The Republican'ts

One of the thing I liked about Howard Cossell was his reaction to those who continued to call Muhammed Ali Cassius Clay after that fighter decided to change his name.

One thing about this country, Cossell (who had changed his own name) said, is that a man deserves to be called by whatever name he chooses. We are a nation of immigrants and many of us came here to reinvent ourselves. Or we simply wanted a certain name for certain reasons, but the minimum respect we can give another man is to call him by the name he chooses.

So the smug, smirking practice of every Republican from Mitch McConnell to John Boehner to Eric Cantor of calling the Democratic Party the "Democrat" party is especially irritating. It signifies the mindset these partisans have which says there is no such thing as comity or civility when it comes to politics, as far as these politicos are concerned.

It is a sort of gleeful Frat Boy prank, they all do. They say DemocRAT as if it is a party of rats, and they look very pleased with themselves as if they have just now come up with something very clever.

Democrats have chosen to ignore this, like some adult who simply will not rise to the bait, because he has more important things to do.

But that is an error. The Democrats need to throw a counter punch every time the Republicans throw one, not just block the blow, but counter punch, and better yet, throw a flurry.

So, I propose calling it the Republican't party. (Or, if the setting is more formal, the Republicannot Party.)

It is, after all, the party of cannot do. Can't have contraception. Can't bail out the auto companies. Can't pay for unemployment insurance. Can't intervene to save the country from driving off the economic cliff. Cannot find Osama Bin Laden. Can't spend money on roads or bridges. Can't tax billionaires. Can't do anything, except, of course, force vaginal probes up women who are in their own doctor's offices and force doctors to do probes, say words, take positions they do not want to do.

I rather like it. Rolls off the tongue. Republican'ts and the Republican's party. The party of cants. They pick up a cant (as in a recited, pre formulated, repeated party line) and they stick with it.

Ah, Democracy

"No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States."
--Constitution of the United States of America




I'm going out to vote this afternoon, after work. I've got a candidate for the school board I'm voting for.


There will also be ballot questions, like: Do we need a skate board park in Hampton and are we willing to float a bond for it?


Some homeowner wants to plant azaleas on the other side of the sidewalk, on town land. Should she be allowed? Stuff like this makes it on the ballot in Hampton, New Hampshire.


This morning, on National Public Radio they were interviewing voters in Alabama. A man earnestly declared President Obama is an unconstitutional president because the Constitution says you have to be a natural born American and he is not, because his father was born in Kenya and to be a natural born American, your parents have to be born in America. Says so, right there in the Constitution.
Now this is not a matter of belief. Nor is this a matter of interpretation. This is something you can look up, right there in the Constitution.


But this Alabama voter, very earnestly, was speaking into a microphone and telling us something.


What he was telling us is that if you wish really, really hard, the world will be the way he wants it to be.


When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are, your dreams come true.


Another Alabama voter said she will vote for Rick Santorum because he wants to put God into everything, and she likes that.


Listening to these voices with their Southern accents and Southern rhythms and Southern inflections, I felt so very lucky to live in New Hampshire.


Not that I you never hear this sort of thing up here in the Granite state.


But when I told my coworkers what I had heard this morning they all broke out laughing and asked me to repeat it. When I repeated it, I tried it in my best Southern accent and they loved it even more. They roared with laughter.


It was very un PC. It was like laughing at a Polish joke, about how stupid those Southerners are.


It was a bonding moment.




E Pluribus Unum.

History as Psychology

Richard Hofstader has his detractors. He was a historian at Columbia University, and George F. Will described him as the quintessential example of the condescending liberal because Hofstader wrote The Paranoid Style in American Politics which offended Will because it so clearly portrayed the very sort of reactionary Republican we see today in Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and, that Zelig of Republicans, Mitt Romney, as a deranged and truth-be-told, psychopath.

Professors of history decried Hofstader's penchant for using secondary rather than primary sources in his review of the past, but this is an irrelevant and essentially effete criticism: What do I care how Hofstader arrived at the truth? I care whether or not he can see the truth.

And looking at the mindset, or the psychology of the Rush Limbaugh's of the world is the only way to really understand their appeal.

What is just as, if not more important is looking at the psychology of those who are listening and echoing what they hear Limbaugh said.

Which brings me to the instance which prompts this posting. This week a forwarded email circulated around my office. It was a rant by a 21 year old woman who was incensed, outraged by something she had seen on Fox News: Down and Out types who has so little self respect they had actually stooped to using food stamps, were using those government hand outs for the undeserving to buy Ho Hos or some sort of junk food--the name escapes me--the modern equivalent of Twinkies.

This provoked a torrent of invective among the young women in my office, most of whom have children below the age of 10, and whose salaries average in the low $20,000 range.

The only email which had provoked the same level of contempt was a "Shoppers of Walmart" compendium of photographs of grossly obese or otherwise physically repugnant Americans, often wearing short shorts which barely contained their pelvic anatomy.

It fascinated me the fury all this provoked. There was no sympathy, only anger and revulsion at these people who were just one step or maybe a few steps below these office workers on the socio economic scale.

They had no such resentment toward those above them, at least none I've ever been able to detect. These people who have some high school, or graduated high school, or some community college do not blink an eye at the pie graphs showing the small sliver of wealth their own income group controls. They know they are struggling economically. They pay more than half their incomes in rent and food is a significant part of their cost of living. They are in and out of living with their parents, dealing with older cars which keep breaking down making them late for work, dealing with misbehavior of their children at school, phone calls from teachers or principals, and yet they see none of their own circumstances as being connected to what the top 1% or the top 20% are doing in the world, are doing to their world.

They have accepted since they do not have "qualifications" they do not deserve better. They have bought into the idea of a meritocracy so thoroughly, they accept their place at the bottom of the scale as deserved.

One woman, who I know particularly well, tried to take a course in "Anatomy and Physiology" at a local community college, which is required so she can get a certificate which says she is a certified "Medical Assistant." Now, this is a woman who has learned a great deal of practical physiology and medicine in the 5 years she has acted as an uncertified medical assistant. She is very bright, and she reads every chart before she passes it on to the doctor she assists and if there is a relevant lab missing, she notices that, and she gets on the computer and digs it out. She does a blood test on a patient and records the result but she doesn't stop there, she looks at the pattern of how that test fits with previous tests on the same patient, and she often hands the chart to the doctor and says, "Looks like Mr. Smith is burning out his insulin production. Bet he'll need insulin soon. I'm not telling you your job. I'm just saying."

She's almost always right.

But the course she took at the community college was taught by a martinet, infamous among the women who have to get past him, and she brought in the work sheets and exams this professor subjected his unfortunate students to and they were evidence of a special psychopathology. The other physicians I showed them to just laughed. The questions were: a/ about such minutiae as to be laughable b/ revealed the professor did not understand the very topics he was attempting to "teach" his students.

But he stood between his students and "certification."

The woman I am talking about dropped out of the course, defeated, convinced she did not deserve any better, did not deserve to be "certified."

The fact is, she is better, knows more, is more valuable to the patients and the clinic, and is more deserving of being called a "certified" medical assistant than 90% of those who have got that certificate.

Thus is the poisonous result of selling the notion of "meritocracy" to the American soul.

It would be one thing if true merit were accurately defined and identified, but it's quite another how the whole notion of who deserves the prizes is practically delivered in our current day American nation.

Snob Appeal

Rick Santorum was not thoughtless to use the word snob in connection with college education.

Like Rush Limbaugh, who is the well spring of Republican Party thought, he knows to which resentment he can appeal.

I interviewed a man today who has been a welder for 30 years. Welders these days are not just guys with torches and masks. This guy had welded everything from space shuttles to airplane engines to medical devices and what he does is very high tech and highly skilled and requires a talent for measurement and a lot of practical math.

But some years ago he was working at a company, managing thirty employees in his department and doing a terrific job. The company's earnings had risen ten fold over his tenure there and his supervisors and bosses decided it was time to bring him into management.

Until they found he had never been to college. He was not only not promoted, but because they felt they could not simply keep an employee who had become so visible and valuable in a non management capacity, they fired him.

All because he had not earned his merit badge: A college B.A..

In this, I find myself in odd company: Charles Murray of the American Enterprise institute says we should prick the BA balloon. It's become a pretty meaningless credential. It's only meaning is bestowed upon it by mindless, lazy "human resources" types who don't want to have to devise ways of actually evaluating people in a meaningful way--they want to just throw out all applicants who do not have B.A.'s. It makes the life of the HR person easy--she can go to lunch on time.

So when President Obama says everyone should be able to go to college, for people who smoulder with the resentment of that experience, they hear it as, "Everyone should go to college." And they think: Why? Why should some feckless privileged frat boy who spent four years drinking on his fraternity porch be promoted because his father paid for 4 years of college.

Fact is, not everyone should go to college. Fact is, the college degree should not be a ticket to promotion at the workplace and should not even be a ticket to the hiring interview. In our zeal for a "meritocracy" we breed understandable and justifiable resentment among those who have been mindlessly made into losers.

Funny thing is, the resentment is not directed toward the owners of the factories, but always toward the President and the Democrats.

That one, I'm still trying to figure out.

Rush Limbaugh: The Boil Lanced

Sometimes, in medicine, you have to dissect open a wound and follow it from the surface downward into a deep cavity, to really appreciate the extent of the pathology. One of the most common instances of this is a a peri rectal abscess, which can, once excavated, wrap around all sorts of anatomy and be far more extensive than anyone appreciated when they first began cutting.

So let's explore, layer by layer, the peri rectal abscess which is Rush Limbaugh. I have thought, until now, of Limbaugh as the central nervous system of the Republican party, but now I realize, he is the the peri rectal abscess. But then, rectum, brain, when talking Republicans, I repeat myself.

Limbaugh attacked Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown University law student who had the temerity to say she thought the Jesuit institution, which provides health insurance to its non Catholic workers and students ought to include in that health insurance contraceptive coverage, which she considers part of health care for women.

To his credit, and typical of the Jesuits, the president of Georgetown, who disagrees with Fluke, quoted Saint Augustine, "Let us , on both sides, lay aside all arrogance. Let us not, on either side, claim we have already discovered the truth."

You got to love the Jesuits. Mad Dog was on the faculty of that Jesuit institution for nearly 30 years, and if there is an order in The Church, which can disarm you with its open mindedness, it has to be the Jesuits. But I digress.

Rush Limbaugh.

Rush Limbaugh says Ms. Fluke went "before a Congressional committee and says that she must be paid to have sex. What does that make her? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She's having so much sex she can't afford the contraception. she wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. What does that make us? We're the pimps. The johns." And then he adds, the coup de grace, saying if we are all be asked to pay for her having sex, we ought to demand something for our money, "We want you to post the videos [of you having sex] on line so we can all watch."

Whew!

Where do you begin? There's a lot going on in there.

First, there is the idea that a woman who asks for coverage for an IUD or an oral contraception is asking to be paid for sex. If she had a health insurance account, from which she could withdraw money for any health care cost, would she still be asking to be paid for having sex?

When most people think of a woman asking to be paid for sex, they are thinking about a woman who structures a deal with a client: I will have sex with you if you will pay me money. Here we have a woman who says, I would like treatment which will protect me if I behave in a way you do not want me to behave, but I want to avoid some very unhappy outcomes.

Before we go on: The insurance payments for Georgetown students do not come out of the taxpayer's pocket. The payments come from the pockets of the parents of the Georgetown students, for the most part.

And then there is the notion that insuring someone engaged in a risky behavior is something the insured is being paid "to do?" Consider the auto wreck. Have we paid the woman who was knocked unconscious and fractured to be knocked unconscious and fractured?

If we paid for the installation of a seat belt in her car, would we be paying her to have a wreck?

We want to prevent breast cancer, so we pay for mammograms. If a woman is found to have breast cancer, we do not say we are paying her to have breast cancer.

Then there is the usual Limbaugh escalation to moral outrage: If you make me pay for your coverage, then you are making me complicit in your crime of having a need for contraception, and that makes me both a pimp and a john, a participant in illegal and immoral sex.

Well, up to this point, there is a certain logic: You are demanding other people become involved in the implications of behavior they may not approve of and so they have a right to feel possibly complicit. It's all hyperbolic and over the top and exploded into outer space, but there is a shred of a line of reasoning.

Until we get to the sex videos.

And this is not exactly new with Rush Limbaugh.

I well remember, during the Clinton years, a twenty minute rumination by Rush Limbaugh about the Clintons having sex at the White House. First he elaborated about how fat Bill Clinton had become. Then he expounded on how fat Hiliary was. Then he put them in a bed in the Lincoln bedroom. Then he cackled about the creaking and moaning of the wooden timbers of the Lincoln bed, straining under the weight of the Clintons having sex and on ad nauseam.

What was really peculiar and striking was the detail with which he described the sex and duration of his description. He simply would not let go of it.

He was getting rather breathless describing it.

It was Clinton porn, right there on the radio, courtesy of Rush Limbaugh.

Limbaugh had his paid guffawers in the studio, laughing like drunken hyenas at a fraternity party, of course, but he was stoking his own flame.

I am not a psychiatrist. I am not even much of a fan of pop psychology.

But I would say, this man has a problem with sex.

I mean, just look at the man.

I don't want to even imagine or explore why he might have a problem with sex, with women, especially with women who, while they might want to have sex with some male, would not under any circumstances want to consider having sex with Rush Limbaugh.

Even thinking about Rush Limbaugh having sex has got to be a pretty disturbing proposition for most people on the planet, no matter what their gender.

None of this would be particularly germane to a political website, were it not for the particular psychopath we are considering.

After all, Don Imus is just as rancid, but Imus, as right wing as he is, does not inform, does not formulate thought for the Republican Party. Rush Limbaugh does. He is the central nervous system for the Tea Party Republicans, for Joe Six pack Republicans.

Rush Limbaugh is the pacemaker for the heart of the Republican Party, Fox News.

And this is what they are made of.

Yikes!

The Big Tent: Republican Party Style

The Republican Big Tent

Sometimes Hendrick Hertzberg is simply on his game.

Writing in the New Yorker, March 5 he encapsulates what the Republican Party has become:

"An excitable, overlapping assortment of Fox News friends, Limbaugh dittoheads, Tea Party animals, war whoopers, nativists, Christianist fundamentalists, a la carte Catholics (anti-abortion, yes; anti-torture, no), anti-Rooseveltians (Franklin and Theodore), global warming denialists, post-Confederate white Southrons, creationists, birthers, market idolators, Europe demonizers, and gun fetishists."

And that's not to mention, Ayn Rand idolaters, Ronald Reagan worshipers, super patriots, endless war advocates, labor union bashers, American Royalists, constitutional originalists (whatever that may be) Bible thumpers, anti contraceptive, anti pre marital sex, anti sex Puritans.

And that's just the short list.

These are not people you can talk to. These are people you have to defeat, dismember and drive a stake through their hearts because, if you do not they will re emerge like so many zombie vampires and try to kill the Republic.

A Republic, as Ben Franklin once said, "If you can keep it."

A Republic requires a loyal opposition. That, we ain't got.

Moral Hazard

Bail Them Out? Think of the Moral Hazard!

Downloaded to my Kindle are books examining the origins of the financial crisis which surely would have precipitated the second Great Depression, had the federal government not acted to avert it.

This appears to be a case of having studied history and as a result, having been able to avoid repeating it.

The origins, the history of how we got to the brink is, like all history, one long argument, and surely, there are many factors, but sometimes it helps to be simple minded and unencumbered by too many facts; Alexander, after all, cut through the Gordian knot with a single stroke, seeing a simple solution.

In my case, being simple minded, the story looks clear enough: For years Republicans agitated to rescind the safeguards, the regulations, placed on the American banking system after the 1929 Depression. The Republicans argued our economy could not compete with other economies around the world as long as our bankers were shackled by regulations which prevented bankers from engaging in the imaginative, creative, innovative practices which the rest of the world was developing. Unleash the animal ferocity of market forces, the Republicans cried, and the Democrats, as usual, not having the courage of their own convictions, not wanting to look like the slumped shouldered, wispy voiced wusses the Republicans said they were--the Democrats meekly acquiesced and allowed the repeal of a law called (and I've likely misspelled) Glass-Speigel Act.

So the bankers were now free to take the most carefully examined and reliable form of personal debt--home mortgages--and to buy and bundle these as collateral and sell these as stocks on the market.

Of course, as soon as mortgages became a commodity, the quality of the work which had made mortgages so safe and valuable evaporated, and the brokers didn't care what they were selling as long as they had something to sell, so the bankers rushed to find any names to affix to any paper mortgage and a lot of people found themselves new home owners and that phony phrase, The American Dream, became just that. A dream, not a reality.

Of course, as is true of most shoddy products, these mortgages looked good for fleeting moment but with time, they fell apart like cardboard shoes.

Then the whole thing collapsed, right on President Obama's head.

The Republicans, who had been the instigator of the whole fiasco then blamed it all on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the most available scape goats with a government connection, and loudly decried any form of relief for mortgage holders, for the average guy on the street, for the fools, as a form of "Moral Hazard."

After all, the mortgage holder was fool enough to sign a contract for a house he could not afford--now he had to take his bankruptcy and the loss of his home like any gambler who had lost a foolish bet.

Of course, there was no moral hazard talk in connection with the sleazy brokers or the sleazy bank officers or the sleazy Republican politicians who had built, marketed and sold the cardboard shoes.
No, all the moral hazard belonged to the little guy on Main Street, not to the Wall Street Crowd.

The Wall Street crowd had long since got its bonuses and moved on.