Saturday, April 11, 2009

Conservatives give the term "hysterical" a bad name.

I know I said I was going to take a blogging sabbatical for a month or two, but this has just been getting under my skin. Many bloggers have been talking about this, and I may end up linking to several of them. I am not going to add anything that hasn’t already been said.

Many people predicted that conservatives would go absolutely nuts after the ’08 election. I suppose I agreed with them, but I had absolutely no idea about how bad it would get so quickly. I am going to do this from memory, at first, just to see what I can come up with.

- Congressman Bachus from Alabama states that he has the names of 27 socialists in Congress, but of course does not produce those names. Where have I heard this one before?
- Michelle Bachmann states that the Obama adminstration is getting up “reeducation camps” for young people that volunteer that will essentially brainwash our impressionable teens and twenty somethings to support the Democratic party.
- Fox News, CNN and others go overboard in covering Obama bowing to the King of Saudi Arabia, saying essentially (I’m paraphrasing here) that Obama is acknowledging that Muslims are above all others, while ignoring that George Bush used to hold hands with this same king and kissed him on the cheek in one famous photo.
- One Texas state legislator called on Asian people to change their names to make them easier to deal with for Americans.
- Glenn Beck… What can one say about Glenn Beck? He talks about Obama’s coming police state while standing in front of an electronically generated background showing Nazis marching across the screen. He screeches that Obama is going to take away Americans guns.
- Republican congresspersons, directed by Republican whip Eric Cantor, try to ambush freshman Democratic congresspersons by shouting at them and disrupting their speeches in front of Congress, trying to get "You-Tube worthy moments” to embarrass the Democrats.
- Conservatives disparage Obama for the use of teleprompters and essentially say that he is verbally challenged, ignoring all the while that the last Republican president mangled the English language at every opportunity given to him and could not even pronounce the word “nuclear.”
- News organizations all over blast Vice President Biden for calling out Dick Cheney’s lies, but say absolutely nothing about Cheney’s initial statements declaring that Obama is making the country less safe by discontinuing the policies of torture and illegal imprisonment.
- Newt Gingrich wanted to go into North Korea and destroy their missile (which turned out to be a colossal and embarrassing dud) with “a laser.”
- Republicans go apeshit about Obama “cutting the military budget” and “gutting the military of the U.S.” when he is, in fact, actually raising the total dollar amount while redistributing the allocation among programs. This activity is being supported, if not directed, by George W. Bush’s last Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates.
- Conservatives everywhere, upset about something, after being prodded repeatedly by Fox News, organize massive “tea parties” to protest something. They do not acknowledge that President Obama has already passed a very large middle class tax cut. The protestors seem to be protesting setting the tax rates back to pre-Bush tax cut levels for the wealthiest Americans. They also fail to recognize that “tea bagging” has a previous, overtly sexual, meaning. Look it up in Wikipedia. I’m not going to link that one.

There are, no doubt, more examples out there from just the last couple of weeks. You get my point.

All this is occurring just about three months into the Obama presidency. Three months. The hard-core conservatives of this country are absolutely insane. They have lost all ability to reason and to actually try to act in a rational manner. All they know how to do is call their enemies names and to try underhanded tricks to score political points for them and/or undermine the Democrats who were elected fairly. Oh, that reminds me, I forgot to list that whole Norm Coleman thing in Minnesota, where Republicans would rather undermine the democratic process and deprive Minnesota of full representation in the Senate just so they can withhold one more Democratic vote in the Senate.

I’ll tell you one thing. Republicans and conservatives better get their last kicks in now, because after the midterm elections of 2010, there will be even a greater majority for Democrats in both houses. There will be a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, so it won’t matter what kind of stunts these clowns try.

I am actually all for a strong two-party political system. I think unbridled power, for either side, is not a good thing. Eventually, people start to overreach. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. But the current Republican party is not holding up their end of the bargain. Both sides need principled people willing to put national interests in front of political grandstanding and trying to demolish their sworn enemies, at whatever the cost to the country. The current Republicans are hard-core ideologues who spout off whatever comes into their pointy little heads. It does not matter they are all up in arms because they are accusing Democrats/liberals of doing things that they have been doing for the last eight years. They don’t care if they change their positions from statements they have made, on the public record, just so long as they can score some political points.

I suppose I can take some solace in the fact that, as the Republican party sinks deeper and deeper into insane rage, their ranks are growing continually thinner. They are condemning themselves to irrelevancy. If they continue this way, the Republican party will never be anything more than a regional political party. I am not saying that this is a good thing for the country. But before Republicans are ready to get back in the saddle, they need to do a massive amount of housecleaning. Until then, the whole lot of them can wander around in the desert for a while. Maybe that will bring them to their collective senses.

But I'm not holding my breath on that one.

UPDATE: Oh, yeah. How could I forget the Republican non-budget budget? The one that essentially RAISED the deficit by giving a HUGE tax cut to people making over $100,000 a year and freezing all spending in the midst of the biggest financial crisis since the 1930'S? And all the while making a huge show out of it, so much so that even the conservative media people made fun of them?

Many of these people can't even see how ridiculous they look.

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