On the Contrary

Saturday night I went to a birthday party of a dear friend.  I live in conservative hell so I promised my wife I would say nothing political.  “Nice weather we are having.  You look really great in that new dress.  How’s your golf game?  Can you believe those Giants?  Been hunting or fishing lately?”  You get the drift.  It makes for a pleasant, but boring evening.

Well I had just sat down with a plate of food when one of our local doctors (physician) sat next to me.  No, I resisted the urge to  ask him what he thought about the health care reform, but one of my more conservative friends did.  Well, he looked at my conservative friend and surprised the hell out of him and me by saying something to the effect of, “It is about time because it can’t get much worse.”  So then my conservative friend said, “Well what about this crazy single payer idea?” and the doctor replied, “I think it would be a good idea.”  Whereupon my conservative friend replied, “Anything the government gets involved in, they screw up.”

So at this point I lost control.  I asked him if he was going to turn down his Medicare, did he not like the outcome of World War II, did he not think the VA Bill stimulated our country’s growth, did he think his education at the University of California was totally covered by his tuition, or whether the FAA is really necessary when he sends his fruit to the East Coast?  I stopped at that point because my wife was kicking the hell out of my leg under the table.  Of course she was right.  There was no point.  They believe that government cannot do anything useful and reality is not going to intrude on their mental constipation.

Now locally I understand them to some extent.  They are small town people and their whole life is about who you know and your reputation.  Government intimidates them because government always has to have a level playing field, called bureaucracy.  They don’t care if you are honest, or rich, or famous, or who you know.  You need to fill out the forms in triplicate just like everybody else.  They see that as waste and red tape.  They simply do not understand government in their world and resent having to go through the process and jump through the hoops.  Therefore government is bad and it just screws up their lives and they shut out what the government does that makes their whole lifestyle possible.   They don’t think anymore. Instead of learning how to work the government system, they reject and resent it.  They like their world black and white.  This gray stuff scares the hell out of them.

That would be bad enough, but now we are seeing it play out in our public life in Washington.  Apparently mentally constipated government haters are what the current  crop of the Republican Party is made up of in the Senate.  The cash for clunkers is terrifying them.  It isn’t just working; it is wildly exceeding expectations.  Not only is it helping our auto industry by actually growing their sales and keeping a manufacturing industry and the millions impacted by this business employed, it is also stimulating our economy and it is exceeding the hope of removing gas guzzles off the street by averaging an almost 10 mpg upgrade.

So what do the Republicans want to do?  Kill it. The money to fund this is coming out of the stimulus package, it is working better than anyone envisioned, and they want to stop it.  They simply can’t accept the fact that the government can do some things very effectively and it doesn’t involve tax cuts or low interest rates.  It is all about ideology and not about what works.  Like the Catholic Church in the time of Galileo, they will try to bury reality in order to not have to revise their theology which is sacred.  If you doubt me remember how they tried to bury the science on global warming.

The sad thing is that in this day and age they are badly hurting this country.  Instead of trying new things and finding out what works, they fight change even in the face of the reality of the success of that change.  Or as my conservative friend would say, government screws up everything so this program must be a mistake.  So we don’t have honest discussions anymore, just birthers, shouters at town hall meetings, and Senators and Congressmen who spread lies about other countries health care systems and what is in the health care reform package.

Our form of government came out of the Enlightenment when we discovered that rational thought could resolve issues through honest dialogue and debate instead of relying on faith based beliefs that resulted in religious wars.  Now the Republicans and other constipated thinkers are trying to take us back to the dark ages by stifling thought and debate and denying reality.  “If the government does it, it must be bad.”  Hopefully we are not going to let them do it to us this time.

I spent a great deal of time bashing the TV news media for being unable to move away from inconsequential political wrangling and focus on the real issues facing our country.  The trouble is that this approach takes real work.  It is so much easier to have two or three political writers/reporters on a panel and they can rehash old political stances forever.  This added to the fact that most of these pundits live in their own political bubbles makes this discussion even more irrelevant.  One of the current topics about the Republicans is a case in point and it is a focus on form instead of substance.

It is not a news flash that the Republican Party is in decline.  But the discussions you hear are inane.  “They are looking for a new spokesperson, someone who can connect with younger voters.”  Or, “They are trying out issues that might stir up the public and see what sticks to the wall.”  We all saw Newt Gingrich over the weekend (and other Republicans) claim that being civil to Hugo Chavez would be the fall of Western Civilization as they sense our fear and become more bold.  The Chairman of the Republican Party, Michael Steele, is trying to get Republicans to connect more with young blacks by using hip-hop.  Sarah Palin’s now ancient connection with the red meat conservatives was seen as the resurrection of the Republican Party.  It is all public relations and has nothing to do with their message.  It is all form over substance.

Recently one of the cable shows had a real live professor of political science on the show who actually spoke the truth, which of course was roundly ignored.  He said something like this:  “We have one and a half political parties in the United States and we all know that the half party is the Republican Party.  Don’t they understand that minorities today that vote primarily Democratic will be the majority by 2030?  They cannot go on being the party of white Southern men and expect to be a force in tomorrow’s politics.”

In a few short sentences he summed up the reality of the Republican Party without laying out their underlying problem:  Their message, the substance of who they are, no longer appeals to people in the twenty first century.  Well I take that back.  There were the tea baggers, that disenfranchised group of irrational souls that just dislikes everything.  But as John Stewart described them, that “mono-colored” demonstration, kind of summed up their lack of appeal to most Americans other than the ones desperately trying to hold on to some non-existent past.  The Republican’s basic message, the substance of what they believe, is being rejected by average Americans because it has not brought us to a safer place.  Yet they are desperately hanging onto that message and it may be their final demise.

Watching John Boehner this weekend was a case in point. Appearing on ABC’s This Week, the Ohio Republican was asked what to describe the GOP plan to dealing with greenhouse gas emissions,  “which every major scientific organization said is contributing to climate change.”

Boehner replied: “The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical. Every time we exhale, we exhale carbon dioxide. Every cow in the world, you know when they do what they do you’ve got more carbon dioxide.”

I could point out that no one has said carbon dioxide is a carcinogen or that cows fart methane, not carbon dioxide, but the point here is the world of denial they are living in to support their fundamental ideas, small government, cut taxes, trickle down economics, and few regulations.  Newt Gingrich’s attempt to portray the handshake with Chavez as some earth shaking event is just more evidence that they really have nothing to add to our dialogue about our way forward.  Denying federal bailout money as your citizens go to the poor house is the ultimate act of irrelevancy of your ideas.  Thank you for the South Carolina student who is suing her governor to failure to responsibly carry out his duties in office when his refusal to take the funds will prevent her from going to college and someday being part of the solution.

The real problem with the Republican Party is that they need a new message, not a new salesman or a new paint job. It is becoming quite obvious that the current crop of Republicans is unable to re-craft their message to recognize the realities of today.  Even though many Democratic policies make many in the middle of the road nervous, until the Republicans become even moderately relevant, there is only one choice.  The world has changed and Republicans have not.  It is the very definition of extinction.  Oh I forgot, they don’t believe in evolution.  My point exactly.

One last thought about the media:  As long as they continue to present Republican ideas with equal weight to the solutions that are being proposed by the Democrats for our future, the discussions will be irrelevant.  Most Americans have already rejected these ideas and now it is time to have a real debate about what is being proposed rather than to giving equal weight to old arguments that no longer have any merit.

Sorry about the missed posts, but I have been otherwise occupied.  Last week I got one of those, “Can you come down to the Bay Area and help us out with a Project, say today?”  So of course I complied and as soon as I got back we left for San Diego to visit my son (where I am now).  It’s hard to get riled up about politics when the sun and the surf are so beautiful, but I am a trooper.  Also for those of you who distain my politics and enjoy Wine/Vine, I have lots of news, but it will have to wait for this weekend because as soon as I get back from here, I am back in the Bay Area on another project.  In this economy, I would be a fool to turn down any work.

I did, however have a couple of interesting conversations with several conservatives.  One has to wonder why, in a world where 70% of the population blames the banks for our problems and generally think President Obama is doing the right thing, I only run into the other 30%.  Oh well.  Anyway the conversation went something like this:  “George Bush was really a liberal and the problems we face are the fault of government and Bill Clinton.  Obama is destroying what we know as America.”

Needless to say I took issue with these ideas that apparently are totally uniformed by a study of the Depression, books on what caused our problem today, or reading of any kind other than conservative noise machines.  What I found so striking was the shrillness of it.  They were almost frantic.  It was as if fear had taken over their minds and reasoned consideration of other arguments could not be tolerated.  I think we are seeing the same thing on the TV Cable News where many discussions are breaking down into shouting matches.  We see language from politicians such as Michele Bachmann and others which boders on trying to create anarchy.  It is, in fact, incitement to riot to the conservative mindless.  What it really exposes is that they don’t believe in Democracy.

I say that because as much as they would like to ignore it, George Bush and his fellow Republicans were and are super conservative and they had their way (12 years in Congress and 8 years in the Administration) and the result of their policies are the disaster we are seeing before our eyes.  Now it is somebody elses turn and they are not willing to even considering another approach.  I think this is a primary difference between the conservative Republican faith in their economic dogma, and the Democrats.  Democrats will try a different approach and if it doesn’t work, will make modifications.  As evidence by the Republican’s no new ideas, Republicans are Johnny one-note and are inflexible to change.

The shrillness scares me becuase if you recall, the second most lethal terrorist attack in the United States was from one of the radical rights brethren, Timothy McVeigh.  The language they are using is food for thought to another McVeigh.  For my own part, I am so relieved that we have a President like Barrack Obama where rational thought is put into policy whether it is funding for family planning or understanding that our Cuba policy to pacify right wing Cuban-Americans has totally failed.  Dogma no longer rules.

There are many things I would like to see changed in this new administration or I think they are being too timid about, but I am willing to let things play out and see if I am wrong.  The conservatives I talked to have their minds closed and want him to fail because they already know he will.  If he doesn’t fail then they may actually have to examine everything they are so desparately hanging onto.  That would be devastating to their psyche.  They can’t have that so he must fail.  It is kind of like being an alcoholic.  I wonder if we can devise a 10 step program for recovering conservatives.