fear Wendy Davis by making them believe she is AB, then they will flee into the arms of the darling R candidate, breathless and sweaty from the run. This has worked well for the Texas Rs in recent history, and they hope it will again, because who would vote for this latest candidate if they actually thought about it, or the last two before him? 

Like all other human beings, I too have a reptile brain, and it tells me that the madmen who crafted the AB campaign earned their paychecks. When I say madmen, by the way, I don't know if they actually work out of an office on that famous avenue, but I do expect that they are all men. However effectively this ad works on the reptile brain, though, it stirs a much different emotion in me than the one intended -- it makes me angry, because I also have a higher brain capable of critical thinking, and that part of my mind detects the potent stench of snake oil in this AB concoction that insults the intelligence of anyone who truly has intelligence. I sincerely hope that enough Texans also pick up on that offensive odor and make the smarter choice in November, rather than the more fearful one.

The Inside Story of a Disability Scammer

"I know there are people scamming the system -- I've seen them." So said a guy about a year ago who was then renting a room in my house. I tried to tell him that people had previously told me he was scamming the system, in an effort to make the point that unless you really know someone, you can't judge their disability, but every time I tried to say that, he got very defensive about his genuine need for assistance. I didn't question his need, and I told him so, but he couldn't understand how anyone could think he was a scammer, and he kept telling me that he knew for a fact that undeserving people were scamming the system. Along the way, he also mentioned skin color at least once or twice when referring to the scammers, as often happens when this subject comes up.

I've heard the stories for most of my life, and without knowing the facts, I tended to believe them early on, though life has since taught me many times not to make such judgments without first-hand knowledge of the circumstances. I remember an apartment manager in Alameda, CA, telling me a few entertaining and unusual stories, and then among them he threw in the usual disability scammer tale. The person collecting the disability check, who rented a place in one of the managed buildings, supposedly had severe back problems, but, as the tale always goes, the manager witnessed the disabled guy doing things that someone with such back problems could not possibly do, leading to the obvious conclusion. I believed the story-teller's first-hand account of what he had witnessed, and at the time I had no possible counter explanation, but life can teach you some answers if you actually want to learn them, and since then, I have learned quite a few.

About that guy living in my house, I had truly been told that he was scamming the system, and the people who told me this cautioned me against renting him a room. I could tell from just knowing him a little that he was a bit of a get-over, and I couldn't tell how much I could trust him, but I also knew that I couldn't judge whether or not he had good reasons for his disability status, and that I'd have to know him better before I could make that judgement.

Initially, I did think maybe the guy was getting over on the system. He told me he had, in his younger years, worked hard and made a 6-figure salary, but he felt frustrated that most of his money went to pay for his alimony and child support, so at a certain point he decided there was no point in working so hard, and he just gave up. That sounded like a scammer. In addition, he was generally a cool guy, who had been a biker until the injuries finally caught up with him and he had to sell his Harley. He also had some programming and electrical skills, which included showing me how to wire an electric dryer circuit. Added up, that mostly looked like a scammer, although the biker injuries did give me a clue that maybe he might have some genuine need for the disability status.

Over time, though, I began to notice and understand the pattern, and I eventually figured it out without him admitting it to me -- he was bipolar. That explained his alcoholism, and also the days when he didn't seem to sleep at all, contrasted, only a few days later, with days when he seemed to not get out of bed for 36 or 48 hours. Sometimes he could barely get up and down the stairs, due to his back pain, and other times, he almost bounded up and down those stairs. If you saw this behavior from a distance, you might think he was faking it with the back pain thing, but he had no reason to put on an act for me. 

Understanding the nature of bipolar disorder, I now believe that it holds the key to many, and possibly even most, of those disability scammer stories. If you didn't know my renter's tale, you could easily believe he was scamming the system, and some people who knew him did believe that. If you saw him out in public, when he was at the top curve of that cycle, he seemed fine, and he didn't look or act like he was in pain, because he wasn't, but you also wouldn't know that maybe 2 or 3 days of the previous 7 or 8, he was in so much physical or psychic pain that he didn't even get out of bed, and that on other days, when he did try to get out of bed, he could barely make it up and down the stairs. As is so often the case in life, once again, the lesson is Judge Not, especially if you don't have all the evidence. My renter hadn't learned that lesson, and so, ironically, he was looking at other people much like himself, though he couldn't see the similarity, probably due at least in part to his focus on the color of their skin, and he was judging them to be scammers, just as others judged him. Knowing his story, I knew he wasn't a scammer, and if I could know their stories, I would bet that most if not all of the ones he judged to be scammers are in reality not scammers either. Not knowing their stories, I'm more than willing to grant them their benefits without any great concern about how they might be getting over on the system -- I'll bet they're not.

Government by the S

Beginning in 2001, George W. Bush introduced me to a new concept that I hadn't knowingly met before -- government by the S, as in DUMB ASS. I started finding out about GWB by watching a TV presidential debate, and on first impression, I couldn't believe that the Republican party would nominate a candidate so stupid, regardless of his status as a presidential son. As the Bush/Cheney years progressed, and I got to know the VP a bit better, I quickly concluded that he had a few more working brain cells than his partner, but I have lately realized that I gave him much more credit than he deserved.

During the Bush/Cheney era, progressives often remarked on how the B/C crowd made Orwellian use of the English language, and consistently implied, but never directly stated, that Iraq had some connection with 9/11. When questioned directly, they denied making any such connection, yet they continued to imply it in their public statements. I assumed that they knew they were lying, just as I assumed Donald Rumsfeld knew he was lying when he claimed in a televised national press conference to know the location of Iraq's phantom WMDs.

Lately, however, in the face of mounting evidence, I've concluded that Rumsfeld actually believed in those WMDs, and I also now think that most of the Bush/Cheney crowd believed in the phantom 9/11 connection. They knew that troublesome reporters from the liberal media (or the nuanced media, as I explain in my 3/10/14 blog) would dog them about something they couldn't actually prove, so they never directly asserted it, but I think they did believe it.

How could someone as smart as Dick Cheney believe something so absurd? Easy -- he's actually not that smart. Mr. Cheney has a manner of conveying his thoughts and opinions in a way that makes him sound informed and intelligent, but if you actually pay attention to what he's saying rather than the way he's saying it, and you know the facts that contradict his assertions, you will know that he's actually talking nonsense most, if not all, of the time. For example, as I pointed out in my Hobgoblins blog (3/22/14), his 1% solution to foreign policy threats was, in reality, an admission of his own inability to distinguish between a 1% threat and a 100% one.

At the root, the hobgoblins that haunt the right-wing mind lurk there for one simple reason -- these people are stupid. There are levels of stupid, of course -- someone who talks about members of the Muslim Brotherhood hiding in the executive branch of the U.S. government is obviously a few rungs further down the ladder than someone who claims to have lists of secret communists there -- but none of these accusations ever made any sense. And did McCarthy have no sense of decency? Actually, he had no sense at all. Do Bush, Cheney and most of their crowd feel any sense of remorse for the way they destroyed the lives of thousands upon thousands of people? No, because they also have no sense. When you elect people this stupid, you get stuff like 9/11 and Iraq, and stupid people believing that the 2 are connected, when the only thing that really connects them is the stupid people who couldn't prevent the first and who caused the second. While government will always include some representatives from the ranks of the stupid, I hope we're moving in the direction of having more smarter people involved in governance, though from, say, the look of the current majority on the Supreme Court, we sure do have a lot of room for improvement.

A Puzzling Metaphor

The house I now live in came with lots of stuff, much of which I don't need or want, so I had to begin a process of weeding out the excess baggage and trying to figure out a good destination for it. Among my newly-acquired possessions were more than a dozen puzzles, and while I enjoyed doing puzzles back in my school days, they had come to seem like a quaint relic from the pre-PC era. In planning to sell them, though, I ended up putting a few together, and enjoying the process once again. Along the way, they inspired a few basic thoughts about how they went together. 

Which piece counts? They all do. What's the most important piece? At the moment you're working, it's the one you can't find, but for the whole picture, no one piece matters any more than the rest. Also, every piece has a slightly different shape, size and coloring. Some pieces may be very close in shape, size and coloring, but no two are the same -- every piece is different. 

However, the pieces usually fall into basic shaping groups, some with 3 tabs and 1 slot, some with 1 tab and 3 slots, some with 2 each on opposing ends, and some with 2 each on adjacent ends. Then there's the edge pieces, which have 1 flat side and every possible combination of tabs and slots for the other 3 sides. Some puzzles expand the shape possibilities even further, but the point is that you can group puzzle pieces by these basic categories, and sometimes doing so will help you to find out where they belong, although usually you're better off grouping them by color values. However, some more modern puzzles actually move beyond the basic 4-sided piece concept altogether for some of their pieces, so many of those will defy any sort of categorization.

Sometimes you think you know exactly where a piece goes, and then you try it and it doesn't work. Sometimes you can put the wrong piece in place, and it seems to fit, both visually and in terms of shape, but it can still be the wrong piece. How do you know when you put a piece in the wrong place? You figure it out when the pieces around it don't fit into place. However, not fitting in doesn't make the piece bad -- it just means that the piece belongs somewhere else. Also, sometimes you can try a piece when you don't think it's the right one, and it will surprise you by fitting exactly into place. 

As to the political implications of this puzzling metaphor, in a movement for social justice, some will find their place sooner than others, and some will seem to matter more than others, but in the bigger picture everyone matters, and everyone's contribution to the whole end result matters, whether large or small. Some may have similar skill sets and similar talents to offer, but still, everyone has a unique and important role to play, though some may need a take their time finding their place in the grand picture. Some may think they know where they belong, only to find that somehow things aren't working out, and they'll have to try something else. Some may think they won't fit in somewhere, only to surprise themselves by finding out that they actually fit very well. The best way to judge whether or not the pieces in a section fit together is to step back and look at the bigger picture.

A long time ago I heard of a movie that begins with a scene of someone cutting puzzle pieces to make them fit, and the understated humor of that scene fills in the remaining spaces of my puzzle metaphor. Unfortunately for honest people, in life cheaters often do prosper, contrary to a common childhood teaching, but once in a while a cheater cheats themselves in some spectacular way, because cheating is all they know, and the result provides some satisfaction to those of us with a deep longing for genuine justice. The person who cuts puzzle pieces to make them fit does not finish the puzzle sooner, but rather ends up with a picture that makes no sense, and one that inspires only laughter and scorn from those who look at it.

It Depends on the Meaning of the Word "Future"

This morning I found a op-ed in my local newspaper by our local Congressman, which he entitled Keystone Pipeline Will Secure Our Energy Future without a single hint of irony. Going for an even greater level of unintended irony, he begins his piece with a short ramble about how his political colleagues in Washington and in Albany (this being New York State) are good at "kicking the can down the road and putting off important decisions" and how they "drag their feet on facing up to challenges."

My Congressman then goes on to suggest that we should kick the Transition From Fossil Fuels to Renewable Energy can down the road by investing a greater stake of our energy future on further and more extreme fossil fuel extraction -- a process that by definition has a limited horizon. This vision of the future extends for, at best, only a few decades, and would make the transition to renewable energy much harder to achieve.

Along with more extreme methods of fossil fuel extraction, such as tar-sands oil and fracking, come more extreme air and water pollution, plus more extreme and more common accidents such as the recent Lynchburg train explosion and the nearly-constant gas pipeline and well blow-outs, explosions, fires, and major leaks. Who pays for these problems? Judging by past behavior, we can expect the extraction companies to pass on to the rest of us a large share of the cost of their screw-ups, and of the pollution that their regular operations cause. Some people will unfortunately pay with health problems and decreased quality of life for the extreme profits of the greedy petrochemical industry.

In his op-ed, the Rep repeated some dubious industry job claims, but made no mention of the possible climate consequences from more extreme greenhouse gas emissions, or the probable export of large portions of the extracted fossil fuel products to countries where they'll fetch higher prices. However, what if, instead of following the Congressman's short-sighted advice, we now move aggressively in the direction of safe, renewable forms of energy? Where will we be in 30 years? Or, if we follow his advice, in 30 years, what then?

If we build the solar and wind farms now, in 30 years we'll still have the solar and wind farms, as will the generations to follow. If we build the Keystone XL and thousands of gas and oil wells, rather than focusing on solar and wind farms, in 30 years we'll have much more polluted air and water, and not enough solar and wind farms. Is that really how the congressman from my district wants to secure an energy future? Perhaps he doesn't plan on being around that long, and doesn't care about what happens after he's gone. Personally, I'm grateful that at least some of the statesmen (and women) of previous generations took a longer view than that.

Who's In a Daze?

Just as I began my blog at the end of the 3rd week of April with a critique about a John Stossel show that he put together around the year 2000 in which he suggested that laws to keep the air and water clean were unnecessary because somehow the air and water in the U.S. had gotten much cleaner over the previous 30 years (I wonder how that happened!), along came a fresh Stossel opinion piece where he asserted that climate scientists have greatly exaggerated the potential threat to our civilization posed by climate change. This time around, JS timed his piece to hit shortly before Earth Day, with a snarky title pun aimed at environmentalists, but the main target of his scorn was a climate science report recently released by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

A few years ago, the Sierra Club magazine published a pair of satellite photos of the Arctic, with September of 1971 next to September of 2011, and just looking at those pictures, I could clearly see the dramatic loss of sea ice now occurring at the end of the northern hemisphere's warm season, compared with much smaller melting from 4 decades earlier. However, when I showed those pictures to a guy living in my house who leaned to the political right wing, he looked at me as if I was playing some sly liberal trick on him, and he muttered something about having seen different pictures of the Arctic sea ice.

Now climate scientists are predicting that within a few short years, and possibly as soon as the summer of 2016, which is a little over 2 years from now, the Arctic will experience a period with no sea ice whatsoever. I do not need a climate scientist to tell me that this is a major change, because I know that just 4 decades ago, the Arctic sea ice, even at its lowest point near the end of the warm season, still extended well beyond the Arctic circle, but apparently people like Mr. Stossel and my old right-wing housemate do not see the complete loss of Arctic sea ice as anything particularly important.

I haven't studied climate science, and so I must defer to the experts when it comes to the details. In the absence of scientists, I wouldn't know that this lack of Arctic sea ice has not occurred during all of the time that human beings have walked the earth, and I also wouldn't have guessed that an average temperature rise of a few degrees C would have caused such a major ice melt. In addition, I wouldn't know what this lack of Arctic sea ice might mean going forward, but I can clearly see that an Arctic with no sea ice will be a dramatic change, not just from 1971, but even from September of 2011, which is less than 3 years ago, and so I have no trouble believing the experts when they predict that this major change will bring about other major changes. Somehow, Mr. Stossel, and probably my old right-wing housemate as well, can see the prediction of an ice-free Arctic coming true, and still say that the scientists who made that prediction are exaggerating its significance. Perhaps the daze that JS sees is just the reflection of what surrounds his own head, but I doubt that he'll ever consider that possibility.

The Forgotten Smog Clouds

Back around the turn of the millennium, John Stossel acquainted me with the modern right-wing political argument, either breath-takingly clueless or slyly corrupt, that when a law works too effectively it should be ended. Mr. Stossel took a swim in the Hudson River in front of the camera to demonstrate how laws to clean up water pollution are unnecessary, and in so doing he convinced me that listening to him was a waste of time.

In his category of the unnecessary, J.S. included laws to prevent or mitigate air pollution, which made me wonder whether he remembers the smog clouds that once surrounded U.S. cities before the E.P.A. came into existence, or if he somehow never noticed the problems. I remember very well that the New York City smog cloud could be clearly seen from the Tappan Zee Bridge, even though the rest of the skyline could not. I don't remember the extent of every smog cloud around the major cities I travelled through in the early 1970s, but I do remember that all of those cities, from Atlanta to Buffalo, Louisville to Washington, and on and on, they all had one.

The smog cloud I do remember well, though, was the Chicago one. It started about 100 miles outside of the city, and you could see it clearly for about 20 to 30 miles before you got into it. As you approached the smog cloud, it seemed to disappear, which meant that you were getting inside of it, and once inside of it, you could easily forget about it, because it showed no obvious signs of its presence. Living inside of it, most of the time you could be completely unaware of its existence, as probably most people were. 

One sunny spring morning in the early 1970s, though, that smog cloud did show itself to me, as I happened to be awake before sunrise, staying up all night in the company of my college text books. I looked eastward across Lake Michigan, wanting to see the sunrise, but I couldn't see the sun come up because the smog was too thick. As the surroundings got brighter and clearer, I kept glancing eastward, and I couldn't see any clouds blocking the sun, but I also couldn't see the sun. About an hour after it was actually daylight, the sun slowly rose above the edge of the haze, but by then I knew I couldn't honestly tell anyone I had seen the sunrise.

Slowly, during the '70s and '80s, the smog clouds around American cities disappeared, largely as a result of laws passed by Congress and enforced by the E.P.A. The 2011 W.H.O. ranking of the cities of the world with the worst air quality showed that U.S. and Canadian cities now have much cleaner air than cities in Asia which, by some odd coincidence, have much less regulation on sources of air pollution. Folks like John Stossel would have us believe that regulations and the E.P.A. have nothing to do with those air quality rankings, which makes me want to say one thing to him: "Give me a break!"

The Most Dangerous Game

For an example of the danger to civilization which the super rich can pose when they control too much of our modern politics, you need to look no further than right-wing casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson. This Richy Rich fellow bought Newt Gingrich during the 2012 Presidential election season, hoping to gain a chief executive in the deal, but fortunately for the survival of our species and all higher life forms on earth, Newt proved to be a bad investment. 

Now Mr. Addledbrain is shopping for a 2016 Presidential candidate, and what does he want? He wants someone who will make sure that a certain casino billionaire with the initials S.A. won't be prosecuted for bribery of foreign officials, which is against U.S. law and which the evidence suggests he may well have done, plus he wants someone who will outlaw online gambling, since this creates competition for the casino business. These two desires certainly run counter to the best interests of at least 99.99% of the remaining U.S. population, but it's SA's 3rd desire that should cause the greatest concern -- he wants someone who will nuke Iran.

It doesn't take a genius to foresee the probably results of such a foolish military action, but you do have to see further than the end of your own nose. Setting aside the callous suggestion of murdering multitudes of people -- and to be fair, Richy Rich has entertained the idea that perhaps we could simply drop a nuke into the Iranian desert as a kind of warning shot, and such a move might only murder a handful of innocents rather than millions -- following such a suggestion would lead step by step to a nuclear arms race in which there would be no winners, but in which human civilization could very well be the loser.

Dropping a nuke on Iran, even in a sparsely-populated desert zone, would send the message to the rest of the world that we as the most powerful military force on the planet could no longer restrain ourselves from using our most destructive weapon. Any nation considering itself a possible target for future U.S. military strikes would suddenly feel compelled to begin stockpiling nuclear weapons purely as a matter of self-defense. Rather than putting an end to a nuclear weapons program in Iran that may or may not exist, such a strike would guarantee that the Iranians would strive as mightily as possible to acquire nuclear weapons as soon as they could. 

We do not want to give Russia, or China, or Iran, or whoever, the idea that we might just drop a nuke on them some day. Or, at least, those of us who can think logically about the foreseeable consequences of our actions, we don't want to do that. Mr. Adelson does want to do that, though, and because he has so much money to spend on buying the candidate of his choice, he has a line of politicians who can't wait to sell themselves to him. For the good of all of us, we can only hope that he makes a bad choice once again. Also, for the future of our species, and all other higher life forms, we need to end this system of political pay-for-play as soon as we possibly can.

The Five Most Corrupt Political Actors on the D.C. Stage

The five most corrupt political actors on the D.C. Stage -- Supreme Court justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy and Alito -- just delivered a decision earlier this week, in the case of McCutcheon v. FEC, that clearly shows the depth of their corruption. Their decision will effectively remove the limits on how many members of Congress their Richy Rich friends can buy, and they made sure to hand it down early enough in the year to make a difference in November.

During the oral arguments for this case, Unjustice Scalia remarked that "Three and a half million dollars isn't a heck of a lot of money." To completely understand the context of Scalia's remark, add the phrase for one person to spend on political campaigns in a single election cycle to the end of it. This should give you a clearer idea of who Mr. Scalia works for, and who his friends are. Even for someone making a salary of $10 million/year, spending over a third of that salary on a single election cycle would amount to a heck of a lot of money, so Mr. Scalia's friends, and the people who he wants to please with his decisions, are not mere millionaires with small 9-figure net worths -- they are Billionaires, with a very big B.

Side note to New Hampshire residents: Remember that, when asked, Scott Brown initially named Scalia as his favorite SCOTUS judge, but quickly amended that statement following the gasps of shock coming from the live audience. You might want to take that into consideration when you think about who to vote for in your U.S. Senate election this coming November.

Of course, McCutcheon is only the latest in a series of corrupted decisions designed to please their rich friends, and it is Part 2 of their continuing efforts to dismantle a federal election system that would limit how much those rich friends can spend to buy members of Congress and influence Presidential choices. They began this systematic disassembly with the Citizens United decision in January of 2010, and no doubt they will continue taking apart federal election spending restrictions when and where they have the chance to do so. 

Only someone swimming in a sea of corruption could write, as Unjustice Kennedy did in the Citizens United decision, that money given to national political campaigns does not even present the appearance of corruption. Anyone aware of the corrupting influence of money on politicians would not write such an obvious lie into a legal record and expect it to be taken seriously, so the fact that Kennedy did so, and spoke for his four colleagues when doing so, tells us just how corrupt to the core they are.

In the Citizens United case the corrupt five also made clear their contempt for American democratic traditions, and the very concept of the will of the people, when they equated money with free speech. Anyone who says money equals free speech is saying, in effect, that the more money someone has, the more influence they should have over public policy. From that point of view, the will of the majority only matters if it can be bought and paid for -- the rich should rule, according to these corrupt five, and the more they have their way, the more the rich will rule.

The Right-Wing Approach to Solving Problems

Sharing a living space over the last few years with a right-wing guy, I came face-to-face with a few annoying situations that could easily have been avoided by using a small amount of foresight. For instance, this fellow rarely took showers, for reasons unrelated to the subject at hand, but when he did take one, he would remove the small catcher that I had placed in the drain. Why? He had long hair, and when he took a shower, so much of his hair would fall out that it would clog the strainer and not allow the water to drain out. The longer the shower, the deeper the water would get if he left the catcher in the drain, so what did he do? Before he took a shower, he removed the strainer.

Why did this annoy me? Because, being the responsible one, I would inevitably have to get out the plunger and spend some work time with that bathtub drain at the point when the hair that flowed into it caused a clog further down. It occurred to me, on one such plunger occasion, that my housemate had provided me with the perfect metaphor for the right-wing approach to solving problems. He couldn't see very far past the end of his own nose, so he could not imagine what might cause the bathtub drain to get clogged.

During the Bush/Cheney era, we got used to hearing these right-wingers say "No one could have imagined..." or variations on that theme, when in most cases someone actually had imagined -- just not someone from their ideological circle. Pick a subject, from infrastructure maintenance to disease prevention, unemployment assistance to scientific research, investment in education to environmental protection, and the short-sighted right-wing approach will almost always lead to far greater long-term costs, even if it manages to achieve some small savings in the near term. Right-wingers do not see the long view, even when it's a matter of months rather than years, and they don't have enough brain cells firing at any one time to add up the logic of their actions to get to the inevitable sum of the results of those actions, so we put the future in peril whenever we hand them the keys to that future. 

Beware of the right-wing politician who says he can save you money by not spending for that ounce of prevention --  most of the short-term benefit will go to the wealthy 1%, but even if some of it does trickle down to you, the bill for the associated pound of cure is guaranteed to cost you a lot more in the long run.

The idea of the 7th generation apparently comes to us from the Iroquois nations, where those chosen to lead the tribes and to make the most consequential decisions did so on the basis of how their decisions might possibly affect 7 generations of their children. With right-wingers, you won't get 7 generations of forethought -- you'll be lucky to get 7 minutes.

Hobgoblins of the Right-wing Mind

Note: This is a repost and slight revision of a blog originally posted in September of 2012 on my website (DaveElder.com) back when the website had a blog page, before the March 2013 redesign.

Back when Dick Cheney explained his 1% solution, in which he said he would choose to interpret a 1% threat to the national security of the United States as equal to a 100% threat, he as much as admitted that he didn't have enough brain cells firing at any one time to be able to distinguish between a 1% threat and a 100% one. You would expect a leader focused on national security to weigh each potential threat based upon how it really tips the scales, determine which threats merit greater attention, and then set strategic priorities based upon that determination. Skewing your priorities to make a 1% threat equal to a 100% threat could lead to disastrous ends, such as invading a country that poses no actual threat to your own, based upon false evidence or faulty interpretations of intelligence, resulting in trillions of dollars of new debt on top of unnecessary widespread death and destruction.

After all, what kind of crazy paranoid fool carries around a hazmat suit in the trunk of his car, worried that terrorists could strike at any moment? The same kind of fool who could believe that Saddam Hussein played an active role in the 9/11 attacks, even though logic and a clear understanding of the facts would dictate otherwise. Like many others, I noticed the Orwellian way in which Bush and Cheney often linked Iraq and 9/11 in their speeches, when no such link actually existed, or even could have existed, but in their minds such a link did exist. Mr. C had to admit in a post-administration talk that he never found that missing link, even though while in office he did his best to have such a link tortured out of the mouths of various prisoners.

From a 2012 book entitled 500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars by New York Times contributor Kurt Eichenwald, we learned that not only did Bush and Cheney ignore repeated warnings about an imminent Al-Qaeda attack within the United States, but some in their administration floated the idea that Osama Bin-Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack on the U.S. for the purpose of distracting the administration from the very real threat (in their minds) posed by Saddam. While such an idea made no logical sense, it appealed to the simplistic thinking of a group of people who can only understand the world in terms of "us versus them." Sadam and Osama, in reality, never worked together, and never would have done so, but Cheney, Bush and the rest of their neocon cabal could never understand that. When presented with a strategic offer from the leadership of Iran, Cheney responded by saying, "We don't talk to evil." What kind of leader uses such a phrase? One who can only comprehend the world by reducing its complexity to the simplest and most blunt terms, and such a leader will almost always mislead.

Remember back in March of 2003 when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told a live press conference and broadcast network audience that he knew the location of Iraq's non-existent WMDs? Looking closely at those non-existent WMDs now, they bear a striking resemblance to the super-secret Soviet ABMs which The Committee for the Present Danger, run by Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cheney, worked very hard to protect us from back in the late 1970s and up through much of the 1980s. When the fall of the Soviet Union proved conclusively that no such Soviet Anti-Ballistic Missile program had ever existed, Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cheney almost immediately found new enemies to fear.

Over the past few years, right-wingers have vowed to keep us safe from the imposition of Sharia Law, the enforcement of martial law by U.N. troops, and the threat posed by hidden members of the Muslim Brotherhood inside of various security-related departments of the executive branch. The echoes of McCarthyism in the Muslim Brotherhood accusations are astounding indeed, but to be fair to Mr. McCarthy, while there were no Communists in the executive branch of his time, contrary to his loud and forceful assertions, the likelihood of there being one was still much greater than the possibility of a member of the Muslim Brotherhood lurking within the present day executive branch. As far removed from reality as right-wingers like McCarthy were in the 1950s, the modern-day heirs to their paranoia have moved a step or two further away from reality.

I had thought that, given their incredible mishandling of security matters related to 9/11 as well as other significant events such as the anthrax attacks (which were never solved) and violations of D.C. air space by small private aircraft, the Bush/Cheney bunch would forever put an end to the myth of Republican superiority in matters of national security, but yet that myth still persists in some quarters. Why? Because right-wingers believe that only other right-wingers can keep them safe from the hobgoblins that haunt their simplistic worlds. Those of us who live in the reality-based community, with its thousands of shades of gray as well as millions of colors, cannot afford to have these clowns handling our national security, because not only will they not see where the next major threat might come from, if it's substantially different from the last one, but they will also drag us into more wars against people and countries that pose no actual threat to us, but who are different enough from us that these right-wingers will see in them some possibility of a 1% threat to the United States, and that possibility will then become 100% to them because they cannot actually tell the difference between the two numbers. The only way to achieve genuine, effective and lasting national security is to keep these right-wing fools, and the hobgoblins that haunt their simplistic minds, as far away from our national security apparatus as possible.

Separating the Conservatives from the Authoritarians

Conservative John Dean did American culture a truly beneficial service, in his book Conservatives Without Conscience, by identifying the true nature of the Dick Cheney types -- they are authoritarians. In the book he speaks about how authoritarians have taken over the conservative movement, and while people like Cheney call themselves conservative, their actions follow a very authoritarian pattern, not a conservative one. 

Growing up in a conservative household in the 1960s, I would not have believed that 4 decades later, someone calling himself a conservative would start an unnecessary war, champion torture techniques and institute a major domestic spying program. We saw and expected this kind of behavior from the Soviet Union, and other Communist states, but surely no American leader, of any party or political leaning, would do that, would they? I couldn't imagine anything more un-American, and more un-conservative.

Mr. Cheney did not try to disguise his obvious contempt for democracy, and the will of the people, when he uttered his famous single-word reply to a reporter's mention about majority opposition to the Iraq War in 2007 (So?), but Dick will not call himself an authoritarian, even though he would have wished to rule by dictate, because he knows that American culture does not respect or value authoritarians. He and others like him want to give the orders, and have those orders followed without question, regardless of what the majority, or even significant minorities, might think of those orders, but these authoritarian types can't openly admit that. 

So how to draw the line between the genuine conservatives and the autocrats who call themselves conservatives? Actually, they draw that line themselves, and unknowingly reveal themselves, when they defend, make excuses for, or try to promote what they usually call enhanced interrogation techniques, which can be clearly understood as torture. Quite simply, anyone who believes that you can beat the truth out of someone is not conservative -- they are authoritarian. 

I remember laughing along with my classmates in grade school when we heard the absurd confessions of the Salem witch trials, where women who had been tortured admitted to turning themselves into cats and birds. In the 1970s, the Spanish Inquisition was a favorite Monty Python joke as well. Among the baby boom generation, it was understood across political lines that torture was an anachronism from the Dark Ages that only survived in the modern world under autocratic regimes like China. I could not then have predicted that an American government autocrat calling himself a conservative would resurrect a technique from the Spanish Inquisition and insist that it has a useful modern application. I don't know if Mr. Cheney believes that the Spanish Inquisition did a good job of ferreting out heretics, or if he's convinced that some women in Salem really did turn themselves into cats, but given his fantasies about yellow cake and Iraqi WMDS, perhaps he does believe these other crazy things. 

The men who, by their labor, crafted the basic structure of the U.S. government in the era that followed The Age of Reason, understood the folly of cruel and unusual punishment, and so they wrote a prohibition against it into the foundation of American law. They understood, by virtue of reason and logic, that torture serves mainly to command obedience and yield false confessions. Anyone who speaks in favor of harsh interrogations does so not from a desire to conserve basic American principles, but from an autocratic impulse to control people in whatever way possible. No matter what the guy calls himself, if he says torture works, he's an autocrat, not a conservative.

Why They Call it "The Liberal Media"

We have Richard Nixon to thank for the phrase The Liberal Media, and in that long-ago era I logically deduced that, with the media being part of the establishment, it would probably ideally position itself slightly to the right of center. Indeed, in a time when television reporters could and would actually ask a commander-in-chief some tough questions at a press conference, and the commander-in-chief generally felt a public obligation to personally appear at many such press briefings, the American Fourth Estate appeared to me to lean a bit to the right, but not particularly so.

I naively thought that the so-called Liberal Media's fawning adoration of Ronald Reagan would forever put an end to the phrase. As the hard-hitting questions of a typical 1980 Carter press conference suddenly gave way to a kid-glove approach to Reagan, who often didn't even bother to show up for briefings, the idea of a liberal media seemed ludicrous. Following the Reagan years, I watched the Corporate Media tilt more to the right, even as the self-labeled conservative mouthpieces accused that media more and more of tilting to the left, so that by 2003 you could hardly find a single voice speaking out against the right-wing clique that engineered GWB's invasion of Iraq. Watching this unfold, I thought, as TYT's Cenk Uygur has suggested, that the right-wingers were working the refs, so to speak -- they were constantly accusing the Corporate Media of left-wing bias simply to get that media to swing more to the right.

Then a few years ago, I moved into a place where I shared common spaces with a renter who I did not know very well at the time. During one of our first political conversations, he told me that he considered himself a centrist, and that he liked to hear both sides of an issue. He understood that Fox News presented the conservative side, and he told me that he would watch CNN, CBS, NBC or ABC to get the liberal side. This sounded to me like striking a balance between the strongly right wing and the crazy extreme of the right wing, and I had to ask him why he thought the corporate media outlets he named, other than Fox, were liberal. "What is liberal about CNN, or CBS?" He had no answer for the question, and he could only say that all the major news stations other than Fox seemed liberal to him, whatever that meant.

Getting to know him better over the next couple of years, which will happen when you share common living spaces, I began to get a stronger impression of how much this fellow leaned to the right, despite the fact that he had voted for Obama in 2008. Still, I didn't realize just how much he depended on Fox for his facts until the moment, in the summer of 2012, when he revealed his birther leanings, saying that "a lot of people were talking about it." Well, in fact, there was only one place on the dial where "a lot of people were talking about it," so at that point I knew he had to be spending a lot of time on Fox. I quickly pointed out the logical absurdity of the birther arguments, and took some small comfort in the fact that he could still respond to logic in basic conversation, despite his obvious attraction to the Fox world view. Not long after the birther exchange, I saw quite clearly why he said the media, other than Fox, seemed liberal to him.

George W. Bush once said to Joe Biden, "I don't do nuance, Joe."  Well, neither does Fox News, and this is the key to why the watchers take such comfort in the world view that it expresses. Take the millions of colors from a snapshot, and convert it not just to grayscale, but to purely black and white, and you have arrived at Fox. While the Fox folks may occasionally admit to the existence of exceptions, largely, in the Fox world view, a Muslim = a terrorist, a latino = an illegal alien, a doctor who performs abortions = a baby killer, a typical black teenager = a thug, and on and on. When the folks who like Fox News call the rest of the media liberal, it seems liberal to them because it presents a view of the world which, regardless of how much it might lean towards the conservative side, is still nuanced, and nuance, in and of itself, seems liberal to the Fox audience. To put it bluntly, Fox News puts it bluntly, and that's what the Fox audience wants. If you substitute the word blunt for Fox and nuance for liberal, when you hear Foxers use the phrase the liberal media, then you'll know why they call it the liberal media.

My Letter to Secretary Kerry About Keystone XL

Below is my letter to Secretary of State John Kerry regarding the proposed Keystone XL pipeline (Northern segment). Feel free to copy and plagiarize as much as you'd like to send him your own version as well, or to cut and paste for crafting your own public comment.

The public comment period ends at midnight on 3/7/14, and you can submit comments at:

http://www.regulations.gov/#!docketDetail;D=DOS-2014-0003

To submit a comment to Secretary Kerry, you can use this link from the Friends of the Earth website:

http://action.foe.org/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=15004

Dear Secretary John Kerry,

I'm writing to urge you to reject the Keystone XL pipeline. The problems with this proposed pipeline are many and varied. As I would hope you understand by now, and as the pipeline rupture in the Arkansas town of Mayflower in 2013 made abundantly clear, dilbit, which the XL would carry if completed, presents major challenges that conventional crude oil does not, both in terms of conveyance, and in terms of remediation, should that become necessary due to ruptures or other possible catastrophes.

Due to these major challenges, TransCanada's recent history does not inspire confidence. Their Bison natural gas pipeline exploded in Wyoming in July of 2011, about 6 months after completion, and 2 months after TransCanada's director of pipeline integrity was quoted in an industry trade journal saying that Bison was built with “state-of-the-art” technology. "They [the pipelines] will be in place for 20 or 30 years before they need any repairs," the director said. When the company's director of pipeline integrity can be that spectacularly wrong, giving them a green light on the XL project seems like courting disaster and asking for trouble.

Behind the many catastrophic examples of TransCanada's incompetence that a quick internet search can reveal, we have the inside information from Evan Vokes, who worked for TransCanada from 2007-2012 in the engineering department that has responsibility for construction standards. Mr. Vokes has spoken out about the company's lack of compliance with industry welding standards, and about how TransCanada's management preferred to try to silence him rather than to work to improve their standards compliance. In light of these revelations, it's not that surprising that the completed Keystone Southern section already has substantial problems, which Public Citizen has compiled in a recent report, available at:

http://www.citizen.org/documents/Keystone%20report%20November%202013.pdf

I also instinctively don't trust any project EIS compiled by people who stand to gain substantial income from the approval of that project, any more than I would trust defense contractors to make decisions about war and peace.

Furthermore, recent findings published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicate that levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) emissions into the air from tar sands operations may be 2 to 3 times higher than industry estimates. The industry's officially-reported emissions for the oil sands area show an emissions density that's lower than just about anywhere else in the world, including Greenland, and such findings insult the intelligence of anyone concerned with industrial pollution. I would trust the word of a man like James Hansen much more than what self-interested and short-sighted petrochemical hacks have to say.

We don't need to endanger our environment simply so that some wealthy Texas refiners can pay less for their raw materials by getting them from Canada instead of Venezuela, and in so doing, encourage greater tar sands development. What's good for a few rich Texas oil barons will not be good for the rest of humanity.

Sincerely,
-Dave Elder

Connecting the N-word with the S-word

In the Upstate New York conservative Republican household I grew up in, we did not use the N-word. My family did not champion the cause of integration, but when we saw the TV news clips of Bull Connor's dogs attacking black people on the streets of Birmingham, the naked racism shocked us all, and none of us approved of it or made excuses for it. The actions and words of black leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., sometimes made my family uneasy, but we all still experienced his assassination as an epic tragedy and a racial injustice.

No one in my circle of high school friends used the N-word either. In a world of the latest Doors LP, the Ford Mustang, nuclear fission, the Apollo space program and fast food 15-cent hamburgers, the N-word sounded like a relic from the era before Hiroshima. The only kids at my high school who used the N-word were a few hicks from the sticks, and it was understood that their gears moved a bit slower than the fast times we were currently living in.

My Christian-fundamentalist family had regarded the N-word as gutter talk, on the same level as the F-word and its four-letter cousins, but as a young adult no longer living with that religious family, I soon added the F-word and other four-letter oaths to my working vocabulary, though I felt no great need to also take up the use of the N-word. My circle of friends rarely included anyone who used it regularly, and even watching Lenny Bruce's comedy bit about it didn't change my mind. I understood Lenny's point about the power of repression, but I just couldn't personally connect with the idea of over-using the N-word to defuse its power.

During the era when it came into common use among black musicians and singers, I still had no interest in using it myself, and I didn't feel deprived because I didn't use it. With the N-word, context matters, and I instinctively understood that it carries a much different weight when used by a white person than when used by a black person.

Beginning to reconnect it with the S-word, I was there at the moment when my grandfather learned that his wife's sister's husband had attended a local KKK recruiting drive back in the 1920s, and he reacted to this news about his already-deceased brother-in-law by saying, "I didn't know Lou was that stupid." The couples had socialized on a number of occasions over the decades, but somehow he had missed knowing something very basic about his brother-in-law. At that moment, I knew them both a bit better, and I respected my grandfather even more than I had before.

More on the S-word connection came my way soon after I joined the Southern Poverty Law Center, when their quarterly Intelligence Report began showing up in my mail box. After a few issues, I had a much clearer impression of the type who make up the core of racist gangs and groups -- mainly, the guys who like to hang out in bars and pick fights with people they don't know. On the dumb-dumber-dumbest scale, they usually fall pretty close to the est end, but all these losers have to do to give their sad shallow lives some depth of meaning is to tell themselves that they're fighting not simply because they enjoy violence, but for the higher purpose of defending the white race.

So then I recently heard about the white people who feel constrained when they can't use the N-word, and it took me a while to decode what they meant when they said they weren't racist, until I realized that they define racism as committing acts of violence against black people (or brown people, etc.). These kinder, gentler racists assume that all of us white people (which, according to at least one Fox News host, includes Jesus and Santa Claus), we understand that black people are inferior to whites, so what's the big deal about one of the superior types using a word that refers to the inferior ones?

How stupid is that? Now in the modern era of Spotify, Tesla, the GPS and the iPad, we have the benefit of recent scientific evidence to prove that race is an artificial human construct. The human animal does not have race genes, but simply genetic adaptations to time and place, and all humans share a common genetic ancestry that originated in Africa. So it has become increasingly clear to me that the white people who want use the N-word express their proximity to the S-word when they do, and the more they use it, the dumber they are. If you can find a notable exception, I'd love to hear about it, but I haven't seen one myself, and coming to the recent understanding of this equation has added a bit more 20-20 to my own hindsight.