A poster from AtTheZone.com (Paisleyspeaker) Narcissism. Xenophobia. Superstition. Bigotry. Sadism. Cultism. Denial. Sexual predation. Arrested development. Delusion. Bullying. Dissociation. Paranoia. Repression. Obsession. Avarice. Egotism. Insecurity. Pathological lying. God complex. Megalomania. Misogyny. Sociopathy. Do any of these words describe Republicans you know, either personally or as elected or appointed officials? Perhaps more than one term applies in any number of cases. I am not a psychiatrist, psychologist or sociologist. But I do have common sense and a long memory. I saw the seeds of many of these behaviors among Republican voters, commentators, candidates and office holders about the time Ronald Reagan came to power. Now, these behaviors dominate Republican discourse. They are mainstream. Reasonable voices like Colin Powell and Charlie Crist are ostracized and subjected to ad hominem attacks from the "true" GOP, like Rush Limbaugh and Dick Cheney. Others, like Richard Lugar and Lawrence Wilkerson, openly disagree with their more radicalized fellows to such an extent that Reagan's 11th Commandment is officially dead. Still others that were arguably reasonable, like John McCain, have become increasingly shrill and strident. Arlen "RINO" Specter changed sides. The venerable Tom Davis just gave up. Every month, lately every week, features the GOP in a new public relations disaster. Jindal. Cheney. Specter. Ensign. Sanford. Palin. Each new incident brings out the gymnast in the GOP apologists and spin-doctors. The latest and strangest occurrence was Sarah Palin's pouty and abrupt resignation as Alaska's governor. Her ill-considered public ramblings equated continuing with quitting, quitting with winning, and leading with being driven from office - up-is-down, wrong-is-right Bizarro politics at its finest. A child would typically reject these absurd notions, but a swath of educated, credentialed and popular GOP role players have the temerity to call this move "shrewd." Partially, this is institutional damage control, but a survey of various conservative blogs indicates an amazing degree of support and acceptance among some members of the rank and file who still love their Sarah. Republican strategist Ed Rollins had the honesty to call it political suicide, but when Ed Rollins is the voice of sweet reason, something is seriously wrong in the clubhouse. I have therefore been forced by events to come to a reluctant conclusion. I say "reluctant" because it's so improbable, but, as A. Conan Doyle wrote for Sherlock Holmes, "How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?" My conclusion is that the socio-pathologies listed above are not characteristics of Republicans, they are Republicans' characteristics. To avoid being accused of sweeping generalizations, let me reel it in a bit and say that these are the characteristics of too many Republicans for the party's own good. Any organization is an expression of the humans that make it up. Leaders cannot lead and followers cannot gather in the absence of at least the perception of shared vision and values. The men and women who lead the Republican party reflect various tendencies of their constituencies; this is axiomatic in the fact that they are the leaders. And the remaining American men and women who self-identify as Republicans share characteristics of the leaders they have chosen; it's axiomatic in the fact that they are followers. In the broadly construed organization of Republicanism, meaning elected officials, party members, operatives, commentators, contributors, and voters, some of these social pathologies have masqueraded as policy. There is a strong strain of covert and at times overt bigotry in Republican thought on social programs. On immigration reform, while Democrats have embraced the logical advantages of soliving a problem while expanding their base, xenophobia is a core aspect of the GOP's emotional and self-defeating reaction to the issue. Unbridled avarice drives much of the GOP opposition to progressive taxation. Other policies abound with emotionally unstable dynamics: paranoia is interchangeable with national security, denial is the handmaiden for global warming, and pathological lying passes for communication. Other examples of emotional defects are found among some of the most visible Republicans in the country. Sen. James Inhofe, who was "outraged at the outrage" over institutionalized torture of prisoners, has a strong streak of sadism. Mark Foley was an archetype sexual predator; his fancy for young men could easily have been the substitute for a darker preference. In its most extreme expression, Evangelical Christianity is not what Jesus Christ taught, but tantamount to superstition; see Alan Keyes, who in his debate with State Senator Obama cited religious faith as a cure for our problems. Cultism is in full bloom for Mike Huckabee and similar believers who despite unalterable proof in sciences from paleontology to physics peg the Earth's age at about 7,000 years (all probably displayed in an emotionally comforting time line at the Creationist Museum). On the other hand, they dismiss evolution as a "theory" incapable of scientific proof. Evidently, Huckabee and his fellows see no flaw in this contradiction, or in such a selective approach to applying their standards of proof to reinforce personal beliefs rejected by an overwhelming majority, including people of many faiths. Repression: Larry Craig, a tortured soul who deserves pity. God complex: Rudy Giulianai. Egotism: Tom Delay. Narcissim: Gov. Mark Sanford. Delusion: Sen. Jim DeMint. Arrested development: Sarah Palin. Sexual obsession: Sen. David Vitter. Sociopath: George W. Bush. Megalomania: Too numerous to list. Paranoia, thy name is Cheney. Sen. Jim Bunning and Rep. Michelle Bachman are, well, just nuts. Yet every one of these miscreants boasts (or boasted) strong support in segments of the American electorate. Clearly their voters saw something they liked, and some still do. Similarly, Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter and their like are reprehensible humans, serial liars and media bullies who are loved by misguided millions. It all becomes a self-reinforcing feedback loop until one of the players cracks under the pressure (i.e., Craig, Palin) or is found out (i.e., Ensign, Sanford, Vitter). Then the sparks fly and veteran observers, Republicans and Democrats alike, just shake their heads in bemusement. Democrats have their own scoundrels, but they are far fewer in number, do not dominate policy, and of late are quickly ejected, not defended (Rod Blagojevich, Eliot Spitzer, William Jefferson). These are signs of an emotionally healthy organization. I still am incredulous at this realization, but it potentially explains so very much. The GOP isn't in deep trouble because of Iraq or demographics or scandals or recession. These are contributing factors but they are all transitory. The GOP is in trouble because a significant portion of the party's base, the party's leaders, and the party's most vocal spokespeople are slaves to identifiable social and mental disabilities. They are not driven by ideology, but by pathology. It's been festering for years, culminating in an ongoing, spectacular collapse due to their inability to maintain the façade, accept the failure of their beliefs and cope with a changing world. This is why so many Republicans are retreating to their comfort zone and preaching a "return" to core, conservative values even while the country as a whole is demanding the opposite and GOP leaders betray those values with stunning visibility. This call has nothing to do with embracing true conservative political thinking as a strategy- it's a call to return to the cult of dysfunctionality under the delusion that repeating with greater intensity the same behaviors that produced monumental failure will instead produce success. A belief that this approach will lead to national political prominence and the establishment of government doctrine is delusional in the highest degree. Bush may not have been a "true" conservative but he was a "true" Republican while Colin Powell is not, and therein lies the GOP's problem. Scandals, outrageous remarks and ill-considered actions are not causes of the Republican downfall, but symptoms of deeper flaws. The symptoms will recur as long as the issues remain. This won't improve with new strategies - the GOP needs better, healthier people from top to bottom When that happens, the extremists will be pushed to the fringe, where they used to be. Until that happens, the Republican party will continue to be, at best, regionalized, marginalized, and comically disorganized, and, at worst, hateful and violent - their blogs seethe with venom and their farthest reaches include and condone political murderers and terrorists. The political contest today is no longer just about policies, ideas and personalities. It's also about one side that proceeds from mental disorder versus one that doesn't. Rational individuals would drive the most visible and vocal Republicans out of their party, into the sea and start all over. Accepting these behaviors is dissociation from reality on a mass scale. Eliminate the impossible and whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
For some reason, liberals seem to suffer from some sort of cognitive dissonance when confronted with this sort of evil. Their minds seem to reject it. No matter how many times the GOP has demonstrated its monstrosity, the liberals in our country still can't seem to accept it as truth that half of our population is voting for irredeemable monsters. It's not that we are stupid, but one of the consequences of having faith in the good nature of people is that such a belief is difficult to reconcile with the existence of the GOP. Listen to how the GOP tries to argue against universal healthcare: they say things like, "As soon as it happens, I will exploit it by visiting the doctor everytime I have a runny nose. If I don't manage to destroy the system by overburdening it, at least I'll get a lot of free visits to the clinic, and it will be on your dime." Yeah, that makes sense. The GOP is the party of losers and assaholics, and that's all there is to it. The people who vote for them are just naive, though. It's the politicals of the party I have a serious problem with. Oh... I also have a problem with "libertarianism." The reason I hate libertarianism is that those pretentious bastards make the unverifiable claim that they are following in the footsteps of the people who founded the country. I have four principle problems with conservative libertarianism: 1) The so-called "founding fathers" had highly diverse views in their philosophy on government. Saying that you are following in the footsteps of our "founding fathers" begs the question, "Which one?" Some of them were leftist by modern standards. 2) There is no such thing as "classical liberalism." Anyone who uses this term deserves to have his nose broken by a two-by-four because I really do think it is valid justification for violence. I can't believe that such a stupid, pointless term exists. Libertarians only use this term to make pretensions that they are following an older, "more pure" philosophy on government. How fucking arrogant and stupid. 3) As written above, libertarians invariably make pretensions of following an "older" philosophy on government. They think they are going "back into the past," and the reason this is so stupid is that, by doing so, they are ignoring every event in our history sense the country was founded. History is useless if we don't learn anything from it. In the USA, we have been refining our method of government for over two-hundred years. All we had at the start was a very vague and imperfect idea of what we wanted to do that would make us different. We can't do shit to make our country better WITHOUT straying from our original notions, so why do these libertarian fuckheads insist that scrapping everything we have learned in the past two hundred years is going to make everything motherfucking better??? 3.5) The reason that old knowledge is reliable knowledge is that we have had two hundred years to road-test it, people. Just because you dug up some other radical idea that happened to be in vogue at the time doesn't mean that it's going to have the same level of viability as the one from the same time-period that has served us faithfully for over two hundred years. We road-tested that one, and it failed miserably, alright? Either that, or we thought it was fucking stupid. Seriously, do you want to go back to draining people's blood with leeches just because what passed for doctors four hundred or so years ago thought that the Book of Revelation suggested it could cure a disease? 4) They all claim that they are "non-partisan," but they inevitably turn out to be just another bunch of GOP trash. At least they realize how much decent people hate the GOP, but they negate this by continuing down the wrong path even when they know better. Conservative libertarianism is really a shitty, half-assed philosophy that is not even very well thought-out, but they will never admit to it. These guys are so arrogant that they can hardly even dream of the idea that their ill-wrought, ill-conceived views are anything but approaching perfection. What a bunch of assoholics.
A lot of liberals right now are deciding that it would be a really good idea to suppress certain people's freedoms for the sake of preserving everyone else's freedoms. We also have a vested interest in preventing your dumbass politicians from getting the Muslims pissed-off enough with us to start launching nuclear warheads at our country. If going against some of our principles, viz oppressing your liberties, can reduce the risk of our country being turned into a nuclear swamp, then it's worth it. I don't want to fucking die. We are also moving away from the philosophy that hate is always bad. We admit that there is a time and a place for this emotion. For example, we hate the GOP, and they deserve it. They are useless dead weight on our country, and they consistently cause pain and embarrassment for the rest of us. In a word, die. Pithy enough for you?
Cockroach:A lot of liberals right now are deciding that it would be a really good idea to suppress certain people's freedoms for the sake of preserving everyone else's freedoms. We also have a vested interest in preventing your dumbass politicians from getting the Muslims pissed-off enough with us to start launching nuclear warheads at our country. If going against some of our principles, viz oppressing your liberties, can reduce the risk of our country being turned into a nuclear swamp, then it's worth it. I don't want to fucking die. We are also moving away from the philosophy that hate is always bad. We admit that there is a time and a place for this emotion. For example, we hate the GOP, and they deserve it. They are useless dead weight on our country, and they consistently cause pain and embarrassment for the rest of us. In a word, die.[/B] Pithy enough for you? ------------------------------------- i am an individual. watch how you talk to people.
Report it all you want. You can't hide from the truth. We protect our freedom by imprisoning people who have commited one too many heinous crimes against their fellow man. Promulgating lies and distortions for the sake of inciting hatred and intolerance toward your fellow man is an inexcusable act. Demonizing the poor and the disabled as "welfare queens" in order to bar them from turning to the state during their time of greatest need is foul and evil. Trying to demonizing women who choose abortion as flighty, shallow, and selfish in order to justify depriving them of their reproductive rights is no less a crime than actually raping them, as far as I am concerned. Promoting a pro-war policy that can result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people makes you no better than a murderer. It is a crime, and I do not forgive it. The only answer is to drum the GOP out of politics for good. No good will ever come of that party. It must be destroyed for the greater good. It cannot be allowed to continue.
with a few words i write something profound after someone posts a rambling manifesto and this is the response i get?
It was a pithy insult and a political taunt. Look, dude: I don't want to be blown to pieces because your dumbass politicians can't figure out when to shut up. First Reagan didn't care if he got us blown to pieces, and then Bush picked a fight with North Korea. The government of North Korea had such a boner to blow our country into as many individual pieces as possible that the People's Republic of China, which barely even likes us, had to intervene to get those demented psychopaths under control. Does that strike any chord with you, or are you completely ignorant of how close you may have been to becoming a radioactive pizza? I don't know about you, but some of us live next to coastal military bases, and we don't want to be crispy. Wake up: your politicians are completely shitty. They outright bullied their way to power, and the name-calling and back-biting was enough to make me vomit. They have been making all of you look like assholes, even if you, as an individual, might not be such an asshole I am not convinced that you are much different, though, because all I have seen from you so far is that nasty, little taunt. I think your buddy, Limbaugh, might have rubbed off on you! How do you like having that retarded, drug-abusing assoholic to lead your party around by its shrunken balls? Take a long look at that jerk because that repulsive pile of shit has been calling the shots in your party for a long, long time. Limbaugh is a freakshow and a half, man. Do you realize that he calls his fan club the "Dittoheads"? Doesn't that tell you something about this sociopathic turdmonkey's mentality, or do I need to be more descriptive? If you like having that jerk representing you, then I don't know where your brain is located, nor do I want to know. I don't hear you complaining much about his rotten bullshit, though, so I can't help but wonder if you somehow approve of the disgusting freak. The world doesn't even need the Ringling Brothers anymore, thanks to that jerk. And get used to this: when your politicians go around doing fucked-up, asinine things, you are going to take the heat for it because you are their employer. In the name of Jesus Christ, control those fools before they get us all killed. Between their efforts to stir up shit with North Korea and the Patriot Act, this was not feeling very much like a freedom-loving country while they were running things. I am not one of those people who are impressed with pithy statements.
your rambling and i can barely decipher what any of this has to do with me or why you are making this personal. when i said: Too many words to kill free speech. (an excellent quote btw, that i personally authored) i was responding to the op. (edited)
That kind of pithy retort makes you sound awfully dismissive and highly disrespectful, John. You did not address the contents of the OP at all. People who speak in slogans and pithy, little remarks like that are just as lazy as they look. The person who wrote the OP was obviously trying to articulate thoughts that he had not really pulled together in his head, and I would agree if you were to say that his post came out looking very tortured and difficult to read. Your little comeback implies that the style of his writing has something to do with the validity of his point. That is very shallow, and that makes you look shallow, not "profound." If you want to complain about the readability, that's one thing. Besides, you are lucky that I try so hard to avoid implicating conservatives in general in the actions of the GOP. They are your political party, therefore they are your responsibility. When they screw the pooch, it would be justifiable for you to hold the blame for it. To improvise on an old saying coined by the 1st Baron of Thurlow, a political party has neither a body to be punished, nor a soul to be condemned, therefore it falls upon the voter, which is you, to see to it that it behaves itself. The GOP spent 12 solid years making an ass of itself, and who is there to blame but you?
do you have me confused with someone else? i see what happened now, you saw my post and thought i was responding to you?
and i did report you. just so people know. i only report one or two ther posts and they were not even about me. i get no response, awhile ago i pm'd the admin, this was years ago and i still havent received a reply.
