The Twilight Zone: A Political Version

Constitutional historian Richard  B. Bernstein* writes in a Facebook post:

Friends keep asking me what I think about the nation's political future after the shutstorm. OK, here are some thoughts, submitted for your approval in the political version of THE TWILIGHT ZONE (where we've all been living for the last three weeks):

"First, a week is a long time in politics, as the late Sir Harold Wilson noted, so trying to predict the future nearly three years ahead is a mug's game.

That said, right now the GOP has given itself such a dreadful beating that it will be a long time before it recovers fully from the Tea Party spasm. Indeed, what we're seeing is the product of a Faustian bargain. Rich corporate-minded donors such as the Koch Brothers thought that they could foster and thus control the Tea Party crowd, only to discover that they can't. The GOP is suffering a civil war within its ranks, as Tea Party true-believers and their self-anointed leaders (Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin, and company) square off against establishment Republicans (John McCain, Mitch McConnell, and company). Rumors are rife of GOP primaries featuring amateur Tea Party true-believers challenging such establishment types as McConnell, and Tea Party funders targeting the establishment types.

The spasm has not only made government look better in the eyes of most voters, and the GOP look rotten, and Congress look worse, but it has bolstered the popularity of President Obama and the Democrats.

And yet we know a few things to be worried about and not to be complacent about:

(1) Too many GOP Representatives (fully half of them elected in 2010 and 2012, and thus amateurs with anti-government mania and no respect for the institution in which they serve) are in gerrymandered districts. Now, maybe voter wrath will overcome such gerrymandering, but that will be tricky. Against that truth is the other truth that lots of the Democrats who lost seats in 2010 were in purple districts that could easily flip back into the Democratic column, and in those districts (enough to flip control of the House back to Democrats if they all toss out incumbents in 2014), the incumbent GOP Representative is trailing a generic Democrat.

(2) The Senate is tricky, too, for different reasons. GOP strategists were long salivating at the chance of retaking the Senate -- but they felt that way in 2010 and 2012, also, and each time, GOP candidates self-destructed, resulting in the narrow election or re-election of Democrats, including in seats that experts had written off as GOP gains.

(3) Voters often forget spasms of political ineptitude, but this one may have staying power, and the Democrats stand ready to remind voters of the 2013 spasm.

(4) The parties have reversed conventional stereotypes of organization and disorganization -- the Democrats are standing firm and united, and tolerating ideological and political diversity among their ranks, while the Republicans are shattered, divided, and forming circular firing squads.

(5) The Democrats have a good bench of potential presidential candidates for 2016 (I remain skeptical of Hillary Clinton's chances for reasons including her age and health and the dreadful mess she and her advisers made of her 2008 run). The GOP has the same collection of clown-car idiots, but so far with no sign of a serious adult in the room or even half-an-adult. And the party's schismatic character suggests that any adult or even half-an-adult who tries to run will be sorely weakened by a divisive, bitter, vindictive, and ridiculous campaign that will make the eventual nominee the leader of a suicide mission.

So ... though nothing is guaranteed, and lots of things can change in the next two-plus years, we may have reason to hope for change in a good direction in 2014 and 2016."

*Constitutional historian Richard B. Bernstein, who writes under R. B. Bernstein, is a distinguished adjunct professor of law at New York Law School and adjunct professor of political science and history at the City College of New York. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he has authored and edited several books on American history, the constitution and the founding fathers. His most recent endeavor is a biography of Thomas Jefferson and he is currently engaged in writing about the life of John Adams.

Of Liars and Loons

California Republican Party Convention

I didn't watch Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation yesterday, so I have no idea if he ended his broadcast with his usual, "Both sides do it" - whatever "it" is at any given time. I hope not. I hope by now he has finally come to realize just how lazy, shallow and misguided he and the rest of the main stream media have become.

To keep saying "both sides do it" is wrong and irresponsible. As Aljazeera reports, "This sort of false equivalence is not just a failure of journalism. It is also a failure of democracy."

The Atlantic goes so far as to charge the "broken media" of actually aiding and abetting in breaking the government: "There's a direct connection between the shutdown and hyperbolic, partisan journalistic outlets driven more by profits than the search for truth."

Back in January 2011 Parsley's Pics featured an in depth look at bias in the media entitled The Main Stream Media Can't Do Their Job Wearing Blinders. Apparently they weren't listening because they're still wearing them.

No, Democrats do not "do it, too" and both sides do not have an over-abundance of  liars and loons.

On the loony side are the conservatives who hate Obamacare but think the Affordable Care Act is acceptable:



Even loonier, there are a number of petitions going around to fire John Boehner. I always ask, "replace him with whom? Eric Cantor?" Oh no, no, no. "Ted Cruz"? Nope. How about Sarah Palin? You bet'cha!

The Democrats pride themselves on their diversity but Republicans have their diversity, too. I'm just not sure how you measure it because they all look alike to me: Old. White. Men. The few women who remain in the party all walk, talk, think and dress alike: no pant suits for them, no independent thinking, no war on women. Their battle cry: Submit!

I guess you have to look a little deeper than age and skin color to find the diversity - maybe a brain scan or a coronary angiogram - assuming they have one or both organs.

Even some of the slow-to-come-to-Jesus-media are beginning to blame the shutdown on the Republicans but due to their ineptness and self-delusion, the Republicans who believed Romney was leading in the polls in 2012 seem to be completely unaware that they are the ones who brought it about.

Despite voting for the shutdown, Rep. Renee Ellmers (NC) expressed outrage that "needless, needless suffering" is happening at Fort Bragg which, of course, is in her district, and of course, it is Obama's fault.

Then we have this Republican bully from Texas displaying his brass when he berates a U.S. Parks ranger, who just happens to be a woman, for the shutdown of the World War II Memorial on the Washington Mall. This is the same Randy Neugebauer who once shouted "baby killer" at Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich) on the floor of the House of Representatives. A real class act.

I don't know the name of the longest book ever written but I do know that if one were to write a book listing the Republican hypocrisy and lies from just the last decade, it would surely be longer than War and Peace. Obviously, there's no way to adequately cover them in a blog piece but here's a small sampling.

Martin Bashir, a British journalist and one of the most astute political commentators today, calls out "Professor" Cruz after he delivered a "masterclass in duplicity, self-contradiction and rank hypocrisy" to the senate. Right before the vote on the government shutdown Bashir focused on the "GOP's lunatic hypocrisy." There's plenty of both.

The lies that emanate from the TPGOP keep the fact checkers hopping like a bunch of Mexican jumping beans. Little old women squirm around in high anticipation waiting for their daily dose of fright wing chain emails and squeal with delight when they finally arrive. They just love to get all "skeert". Here's just a few but please try to contain yourselves:

-- Spiteful Obama blocks off Mt. Rushmore with a sheet suspended from helicopters.
-- A dire warning about Obamacare (one among thousands)
-- One of my favorites from Fox News: Obama is personally funding Muslim Museum
-- Obama declares November National Muslim Month
-- Pants On Fire: A man who opted out of Obamacare charged a $4,000 fine
-- 15 myths the media (and fright wingers) should ignore during Obamacare implementation
-- Top 16 myths about the health care law
-- Obamacare myths explored from FactCheck and reprinted in Huffington Post

If all this depresses you, imagine how this poor guy feels.

The Enemies of Democracy

For several months now, maybe even for over a year, the raging flood of posts on Parsley's Pics have been slowing down to a mere trickle. Sometimes I feel like turning off the faucet altogether but in the end I can't seem to reach the knob that would permanently put an end to even the weakest of drips. There are many reasons for this, the main one being an all consuming anger, "loathing" to be more precise, for the "the enemies of democracy" as described by Terry Bonner in the following text (which begins below the image).

The first part was written right before Ted Cruz's swan song to end all swan songs and the brief second part came immediately after. Bonner is a retired physician turned philosopher.

GOP Propaganda from Now the End Begins
Believe it or not, a Ted Cruz fan posted this on his
Facebook as "proof".

It is not my intention to alienate my friends by harping endlessly on politics. To be honest, at this stage of my life I would much prefer to be discussing geraniums and planning excursions to England. Still, I feel moved to counter some of the unadulterated bollocks I hear spouted off in these threads with atomic regularity, because somehow commonsense decency has taken a hiatus in America.

First, this whole "Defund Obamacare" campaign is absurd. The ACA was NOT cooked up from a blueprint provided by the Kremlin. It is essentially the Bob Dole/Orrin Hatch plan cooked up in 1993 as an alternative to "Hillarycare". The insurance lobbies have gone full bore to defeat Obamacare mainly because it was worth a shot to save the small profit margin which they will lose following its implementation. They will not, however, go broke, as would have been the case if a sane single-payer national health service had been enacted into law, like the ones enjoyed by citizens of Denmark, Sweden, Holland, England, France and Germany.

So don't fret. We will still remain throwbacks to the 19th century among the industrialized nations of the world.

Second, my dad and his union buddies were no screaming Reds. He was a Korean veteran and a machinist who loved his country and believed in the American Dream. However, he would have gone ballistic over the prospect of denying healthcare to thirty million of his fellow citizens. I daresay that most of your fathers would have felt the same. These were children of the Depression who understood what the New Deal was all about. It was not socialism, but fairness and cooperation, which created the great American middle class.

Somewhere along the line, we forgot the lessons of our fathers.

Finally, if you don't think demagogues like Ted Cruz and Sarah Palin are the enemies of democracy, then we all might as well give up right now and learn the words to Die Fahne hoch. These people are shills for some deep-pocketed oligarchs who hate democracy and see our republic as a government of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations. The Tea Party politicians are not even transparent about their reliance on Koch brothers monies. Yet collectively we choose to overlook this glaring reality.

We should be very afraid.

So that concludes my politicking for the day. I thank my FB family for their indulgence I have long since become estranged from my Tennessee relations, who now speak a different language and understand a whole different set of metaphors. And I really do not believe that the great rift in our society can ever be repaired short of bloodshed. However, I retain hope that we may yet come to our senses and regain our bearings toward a future rooted in fairness, justice and simple values of human decency.

A few days later Mr. Bonner adds:

Apparently I will have to save my last gasp of energy and strength to repeat this mantra purely for the sake of truth, because the brazenness of the lies in our current civil discourse has reached a new level of hypocrisy. Obamacare, which Sen. Cruz compares to appeasement of the Nazis and Speaker Boehner seems willing to sacrifice the Constitution to destroy, WAS A REPUBLICAN PLAN! This isn't rocket science. The plan was developed by Jim Demint's Heritage Foundation in 1993, and it was introduced to the Senate by Bob Dole and Orrin Hatch in that same year. The purpose of the plan was to prevent any national health insurance scheme from having a public option.

Romneycare in Massachusetts was an exact scale model of the Heritage plan.

So there is no logic, no reason and NO TRUTH behind these increasingly tedious objections to the implementation of Obamacare. The Republican opposition is tantamount to publicly disowning your own child.

I've got no use for parents who disown their children, and right now I've got less than no use for Republican obstructionism and the sabotaging of THEIR OWN BLOODY IDEA.

If we Progressives had prevailed, we would have extended Medicare to everyone. In the future, we won't let you forget it!

Note: Parsley's Pics will continue with renewed vigor. We have a war to win.

R.I.P. Kansas

With a few minor changes in events, names and places Jason Probst's obituary for his native state of Kansas, which recently ran in The Hutchinson News, could be a lament for several other states these day, if not for the entire country.

"Kansas 1861 -2013"

"TOPEKA - The Great State of Kansas passed away on March 31, 2013, after a long and difficult battle with extremism that became markedly more aggressive in 2010. The struggle left the state so weakened it could no longer fight against the relentless attacks by the fatal disease.

Kansas was born on Jan. 29, 1861.

The state is preceded in death by fair taxation, good highways, strong education, family farms, a good public parks and wildlife system, open government, neighborliness and belief in helping each other out, freely elected public servants, and political moderation.

Kansas is survived by widespread poverty, low-wage jobs, high property taxes, pollution, poorly educated children, outmigration and rural depopulation, foreign land and farm ownership, lobbyist-funded legislators, chronic mistreatment of the disabled, a maniacal hatred of government and children who dream of living anywhere else.

During its early years, Kansas played a pivotal role in the Civil War by staking out a strong progressive stand against slavery. Despite repeated raids from border ruffians, Kansas held firm to the belief of free men and free soil.

Throughout its life, Kansas often aligned with leading progressive causes. William Allen White, one of the state's most notable residents, once wrote that "if it's going to happen, it happens first in Kansas." That once was true. Kansas was the first state to ban the Ku Klux Klan, and the first to elect women to public office - one as mayor and another as sheriff.

It was the birthplace of the populist movement, rising as farmers and ordinary people grew weary of the Gilded Age politics of the late 1800s and early 1900s that favored investment interests over those of landowners and laborers.

Kansas was a leader in public education, with one-room school houses dotting the plains. A full 12 years before it was a national concern, Kansas established child labor laws that restricted employment of children in potentially dangerous industries.

In the 1950s, Kansas laid the path to civil rights for African-Americans with the historic Brown vs. Board of Education case - the first in the country to rule against a policy of segregation in public schools.

Despite its compassionate nature, Kansas proved to be a state teeming with inventiveness, ingenuity, determination and a savvy sense of business.

Cessna, Beech and Stearman helped establish Kansas as a center of the aviation industry. Coleman launched an international company from Wichita that became a household name. Pizza Hut and White Castle - two iconic eateries - both got their start in Kansas, and the man who helped establish the American automobile industry called Kansas home.

Kansas' history is filled with vibrant, dynamic people. Settlers who claimed land once described as a desert and turned it into the world's garden; immigrants who came by the train-load and brought with them the hard winter wheat that germinated the state's prosperity. Throughout the years, Kansans endured drought, grasshopper plagues, depression and fierce weather, yet its people worked to hold tight to their land and the belief that there was goodness in Kansas. In spite of those hardships, the state produced world-renowned artists, writers, inventors, business leaders, astronauts, even a president.

Kansas was a strong-willed state whose hands were calloused enough to turn up the hardest sod and tender enough to calm a crying child.

Despite its strength and vitality, Kansas couldn't survive the influences of outside political machines that sought to use this fertile ground and its people as a test plot for an ambitious political experiment.

The elections of 2010 and 2012 brought the poisoned pill that would bring about Kansas' untimely end. The first election seated a governor who tossed aside Kansas' storied history and replaced it with a vision of his own design. In 2012, record setting campaign contributions from out-of-state donors financed the defeat of those moderate Republicans who had spent the last of their political careers keeping Kansas alive.

One by one, the things Kansas had spent a lifetime building were dismantled, until the state was rendered as empty and uninviting as it had been in those early days when the first settlers eyed its endless expanse.

Along the way, the state's defenders - the farmer, the laborer, the property owner and the shop keeper - stood mute and passive, hoping for a day when the state would spark back to life, as it had always done before.

They remained silent too long.

In lieu of flowers, memorials may be sent to the Kansas Chamber of Commerce, the Kansas Policy Institute, or Americans for Prosperity all in care of Gov. Sam Brownback, Office of the Governor, Capital 300 SW 10th Ave. Ste 241S, Topeka, KS 66612-1590."

Further Reading: Conservative Shift Has Some Kansans Yearning For The Past

Campfield Under Pressure for His Tasteless Choice of Cooker: Updates

Senator Stacey Campfield

Yep. THAT Stacey Campfield. The very same Don't-Say-Gay-Campfield who wants to kick kids off of welfare when they don't make the grade and who wants teachers to inform parents when their kids are gay and who wants to allow graduate students in psychology to opt out of having to counsel LGBT patients.

Similar to a lot of homophobes Stacey has a very bitchy side to his nature. In fact, some might describe him as downright vicious. Others might opine that he's stark raving mad.

The old boy may have cooked his own goose over the weekend and he may now be sinking to the bottom of the stew pot where he's coming to a slow boil under intense pressure. Campfield displayed his utter depravity on his own blog when he posted this image under the heading, "Here comes Feinstein again"

Today, he turned up the heat when he posted this:

Inappropriate? Me? Never!

I Just got a call from the media saying they had gotten a few calls (about a blog post I did) saying it was inappropriate after the Boston bombing.

Really?

If my post was inappropriate talking about "crock pot control" then where is the outrage from the left when they push for gun control after the Sandy Hook shooting? Im [sic] sorry if I exposed your double standard....

Well, not really.

So, if you're wondering how this low life keeps getting elected, don't look to me for an answer. I'm as stunned and outraged as everyone else. According to Recall TN State Senator Stacey Campfield on Facebook, a poll in the Knoxville Focus newspaper determined that "every area of Knox County was opposed to the Starve the Children legislation except for one. That area happens to be the area that elected him to office to begin with.... Farragut."

With brains like these, who needs geniuses?

UPDATE: 4/25/2013

Appears on "Piers Morgan Live" to "explain why he thought it was a good idea to post an image of an 'assault pressure cooker.'"

UPDATE: 4/24/2013

NC vs. TN: A Race to the Bottom

Last month I wrote about how Tennessee welcomes you unless you're gay, poor, or have special needs. I related how I was too embarrassed to tell people where I was from and didn't mind making something up - Boston, Denver, Seattle - anywhere but here.

That was before I started paying attention to what was happening in our neighbor state to the east of us. I used to think North Carolina ceded us back to the Union because they simply didn't like us but it turns out we have more in common than just our hills and stills.

There's a whole lot of shaking going on. Both states are trembling with fear, ignorance, loathing and God's word. One would be justified in thinking the two states are racing to see which one will reenter the 18th century first.

Take a moment to scan these summaries of what's happening in North Carolina and Tennessee. There's more in this mirror image than just the widths of the two states and there's more at stake than these silly bills.

Voter Disenfranchisement
     NC: Killing the youth vote and shortening early voting period
     TN: Student IDs and an underhanded primary plan

Punishing Poor People
     NC: background checks on people seeking welfare and food stamps
     TN: cut off food stamps for kids not making passing grades in school
     (video of Martin Bashir grilling this utter disgrace to humanity)

That Old Time Religion
     NC: Resolution proposed to establish a state religion DOA
     TN: Paranoid fears of Muslims leads to the absurd

Regardless of whether or not these idiotic measures pass, it will take decades, if not forever, for North Carolinans and Tennesseans to recover from the stupidity and insanity on the part of these public servants. The fallout just creates more division and, in the meantime, far more serious problems go unresolved.

If I were to pen an open letter to my state legislators in Tennessee, it would go something like the one Jamison Doran wrote to those in North Carolina. She talks about the profound love she has for her native state:

They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, and I have found that to be almost painfully true as someone who is no longer a resident of North Carolina. I find myself often longing for the cool mountain breezes, ice-cold creeks, sweet tea, and southern hospitality. I wear a pendant of the state around my neck, publicly displaying where my heart lies, and that while Washington, D.C. might be my home right now, it'll never actually be home.

I can relate because I felt exactly the same way all the years I lived in Colorado and elsewhere, returning as often as circumstances would allow. I too felt that the time would arrive when my native state would beckon me home. Ten years ago when the decision was actually made to come back once and for all, I didn't have the "benefit" of reading glaring and embarrassing headlines about "another horrid piece of legislation".

After reviewing North Carolina's collection of absurd and draconian measures, which are so much like Tennessee's that one would be justified in wondering if our legislators met at the bottom of a ravine on the state line, Jamison ends with a plea:

In this "race to the bottom" my only hope is your utter disregard for what is good and right in the state helps bring people together to voice their outrage over what you're doing. So when the time comes we're mobilized to take our state back and out of the hands of the likes of all of you.

It's too late for me but I urge Jamison to remember the words of one of her state's most talented authors:

"You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory." Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again

Thomas Wolfe Museum
Asheville, NC

Republicans and the Dunning-Kruger Effect

‎In a big meeting of the Republican National Committee, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal told the GOP to 'stop being the stupid party.' Then Texas Governor Rick Perry gave the rebuttal. – Jay Leno

Jindal's remarks came barely a week after the House Republicans had a retreat at the Kingsmill Resort in ole Virginny where they had a panel discussion on "Successful Communication With Minorities and Women." No kidding? In the year 2013, the Republicans need a seminar on how to communicate with women and minorities?

Of course, Republicans blamed their craziness on Obama while not only giving Jindal a pass for helping transform the GOP into the party of stupid but by ignoring their own stupid contributions.

As my mom said more than once while I was growing up, "Some people are too stupid to know they're stupid." This was long before there was anything known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. The D-K effect occurs when incompetent people not only fail to recognize that they're incompetent, but they consider themselves much more competent than everyone else. Or, as Forest Gump famously stated: "Stupid is as stupid does."

Just since the first of the year, I've documented nearly a hundred sightings of  the D-K effect on Republicans. Whether it's the war on women that doesn't exist, science, the Second Amendment (and here), state sovereignty, Obamacare, more of the war on women that isn't, election rigging, or the Constitution according to Gohmert, or, or, or -- you guessed it -- or the war on women -- there it is in all its shining glory, in all its cocksure stupidity, and  in all its arrogant know-nothingness.

Education is where the stupids seem to excel the most. Regardless of whether it has to do with creationism, or prayer, or atheism, Republicans are determined to make believers out of  today's students -- to the detriment of the country and future generations. If they can't succeed through the legislative process, by golly, they'll sneak it in. If a Republican isn't trying to reintroduce prayer in schools, others are demanding students pledge a loyalty oath in order to receive their high school diplomas.

Outshining them all is Tennessee's own Stacey "Don't Say Gay" Campfield. Beyond stupid, this southern transplant now wants teachers to inform parents when their kids are gay and is proposing that food be snatched away from kids on welfare if their grades are unsatisfactory.

Apparently, Tennessee is set to lower its already dismal education ratings "as education officials and lawmakers tidy up details on how to outsource the local school boards’ responsibility to vet and approve charter schools to an outside agency."

Politicians aren't the only ones who suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect. One sees it in the comment sections after articles and on social networks from Fox News viewers and faithful followers of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. Who knew non-medical maladies were contagious?

Bobby Jindal and Newt Gingrich can call for rebranding their party until they're blue in the face, but, as Andrew Rosenthal writes, they

. . . . both seem to assume that those who oppose the Republican Party don’t object to Republican programs and goals. They just don’t understand the G.O.P. message. If that’s not “insulting the intelligence of voters” (as Mr. Jindal put it), I don’t know what is.

In his speech Jindal himself may have provided the ultimate example of the Dunning-Kruger effect when he declared that the Republicans are "a populist party." As Paul Krugman responds:

No, you aren’t. You’re a party that holds a large proportion of Americans in contempt. And the public may have figured that out.

I used to think Republicans were just arrogant, and while I still think they're arrogant, I believe it's because they're too stupid to know they're stupid. They can rebrand themselves all they want, but in the end, they're just like processed food: underneath the new packaging is a bunch of the same old toxic chemicals.

The Colbert Report
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God Forbid Should Biden Not Perform Perfectly

If he doesn't, he'll end up with teeth marks in his arse -- courtesy of the same fleet of fickle liberals who have been eviscerating Mr. Obama over the past week for not performing perfectly. After all, the price of admission was paid and he didn't deliver the goods. How dare the man?

Imagine, if you will, an opera singer who belts out almost pitch perfect arias for 10 years until one night he stumbles and croaks throughout the entire performance. His devoted fans boo him off the stage, toss rotten cabbages, and demand their money back. The reviewers spend over a week proclaiming the singer's career dead as a doorknob. Nowhere in the outcry is it mentioned that the singer was sick as a dog with pneumonia, had a temperature of 104 degrees and a rotten case of laryngitis to boot.

I'm not suggesting that Obama was sick during the first debate of this nauseatingly long campaign nor am I about to say that his performance was pitch perfect. Far from it and I was just as disappointed as everyone else. What I am saying, however, is that while we liberals know for a fact that Obama is not a Muslim, we still haven't learned much about him beyond that over the past 3 1/2 years.

From the moment Obama walked out on stage and before he even opened his mouth, I sensed he was "off." He was actually pale -- strained and drawn looking. At the time, I didn't know about the situation in the Middle East but I did think something had happened to shake him up pretty badly and knock him off-balance.

In a comment on Oh!Pinion, "Octopus" reminds us, or probably more accurately, informs us:

Hours before the debate, an international incident occurred – one that did not get the media attention it deserved.

The Syrian military lobbed artillery shells across the border into Turkey killing 5 villagers. Inasmuch as Turkey is a Nato member and all members are bound by the terms of the treaty, an attack against one is considered an attack against all.

I am willing to conjecture this: Obama spent considerable time that day on the telephone urging restraint among Nato leaders in order to avoid a larger Middle East conflict. Obama has always been focused on performing his job; spouting “blah-blah-blah” before TV cameras has never been his top priority.

Obama flew into Denver late that afternoon to debate a man with nothing to do that day but prepare while the president was dealing with a very serious international crisis, one that our own media pretty much overlooked, at least as far as connecting it to why Obama was "flat."

And don't forget, Romney came charging out like a bull in a China closet, ignoring the rules, changing his stripes yet again - moving from the extreme right to a more moderate stance - and lying and bullying his way through the entire debate. How exactly does one prepare for that?

Don C. Reed makes an astute observation that should be, but isn't, obvious to the media - not even to the hyperventilating Chris Matthews and the rest of the MSNBC crew, not even to the freaked-out Andrew Sullivan, and not even to many liberals apparently.

For an hour I watched the arrogant aristocrat violate the rules of established behavior. He could not even be polite to Jim Lehrer of public television, laughingly announcing his intention of eliminating that program's funding. Romney thought it was funny, joking about how he still liked Big Bird: "Oh, and you too, Jim, haha!"

If Romney is that clueless, rude and uncaring while the nation watches, what will he do when the cameras are turned off, and he is alone with the power of the presidency?

Apparently, "performance" is the new measuring stick by which to judge a debate winner. Not substance. Not truth. Not consistency. Just ask Michael Tomasky who wonders if Obama even wants to be president again.

. . . well, pal, millions of people are kind of counting on you here. All Americans, even the ones who hate you, need you to do your best every day to fix the economy, and you owe that effort to them—even the ones who hate you. Ditto to do your best to protect everyone from violence or attack. And to the people who support you, you owe something else: your best efforts to advance the agenda they wanted you to advance when they voted for you.

Well, I have this to say to Mr. Tomasky:

Hey, Pal: He may be the President but he is first and foremost a human being, subject to the same frailties the rest of us mere mortals are. I realize that this may come as a shock to you but he is not a God nor does he have a magic wand. And you know what, pal? I'll take Mr. Obama, warts and all, any ole day over a highly skilled circus performer who has the money to buy a different costume for every performance and the chicanery to be whatever character he wants to be for any given performance. I also suggest reading this endorsement for Obama in The Nation.

My advice to you and all the knee-jerk liberal whiners out there in la-la land? Take the time to actually read the transcript of the debate. That way, you might not be distracted by cheap theatrics but actually "hear" what the candidates said.
-----
NOTE: Inevitably I end up with far more articles than I can use, so rather than letting them go to waste, I'll share them here.

For Facebook users, this one is a must read.

From Lorraine Devon Wilke:

I am stunned at my fellow Democrats. Stunned. I have never seen such overwrought, hysterical reactions -- from pathetic whimpering and finger-wagging admonishments right down to screeching denouncements and door-slamming party-defection -- all in response to one slightly anemic debate against a Republican challenger high on his own hyperbole. . . .

Writer Buzz Bissinger -- a supposed "lifelong Democrat" -- has loudly and publicly disavowed the president to declare his vote for Romney

Electablog asks, "Really Democrats, have you learned so little about Barack Obama in the last five years?"

This ain't the 90s, says Earl Yazel at The Raw Story.

Paul Krugman criticizes the media for not being able to handle flat-out untruths.

Maureen Dowd as Maureen Dowd.

SNL mocks debate reaction.

Ezra Klein recommends reading the transcript as well but beyond that we differ a bit:

Reading the debate doesn’t necessarily change your impression of who won — Romney’s answers are still crisper and more focused than Obama’s — but it did give me more appreciation for how specific both candidates were in what they were saying. A few notes. . .

The Moon Over Alabama Just Got Loony

Full text from TPMuckraker. Be sure to link to it and read the comments.

"The head of the Alabama Republican Party this week threw his support behind one of the most far-fetched theories of the already bizarre birther movement.

Speaking to a group of GOP diehards on Wednesday in Fairhope, Ala., party Chair Bill Armistead raved about a film called “Dreams From My Real Father.” The movie claims President Obama’s grandfather was a CIA agent who convinced Barack Obama Sr. to marry his teenage daughter to hide the fact that she’d been secretly impregnated by a communist.

The Mobile Press-Register reported that Armistead’s comments came after he was asked by someone in the group about another film, “2016: Obama’s Presidency,” which also weaves elaborate theories about the president’s upbringing.

“If you haven’t seen it, you should,” Armistead said, according to the newspaper. “But I’m going to tell you about another movie. The name of it is ‘Dreams From My Real Father.’ That is absolutely frightening. I’ve seen it. I verified that it is factual, all of it.”

Armistead’s comments were first posted to Twitter by the Press-Register’s political editor but quickly caught fire after being picked up by Right Wing Watch.

The 97-minute film, by director Joel Gilbert, has split the birther movement, which generally believes the president is not a natural born U.S. citizen and therefore ineligible to be president.

Instead of focusing on claims about the president’s Hawaiian birth certificate, the film is narrated by an Obama impersonator and claims the president is a closeted communist, bent on instilling a “classic Stalinist-Marxist agenda upon America at home and abroad.” A disclaimer for the film notes that many of the scenes are “re-creations of probable events, using reasoned logic, speculation, and approximated conversations.”

The film’s website does not list any upcoming screenings, but, according to the conspiracy site WND, Gilbert has said millions of copies were being sent to households in swing states this year."

Laughing All the Way to the Voting Booth

Oh crap. My sides hurt so good.

Salon's Joan Walsh echos my own thoughts about the Republican candidate for president, writing that she's "challenged to constantly come up with new superlatives to describe Mitt Romney's latest craven and/or self-destructive move on the campaign trail."

After obliterating Romney's cruelty and inaccuracies, Walsh ends with, "Mitt Romney will never be president," a pronouncement she made earlier this month after Romney's "disgraceful dishonesty in using the murder of a U.S. ambassador to attack Obama."

Of course, as soon as the story broke in Mother Jones, the video went viral, symbolically becoming the shot heard round the world, or perhaps more accurately in this case, the mother bomb of all bombs. And of course, liberal bloggers (just scroll down the blogroll on the right) and media pundits didn't hesitate to help expand the fall-out. [full video]

Robert Reich, after explaining why the video is so important, gives us the "real Mitt Romney:

. . . a fabulously wealthy financier, presumably speaking to other wealthy people (note the waiters scurrying about), with a passion we haven’t before seen in him — saying it isn’t his “job” to worry about Americans who he describes as “irresponsible,” who fail to take care of themselves, and whose neediness is presumably their own fault.

Some of us thought Romney was without core or principle, an empty suit that would say anything to be elected. But here, evidently, is the real Mitt — a man whose core principle is clearly on display, and articulated with deep conviction: social Darwinism — survival of the richest, the hell with those who need a helping hand.

Ezra Klein argues, rightfully, that Romney's "vision of a society divided between “makers” and “takers” is core to the Republican nominee’s policy agenda."

. . .Republicans have become outraged over the predictable effect of tax cuts they passed and are using that outrage as the justification for an agenda that further cuts taxes on the rich and pays for it by cutting social services for the non-rich.

That’s why Romney’s theory here is more than merely impolitic. It’s actually core to his economic agenda.

Steven Rosenfeld examines all three videos and does a superb job of knocking off the "falsehoods, lies and misstatements" one by one.

These, and many more, are all excellent articles but the writer who gets the award for coming up with the most superb superlative when describing Mitt Romney is Jonathon Chait -- "a sneering plutocrat." Music to my ears.

. . . the video exposes an authentic Romney as a far more sinister character than I had imagined. Here is the sneering plutocrat, fully in thrall to a series of pernicious myths that are at the heart of the mania that has seized his party. He believes that market incomes in the United States are a perfect reflection of merit. Far from seeing his own privileged upbringing as the private-school educated son of an auto executive-turned-governor as an obvious refutation of that belief, Romney cites his own life, preposterously, as a confirmation of it. (“I have inherited nothing. Everything I earned I earned the old fashioned way.”)

Chait criticizes pundits who have likened Romney's remarks to Barack Obama's 2008 monologue, also secretly recorded at a fund-raiser, about his difficulties with white voters in rural Pennsylvania.

. . . the spirit of Obama’s remarks was precisely the opposite of Romney’s. While Obama couched his beliefs in condescending sociological analysis about how poor small town residents vote on the basis of guns and religion rather than economics, the thrust of Obama’s argument was that he believed his policies would help them, and to urge his supporters to make common cause with them . . . [see article for full-text] 

Obama was aspiring to become president of all of America, even that part most hostile to him, in the belief that what they shared mattered more than what divided them. Romney genuinely seems to conceive of the lowest-earning half of the population as implacably hostile parasites.

The revelations in this video come to me as a genuine shock. I have never hated Romney. I presumed his ideological makeover since he set out to run for president was largely phony, even if he was now committed to carry through with it, and to whatever extent he’d come to believe his own lines, he was oblivious or naïve about the damage he would inflict upon the poor, sick, and vulnerable. It seems unavoidable now to conclude that Romney’s embrace of Paul Ryanism is born of actual contempt for the looters and moochers, a class war on behalf of his own class.

It would take a box of toothpicks to keep count of all the times I've heard fright-wingers exclaim, "I don't read that liberal crap" when anyone posts a well documented article which is contrary to their views. While the usual cheering section of the neo-Neanderthals have supported Romney's remarks, maybe the fright-wingers should pay attention to the broadsides from the Republican establishment. This, my friends, is what makes this whole episode so deliciously juicy.

The Weekly Standard's Billy Krystol came right out and called Romney's comments "arrogant and stupid."

The piece de resistance, however, comes from David Brooks who compares Romney to Thurston Howell, the millionaire on Gilligan's Island, a 1960s television sitcom.

Brooks doesn't claim that Romney is out of touch. Instead, and with careful elaboration, he argues that Romney's comments suggest that he doesn't seem to know much about the country he inhabits or the culture of America, political or otherwise.  Brooks also suggests that Romney has lost any sense of the social compact and knows nothing about ambition and drive.

Throughout the article I was mostly nodding my head in agreement with the author -- until the very end:

Personally, I think he’s a kind, decent man who says stupid things because he is pretending to be something he is not — some sort of cartoonish government-hater. But it scarcely matters. He’s running a depressingly inept presidential campaign. Mr. Romney, your entitlement reform ideas are essential, but when will the incompetence stop?

No Mr. Brooks. He is neither kind or decent. Romney wasn't just denigrating certain minority groups, which he is prone to do and which is bad enough. He was talking about half of ALL Americans, many of them Republicans. His entire history demonstrates that he is a sociopath, a bully, a monumental liar, a sneering plutocrat -- a real horse's ass in other words.

UPDATES: Just saw this with Martin Bashir. Two minutes of perfection.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Romney's week from hell causes GOP freak-out. A good overview.

The 2008 GOP Primaries: The Romney That Was and Still Is

Excerpts from Game Change, John Heilemann and Maark Halperin, 2010:

The candidates lined up at the urinals, Giuliani next to McCain next to Huckabee, the rest all in a row. The debate was soon to start, so they were taking care of business -- and laughing merrily at the one guy who wasn't there. Poking fun at him, mocking him, agreeing about how much they disliked him. Then Willard Mitt Romney walked into the bathroom and overheard them, bringing on a crashing silence.

Romney was the guy on whom much of the smart Beltway money had been betting from the start. His resume was impressive . . . .

Romney was running a textbook Republican campaign. He had hired a squad of A-list consultants, pollsters, and media wizards. He'd raised more money than anyone in the field and had millions of his own to draw on. He'd courted the GOP establishment; worked to neutralize the most vocal potential sources of opposition; racked up oodles of endorsements; and carefully tailored his policy positions to appeal to social, economic, and national security conservatives, the three legs of the Republican stool.

But Romney's efforts to get right with the right landed him in trouble. For most of his life, he had been a middle-of-the-road, pro-business, pragmatist, unequivocally pro-choice, moderate on tax cuts and immigration. Running against Ted Kennedy for the Senate in 1994, he pledged that he'd do more for gay rights than his opponent, and declared, "I don't line up with the NRA" on gun control. By 2008, Romney had reversed himself on all of this, which quickly gave rise to charges of hypocrisy and opportunism. Even before he announced his candidacy, a YouTube video [see below] began making the rounds that captured him firmly stating his liberalish social views, comically juxtaposing them with his newly adopted arch-conservative stances. From then on, the flip-flopper label was firmly affixed to Mitt's forehead.

Unlike Giuliani, Romney had no reticence about slashing at his rivals. But the perception of him as a man without convictions made him a less-than-effective delivery system for policy contrasts. The combination of the vitriol of his attacks and his corelessness explained the antipathy the other candidates had toward him. McCain routinely called Romney an "asshole" and a "fucking phony." Giuliani opined, "That guy will say anything." Huckabee complained, "I don't think Romney has a soul." [emphasis mine]

A few paragraphs later, the authors describe Romney's inability to see himself as others do. His reaction to the YouTube video highlighting his flip-flopping was simply, "Boy look how young I was back then."

I'm sure somewhere in this book I read where McCain, I think, said Romney was vicious but I can't find the exact quote as the edition I have doesn't have an index. Maybe I'm just projecting.

But politicians aren't anything if not fickle when it comes to their friends and enemies. A mere four years later on January 12, 2012 John McCain was the first to endorse the "asshole" and "fucking phony" (while mistakenly endorsing Obama for a second term). Giuliani followed suit and endorsed the "man who will say anything" in April and Huckabee jumped into bed with the man without a soul the next month.

Too bad they didn't stick to their original assessments because they were right on target in 2008. Ironically, the only one who has not changed his game is Mitt Romney, a pandering, lying, flip-flopping sociopath who, as we have seen this past week, is also a traitor to his country.

I'm not positive this is the same YouTube video the authors refer to in the book. If not, it's close enough.

Can Obama Top Clinton's Tour de Force?: UPDATE

President Bill Clinton's speech last night was declared a "tour de force" by Steven Benen on The Maddow Blog. He "sizzled" according to Jason Easley at Politicususa.  "It was bipartisan — a bit like giving someone flowers at the same time you're taking a scalpel and dissecting them," according to former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell.

One GOP strategist even remarked that Clinton's speech was the "moment that probably reelected Obama." Matt Lattimer writes:

Here’s why I think Clinton’s speech was successful: He did what almost no one at the Republican convention tried to do, what few conventions bother to do anymore. He treated the American people like thinking human beings.

Squirming like a snake in a pit, a Romney campaign spokesman spoke with forked tongue, or double speak, or whatever the hell you call their gibberish:

"Bill Clinton worked with Republicans, balanced the budget, and after four years he could say you were better off," Romney campaign spokesman Ryan Williams wrote. "Barack Obama hasn’t worked across the aisle – he’s barely worked with other Democrats – and has the worst economic record of any president in modern history.

"President Clinton’s speech brought the disappointment and failure of President Obama’s time in office clearly into focus,” Williams continued.

Huh? Were they listening to the same speech the rest of the world heard?

What can I say? I thought the man hit the ball out of the park and sent it sailing around the world in high speed definition. Stunning. Stupendous. A real slam-dunk -- right into the laps of the GOP.

And after it was over, a tender moment:

And tonight?

Their deliveries are very different. Maybe after all the obstructionism, lies and ugly racist and personal attacks over the last few years, Obama would be justified in coming out slinging -- except that's really not his style, whether we agree with him or not. He's more the "walk the high road" type, I think.

Clinton delivered one of the best nominating speeches I've ever heard -- taking down the GOP talking points, point by point and lie by lie. I think Obama will probably focus on the future, playing on peoples' hopes instead of their fears, playing on their humanity and not their hate, and moving forward, not backward.

Rather than making comparisons, maybe we should just recognize the fact that Clinton and Obama compliment each other very nicely at this time in our history.

Of course, Republicans really want to move backward -- not just to the 1950s but all the way back to the days before talking movies and videos, especially after something like this surfaces.

UPDATE:

I think Obama will probably focus on the future, playing on peoples' hopes instead of their fears, playing on their humanity and not their hate, and moving forward, not backward. (see above)

Obama succeeded in doing just that. Even though I asked if he could top Clinton, I don't think it's the right question or even a fair question. The President's speech and Clinton's were, as predicted, two entirely different speeches with different styles, different messages, and different objectives and goals.

I don't even think it's fair to compare Obama's 2012 DNC speech to others he's made. The man is only human and he can't just go on topping himself speech after speech. He's damn good but he ain't that good.

He sort of stumbled coming out of the gate before hitting his stride, but once he was off and running, it was sheer beauty in motion. Still, it wasn't as fiery as his 2008 speech. Instead, it was more subdued, more reflective and more measured in tone and delivery. Maybe it wasn't a home-run as speeches go, but I think it showed a man who has grown and matured over the last four years, a man who has the strength to look at his weaknesses and mistakes, reassess them and make the necessary corrections.

Most importantly, his speech highlighted the vast differences not only between the two parties but how the two choices will impact on the future of our country.

On every issue, the choice you face won’t be just between two candidates or two parties. It will be a choice between two different paths for America.

No, it wasn't a great speech but it was a vitally important one.

Not Voting or Voting Third Party: An Invitation to "Unimaginable and Unprecedented Chaos"

In a Huffington Post blog piece, Governor Jennifer M. Granholm asks and then states, "Not Voting? The Kocch Brothers Thank You."

A new USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll found that an estimated 90 million people won't vote this fall. That's more than a quarter of the population of the United States.

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If you're one of those 90 million people, you can certainly choose to reject that right, for whatever reason. You might think you're too busy to vote; or that the partisan fighting makes you nauseous; or maybe you feel your vote doesn't count. But let me tell you: If you're staying at home because you're disgusted by the negative tone of the campaign; or you believe both sides run the same vile, lying, attack ads; or because you're turned off by politics: Congratulations, you are fulfilling someone else's agenda. You are following their plan to the letter.

The right is working very, very hard this election, spending record amounts of money, for the purpose of having you decide not to vote. They are desperate for you to stay home. They are spending money on ads. They are spending money on voter suppression. They are spending money on letting you know they are spending money so that it disgusts you; so that you're turned off by the whole awful spectacle they've created. They have the champagne on ice, ready to pop the cork on election night when you opt out.

Not voting isn't just sitting it out. Not voting is giving in.

A 'no vote' is really a 'yes' vote for Romney, Ryan, Adelson and the Koch brothers.

Just as a 'no vote' is a 'yes' vote for the Republicans, so is a 'protest' vote for a third party candidate. The time has come to move beyond ideological purity -- the stakes are simply too high this time around. Voting for a third party candidate will only drain away votes from the one man, imperfect as he may or may not be, who has a chance of beating this juggernaut from the right.

Think of what the impact of a GOP win would be: on Supreme Court appointments, women's rights, voting rights, Medicare, the poor and disabled, minorities, the middle class, food lunch programs, education, environmental protections, deregulation, religious freedom, labor unions, child labor laws, unemployment, peace or war, and the list goes on and on and on.

Writing for The Nation, Erica Alterman puts it this way:

. . . A Romney victory would likely bring with it a large majority in the House and quite possibly a Republican Senate as well, and hence a tsunami of regressive legislation. As the longtime nonpartisan analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein argue, a Republican victory in November will likely prove a key turning point in modern American history. It will offer Republicans the opportunity, in Mann’s words, to put “in place a radical view of policy that goes well beyond anything Republicans have proposed in the past,” one that has moved so far rightward that “no Republican president in the modern era would have felt comfortable being a part of [it].” What’s more, they will likely succeed owing not only to Romney’s eagerness to blow with whatever winds may be buffeting him, but also, as Mann and Ornstein put it, to his party’s “demonstrated willingness to bend, break, or change legislative rules and customs that have stood in the way of radical change in the past.”

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The result, should Romney become president, will be a mixture of policies that favor the superwealthy, punish the poor and middle class, restrict the rights of average Americans, and—I say this without hyperbole—cause a degree of almost unimaginable and unprecedented chaos in virtually every area of American public life. (emphasis mine)

Voting for a third party candidate will not only play smack dab into the hands of the 'divide and conquer' game plan of the Republicans, it will most definitely contribute to "unimaginable and unprecedented chaos in virtually every area of American public life." It is a very real possibility that if the Republicans win, it will be our last free election for generations to come, if not forever.

Presidential Politics: When Is It Okay to Create Hate?

by Frederick Stecker

In late October 2011, the Republican Party of Virginia sent out a cartoon-drawn Halloween card. Reminiscent of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” the card portrayed in one section mindless zombies in lockstep, shouting out “O–Bama;” other sections had ghoulish depictions of Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama with a bullet hole in his head. On June 17, 2012, the Helena, Montana Independent Record reported that the Republican Party of Idaho’s convention hosted Rush Limbaugh as guest speaker. Outside the convention hall there was an outhouse. A sign declared it to be “Obama’s Presidential Library”; it too was riddled with bullet holes, and inside the outhouse hung the president’s “birth certificate” as well as scrawled messages regarding the sexual availability of Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Nancy Pelosi. In both cases, Republican Party spokespersons downplayed these incidents as minor infringements of good taste.

What is going on here? These are uncertain times, but it is worth asking: When, in presidential politics, is it okay to create hate?

Bill Moyers and Michael Winship caution that there is a breath of McCarthyism in rumors that Obama clings to neo-Communism in the air (“The Ghost of Joe McCarthy Slithers Again,” Reader Supported News Web site, April 12, 2012).* They cite the right-wing website, Newsmax, as suggesting “a military coup” “as a last resort to resolve ‘the Obama problem’.” “Military intervention is what Obama’s exponentially accelerating agenda for ‘fundamental change’ toward a Marxist state is inviting upon America.”

In an examination of political discourse over the last 40 years, and focusing in depth on the last three presidential elections, I discovered hard evidence that Republicans focus on creating fear through carefully studied and repeated rhetoric. They assail the Democrats for weakening our country’s standing in the world (the myth of “American Supremacy”); they also employ metaphors that evoke apocalyptic notions of “end times” and God’s judgment.

 
In the opening statement of the first presidential debate of 2000, George W. Bush made reference to the threat of “another nation holding hostage or blackmailing an ally or a friend.” The source of this concern was unidentified; there was no contextual reason for his declaration. Additionally, both Bush and vice presidential candidate Cheney warned of the threat of Saddam Hussein to stability in the Middle East nine times in the 2000 debates. Cheney suggested “military action to stop that activity,” and continued, “I don’t think you can afford to have a man like Saddam Hussein with nuclear weapons in the Middle East.” Lamenting our leadership role in the world, Cheney said, “We have to put Iraq back in the box, so to speak…the French and the Russians are thumbing their noses at the international regime.” The perception: America’s role in the world is deteriorating.

The 2004 debates hinged directly on issues of national security in the wake of 9/11. Again in the first debate, President Bush urged the country to be resolute in the pursuit of “terrorism or the world will drift toward tragedy.” In the 2004 debates, the use of fear metaphors rose by 413%. While Kerry called for a new credibility by building stronger alliances, President Bush talked about Islam as an “ideology of hate” and spoke in religious terms about America’s “call” to intervene in the Middle East because that part of the world is “desperate for freedom” [code: perfect freedom in Jesus]. Bush denigrated Kerry’s appeal to a “global test” before military action as dangerous and lavished additional stealth religious terms that signaled Biblical literalists, while inducing subconscious fears to undecided voters. For example, Bush’s educational program “No Child Left Behind” calls to mind evangelical Tim LaHaye’s popular Left Behind series of books and movies about the bloody end of the world with the return of an avenging Jesus. Additionally, President Bush employed Homeland Security terror alerts to bolster his position. Terror Management Theory posits that recurrent exposure to fear-inducing stimuli creates a sense of impending catastrophe, hence conjuring up an unconscious fear of death in the post 9/11 debates. This was a turning point for the undecided voter; it made more sense to re-elect an incumbent in an atmosphere of fear, over choosing a candidate with no experience as president.

Finally, in the 2008 campaign, laced with reminders of “fighting the terrorists there so that we don’t have to fight them here,” Senator McCain achieved his party’s nomination in part by soliciting the endorsement of two evangelists: Rod Parsley of Ohio and James Hagee of Texas. Parsley, a “Christocrat,” announced that Christopher Columbus was seeking a route to the New World in order to eliminate Islam. Hagee had declared Hurricane Katrina the result of God’s judgment on homosexuals.”

In the presidential debates, Obama used the “Siamese-twin strategy” to link McCain to Bush. In response, McCain used negative references regarding Obama’s lack of experience; they sored to 40% of his depictions of Obama by the third debate. John Boehner, in Oxford, Ohio called into question Obama’s use of an abstention (“present”) in his voting in the Illinois Senate, “In Congress, we have a red button, a green button, and a yellow button, all right. Green means ‘yes,’ red means ‘no,’ and yellow means you’re a chicken shit. And the last thing we need in the White House…is some chicken who wants to press the yellow button.” According to FactCheck.org, Obama’s choice of the yellow button occurred for only 3% of his voting record.

Throughout the last three debate cycles, there has been an escalation in Republican presidential rhetoric pertaining to fear. Threat language encourages unexamined choices; it arouses anger. It speaks to primal instincts of “fight or flight.”

Regarding large gatherings like political conventions, Gustave Le Bon notes that crowds respond to the “hypnotic suggestion of the leader and become slaves of unconscious activities of the spinal cord” (The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, 1895, 17). Freud (1922) speaks of the fusion of the ego with the ego ideal (Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, James Strachey ed. and trans, 1959, 96). Otto Kernberg asserts that in unstructured groups, there is resentment toward the independent thinker, especially in times of national disorganization (“Sanctioned Social Violence, a Psychoanalytic View,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, June 2003, 84:683-698.) He writes: “Modern communications have created a mass psychology, a tendency to sharply differentiate what is good and bad; splitting the object world into idealized and persecutory figures; [and creating] a primitive morality …with an intolerance for emotional depth…with a tendency to replace sentiment with sentimentality. Mass psychology…is a most powerful amplifier, both of paranoid ideologies and of leadership provided by narcissistic merchants of illusions” (694).

Candidate Romney’s campaign theme “Restore Our Future” is telling. As we approach the debates for 2012, it will be important to listen to what is being said; it may, however, be more important to monitor both feeling states and facts.

Frederick Stecker, DMin, PsyaD, is an Episcopal minister and a student of applied psychoanalysis and culture. His book, "The Podium, the Pulpit and the Republicans: How Presidential Candidates Use Religious Language in American Political Debate" was released in August 2011. This article appears in "Clio’s Psyche," a quarterly publication of the Psychohistory Forum, September 2012, Volume 19, Number 2.

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Transcript of Bill Moyers' The Ghost of Joe McCarthy Slithers Again. 

The video was featured in Moving Forward: The Ghost of McCarthyism Is Alive and Well on this blog.

Dr. Stecker was also quoted in the article Santorum's Little Film of Horrors: "Santorum is warming up the Republicans with this the first of many video clips about the future should Obama win the next election. The use of fear is not an uncommon tactic of the right..."

Gustave Le Bon's The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind can be read in PDF format here.