Okay, no one can miss the voluminous threads started by our resident nutjob, concerning the Norwegian nutjob, and his supposed connection to the TEA Party. Thread after thread, post after post, day after day, our resident mental giant is obsessing over this like nothing before, and it shows no signs of subsiding. The premise is, you are supposed to accept that some lone nutjob in Norway, held similar beliefs to those who support the TEA Party; ergo, the TEA Party are nutjobs like the guy in Norway, or his viewpoints are flawed, or both.
The Unibomber, Ted Kazinski, compiled an extensive 'manifesto' which, when read, sounded very much in-line with the viewpoints of most libertarians... does that mean all libertarians are Unibomber nutjobs? Does that mean we need to dismiss all libertarian viewpoints, because this crazy person did something crazy? What about Jared Loughner? He was pissed off at Gabby Giffords for not being left-wing kooky enough! Does this mean we should discount all left-wing lunacy, and never listen to a liberal again? (*cheers*) Does this mean that all liberal kooks are subject to go mow down a 'moderate' democrat congressperson?
These are arguments which can be made, if we are to accept the premise and inference our beloved nut job has showered our board with. Because a mentally unstable person did something mentally unstable, and took unreasonable action, doesn't mean any particular viewpoint they may have had, is wrong or inaccurate. It just means they took unreasonable action... it has nothing to do with whether they are right or wrong on a viewpoint. Look... most of what Charles Manson had to say about 'the establishment' and 'the authority' was verbatim what we hear from the 60s generation activists who are currently in power in Washington today... it's what Obama meant when he said "we're going to fundamentally change America." Now, because Charles Manson is a nutjob, and did something irrational and unreasonable, we can conclude that his viewpoints were null and void, and had no merit for further debate or consideration? That's great news, you just buried liberalism!
This is more of the two-faced hypocrisy we've come to expect from the left. When it's some nut from the left, we're all supposed to just understand it was a lone nut... like Lee Harvey Oswald... just some kook doing something insane... nothing more to see... never mind that he was all into Socialist government and Communism... left-wing extremist ideology... nahhh... doesn't matter those were his viewpoints... he was just a nut. His viewpoints and philosophy are still sound, they are the basis for the socialist progressive movement of the left today... but that is beside the point. We are to accept that Oswald was a nut.. end of story. But-- let it be someone with any connection to a right wing philosophy, and the 'connection' is made over and over... the 'inference' being, his viewpoints were flawed and crazy, like all viewpoints from the right.
Sorry if the truth hurts.
http://www.bidstrup.com/politics.htm
Why Do Conservatives Ally Themselves With Christian Fundamentalists?
To understand the alliance, you have to understand the history. The conservative-fundamentalist alliance has had a very short but very curious history. It began with the election, in 1976 of Jimmy Carter, an outspoken Christian fundamentalist from Plains, Georgia, the heart of Southern Baptist country. His election was in no small part due to the efforts of fundamentalist Christians who saw him as one of their own and allied themselves with him and his supporters within the Democratic party. Fundamentalist Christians, who had always seen politics as being unworthy pursuits of men of God, had finally begun to realize that politics was the key to freeing themselves from what they perceived as being considered on the fringes of American society.
Jimmy Carter, throughout his administration, tried his best to practice the principles of his humble, honest religious convictions, and steer the course of government in that direction. Unfortunately for him, such governmental organizations as the Defense Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation and many others were of a totally different mindset and were not much inclined to cooperate. Additionally, Carter was a particularly inept micromanaging administrator, who never did master the fundamentals of managing a vast bureaucracy, nor did he have an adequate grasp on the technical fundamentals of economics and political science that the presidency requires.
Inevitably, the perceived failure of the Carter administration led to a discrediting of the fundamentalist-Democratic alliance. That alliance had been based on the Christian and liberal common ground on such issues as human rights, respect for human dignity and a strong desire for spreading the values of civility and justice around the world.
When that alliance collapsed, the Christians began to cast about for a new ally. They found it in the ultraconservative fringe of the Republican Party.
Long a part of the Republican party, the ultraconservatives had always been kept at bay by a party apparatus that feared their extremist views on race relations and Communism, a certain stripe of moral Puritanism, and an exceedingly narrow interpretation of the U.S. constitution. The Republican kingmakers feared that if such views gained currency, they would alienate large numbers of the more moderate party faithful and would lead to destruction of the party. Even Barry Goldwater, who was considered extreme when he ran for the presidency in 1964, could see this and warned, in his book, "Conscience of a Conservative" (1968) of the consequences if these people ever gained control of the party.
But by 1979, the fundamentalists needing allies found willing partners in the ultraconservatives within the Republican party, and found a commonality of doctrine in their moral Puritanism. An alliance was forged, and it found expression in the very persona of a B-movie cowboy actor and ex-governor from California, a man who had only managed to get elected to his state's governorship with the secret, illegal help of right-wingers in the FBI. Ronald Reagan was elected president by a modest majority in 1980. With him, he brought to Washington an entirely new set of values which that town hadn't seen in a president since the early part of the preceding century. Gone was the view that government could solve problems; government was seen as the problem.
The best way to solve the problem of government, Reagan held, was to get people from industries regulated by government into positions of power in the bureaucracies that regulate them, so those industries would be regulated in a more "rational" manner. He did so with abandon.
The result was predictable. Of the approximately 3,500 people appointed to positions in government by Reagan, fully 700, or 20 percent were indicted or convicted of crimes of corruption committed while in office. This included three cabinet officials, one of which was the attorney general, the very man charged with the responsibility of enforcing the law. Historians now agree that the Reagan administration was the second most corrupt in American history, exceeded only by that of Ulysses S. Grant, another conservative Republican.
Yet in spite of the obvious moral failure of the Reagan administration, the fundamentalists loved him. Why? Because he played their tune.
The fundamentalists had always hated communism passionately, and here was a president who, if he was anything, was fiercely anti-Communist, using language like "evil empire" to describe it. Reagan talked endlessly about "family values," a subject near and dear to the hearts of fundamentalists. Never mind the fact that he rejected his own son when he discovered his homosexuality, and he was very publicly estranged from his stepdaughter. This hypocrisy was lost on millions of fundamentalists, who were willing to overlook a lot of hypocrisy to gain the power and prestige an ally in the White House afforded them.
But in spite of his personal example, what truly endeared him in the hearts of most Christian fundamentalists was the fact that he did his best to implement fundamentalist ideals into the machinery of government. For example, Reagan blocked AIDS research at the National Institutes of Health and the Center for Disease Control, and made sure that anyone in that agency that publicly advocated AIDS research would be demoted or fired. Reagan didn't even publicly utter the word, "AIDS" until after more than 30,000 Americans had died of the disease. The result was that the most serious epidemic of the last half of the 20th century in America rapidly gained a foothold that could have easily been been prevented, had the president's bigotry not prevented the Center for Disease Control from doing its job.
Of course the more bigoted elements of the conservative-fundamentalist alliance were delighted. Here was a president who was doing all he very privately could to see that a disease that was killing thousands of members of a despised minority, would be allowed to spread. Here was a president who was opposed to extending civil rights protections to as-yet unprotected minorities they disliked, who was dismantling regulations they found inconvenient or burdensome, and who clearly did not mind seeing their interests furthered as he furthered his own.
Yet the most remarkable aspect of the Reagan -- fundamentalist -- conservative alliance is that the warm affability of the president made his private attitudes of meanspiritedness and intolerance not only acceptable, but even fashionable. At long last, the bigots within the conservative movement could come out of the closet.
And come out of the closet they did, and in large numbers. In a short period of time, they gained control of much of the apparatus of the Republican party, and, allied with the Christian fundamentalists, ensured that no one could be elected to national office on the Republican slate without their blessing. This trend became obvious to the American public in 1992 when at the Republican national convention in Dallas, Texas, in a speech by Pat Buchanan whose Fascist tone sent chills down the collective spines of millions of Americans. The Republican candidate for president, an incumbent, no less, lost the election, in no small part because of that speech. Americans were not used to hearing such intolerant, meanspirited rhetoric from serious politicians from a national platform. The Republican party had been sleeping with the devil, and a truly ugly baby was the result. It became evident to many political scientists that Barry Goldwater's prophesy was about to come true.
Two weeks, as the late Tip O'Neil once observed, is an eternity in politics, and two years is an eternity. By 1994, the Buchanan speech was largely forgotten and conservative politicians had learned to adroitly push the right buttons on the American body politic using the selected folk wisdom technique long practiced by their favorite talk-show pundit, Rush Limbaugh. Saying just the right things and capitalizing heavily on the weakness of the first two years of the Bill Clinton administration, they managed to gain control of the House of Representatives and Senate concurrently, and thereby control of the legislative branch of government for the first time in nearly a century. The result was the Republican "revolution" of dogmatic stalemate, intransigence and gridlock that cost the Republicans much of the hard-won support by the election of 1996. The dogmatic extremism of the hard-core, right-wing conservatives was largely responsible for the re-election of Bill Clinton. Of course, that re-election didn't go down well, and a concerted campaign began to remove Bill Clinton from office. Financed by a wealthy fundamentalist wing-nut, Richard Mellon Scaife, and led by House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a man who was having an affair with his secretary at the time and was lying about it, the campaign siezed upon the fact that Bill Clinton had had an affair with an intern, and lied about it. The rest, as they say, is history.
The Dangers Of The Conservative - Fundamentalist Alliance
Beyond the obvious fact that the conservative-fundamentalist alliance threatens the stability of the Republican party by driving out its moderates, there are serious dangers for the institutions of government as well.
One of them is the fact that the implementation of a narrow agenda suited to a narrowly defined plurality of voters threatens the political stability of the nation as a whole. If conservatives are allowed to impose their doctrines on the rest of society, there will be a rebellion the strength of which the conservatives will be totally unprepared for.
The fact is that women and many minorities in the United States have tasted a measure of freedom and equality for the first time, and are going to be quite unwilling to go back to the "bad old days" without a fight. The unbridled faith of the neo-conservative newcomers to congress in the correctness of their position means that they will be quite surprised to learn that what's good for them isn't necessarily good for all, and that the rest of the country won't take the conservative agenda lying down.
Of particular concern is the drive by the fundamentalist wing of the alliance to make the U.S. a "Christian" nation, with "Biblical principles" underlying its legal structure. To do so would be to mean effectively to abrogate the first amendment to the constitution, which guarantees freedom of religion and speech. Freedom of religion and speech would not truly be possible in an atmosphere where a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible informed all of public policy. How, for example, is a Jewish or Muslim child supposed to feel in a public school being forced to listen to a Christian prayer each morning? The replacement of the American republican democracy with a thoroughly right-wing theocracy will not be easily accepted by the American people. The fundamentalist conservatives recognize this, and are willing to advocate repeal of the First Amendment to make a theocracy possible!
Additionally, there are concerns about the proscriptions of personal freedom that would inevitably be imposed upon non-Christians and unpopular minorities. It is almost inevitable, for example, that laws penalizing sodomy, adultery, restricting divorce, abortion, and family planning services, etc. would be enacted. It is quite unlikely that evolution would be taught in the public schools as the dominant paradigm in biological science. Astronomical and space research would probably be ended to prevent the embarrassment that discoveries in those sciences continually cause fundamentalists.
In short, only values that support the fundamentalist Christian world view would be tolerated in government and education. What would clearly result has often been described as a return to the dark ages, when such a paradigm operated for a thousand years.
:lol:
