Intelligence test: Which U.S. president was born in Hawaii?
The singer-songwriter Bat MGrath writes earnest, heartfelt songs of relationships. Every word rings true. Nothing political. Yet it seems as though every time I see him play, he lets slip some hint of where his sentiments lie. As he did Saturday night. Between songs he described himself as an optimist, which I do believe he is. But, he added, it’s really hard to be an optimist these days.
So true. Friday morning, after I had got the coffee going and fed the dog, I turned on NPR, whose handful of reports on the big news of the day all seemed to open with the same words.
“Officials were converging on a small Oregon town in the hope of finding out what and why…”
What. Another mass shooting in America.
Why. Because a significant portion of America is living in a fantasy word. Refusing to deal in facts, maintaining nonsensical positions and, very often, turning to lies to defend the indefensible.
Dodging truth and embracing lies. Frequently hiding behind the phrase “American Exceptionalism.” On Saturday the United States Air Force launched a strike in support of our extraordinarily corrupt allies, the Afghan government. Leaders so corrupt that, according to Americans who are living there, trying to help keep that country functional, the local people actually prefer life under the Taliban. According to American officials, the Air Force attack was “in the vicinity” of a hospital. If so it was exceptionally bad aim, as they blew up the place. The Afghan government said the Taliban was using the hospital as “a human shield,” but hospital officials said that was a lie. The only people in that building were medical personnel and patients. And now 19 of them are dead. Including children.
American Exceptionalism is overrunning the planet while the rest of the civilized world steps back, aghast. All of the great work that this country has accomplished in the last couple of centuries – slavery, robber barons, stealing Texas from Mexico and genocide of the American Indian aside – is being overwhelmed by a loud, rude, angry minority.
Don’t overlook that word, minority. The conservative point of view, a dangerous ideology propped up by easily refuted lies, is the minority opinion in this country.
Here are the facts. Americans are overwhelmingly in favor of gun control. They approve of marriage equality. They like science. They are fed up with endless war in the Middle East. They want cops to be held accountable for their actions when another unarmed black man is shot or choked to death. They understand the importance of the Environmental Protection Agency. They acknowledge our world is being destroyed by climate change. They’re ready for the legalization of pot. They see racism and economic disparity – nor Benghazi and Hillary Clinton’s email server – as two of the primary issues faced by this country. They understand evolution is not a theory, but a fact. They overwhelmingly hate Citizens United, the Supreme Court decision that gives corporations the same rights as citizens, and is now exploited by Republican benefactors such as the Koch brothers (and, OK, comedian Bill Maher, who gave $1 million to President Barack Obama’s reelection) to inject obscene amounts of money into political campaigns.
A lot of Americans believe in UFOs. I wish that one were true.
Americans are also largely in favor of a woman’s right to her own reproductive decisions, and they are overwhelmingly supportive of funding Planned Parenthood, which has a higher approval rating than Congress. The Planned Parenthood sting videos that conservatives now use as their main argument for de-funding the program are a hoax. (As were the ACORN sting videos, which brought down an organization that helped black people register to vote.) At the second Republican presidential primary debate, the spectacularly failed Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina told a moving story of an aborted fetus, its legs kicking, as Planned Parenthood employees discussed keeping it alive so that they could harvest its brain and sell it for medical research. Not only is that scene not in the fake sting video, no one’s been able to find that specific image anywhere. If you wish to debate the legality of abortion in this country, you may do so. But come armed with facts, not lies.
Most economists scoff at Republican economic theories of endless tax breaks for the rich. Most social academics dispute the Republican mantra that the poor can join the plutocracy simply by working harder. Conservatives gather zombie-like around the notion that poor people, especially poor black people, only want free stuff. Well, politics is all about handing out free stuff. The rich get more, and better, free stuff.
Conservatives are mindlessly caught in the gravitational pull of unstable objects. George Zimmerman, the gun-obsessed killer of an unarmed black teenager who was walking home from a convenience store and paid for it with his life; Zimmerman is a reprehensible creature who’s been involved in a handful of violent scrapes with the law and has recently been tweeting pictures of the body of his murder victim, Trayvon Martin. You may have already forgotten about Cliven Bundy, the New Mexico rancher whose declaration that he wouldn’t pay taxes for allowing his cattle to graze on government land was defended by a score of rednecks who rode their pickups into town, pointing guns at Federal agents. They got away with it. You can bet they wouldn’t have if they were black.
Conservatives establish fundraising web sites for cops charged with murder.
Joe the Plumber. Sarah Palin. Ted Nugent. I’d never even heard of reality TV moralist Josh Duggar until he got caught up in scandals of sex abuse and a web-site designed for spouses who want to cheat on spouses. Where do Republicans find these erratic mascots?
More recently, conservatives are celebrating that wrung-out dishrag of a Kentucky county clerk, Kim Davis. Last week she met with Pope Francis, a move hailed by conservatives as Papal approval for her brand of ignorance. Except now it looks like Davis’ publicists pulled a fast one, sneaking her in with a crowd of a few dozen people, never explaining to the pope’s handlers that this was the woman who’s decided she can break a law – in this case not issuing marriage licenses to gay couples – because she doesn’t agree with it. The Vatican this week issued a statement that the meeting “should not be considered a form of support of her position.” Apparently the Vatican doesn’t get Fox News on cable, the pope didn’t recognize her.
NASA said this week that there’s liquid water on Mars. Rush Limbaugh says it’s not true.
Conservatives are awash in crazy conspiracy theories. Anchor babies. Obama and Hillary as The Antichrist. If you want a good laugh, Google “Jade Helm” or “Agenda 21,” a benign United Nations resolution that conservatives have re-built from spare parts, a Frankenstein of mismatched logic, into a program for one-government world domination through environmental action in concert with the liberal media (Although most media outlets are owned by conservative corporations).
Conservative fantasies include the infamous death panels: Yet most Americans approve of government funding for programs that will help the elderly and terminally ill people make comfortable, end-of-life decisions. And “Truther” quests: The sheriff of Douglas County, Oregon, re-posted a now widely debunked YouTube video questioning whether the Sandy Hook shootings actually occurred. Two days later he sent a letter to Vice President Joe Biden, who was heavily involved in organizing gun control legislation, claiming that gun control would not prevent school shootings, adding that he wouldn’t enforce gun legislation that impinged on the Second Amendment gun rights of the citizens of his county.
That sheriff, John Hanlin, now has 10 dead and seven wounded people on his hands after Thursday’s massacre at Umpqua Community College.
Conservatives cite the Second Amendment as irrefutable proof that they may carry guns with abandon. It does no such thing. The Second Amendment is about militias. That’s why it prominently uses the word “militia.” But we no longer have militias. Just as we no longer have slavery. When reading the Constitution, the context of the times in which it was written is very important.
But context doesn’t matter to conservatives, re-writers of history. Jeb! Bush, your brother started those failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and created the instability that opened the door for ISIS. Not Obama, despite your claims that he prematurely abandoned “The Surge” and allowed victory to slip away. The truth on that one: All of the generals who were involved at the time have said the surge was always intended as a temporary measure meant to give the Iraqi government time to get on its feet, after we’d destroyed it. A full-time surge would have been an unending, unsustainable effort. So quit lying about it.
Conservatives love war. Americans build exceptional tanks and aircraft carriers. But we haven’t won a war since 1945.
ISIS. A reprehensible organization that cuts the heads off of journalists and Muslims alike. Fear grifters such as Lindsey Graham, South Carolina’s inept contribution to Congress, insist that terrorists with knives hidden in their robes are crossing the Mexican border illegally to kill us. KILL US ALL! Wide-eyed, spittle flying from his mouth, he’s offered no evidence that this is happening, and ignores the fact that virtually all of the terrorists who hijacked four airliners on Sept. 11 were in this country legally. As were the terrorists who shot up a movie theater in Colorado, an elementary school in Connecticut, a McDonald’s in California, a military base in Texas, a church in South Carolina and now a community college campus in Oregon.
Conservatives are bleeding from the eyeballs out of fear that radical Islamists are the greatest threat to America today. But the only terrorists who are killing people in this country seem to be home-grown, socially inept, angry, well-armed loners. All of the developed Western nations have them. But we’re the only first-world country where 36 people a day are killed by guns. We have a third-world casualty rate. Because too many Americans believe the answer to any problem is to point a gun at it. And too many American leaders insist that the solution to our international squabbles is to have some 19-year-old soldier in a Wyoming bunker steer a cruise missile into a village on the other side of the world, and it doesn’t matter how many children and goats and old people we kill.
Americans are exceptional confabulists. Conservatives hide behind lies rather than confront their inhumanity and inconsistencies: Why do Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, both the sons of Cuban refugees, hate immigrants? Conservatives want simple, easy-to-understand, bumper-sticker solutions in a complex world of many cultures.
Everyone wants free stuff. But how can we award the kind of tax breaks that conservatives advocate without exploding the national debt? Economists say we can’t. The Republicans running for president are all college graduates, I assume they can do the math. They must be lying to us.
The majority of Americans know that Obama is not from Kenya. If conservatives are so committed to simple ideas, perhaps that could be the intelligence test for the cabal of unqualified losers currently vying for the Republican presidential nomination: In what state was the current president of the United States born? A one-word answer will suffice.
They all know the correct answer. Hawaii. But they’re loath to admit it’s true.
My Friends Rick and Monica have a 1950s-era bomb shelter in their basement. Rick turned it into a rec room, and put the pool table right in the middle of it.
