Dems: Don't give a cent nor inch!
I sent the following message to President Obama, V.P. Biden, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, December 31, 2012 (3:10am).

DO NOT SELL US OUT to the rich. If Republicans demand a higher income limit than $250,000, counter-offer LOWER: $200,000 is plenty rich enuf. Be a man. [Except in text for Ms. Pelosi] Stand tall and crush the Republicans. Remind them, over and over, that they LOST the election and have been repudiated by the public, and if they insist on defending the rich at the cost of raising everyone's taxes, Democrats will DESTROY the Republican Party in 2014. Warn Boehner that the Republicans can go the way of the Whigs, which the Republican Party replaced. Stomp him and McConnell under hobnail boots. You have all the power. Give NOTHING to the Republicans. They regard any token of respect not as a desire for bipartisanhip or graciousness but as weakness. Don't give them any out. Rub their nose in it. Crush them, humiliate them, put them in their place for good. Do not enable them to continue their obstructionist ways. Make Boehner cry out loud and in public. Crush the redneck Radical Right and make plain that their stranglehold on the Nation's culture and politics is OVER. They must get with the program or be run over by the great majority and crushed into the dust of history. Warn them that if they don't budge, you will introduce legislation to initiate COMPULSORY VOTING in Federal elections, so their ONLY chance at winning any election ever again, low turnout of Democrats, will be destroyed, because turnout will always be 95%, and Republicans cannot ever win more than 40%. Go further: take away redistricting from the states, which should have NO SAY over Federal districts, and let computers draw geometrically compact districts, starting in one corner of a state and proceeding to the other end of the state making districts as close to square as possible. Minority rule must END. Warn the Republicans that they have to RENOUNCE minority rule and racism, or end as a force of any consequence in American public policy FOREVER.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:16 AM

 
Glorying in Carnage
Media 'overkill' (you should pardon the expression) — four days of evening newscasts and late-nite news discussions and 24-hour-a-day almost nonstop cable news coverage of ONE story, the Newtown shooting, as tho nothing else happened on the entire planet in all that time, has gone far beyond wallowing in ghoulishness. It actually appears to amount to GLORYING in, even EXULTING in the gore. Finally we have a (Sandy) hook on which to hang indignation about all those other killings that somehow did NOT exceed public toleration, so we might finally get some action on gun control.
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Fine, agitate for gun control. But don't push our faces into children's coffins to do it.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:45 PM

 
Fiting RadRite Lunacy; Again.
I left a number of comments today at an opinion piece on Yahoo by Walter Shapiro, "The longest war: The shooting at a Connecticut school shows, once again, that there’s no end in sight to our lethal way of life". I present, below, most of those that stand on their own.

Defeatism is the only thing that prevents us from imposing draconian gun control, meaning the rounding up and melting down of ALL guns except in the hands of duly constituted authorities and people in perilous situations. There should be NO hunting except for conservation authorities specially authorized to use guns and subjected to rigorous mental-health standards. If you didn't sow it, you have no right to reap it. NO guns in private hands, period. "Swords into plowshares", guns into cars and trains, pliers, screwdrivers, and rebar. The Supreme Court has NO AUTHORITY over legislation. The Constitution does NOT permit the courts any veto over legislation. If the Framers of the Constitution had intended Courts to have a veto, they would have written a means of OVERRIDE into the Constitution. No override? No veto. Congress and the President should simply IGNORE the courts when they PRETEND to veto legislation. And if judges attempt to enforce their unconstitutional decrees, -- and by what means? -- they should be ARRESTED for insurrection against the duly constituted legal authority of the United States, and HANGED (a good sense for the term "hanging judge"). How can 9, or as few as 5 old fools stand against 313 million Americans? Only DELUSIONS of powerlessness cause 313M people to think they are helpless against a mere 9, or even 5, individuals. We don't have to be Carnage Country, Gun Nation. We can rise to civilization and REPEAL the Second Amendment. Prohibition cost us less carnage than the willful misreading of the Second Amendment. We repealed Prohibition. We can repeal the Second Amendment. We have far less to fear from Government, which does not refrain from dictatorship out of fear of guns in the hands of ordinary people, most of whom would NEVER risk their lives to attack the Government, than we have to fear from individual lunatics with guns.

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Drivel. The number of people willing to face off against the 1.2 million people in the armed forces to oppose the Government is infinitesimal, and NO ONE in Government believes the braggarts are REALLY going to "fight for their rights". No, they're not. And there is no reason to. Fears of Government oppression are signs of a serious mental disorder -- paranoia -- and people with such insane delusions should be kept very far away from guns.

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Seek professional help. Neither Obama nor any other American President has taken steps to become dictator, because the INSTITUTIONS of Governmnt prevent dictatorship. That was one of the key objectives of the American Revolution that freed us from the dictator George III. The institutions work, so all this nonsense about us falling to dictatorship is paranoid LUNACY. All people who talk about an Obama (or any other President's) dictatorship should seek help from mental-health professionals. And if they have any guns, they should be disarmed and put on a no-gun list for life.

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We can take guns away from EVERYBODY. We can shut down the factories that make guns and ammunition. We can arrest criminals, and make use of a gun in any crime punishable by death. We are NOT helpless against crime.

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Nobody remembers the carnage of 50 years ago, the gang violence trivialized in WEST SIDE STORY, etc. Your lack of memory does not equate with an absence of gun carnage 50 years ago. People today know NO history. Most barely know what's going on today. And, for most people, what happens TODAY trumps anything that ever happened before.

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I am not a slave because I refuse to own a gun. You're talking nonsense, and I am reasonably sure that if Benjamin Franklin were alive today, he would be stridently agitating for gun control.

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How very convenient to pretend that these incidents of mass carnage have no connection with guns. You are essentially arguing that these things would have occurred even without guns, as tho if Holmes or Lanza used a knife he would have killed just as many people. No. What makes a lunatic into a mass murder[er] is GUNS. The more GUNS out in society, the more DEATHS from guns. All pretenses that guns are more protection than danger is madness -- DISHONEST madness.

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Do you know how to make a bomb, and find the ingredients? Few people do, and few of these nuts are sufficiently in control of their minds to do the planning, building, and throwing of bombs. The pretense that, absent guns, people would resort to bombs is fatuous.

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It is NOT TRUE that the militia was designed to defend against governmental oppression. It was intended to protect civil society from threats from disorder, foreign invasion, and, in those days, Indian attacks. NEVER did the Framers of the Constitution think the militias would turn against the Government. Quite the contrary, the militia was PART of Government.

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It is far more likely that you or someone near you will use your guns to kill someone else near you, in a temporary rage that would pass harmlessly if there were no guns at hand, than that you will ever use a gun in necessary self-defense. Bye!

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Is "KKK Donkey libs" supposed to MEAN something? Liberals are not members of the KKK, and ABOLISHED slavery. Seek professional help.

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[In response to another "Guns don't kill people. People kill people" assertion] Nonsense. Without guns, that person could not have killed 26 people, or himself. How do you gun defenders always avoid the obvious?

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No President has ever tried to become a dictator, and the checks and balances in the institutions created by the Constitution, not guns in the hands of individuals, protect very efficiently against dictatorship. What kind of mad paranoia induces ANYONE to assert that our DEMOCRATIC Government, answerable to the people in elections, aspires to dictatorship? This is esp. bizarre little more than a month after 126.5 million citizens cast votes to decide who would be President. All this talk about dictatorship is INSANE, and the authorities need to inquire into the mental state of people with such a mad delusion.

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When has a knife, steel bar, or brass knuckles ever killed 26 people in a single assault?

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What security guard, or single cop, could keep a lunatic with two semiautomatic pistols and a rifle from entering a school?

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Odd that we have never seen any of the other methods you speak of being used, isn't it? Just be quiet. Guns ARE the problem, and your rationalizations to the contrary are both pitiful and contemptible.

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When did a foreigner ever commit mass murder in the U.S.? All the incidents [I] have seen reported were committed by people born and raised here?

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More guns is not the solution to anything. That would just provide more chances of some TEACHER or security guard's killing kids.

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There are in fact a lot of shootings by police -- as a bunch of girlfriends, wives, husbands of cops could attest, except that they're dead. There are also killings on military bases -- Fort Hood, Fort Bragg -- where guns are omnipresent. Only a lunatic could believe that the solution is more guns.

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Obama divided NOBODY. RACISM divided the Nation, and we know what side you are on. You LOST. Go away and be quiet.

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Liberals are BRAVE, not cowards. Liberals stand against the lies and viciousness of the Radical Right. Liberals declared independence, drove the British Empire out, freed the slaves, gave blacks the vote, and accomplished every single admirable thing about this country, fiting bigots all the way. You LOST the election. Go away and be quiet. You had your say, and we REJECTED you[r] b.s.

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Nonsense all around. Nothing LIKE 10M Americans have died in our wars, and NONE of the actual deaths were to protect the 'right' of lunatics to kill 20 children and 6 teachers in a single morning.

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Liberals aren't responsible for millions of guns being loose in society. That's all the fault of 'Conservatives', as tho the Second Amendment was really intended to put assault rifles and semiautomatic pistols in the hands of lunatics.

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God, shmod. Which God? The God of Wrath? I prefer other fables. Morality has nothing to do with religiosity.

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If guns are actually outlawed, NOBODY will have them. I am always struck by the dishonest defeatism of the Radical Right. Laws can't be enforced, so we should, what? Repeal all laws, including laws against murder? Bow and arrow COULD NOT have killed 20 kids and 6 teachers in a single morning. Not funny.

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How many suicides, and family and friend murders are committed by those guns you are so happy to see out in society? And how many of the crimes you CLAIM were prevented by guns could have been prevented WITHOUT guns? We are not to ask such questions, just believe the irresponsible propaganda from gun nuts.

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We can round up and melt down ALL guns, and I won't put up with delusional defeatism. We don't have privately owned tanks or Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. We CAN control guns completely. The claim that we cannot is PROPAGANDA.

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Obama and Holder have NOT advocated draconian gun control, so your assertion is void from the outset. And NO, "bad guys" could NOT get guns if we had good laws and good surveillance; if all the gun factories and ammunition factories were shut down. That's just garbage propaganda.

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Neither Holder nor Obama knew about "Fast and Furious" and neither of them approved it. Why can't you people ever give up on your lies, even after fact-checkers have blown them out of the sky? You LOST. Go away and be quiet.

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[In reply to an assertion that the guns could have been secured against misuse:] "Secured" how? You're talking nonsense. Anyone living in a household is going to be able to gain control of a gun stored in that household.

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Pls stop promoting the lie that the Constitution allows just anyone to own guns. As for "D T"['s] fatuous assertions, it IS possible to enforce laws. That some jurisdictions don't is not the fault of the laws. You prefer chaos to law. No sane person does that.

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Mental hospitals were intended to help people conquer their demons, not just lock people up. And yes, we need mental hospitals aplenty, and interventions to investigate people who are not just strange, but also a danger to themselves or others. As for the slanderous and unfunny remark from "Michael" [that committing lunatics to asylums would be regarded by Democrats as "voter suppression"], you LOST. Go away and be quiet.

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Crazy people do not weigh the pros and cons, or ease or difficulty, or safety or dangerousness of the insane thoughts that have seized control of them.

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If those millions of gun owners aren't going to use their guns, they shouldn't have them. They risk their kids' getting to them, as happened here.

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But what if new laws WOULD prevent such things? I suppose you'd oppose them anyway. (Your ugly, slanderous icon [username "Kenyan" and icon showing cartoon images of Obama and Marx buddy-buddy] is disgraceful, and shows you to be a profoundly dishonest person no decent person should have anything to do with.)

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Nonsense. Individual gun nuts don't have the GUTS to stand against the U.S. Army or National Guard, and would be completely helpless against the Air Force. Essentially all of the few deaths that might result from mass confiscation of guns would be of gun nuts, and after the first few deaths in pointless resistance were reported, everybody else would just hand over their guns like decent, law-abiding -- nonsuicidal -- citizens.

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That remark COMPLETELY misses the point, and goes off on irrelevant tangents. The mass shooters we hear about had NEVER committed a serious crime before.

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Anyone who thinks that individual gun owners could have kept Chancellor Hitler from doing ANYthing is off his rocker, as is anyone who asserts that Liberals are Fascists opposed to ACTUAL human rights.

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Nonsense. Everything you say is nonsense. Why not just give up on laws altogether, since, according to you, we cannot control anything?

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Compelled prayer, in clear violation of the First Amendment, is fine with you, is it? Empty, rote recitation of formulaic appeals to a nonexistent God would accomplish absolutely NOTHING for public safety. That is, after all, the very same God who ALLOWED these mass killings to happen, isn't it?

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Stop ignoring the RESTRICTION in the Second Amendment: "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state", which STARTS that amendment, means that UNLESS you are a member of "A well regulated militia", you do NOT have the right to "keep and bear arms". You, and everybody else who falsifies what the Second Amendment says, should be ashamed of yourselves.

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There is absolutely NOTHING about Israel that anyone should emulate. And Israeli settlers have indeed mass murdered Palestinians -- and been PRAISED for it. Look up "Baruch Goldstein", who murdered 29 Palestinians and wounded 125!

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So we should just legalize drugs, even tho, with laws against them, 39,000 Americans a year die from drugs. So what if 100,000 or 300,000 would die if we just gave up on the War on Drugs? Defeatists are SO dishonest. Gun control DOES save lives, as does the War on Drugs. There are things that SHOULD be illegal, and things that should NOT. Inability to distinguish the two is a sign of stupidity or dishonesty.

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I have reported your inexcusable "libturd" slander. No decent person uses such abuse in a public, online forum. Be civil, or begone.

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This comments area has NOTHING to do with Benghazi, and nobody wants to hear more CRAP from the Radical Right. You LOST. Go away and be quiet.

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:55 PM

 
Begging for Censorship
Saturday Nite Live tonite broadcast at least three appalling bits that should never have made it on air. Even the opening political skit, which posited President Obama selling out the people, from misplaced pity for a (supposedly) bullied Speaker Boehner, was in poor taste. But when host Jamie Foxx did his monolog, he joked about killing all the white people in his new movie. What the  ... ? The audience did not immediately groan or boo, so I turned the TV off in a rage. SINCE WHEN IS GENOCIDAL, RACIST MASS MURDER FUNNY? Let's reverse the premise, and posit a white comedian joking about killing all the black people in his movie. Would we be laffing that off?
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Michael Richards merely used the "N-word" and almost lost his career. Would he already have been rehabilitated if he had instead shouted that black people should be killed? I don't think so. But Jamie Foxx can exult in murdering all the white people in his movie and not be considered a monster, a public enemy to be cast out of society? He can't get away with that with me.
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I turned the TV back on later, in time to catch the "Weekend Update" segment, and was again astounded at the insanity broadcast by SNL. "Mrs. [Santa] Claus" performed a routine that was not just grotesque and tasteless but also astoundingly raunchy — about Santa Claus!
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The first sketch after "Weekend Update" was, again, weirdly degenerate, an insane bit about a black man going from pimping 'hos' to pimping Christmas trees. I turned the TV off again, and did not return to SNL for the remainder of the "show" — a display of ugly madness. What demented loser comes up with such off-the-wall-nuts garbage? And how does s/he persuade a reputable television program to indulge such lunacy?
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I could see how people who cut themselves off from others might get lost in a world of their own most bizarre daydreams — or nitemares. That's what happens to too many writers in Hollywood, who live entirely within the incestuous world of fiction, cut off from real people because they go from a group of imitation-people (actors and other writers) who deal constantly with fiction to their home by car, isolated from other people not of their choosing. They are insulated against fresh inputs, and listen only to their own choice of music in their own little universe while on the road. They cut themselves off from their roots, which gave them early inspiration. They leave their hometown, their childhood friends, their family. They don't see how things turn out in the real world, and have no idea of how things work in real human interactions. They quickly exhaust their stock of memories of actual experiences. Their new experiences, with hollow people lost in fiction, are devoid of substance. They have to go farther and farther into their own fantasies, because they have no realities — esp., as so often happens, if they also descend into alcoholism and, worse, use of consciousness-altering drugs.
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But Saturday Nite Live is made in New York, and its writers presumably are not isolated in a world of fiction. They walk on sidewalks and take buses and subways, surrounded by real people. They see what people around them are doing. They hear bits of conversation from passersby and people at the counter in the pizza parlor or the next table in a restaurant filled with people from many different industries, not just entertainment — people who live in the real world, not in idle fantasy.
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Yes, these writers now resident in New York may have left their hometown friends and maintain only minimal contact with their family. And many may drink too much and use drugs. But surely they shouldn't need to go far outside all bounds of reality to come up with comedy. Still, they are part of an industry filled with insane degenerates, and are influenced by the culture of ugly madness that dominates the entertainment industry. And it's not just the American entertainment industry. All filmic media seem to attract degenerates, who seek to destroy the power of their nitemares over them by fleshing them out on screen, expelling them from their own mind to the screen and sharing them with others.
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In one of the commercials that followed "Weekend Update", a trailer for a current movie shows an animated teddy bear humping something or other. Isn't that deliteful? No, it's not deliteful, nor charming, nor funny, nor remotely respectable at all.
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Another commercial was for yet another idiotic Hobbit movie, one more proof that the popular culture has descended into infantile madness. Another commercial was for that Jamie Foxx movie that glorifies anti-white, racist mass murder.
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Almost all films today are hyperviolent and/or infantile and/or obscene. Add in bizarre alterations of the absurd fictitious creatures vampires, werewolves, and ghosts. How is any of this crap supposed to enliten us about the human condition, or relate to people's actual lives in any way? It's as tho the target audience for American (and British/New Zealand/Australian) movies today is a 10-year old sexual pervert who is lost in a world of sado-masochistic violence, filled with explosions and death. That is what passes for entertainment today. Such things don't get me singing, "That's entertainment!"
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What has happened to the popular culture of the United States that such hideous monstrousness can get on air over a major television network? Islamists are denounced here for censorship of all material that does not meet the standards of Moslem morality. And their condemnation of American culture, as degenerate and offensive to God, is asserted to be extreme and intolerant. But you know what? Except for the assertion that much of what is produced by American popular culture is an offense to (nonexistent) "God", the Islamist critics of American popular culture are right. This country's cultural outputs ARE dominantly toxic now.
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What has happened to this country? Where are the churches, moralists, ethicists who used to guide us thru the storm of madness? We are now lost in a perpetual Superstorm of insane, violent, apocalyptic, sado-masochistic fantasy. What harvest shall we have when we reap this whirlwind?
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
The Republican Bubble/Echo Chamber
A friend I discuss politics with, mostly by email, is convinced that the Republicans will have to stop their obstuctionism of the past four years because of their losses in the November election. He is aware of the "bubble" in which Republicans and Tea Partiers live, but thinks that it must have been penetrated by the election, so they will have to give in now.
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Unfortunately, I suspect that people who think that, have absolutely no idea how deluded the Rich and their Radical Right servants are. Mitt Romney thought he could refuse to release his tax records, refuse to appear on Leno and Letterman, and answer only questions he liked, without paying any political price, but sailing to triumph on November 6th. Newt Gingrich was as astonished as Romney and other Republicans when their delusions were exploded by the vote tallies. But the walls of the Republican bubble have remained intact, and Republicans STILL insist, against evidence, on believing that the people WANT them to obstruct the people's business.
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They say, "Hey, we retained control of the House of Representatives, so the people are with us 100%" (and want us to continue to keep anything at all that the Radical Right doesn't want, from being enacted). "We have a mandate to resist everything the Democrats want for another two years."
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There is no recall for Congress, so there is absolutely nothing the President, Senate, or even the voters in their district can do to make Republicans behave responsibly and in bipartisan fashion. That is what Republicans think. And that, alas, is the state of the law. Republicans cannot LEGALLY be forced to serve the public.
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What possesses Republicans to be so completely unconscious of reality? Well, it's the nature of the bubble they live inside, whose walls reflect sound back at them in great repetition of echoes from one part of the circular wall to another to another to another, back and forth around them. Every utterance from the Radical Right is amplified and repeated so it sounds like a thousand, 10,000, a MILLION voices of defiance and reassurance that what they are doing is what the voters want. But each of those pitiful utterances is only ONE voice of irration, and all the RadRite voices put together don't amount to a hill of beans in the real world.
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The other point about the Republican bubble is that only voices of agreement can get thru. It is a magic bubble with walls that look transparent, but actually screen out anything that doesn't agree with the PREJUDICES of the Republicans within. And, once within, every selective image is bounced all around the inside of the bubble, in a dazzling wall of distraction from reality. The writings and videos and talk-radio voices that are selectively allowed in are reflected and echoed and amplified and magnified so that all that the people inside the bubble can hear or see says "Look, you're Right! Everywhere you look, you see that you are Right! Elections mean nothing. You are Right!"
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What can burst that bubble? Violence.
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It is a truism of political science that when governments do not provide an outlet for people to effect change thru elections (ballots), many people will be tempted to resort to violence ("bullets" — or bombs, bayonets, knives, poison, or whatever else is at hand). Today's Republicans do not believe for an instant that Liberals (or "Leftists", as the Radical Right likes to recast things) have the stomach for violent revolution, nor even targeted assassinations, to overcome the refusal of Republicans to accept that they have been repudiated by the people, so need to do the people's bidding, and cooperate with Democrats to solve national problems.
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This seems an interesting take. Why wouldn't Liberals kill their recalcitrant and unrelenting foes? Is it because they are cowards? That is doubtless what Republicans think.
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Or is it that key Liberal doctrines are "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" and "Violence solves nothing"?
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Plainly, as a matter of historical fact, violence solves a lot of things. Let's take two examples, the U.S. Civil War and World War II. In the Civil War, violence held the Union together and ended (legal) slavery. It is the cessation of Federal violence in the post-Reconstruction South that permitted the reimposition of slavery, in forms like peonage, sharecropping, and Jim Crow segregation and suppression of voting.
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In World War II, Mussolini and Hitler were not talked out of their mad plans. They were killed, along with their co-conspirators, and that alone ended Fascism and Nazism.
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The United States has probably had more political violence than any other Western country, certainly in terms of assassination. But Boehner, McConnell, and other Republican stalwarts of scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners obstructionism do not for an instant think anyone will shoot them, or plant a bomb in their car that will explode when they turn the key, or send them a Christmas fruitcake laced with strychnine or arsenic. They are secure in their fixed terms beyond the reach of recall, that they can do anything they want for YEARS, and nothing will happen to them.
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So people who think Republicans will have to cave on the "fiscal cliff" or anything else are completely wrong. Absent violence, there is nothing anyone can do to make them see reality. And their reality includes no possibility of assassination.
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One assassination could change all that. A single bullet thru the head of John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul, or any other Republican extremist would explode the Republican bubble, and with it the echo chamber that alone empowers Republicans to ignore elections. But Liberals don't kill to get their way, even when the death toll from Republican behavior — those 45,000 Americans who die each year for want of health insurance; the 1.25 million Iraqis killed by the U.S. invasion and the internecine violence it produced — is explicitly mentioned to justify counterviolence. So Republicans have nothing to fear. All the casualties in the one-sided war by the rich against the rest of us, which they have been waging for decades, will continue to be on the side of the poor and middle-class. And there is NO amount of words, discussion, nor moral suasion that will change that.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 10:13 AM