May 29, 2012
Tuesday

To me the most interesting aspect of what Jim Guenther wrote is how two simple paragraphs could expose so much rabidity; for in reading all of the letters written in response what is most notable is that none of the respondents disagreed that the Republican Party does in fact endorse all of the points of view Mr. Guenther cited. They just damned him for observing and stating that fact.

In the course of so doing most of the writers, using poor spelling and even poorer syntax, simply demonstrated their lack of education and their ignorance. Mr. Guenther used two paragraphs to point out Republican positions with which he disagreed. Somehow to these hate-filled name callers that is name-calling. In other words, pointing out what the Republicans stand for is calling them names. That’s crap. Pointing out what the Republicans stand for is pointing out what the Republicans stand for. If that embarrasses you Republicans so much, find some other things to stand for.

If you think you need to hide what you stand for, it must be pretty bad, even shameful; otherwise why would you want to hide it? Stick it out there for the world to see. If you can’t or won’t, it has to be bad, doesn’t it?

The rest of your effort seems to boil down to “tell a lie,” keep telling the lie, repeat the lie over and over again, and somehow ultimately it will turn into the truth. But, of course, it will always be a lie, except in the game of propaganda, which is the game you are really playing. It is actually quite understandable that the “Joe Goebbels School of Journalism” continues to have such appeal to the political right wing. Goebbels and his master, good old Adolf, were both right wingers, so it’s just a continuum of the crap the right wing has been trying to play for the last 90 years; and for the same reason. They want everyone who disagrees with them dead.

Until they can attain such a state of Nirvana, they seem content with propagating “stupid,” as if somehow that is one of the higher values. Ignorance is not bliss; it is pathetic, and to encourage ignorance does nothing to improve this society. Mr. Al Johnson in his retort to Jim Guenther chose to misrepresent the basest falsehoods and lies as great philosophical truths and facts; to which I have but two responses. If you really believe this crap, I pity you, because you are a moron. Yes, I just called anyone who believes this blather a name that I am going to make stick.

Because in the second instance here is an item-by-item response, and refutation, of the spew that one John Hawkins wrote called “20 Obvious Truths That Will Shock Liberals,” which Al Johnson wants all of you to believe is right wing gospel and truth, to which my only other response is very simple. You folks need to get on a space ship and move because we are no longer members of the same species. Each numbered item, all 20 of them, is precisely re-written as Mr. Hawkins presented them.

1. The Founding Fathers were generally religious, gun-toting small government fanatics who were so far to the Right that they’d make Ann Coulter look like Jimmy Carter.

Not really. Not only were the Founding Fathers not particularly religious, deism being in mode, but as politicians none of them are noted for toting guns. Aaron Burr, a generation later, was an exception, and Andrew Jackson, two generations out, was a famous duelist, but exceptions don’t make the rule, and they weren’t Founding Fathers anyway.

I do hope the supposed contrast between Ann Coulter and Jimmy Carter is representative of the ignorance of John Hawkins, the author of “20 Obvious Truths,” because while Ann Coulter is rather extreme (at least in her posturing for her audience), Jimmy Carter was as vanilla and middle of the road as one can possibly get; definitely not a contrast of polarities.

To assert that the Founding Fathers were a bunch of extreme Right wingers is really dumb. Edmund Burke, the great British conservative of the era, would certainly have told you otherwise; he would have preferred to hang them all. Establishing via revolution the only representative democracy on the planet at the time is about as progressive and as liberal as one can get. It is certainly true that factions developed shortly after the establishment of the government, but they damned sure were not all conservative, even then.

Nor were the Founding Fathers small government fanatics. They repudiated the confederacy of the 1780s with a government that had as its major tenet a strong central government, then started arguing about what that meant pretty much right away.

2. The greatest evil this country has ever committed isn’t slavery; it’s killing more than 50 million innocent children via abortion.

Fifty million over 40 years is something like 1.1 million a year or so; so I’m real curious, in many sections of the country you simply murder any doctor who might consider performing an abortion, so where indeed are all these abortions being performed? State by state, and year by year, please, from 1974 to 2011. I will assume if you cannot provide us with reliable government data as a source of this claim that you just pulled this statistic out of your hat.

If by some chance your number is correct, then apparently there are a whole lot of people out there who disagree with you, and none of them have violated the law. But you call them murderers, killers of innocent children, so your basis for that assertion is religious, not legal. Clearly your religion is not their religion, and whatever their religion might be it is of equal value under the law. Did you stop to think that when it comes to banning religious points of view, we might decide to ban yours first?

So calling all these women, and they are all women, remember, murderers, is really just your own rude, rather obnoxious opinion. And, Mr. Hawkins, we all have at least one of those, too.

Otherwise, why is it just women that you have to call murderers? Last I looked it generally takes two to conceive (I realize there are exceptions to this, too, in this insanely modern world.), so in the event of some unwanted pregnancy why isn’t the dude guilty, too? Fair is fair, seems to me; you are into guilt-tripping the women to the far side of hell; so what is a reasonable punishment for all these guilty dudes? I mean we do need to be moralistic about this. I know. Why don’t we cut their penises off?

In a moral universe guilt should be equally shared, don’t you think?

Comparing slavery to abortion is otherwise about as banal as one can get.

We had a civil war about the one. Do you want to have a civil war about the other?

3. Conservatives are much more compassionate than liberals and all you have to do to prove it is look at all the studies showing that conservatives give more of their money to charity than liberals do.

Conservatives have more money and feel more guilty about it. What else is new? Which is at least as true as the notion that conservatives are more compassionate than liberals. I am told that some folks don’t think dog crap stinks. Don’t make it true.

4. When the Founding Fathers were actually around, there were official state religions and the Bible was used as a textbook in schools. The so-called “wall of separation between church and state” has absolutely nothing to do with the Constitution and everything to do with liberal hostility to Christianity.

Sure see a lot of liberals going to church, and they don’t seem to have any liberal hostility toward Christianity. I think some of them have some liberal hostility toward boneheads like you, Mr. Hawkins, but most of them just consider the source, chuckle, and move on. Back in the day, 200 some odd years ago, the Bible was used frequently as a textbook in school. It was often the only book around for 50 miles.

I would have to study the histories of places like New Hampshire and Massachusetts a bit more to determine whether there were in fact official “state” religions before authorization of the Constitution, but thereafter such were strictly prohibited once the Bill of Rights came into effect.

The separation of “church and state” is what allows folks like you, Mr. Hawkins, to believe the idiotic nonsense that you believe without being burned at the stake. You and yours will never be top dog in that department, so you will not be the ones who get to determine who gets burned at the stake. So maybe, Mr. Hawkins, it’s better the way it is, after all. (Damn, that almost sounds conservative.)

5. The biggest problem with our economy today is Barack Obama. His demonization of successful people, his driving up gas prices, his regulatory overload and threats to increase taxes have terrified businesses into hunkering down, refusing to spend money, and declining to hire new people. Replacing him would do more than any government policy to spur economic growth.

What successful people has the President demonized? What I have noticed is too great an inclination to compromise with jackasses who don’t know what the word means. Gas prices? A matter of market manipulation and speculation, perhaps, but not Obama’s doing. He would prefer the price much lower and has no motivation whatsoever to jack the price up arbitrarily. His political opponents do, and might, but not the President. There is no regulatory overload; there is in fact too little regulation of the markets, and there have been no tax increases. Gee, are all these business people afraid of ghosts and shadows?

I have also noticed that the stock market has been doing just fine since 2009, so the notion that replacing Obama would spur economic growth has to be considered in terms of who that replacement might be. The robotoid alternative offered is simply not acceptable.

6. Not only are conservatives more patriotic than liberals, but most American liberals “love” America in about the same way that a wife-beater loves his wife.

In a firefight there are certain liberals and conservatives in this community I know will pee their pants and stand and defend themselves, their buddies, and their country until the job is done. In this community there are also certain conservatives and liberals who I would expect nothing more of than they crap their pants and run as fast as possible as far as possible, end of story. Ain’t no atheists in foxholes, and liberal or conservative don’t mean nothin’ where the real patriots grow.

You, John Hawkins, are absolutely clueless of what real American patriotism is all about.

7. Out of every 100 cries of “Racism” you hear these days, 99 are motivated by nothing other than politics.

What does that even mean? I hope you understand as clearly as do most of us, Mr. Hawkins, that Republican politics in the past four years has sopped itself in racism.

8. Anyone paying income taxes is certainly paying his “fair share”—and then some—compared to the people who pay nothing.

Simplistic and stupid. There are any number of reasons why some taxpayers pay nothing, from net operating losses and the carry forward and carry back allowances provided under law to outright subsidies of various kinds. There are incentives and credits in tax law that reduce income tax liabilities, often to less than nothing. Depending upon your point of view some of these are probably reasonable, some incredibly unfair.

9. You don’t have a “right” to anything that other people have to pay to provide for you.

Again, simplistic and stupid. You have a right to vote, and putting on a vote costs money, generally paid for by government funds, all paid for by other people, particularly if you are new in town. You have a right to a free public education, though it is true it is generally expected your parents pay taxes to pay for at least some of it. But if you happen to be an orphan and have no parents to pay for it, you still get a free public education, and the state is not going to bill you for it. I am sure certain Republicans prefer it otherwise. No point in a page full of examples, but there are plenty of them.

10. If you can ask people to present an ID to buy alcohol, drive a car, or get on an airplane, then asking them to present identification to vote is a no-brainer.

And you claim to be a conservative. Oh, yawn. “Papers please.” It is the intent of your little ID game to reduce the number of Democratic voters because you require a very specific type of ID that you make very difficult to get. Voter suppression is voter suppression, I don’t give a damned how you label it.

11. There’s absolutely nothing that the government does smarter, better, or more efficiently than the private market with roughly equivalent resources.

Hare-brained horse manure. Starting with making war, there are any number of things that government does smarter, better, or more efficiently than the private market. A private market military is certainly something many reactionaries would like to have until the day when they needed to use it, at which time they would discover how useless such an entity would be. Military vanity is bizarre, arguably, but substituting private sector prima donnas for martinets does not have a snowball’s chance of working.

A more interesting historical example might be roads and highways, again since recently so many reactionaries have wanted to privatize these (with government funds, of course) with high toll fees. Such road or transport network privatization was a popular concept from the early 1800s into the 1840s and 1850s; “plank” roads and turnpikes (and canals), the so-called “macadamized” roads, fenced in on both sides almost like a modern turnpike or freeway, but which were all privately owned and for which a fee was charged for every mile traveled. But horses punched holes in the wooden planks of the “plank” roads, and floods and landslides did the rest; forcing all of the private roads into bankruptcy because the maintenance costs were unsustainable. Starting with local and county roads, because the private sector was investing in railroads, the towns and counties, and then the states, took up the cost of maintaining the roads and the highways. The government really does do it better.

There are in fact many things the government does better than the private sector. Frustrating perhaps, but true.

12. The biggest problem with education in this country is liberals. They fight vouchers, oppose merit pay, refuse to get rid of terrible teachers, and bend over backwards to keep poor kids trapped in failing schools.

Damn. You forgot to mention they eat one or two of them a day, too.

13. Fascism, socialism, and communism are all left-wing movements that have considerably more in common with modern liberalism than modern conservatism.

Fascism is an extreme right wing political movement, Mr. Hawkins, that has a great deal in common with modern conservatism. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the left wing. There is some commonality to liberalism and socialism, but communism has nothing to do with any of the above, particularly as practiced. Communism in practice is invariably a one-party dictatorship with all the workers equalized (as peons) for the benefit of party members. Basically why I assert the political –isms should not be projected as linear, but instead circular, because communism in practice definitely resembles fascism.

Otherwise, Mr. Hawkins, your statement merely indicates you do not have a clue what you are talking about.

14. The Democratic Party was behind slavery, the KKK, and Jim Crow laws. It was also the party of Margaret Sanger, George Wallace, and Bull Connor. It has ALWAYS been a racist party. Even today, white liberals support Affirmative Action and racial set-asides because they still believe black Americans are too inferior to go up against whites on an even playing field.

Here, Mr. Hawkins, you do nothing more than demonstrate your total lack of any integrity whatsoever. It is true that the Democratic party had any number of slaveholders in it during the 19th century. Some Republicans were abolitionists, but more just wanted to ship the slaves back to Africa, including Lincoln. And Jim Crow was an invention of southern whites in collusion with northerners, of both parties.

The people who started the KKK were disenfranchised southerners, who at the time were not members of any political party because they had been deprived of their civil rights by reconstruction. History tries to hide the fact that Robert E. Lee was offered the position of first Grand Wizard of the KKK, but graciously declined with a referral and recommendation to Nathan Bedford Forrest. By the 1920s the KKK spread as far north as Iowa, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, before receding very suddenly in scandal, and there were many members of both political parties in the KKK then.

Yes, George Wallace was a Democrat, and perhaps Connor was, too. A southern conservative Democrat, a Dixiecrat. In 1948 the Democratic Party repudiated racism at its convention for the first time. It took until 1964 and the voting rights acts of 1964 and 1965 before that took firm hold in the Party, and that is where the Democrats have been ever since. Where did the racists go? They became the foundational bedrock of the modern Republican Party via the so-called “Southern” strategy. The Republican Party is the racist party in American politics, Mr. Hawkins. They even proudly volunteered for the role. Anything to get elected including selling your soul to the devil.

The Democrats tossed the racists out. It’s you and your buddies who crawled into bed with them, and became of them.

15. A man with good morals who falls short and becomes a hypocrite is still a far better man than a liberal who can never be called a hypocrite because he has no morals at all.

What do you think of Jews, mein herren? Take out the word “liberal” and substitute the word “Jew,” and you could have taken this off one of Hitler’s posters on the train to Auschwitz.

16. The most dire threat to America’s future and prosperity in the last 150 years hasn’t been the Nazis, the Soviets, or Al-Qaeda; it’s the spending and overreach of our own government.

That is just dumb.

17. Greed isn’t someone wanting to keep more of what he earns; it’s people demanding a greater share of money that someone else earns.

Are you talking about taxes, or asking about a raise in pay? Greed is not knowing when to stop; it is otherwise an obsession with power over others. If you don’t think tolerance of excessive wealth accumulation will not result in hereditary wealth accumulation and a return to monarchy within two generations, then go for it; but you will live to see your children perpetual peons, if allowed to live at all. Or as Exxon has long since stated, “Governments come, and governments go.” Exxon is forever. (Grovel now.)

18. Most of the time in American politics, the liberal “victim” is really a bad guy who is absolutely delighted by the opportunity to pretend to be “offended.”

That is also very dumb. Politicians posture like they all want to win an Oscar, all of them. Who else are you talking about? Talking heads on TV? They are all actors.

19. Jesus Christ was not a conservative, a liberal, or a politician. He was also not a capitalist or a socialist. Still, you can say this: Jesus drew sharp lines about what’s right and wrong, he wasn’t tolerant of what the Bible categorizes as sinful behavior, and there’s absolutely no question that he would adamantly oppose abortion and gay marriage.

And I just talked to the guy the other day, and that is not what he said to me at all. And you know, his twelve disciples were all dudes.

20. When you demand that other people fund your sexual escapades by buying your contraception, your sex life becomes their business.

How voyeuristic of you that you would want to watch so much sex being performed by so many others. How sick, too, for that matter.

Hey, if the poor are provided with free contraception, that should mean there are fewer poor people. It will even reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies that end in abortion. The cost to society of providing contraception at little or no cost is far less than not doing so.

What you seem in fact to be saying is that you want to determine when people have sex and under what conditions. Free contraception to you means you have the right thereby to interfere in someone else’s sex life.

Why don’t you just come out and say that instead of beating around the bush? You want to be a fascist in the bedroom and in the bathroom, too. Wow, what an agenda.

As Mr. Jim Guenther fully appreciates “dumb is not better,” and to the extent some of you out there believe this stuff Al Johnson and John Hawkins, et. al, are spewing is the extent to which reasonable folks do not suffer fools gladly.

David G. Hanger
Ketchikan, AK

Representations of fact and opinions in letters are solely those of the author.
The opinions of the author do not represent the opinions of Sitnews.