What the World Thinks of the GOP

Recent European press op-ed about the American Republican primaries

THE GERMAN PRESS

The Republican presidential contest in America is a “freak show,” said

Marc Pitzke in the German Der Spiegel. The candidates vie with one another

to spew the most outrageous hard-right positions,  denying evolution while

endorsing torture and joking about electrocuting illegal immigrants. How

did a major  party in the world’'s sole superpower become a “club of

liars, debtors, betrayers, adulterers, exaggerators,  hypocrites, and

ignoramuses?”

These know-nothings are enabled by a U.S. press that has been “neutered by

 the demands of political correctness” so that it can'’t say what’s

obvious: These people are daft! Instead, it “proclaims one clown after the

next to be the new front-runner.” The current favorite, Newt Gingrich, is 

actually considered an intellectual merely because he can create sentences

with multiple clauses. Scarcely a  one has even the most basic grasp of

foreign policy. One said Africa is a country, another that the Taliban

rule  in Libya. Collectively, “they expose a political, economic,

geographic, and historical ignorance that makes  George W. Bush look like

a scholar.”

THE FRENCH PRESS

That’'s the scariest part, said Lorraine Millot in the Paris Liberation.

The only GOP candidate who knows a thing about diplomacy, Jon Huntsman, is

dead last in most polls. The others “careen to extreme positions that

include starting new wars and abandoning old allies.” And that’'s when

they even have a position. Herman Cain, now thankfully out of the race,

was the front-runner even though he couldn't find a single coherent word

to say about President Obama'’s policy on Libya. He even boasted of

knowing little about foreign countries. And yet it was his adultery, not

his astounding ignorance that brought him down.

THE BRITISH PRESS

There’'s a simple explanation for this bizarre phenomenon, said Max

Hastings in the London Daily Mail. In the “lunatic, gun-toting badlands of

America'’s Hicksville, Tea Party country,” it'’s considered suspiciously

elitist to show any interest in modern science or the world beyond

America’'s borders. “Say what you like about British politics, no MP of

any party would dare to offer themselves as town dogcatcher while knowing

as little about the world as the Republican presidential candidates.” We

take public service seriously. Yet we in Britain, and everyone in the rest

of the world, will suffer if “one of the lunatics” vying for the

nomination makes it to the White House. “The American political system has

seldom, if ever, looked so inadequate.”

Don’t worry, said Matthew Norman in the London Independent. The fact that

Gingrich is the latest threat to Mitt Romney’'s inevitability just

“confirms how inevitable” Romney’'s nomination is. The thrice-married,

ethically challenged Gingrich is unlikable in the extreme. Which means the

nominee will be Romney, “the slimiest, phoniest opportunist to run for

president since...well, ever.” So sit back and enjoy this circus passing

for a presidential election. It can’'t possibly end in a GOP victory. Can

it?

Sad News Out of Washington Today (May 17, 2011)

The GOP today blocked Dem efforts to end tax breaks for the Big Five Oil Gang.

I can’t fully express my sorrow on this one. To me, it feels like a kick in the gut, a low blow, a blind-sided clipping … and there’s no one to penalize them, or red-card them, except the voter.

I’ve been saying now for years that the GOP, an extension of The 400, has been guarding and guiding the largest transfer of wealth ever seen – from the pockets of the many to the investment accounts of the few, draining our economy of working capital, creating fewer jobs in America and out-sourcing everything they can, taking it out even more cruelly on the working poor, our children, our schools and our cities.

Meanwhile, flooding the talk-show airwaves with a particularly cruel blarney – that if folks just hang a little, boot out the Dems, forcing the working stiffs to make “necessary sacrifices,” like pensions and wages and health care, one of these days, we’ll find glory-land and everyone will be happy.

I can’t believe how many good and decent folk believe this nonsense and continue to support the GOP. The magic words are “lower taxes, smaller government, cut spending and create jobs” – except we never quite get to jobs, while our public schools and roads and national parks and city and state services are falling apart, and if the GOP track record says anything at all, they’ve never cut the budget, but simply move it away from the social welfare of the nation to the corporate profits of The 400, supporting war, which, of course, is the largest welfare program in the world, moving billions of our dollars through the defense industry, the military-industrial complex of which Eisenhower so forcefully warned us.

Thousands of Christian churches have aided and abetted this hoax, but holding up wealth and happiness as a personal goal, if, of course, you do as the preacher says. And though wealth and happiness rarely come to the many, it does, of course, come to a few, who are the then paraded across the stage as role models, and publish books and get interviewed on FAUX news – keeping the illusion alive for the masses.

These churches have long ago left the gospel behind, reducing Jesus to some kind of personal trainer or spiritual guru who will make them wealthy, or at least get them to heaven.

I heard the news today of the GOP “victory,” and felt a darkness descend on my soul.

Only to be intensified by the news out of Sacramento, as the GOP in CA continues to hamstring our governor and further the disintegration of public services.

Sadly, for the GOP, creativity has died. But, then, when you’re working for the Koch Machine, who needs creativity? The sledge hammer approach works just fine to hasten the transfer of wealth, destroying unions, buying our legislative bodies through obscene campaign contributions, enlarging the corporate wealth-care of the rich, who then fatten the wallets of their political toadies.

I had to laugh today as Newt Gingrich actually seemed to have some sense in his criticism of Paul Ryan, and then quickly backtracked, like a stray sheep yanked back from the precipice of reason with a mighty yank from the shepherd’s staff.

McCain, as well, seems to have reclaimed some sense, but the t-bags are clearly strangling the life out of the party, choking off reason and commonsense, stripping the GOP of it’s conservative character, turning the GOP into a reactionary force serving the interests of The 400.

Has Gingrich Slipped A Cog?

Has Gingrich slipped a cog or two?

He now has religion, something he’s been working on for some time now, trying to rehabilitate his relationship with the far right so that he can use it as a campaign base for the next presidential gig in 2012? I think so!

Converting in May, 2009, from his Southern Baptism heritage to his wife’s Roman Catholicism, Gingrich recently said: "I am not a citizen of the world. I am a citizen of the United States, because only in the United States does citizenship start with our creator."

Echoing the nonsense of a group of so-called Christian “scholars” who claim our Founding Fathers to be “evangelical” Christians in the late 20th Century mold (they were, in fact, mostly Deists; several would hardly qualify as believers) seeking to create a “Christian” nation.

Not so. Our Founding Fathers and Mothers all knew the horrors of a “Christian” Europe, and here in this land, they sought to create a nation free of such politicized religion, so that religion might be freely chosen and politics be secular. The separation of church and state remains one of America’s greatest contributions to the world of ideas, but it’s being threatened now by the far right who would like to see an American theocracy.

Gingrich is savvy – he’s learned his lessons well. For the last 40 years, the road to the Republican presidential nomination began with far right Christians who, in the last two presidential runs, propelled Dubya into the White House.

The following quote from the Washington Post says it well:

Gingrich seems to have learned what George W. Bush showed John McCain in 2000, and what James Dobson helped McCain understand in 2008: The path to the Republican Party presidential nomination begins at the church -- in this case, Rock Church in Virginia Beach.

"Lord," Engle [the pastor] prayed as Gingrich bowed his head and opened his hands, "extend his influence for righteousness in this nation, lay your supernatural hand of God upon him and deliver him from the evil schemes of the enemy."

Not quite the "every form of witchcraft" from which Palin's pastor sought to protect her, but then positioning for 2012 has just begun.

Yet sun has set on this kind of “Christian” thinking. With the killing of Dr. George Tiller, we see where the road ends in a dark and dangerous place for this kind of self-righteous, fascist-like, theological gobbledygook. Though many such Christians “decry” the killing, I get an uneasy feeling that it’s mostly rhetoric rather than a responsible distancing from such violence. And I’ve yet to hear a anyone in that camp admit the possibility that fiery pulpit rhetoric might contribute to the further unsettling of an already unstable mind.

Indeed, violence has a special place in these congregations – their bloody end-of-the-world scenarios (see their Halloween haunted houses and their lurid images of hell), revival services with plenty of threats, ”Jesus Camps” for their children, the lionizing of athletic violence, the easy division of the world into good and evil, the love of guns and warfare images, and a violent god who kills his enemies with gusto (everyone cheer now).

Playing upon all sorts of half-truths, god and country are fused together into some sort of anguished creature (see “The Fly” – “Something went wrong in the lab today...something very wrong...”).

Something has gone very wrong in the far-right lab – as we see paralleled in the worst examples of Islamic extremism and in the terrors of the Middle Ages where religion and state are fused together into some hideous alliance, with the state punishing those who violate the established religion, and the church establishing and crowning the head of state.

Is this the kind of world we wish to have?

But this is exactly the kind of world proposed by the far right and regularly preached from the pulpits of its churches.

If you really want to know what’s cooking under the counter in such places, do a Google on “Christian Reconstructionism” – begin with the Wikipedia article. I can promise you this: Gingrich reads and knows well this bizarre world of twisted ideas.

As much as this form of Christianity has dominated the news in recent years, it’s a hybrid born in America.

Like hybrid grains and fruits, it’s highly productive, needs enormous amounts of water, fertilizer and endless tending, with a long shelf-life, but with none of the flavor you remember from childhood. If a strain of mold should evolve, or some new bug emerge, it will quickly succumb. This hybrid religion has none of the genetic heartiness of historic Christianity (see Diana Butler Bass’s fine books, “Christianity for the Rest of Us” and “A People’s History of Christianity”) or any real saving power.

The greatest impediment to the future is ignorance of the past, and to listen to far-right preaching and to read their books is to hear a vast restless army of ignorance ready for “the next war” – whatever that war might be as determined by James Dobson or Rush Limbaugh or a host of other extremist voices ready to “slay their enemies and conquer the world for Christ.”

How I yearn for the mainline church in America to recapture the power of faithful thinking, to love God with the mind as much as some folks claim to love God with the heart. To love God with the historical perspective – knowing well how folks in other times and places sought to love God – where and how they succeeded and where and how they failed, and working well (read intelligently) with Scripture. We have to know our faith thoroughly; we have to know our Bible better than they do. We have to be equipped with logic and conviction; clear thoughts and our own version of a passionate Christian rhetoric, but grounded in the command to love and the welcoming vision of Jesus.

It’s a tall order for thoughtful, progressive folks of faith, but it can be done. And more than that, it must be done.