02/07/2013:

HEY! THESE ARE WABBITS! My wife used to be a high-school English teacher.

One year, she had the misfortune of having to instruct a rather dim young woman who was also saddled with a mild speech impediment. The class was working its way through Richard Adams' Watership Down.

About three-quarters of the way through the novel, this student's hand suddenly shot up. She had had a major realization—an epiphany, really:

"Hey! These are wabbits!"

Lately, I'm finding that I identify more and more with that young woman (except for the speech impediment, and I had one of those too when I  was a little kid).

During all those long years when I voted mostly Republican, I still like to feel that I was doing what was best for the country. I was a classic neocon: strong supporter of Israel and a believer that people deprived of Western-style freedoms would embrace Western-style freedoms if given a chance.

I still support Israel, although you're hearing more and more these days from the Litvak lunatic fringe and I have little use for them.

But I think our experience in both Iraq and Afghanistan is more than sufficient to show that if you give some freedom-deprived peoples a taste of Western liberties, they'll basically piss all over them. Which means, to me, that Western-style liberties just aren't what some people want after all. A rather inconvenient truth, but there it is.

Yet any failures of the "neocon revolution," such as it was, would not have been enough to drive me away from the GOP. At first I paid little attention to the so-called "Tea Party" faction, since they seemed to me just another group of extremist basket cases that we've always had tucked away in the nooks and hollows of Wisconsin (they used to be called "tax protesters," and they'd shoot you if you strayed onto their property).

But suddenly one day (around the time I wrote this) I woke up and realized that the neocons were gone and the Tea Party had taken over. And that's when I had my own epiphany:

"Hey! These are fascists!"

The old GOP's "small government" had suddenly become "no government." In government's place was a stark, brutal world that would be run entirely by the very wealthy (the "makers," as Paul Ryan, the architect of Tea Party fascism, famously put it) , where the "takers" (Ryan again) would be penalized by ultimately having to slave away for third-world wages, without recourse to niceties like health insurance that would theretofore be reserved for the "makers," who would also be rewarded with pilfered Social Security monies and government pension funds looted from civil servants to enrich themselves to even more obscene levels. That this kind of system would lead (probably sooner rather than later) to violent revolution—see "France," "Russia"—was the least of the Tea Partyers' concerns. And the US Supreme Court helped the Partyers immensely when it handed down its "Citizens United" ruling... with results such as the one where three billionaires had more influence on our last gubernatorial election than Wisconsin's 5.5 million citizens combined.

Although all signs indicate that Paul Ryan originated this dangerous new American fascism with his Ayn Rand fixation and longtime subservience to large corporate interests in and around his hometown of Janesville, WI (which has since all but disowned him), the cancer has spread elsewhere.

A couple states to the southwest, Governor Sam Brownback and his Tea Party pals are conducting an "experiment" (their own term) to see what happens when you cut education and social services to the bone and give the money to a few rich folks. (Result: You get dumber kids, more dead people, and richer rich folks, but hey, whatever, right?). 

Meanwhile, there is no joy in Hoo-ville as a few faces in the GOP have begun to realize that many Americans would really rather not be Nazis, and participate in Randian social experiments.

But that our country even had to come to this sorry pass is deeply troubling, and a sign that we can't let our guard down ever again.

Look at the Germans. They were an "enlightened" people too.

Posted by Alois on

Comments

[Moderate Democrat]

Agreed - although a Democrat, I believe that there are often good ideas coming from the Conservative camp. Alas, what we've seen taking over the Republicans reminds me of George Wallace, what with his anti-intellectualism, his nativism, his racism - all things which when put in the name of Conservatism would set Bill Buckley a-spinning in his grave. Look at the choices which the Republican party has made in the primaries: Mourdock instead of Richard Lugar; Christine O'Donnell instead of Mike Castle; Sharron Angle; Todd Akin - those were four races that could have gone Republican (in Indiana and Missouri, would likely have, if the candidates weren't lunatics). I suspect it won't be until 2020 that the Republican party has a correction back to the center that the Democrats did in 1992. We'll see...

As far as the Israelis, Bibi's bright idea of joining up with the nastily nationalist party of Avigdor Lieberman blew up on him - the final count was 61 Knesset members who are on the right, 59 center-left (mind you, Bibi's coalition contains the Black Hats - Sephardi and Litvak, and "center-left" includes the Arabs). The strong showing by Yair Lapid's Yesh Atid party may mean that some kind of national service will be required of the ultra-orthodox (including my nephews and possibly my nieces' husbands)- there is a lot of resentment about the free ride they've gotten for the past 60 years. Of course, that's almost as big a demographic time-bomb as the Arabs. We'll see how that plays out.

[Pete (Alois)]

Thoughtful comment as always, Dr. D.

I'm not nearly as up on Israeli politics as you are--get most of that via my son, who couldn't agree with you more (and of course, he spent several years living there). What's going on here is more worrisome, if only because you and I actually live in this country. Walker's Wisconsin is a Stygian wilderness of shuttered storefronts and shattered dreams, more reminiscent of Appalachia (or what Appalachia was like in years gone by, before it became more economically healthy than Wisconsin). And the pinheads in our populace--who may even turn out to be a majority--are still frothing at the mouth to "get" the state employees, believing hook-line-and-sinker the Nazi-like lie Walker told them that their troubles have all been caused by "pampered" civil servants. (Like I said... pinheads. Just like the Germans who were led to believe that the Jews caused all their woes.)

But that's all window dressing. Ultimately the Tea Party program is about hijacking funds that were meant to go to the little guy (pensions, Social Security, Medicare) and giving them to Paul Ryan's "makers," in some sort of sick belief that running our economy like colonial India's will make America great again (at least, for the very rich). If a couple million Americans die early, pointless deaths as a result, well, hey--that never stopped Hitler, did it?

These are extremely dangerous people and Americans need to wake up before it's too late. So what if we "get" the damned gobmint workers, if it causes the entire country to collapse?