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Republican Preachers: Believing What You Know Ain't True
In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain makes a stinging observation on the overtly religious. “Faith is when you believe something you know ain’t true.” This is a perfect description of the religious asylum that is now the Republican Party and the tortured gospel they are spreading all over the country. Virtually the entire barnyard of their presidential candidates are preaching a mix of born again religious revivalism and brutal 19th century industrial capitalism, that they “know ain’t even remotely true.”
By and large these are not genetically stupid people. But the political trash talking they feel obligated to serve up to the Tea Party Gods--Rush Limbaugh and the inquisitors at Fox--has degenerated into a competition of who can do the best impression of an absolute lunatic. Rick Perry is preaching virtual secession from the union, while holding prayer vigils for God to solve our problems. By what twisted logic does contempt for the federal government and even secession equate to patriotism? Someone please show me where the founding fathers advocated prayer as the vehicle for solving a national debt crisis?
Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty have flip flopped on virtually every position they ever espoused so that their insanity titers can match Michelle Bachmann's. I’ve met with Jon Huntsman on more than one occasion regarding environmental issues in Utah. He was a reasonable moderate Republican as my state’s governor and appeared on TV ads three years ago exhorting the entire country to act on the climate crisis. He did that because he respected the warnings of our climate scientists. Now he says we can't deal with global warming in a depressed economy. He knows perfectly well that those same scientists are warning that if we don’t act on it right now, we condemn our children to a brutal, dangerous and likely unlivable world. Newt Gingrich? He appeared on national TV ads with Nancy Pelosi saying that he agreed on the urgency to deal with the climate crisis. Now he looks like a Keystone Cop, tripping over his own feet in full speed reverse.
Sarah Palin? Oh, never mind. Rick Santorum? According to him the world’s scientists are all in on a conspiracy with Al Gore. Really Rick? That conspiracy would have to have started in 1824 when the greenhouse gas phenomenon was first described by the French scientist Joseph Fourier. It would have to have involved scores of scientists in the 1800s like John Tyndall of the Royal Institute of Great Britain, George Marsh, the founder of the Smithsonian Institute, and hundreds of scientists in the 1900s like 1903 Nobel Prize winner Svante Arrhenius. The conspiracy would now have to involve virtually the entire world’s scientific community. That makes sense to you, Rick? Really?
Almost as irritating is the chorus sung over and over by Eric Cantor, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan and 99% of Republican Congressmen proudly declaring their Huckleberry Finn type faith that an unfettered free market is the only way to create to millions of new jobs. “Stop choking businesses with excessive regulations!” they chant. All businesses, all regulations. Really, Mitch? Never mind that it was precisely the elimination of, inadequacy of, or lack of enforcement of federal regulation that allowed Wall St. to drag the economy to the edge of the apocalypse and the very reason why there are no jobs. Never mind that it was poor regulation and free market cost cutting that brought us the Deep Water Horizon, Kalamazoo River, and now Yellowstone River oil spills. 1,800 oil spills have occurred in this country in the last five years totaling 16 million gallons of oil contaminating our land and water. And Mitt, you want regulators to get off the backs of the oil companies? Really?
Never mind that it was inadequate federal oversight and greedy, unfettered capitalism on steroids that allowed Massey Energy to commit manslaughter on 29 coal miners last year. Hey, Eric just what jobs are created by paring down our already bare bones federal food inspection? Will even more outbreaks of e-coli and salmonella in peanut butter, spinach, eggs, cantaloupe, sprouts and hamburger be counted as just collateral blessings from unleashing the free market? We certainly don’t want to pay for inspection of imported sea food from Japan because a little radioactivity in your tuna fish and scallops would probably just make it taste a little more crunchy.
Hey Newt, what jobs will be created by eviscerating the EPA and their enforcement of the Clean Air Act besides morticians and health care providers? Michelle, so you’re comfortable with eliminating money for bridge inspectors from the National Transportation Safety Board because the one that collapsed in your home state in 2007 only killed 13 people, and that’s a small price to pay for that warm, orgasmic tingle only the free market can give?
Lets certainly get regulators off the backs of the pharmaceutical industry because other than the millions of people who have been killed or injured by Phen-Fen, Vioxx, Avandia, Bextra, Cylert, Baycol, Palladone, Trasylol, Tylenol, Darvocet, Heparin and all the drugs now made with ingredients from China without any real standards or controls--i.e. most of them--there's no reason to think an unregulated free market won’t work out just fine. Really, Sarah? So if defective and tainted drugs weed out the weak among us, that’s just the beauty of the Ayn Rand/Milton Friedman world view?
The entire middle class is struggling with unemployment, under employment, mounting debt, lost pensions, mortgages foreclosed or underwater, and you want to undo even the pathetic protections of the 2010 Consumer Protection Act and put Elizabeth Warren’s head on a platter? Really, Speaker Boehner? That’s the job elixir the middle class so desperately need?
As with most religions the Church of Unfettered Capitalism doesn’t have to make sense in order to thrive. But it does need preachers at the pulpit exhorting us to “believe in things that we know ain’t true” and the Republican Party can't get enough of them. Huckleberry Finn would be so proud.
33 Comments so far
Show AllIt seems that it really doesn't matter which party as you could say the same about the dems, they are not just in your face except for Obama is getting pretty much in our face with his capitulations and back stepping. Blue Dog Dems, Bankster Dems from New York, Deleware et al the other states, millionaire dems who became millionaires with the favors from the corporate mafia and banksters.
Please someone say that Bill Clinton helped bring all this to us via NAFTA "so called free trade agreements, deregulation further of media, deregulation or Commodities Modernization Act and repeal of Glass Seagal all signed by this sax playing hypocrite. But no dems have to protect their own but then as congressmen and women at the time, they sent the bills to him for signature? So they are not admitting to their culpability.
Let's get honest! I'm a democrat, independent, green, democrat who is sick and tired of this good cop/bad cop routine and the pundits that don't tell it like it really is. We're screwed, all of us who do not work for the public interest and screws us from cities on up to federal government. I would pretty much bet they are all on the take or have found some way to scam in their positions except for the worker bees like the actual people on the streets out working for a living protecting via police and fire and teaching our children, out on roads and highways construction workers who at times it seems there are two of for everything but probably is for safety reason or the person helping you at motor vehicles lines or giving you driving test, or helping you with Social Security, or ever IRS help lines but there management is probably finding ways to screw you.
Fed UP, it all has to be torn down and started over again.
Exactly this lib-bot is as tiresome as any tea party douche and as a Green decentralist I'd love to see the U.S. empire break up and in the process give local farmers a break, and third world people who have had the U.S. boot heel on this neck for way too long.
Of course it's *that* season again so watch for an influx of Dim apologist articles here and banning of Greens and direct action activists calling for a general strike. :(
Dr. Moench, concerning your comment, "The conspiracy would now have to involve virtually the entire world’s scientific community," unacknowledged in your article is the blatant anti-intellectualism inhabitant not only the Republican Party, but the nation at large. My suspicion is your unawareness of this phenomenon is its relatively recent metastasizing into the natural sciences. This "no-nothingism" engulfed the humanities in the 1970s (to the indifference of natural scientists I would like to note) and subsequently has been slowly eroding the social sciences--except perhaps for economics, which has proven itself mythology with onset of "The Great Recession," and squabbling over how to respond to it. Only beginning perhaps in the 1990s has this cancer spread to the natural sciences, where now the National Parks Administration does not want to offend creationists regarding the Grand Canyon, and climate deniers get "point-counter-point" representation on editorial pages. Keep in mind, oh physician, prescription medication is now advertised on television, the Federal Government has released innumerable drugs with reduced testing and disastrous consequences, and folk medicine gets equal time with pharmaceuticals on talk shows. Go talk to a literary critic, or historian, or philosopher, or sociologist, or anthropologist, or political scientist, if you want to know what it is to like to have seriously considered a matter, only to be dismissed by the likes of Rush Limbaugh or Nancy Grace or NBC, CBS, and ABC, network news, along with the New York Times, etc.
What is your point? He doesn't seem unaware of any of the things you mentioned. Especially the drugs. He stated that he is aware they kill people. Do you think he can magically keep them off T V? It seems you are agreeing with him on all the points he made.
People are way over medicated. They keep making up new diseases. Drugs are dangerous. They state that fact in their infomercials but people aren't listening.
My point is the anti-intellectualism which has settled into a cultural norm in the United States. It has taken natural scientists, including physicians, longer to realize this because they became the intellectual "stars" starting in the seventies. Glorying in their status, they rather smugly paid little to no attention to the dismissal of the humanities first, and then the non-economic social sciences. Now, the anti-intellectualism has come for the natural sciences. All your plaint does is illustrate this concerning medicine. That Brian Moench recognizes its coming for medicine is my point, what he does not seem to recognize is this is part of a long term development. As this no-nothingism is reaching fulfillment, the opportunity for an intelligent approach to any problem is slipping away.
Philandrel: Every trend you list accelerated dramatically when things like the "700 Club" got a piece of the T.V. pie. Between Christian home-schooling, and megachurches that thousands attend, Christian publishing, and the Christian music industry, MILLIONS of people have been indoctrinated into a retrograde form of Christianity that lends itself to the march towards a Theocratic State. Chris Hedges wrote about this in "American Fascists," and I think John Dean intimated as much in, "Conservatives Without Conscience."
Although most of us on C.D. recognize the complicity between both parties with respect to ensuring the interests of their biggest donors, corporations (who profit from less pesky regulations), many Democrats OTHERWISE still have a brain. They are not trying to court the Christian theocratic monster, and in my view, that is EXACTLY what it's become. Imagine the paradox, as I presume any spiritual entities outside of this twisted realm regularly do: that the nation with the most pronounced "religiosity" happens to also be the one with the largest weapons' arsenal, and a very eager enthusiasm towards using it on whomever is designated as the enemy du jour, valid evidence (as relayed through a captured propagandized media machine) or otherwise.
I really like this article, and the way the author spells out the details of what a further decimation of safety protocols would look like.. if various industries were FURTHER deregulated. This data, if internalized, should sock it to the shils for Ron Paul who shamelessly go on and on about "Their Man."
No doubt the rise of the Christian right has been a driving force behind the growing anti-intellectualism. Although not as explicitly as in Rene' Descartes' time, the religious declare all human misery God's punishment for the exercise of human reason. Thus, they call for supremacy of intuition over reason. Doing so, no standard of rational intuition can be forthcoming without inconsistency.
Now, one must guide oneself by one's "gut" reaction. If our intuitions conflict, we'll have to resolve this by determining who can dominate the political system. This is what occurred in the period of the Populists. They were believers in an uncontrolled market, ascribing the failure of some as due to market manipulation by the well off, and failure of others as due to personal fault. Thus, William Graham Sumner wrote, "If you find a drunk in the gutter, leave him there, for that is where he belongs according to the fitness and nature of things."
Conveniently left out was a standard determining who was not responsible and who was responsible for personal failing. Thus, the righteous can decide this on the basis of their "gut." Ron Paul, and his demon offspring Rand Paul, are contemporary manifestations of this old line populism which, by the way, intertwined its commitment to capitalism with Christianity. Seeming to die away with William Jennings Bryan, it has gained new life.
There is a limit on the religious interpretation, however. Polls over the last several years have actually shown a serious decline in religious belief. I believe (no irony intended) in a poll taken last year, non-believers closely approached 50%. If I am not mistaken in my empirical claim, the anti-intellectualism stalking the land is a product of more than a religious revival. As so, it is much more difficult to combat.
Certainly the highly educated anti-intellectual "no child's left behind" "race to over the top" Barack Obama is doing nothing to halt this trend. His Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, appears to "know" all that is knowable is already known. So being, rigid testing is to what "education" is to become. If this is mistaken by Divine revelation, as so judged in the state of Texas, then so be it. In the Lord's name, and only in the Lord's name, shall it be altered.
PHILANDREL: Thank you for the highly nuanced response. I agree with the points you made. I often relate that causative factors are always complex, and NEVER about one item alone. Therefore, one component to consider (as a causative factor) is the type of education that disallows critical thinking, and instead forcibly adjusts students' thought processes to suit test results. The power of religious dogma (with a particularly anti-science bent to it), acts as another. I would postulate the following items as co-contributing forces:
1. The media. Up until the l950s, homes did not have televisions. Children spend more time in front of the TV (or on video games) than they do reading. Their worldviews are being increasingly shaped by the MSM, and quite a bit of its messaging is done at subliminal levels.
2. Food that is NOT food. You probably know that our ancestors ate vegetables grown in soil that was far richer in nutrients. That in contrast, much of what we eat today is largely divested of nourishment. Many women work, and therefore rely upon instant dinners or fast food establishments. In short, real nourishment is lacking. And I think this deficit factors into concentration, behavior, and the hundred deviations on school protocol that end up being "treated" by sending millions of children to a variety of specialists so that they can be fixed (with drugs), which is to say conditioned for stillness inside a classroom.
3. Sports and the macho ethos. Girls are seldom teased for reading books, but young boys are. It's not considered very macho to head home with books... when there are sport practices that call for so much time. Our nation worships sports the way the Romans had their arena to fill the need for diversion via bread and circuses. (This also functions as a direct feed into the military through a worship of the hero-fighter-warrior ethos.)
Perhaps other factors can be added to this list, but I think if we take these elements together, we end up with a pretty good portrait, and a sense of what has led to anti-intellectualism, or what some in this forum see as a stupid/sheep like population. No singular item is THE answer because this conglomerate factors into the net result.
Siouxrose, I agree many factors seem to be in play. However, what exactly has fostered this anti-intellectualism, and how factors have interacted, I don't know. But, when you have teachers demonized, you know something serious is happening. My only response is a badly remembered line from a recent political cartoon. "Do you remember when teachers and public employees brought down the world economy? Yeah, I don't either."
You are incorrect philandrel when you state:"Polls over the last several years have actually shown a serious decline in religious belief. I believe (no irony intended) in a poll taken last year, non-believers closely approached 50%."
Religious belief has not been declining in the United States. The United States is one of the most religious nations among developed nations. In most polls less than 2% of Americans report that they are atheists. The prevalence of disbelief in religion in the U.S. varies from poll to poll depending upon how you frame the question but has never been as high as 50%. There are Western European nations that have reported levels of disbelief in religion as high as 45%.
A 2007 Pew Forum survey found the following percentages of religious belief in the United States:
1. God or a universal spirit 92%
2. Heaven 74%
3. Hell 59%
4. Scripture is the word of God 63%
5. Pray once day 56%
6. Miracles 79%
Later polls have confirmed the 2007 Pew Forum survey results.
The dualistic belief that there is something out there independent of matter is so prevalent that the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey showed that 21% of those who identified themselves as atheists, and 55% who identified themselves as agnostics, expressed a belief in some sort of God or universal spirit.
Yeah, the 2009, 2010 polls of which I am remembering, not having gone through the arduous process of trying to isolate them on the internet (if even possible), are in my memory consistent with what you note. Although religious commitment had declined in the way I describe, when asked about some sort of "universal spirit," belief was something like you list. What I remember from reading articles on these polls is how inconsistent the data appeared, at least superficially. Something is up with religion in the U.S., and I don't know what it is.
Philander religious belief is thriving in the U.S. What is changing in the U.S. is the nature of religious belief. In fact, the current proliferation of religion and spiritualism in the U.S. is somewhat similar to the Great Awakening of the late 19th and early 20th century.
A 2008 Pew study found that 28% of adults had left the faith in which they were raised in favor of another religion or no religion at all. The number is even greater, 44%, when switching from one form of Protestantism to another is included.
Additionally, surveys show that America is losing it's Protestant majority. The percentage of of Americans who are Catholic has held steady at about 25%. This percentage of Americans who are Catholic has held steady despite that fact that more than 10% of Americans raised as Catholics have left the faith. The maintenance of the percentage of individuals in the U.S who are Catholic at 25% is due to the large influx of immigrants from Latin America who now constitute almost half of all Catholics in the U.S.
The reason that you might have thought that recent studies showed that the percentage of disbelief in religion in the U.S. may have been as high as 50% is based upon results obtained when respondents are asked what type of god they believe in. In a Baylor University study, 16% of respondents expressed belief in a God that does not interact in the world. 24.4% of respondents believed in a distant God that is not active in the world. These respondents beliefs are most consistent with the deist god of the eighteenth century Age of Enlightenment than the Christian God. If you combine these two groups with atheists you have almost half of all Americans, 45.6% or 137 million people, who either do not believe in God or believe in a God who does not act in the universe except setting it going on its way according to natural laws he created. This does not say that nearly 50% of Americans don't believe in God. It says that nearly 50% of Americans have belief in a God that does not have the characteristics of the God of Christianity/Judaism/Islam.
When the Baylor University study includes the responses from the other respondents in the survey, you obtain a figure that 98.4% of the study respondents express a belief in some type of God.
Contrary to the assertion of some that religious belief is under attack in the U.S., religious belief in the U.S. is healthy and thriving.
It was the PEW poll I was remembering, and your analysis of it is much more acute than mine. Thanks for your commentary.
Photius,
A team of Israeli software developers are working on distinguishing how many authors are responsible for writing the Bible: http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/viewnews.php?id=209344.
I suspect that its findings will eventually alter many of the figures represented in the 2007 (and beyond) polls.
Hello Gail,
Thanks for the helpful link. I reviewed the article. I am sure that you are aware that for over a century critical textual analysis of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament have called into question long held beliefs about the authorship of many of their texts. What I found interesting in the article was that the software analysis of the Torah agreed with critical textual analysis of the Torah that for nearly a century has suggested that the Torah had at least 4 or 5 authors. This is has been called the documentary hypothesis.
The agnostic biblical scholar Bart D. Erhman has a new book titled "Forged: Writing in the Name of God--Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are" that examines the question of the authorship of the biblical texts and demonstrates that many of the books are forgeries. I highly recommend it if you have not read it.
Much of the information that Erhman presents in his book and the documentary hypothesis of the Torah have been known by biblical scholars for some time. This information is taught in all but the most conservative evangelical seminaries. Despite the fact that most seminarians are taught this information, it is not disseminated to the laity. I am therefore doubtful that the work of the Israeli software developers will have a significant effect on the prevalence of religious belief in America, particularly Christian religious belief.
"and climate deniers get "point-counter-point" representation on editorial pages."
Editors of newspapers, publishers of newspapers, those who decide what goes onto editorial pages are not scientists.
RFLOH: As IF the editors are not beholden to their advertisers/sponsors. What a short sighted piece of analysis you pass off as truth in your missing-the-forest-for-the narrowest-tree sort of way. Do you never tire of playing the devil's advocate, even when the hair you split sends you into a virtual Theater of the Absurd?
See if you can dig up the quintessential essay on this subject written by Gloria Steinem decades ago. You might learn something.
"The rich have two political parties doing their bidding. The rest of us are running around waving flags and shouting 'We are free! We are free! We live in a democracy'".---Michael Moore
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
- Upton Sinclair
It's becoming tiresome to repeat, but it still needs to be pointed out:
Sounding off about the flamboyantly hypocritical and reprehensible Republican pseudo-evangelical con artists is well and good-- but it creates the false impression that the Democrats are more likely to be sober, respectable ministers of the Lord and faithful servants of We the People.
Months ago, I noticed that some of the regular liberal-lite moderate progressives published on CD, those who write from a wonky "inside-politics" perspective, had dialed down explicit support for Democrats.
That is, they would write articles exposing how wrong-headed, sinister, and treacherous Republicans are on a given issue. But instead of stating outright that Democrats were obviously more trustworthy and worthy of support, they would just leave the "Republicans Bad!" analysis hanging in mid-air, seemingly leaving the reader to draw their own conclusion.
It remains an open question whether this is a deliberate rhetorical strategy to garner support for Democrats without exposing the writer to skeptical criticism, aka "blowback", for openly advocating Dems, or whether the writer unconsciously didn't include references to Democrats because they seemed irrelevant to the "Republicans Bad!" topic.
But at this late date, any article exclusively focusing on the Republicans as the scurrilous Greater Evil without considering their Democratic enablers and tacit allies is half-baked at best.
O.S. (why not SOS): Well-stated and analyzed, as usual!
For many of the persons you implied, the need for a job remains a very real motivating factor... particularly in these times.
I think the problems mentioned in this article started when Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House. Prior to that Congress was an old boy's club, which was not necessarily good, but things could get done. Sam Rayburn used to say about the House, that you have to go along to get along. And in the Senate, there was an unspoken rule that a new Senator was not supposed to make any speeches for a year or two.
All that changed when Newt started rabble rousing. The country would be much better off if he had gotten tenure at that school in Georgia where he was teaching.
A religious asylum for the Republican Theocrats sounds good to me - Death Valley perhaps? Or banishment and deportation?
Ocean: I second the motion... but do understand, they're all over the world now influencing (when not backing) conservative causes. Too bad Australia is already taken... although as a result of global warming, Siberia IS warming. Hey, if a charismatic enough Evangelical TV snake-oil salesmen got on board to convince the flock that Jesus' anticipated return would be THERE (I'm sure obscure bits of Biblical scripture hobbled together could make for a cogent enough narrative to convince much of this ilk), the exodus just might begin!
I find it quite hard to comphrehend that this society with all its educated people has become the disinfomation society. The exact opposite of what was once so highly touted. The English certainly understood divide and conquer. That tactic is fully in force today. Turn its people against one another. Commonsense thrown out the window along with all the gains "ordinary people" have made over the past 60 plus years. Ronald Regan once said" poor people are poor because they want to be". Pablum for all the monied people to make them feel that they deserve to be better off. Poor people are lazy etc. etc. I used to think the US was an evolving society. The society is devolving into insanity.
Vaclav Havel wrote an essay in 1978 "The Power of the Powerless"
< http://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/165havel.html >
these are just paragraphs 8 and 9
{8}Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the repository of something suprapersonal and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves. It is a very pragmatic but, at the same time, an apparently dignified way of legitimizing what is above, below, and on either side. It is directed toward people and toward God. It is a veil behind which human beings can hide their own fallen existence, their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo. It is an excuse that everyone can use, from the greengrocer, who conceals his fear of losing his job behind an alleged interest in the unification of the workers of the world, to the highest functionary, whose interest in staying in power can be cloaked in phrases about service to the working class. The primary excusatory function of ideology, therefore, is to provide people, both as victims and pillars of the post-totalitarian system, with the illusion that the system is in harmony with the human order and the order of the universe. . . .
{9}The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah...we all get it . The Republicans are insane! People who read and respond here at CD know that.
The problem, as many of us keep saying, is the Lack of Effective Opposition to that Insanity. The problem is the effing Democrats.
The points expressed in this article would make a good platform from which to run for office. Will democrats do that? Will pigs fly through a frozen hell?
I am sick unto despair of Democrats, Obama in particular, desperately seeking bi-partisan consensus and compromise with this bunch of greedheads whose policies have brought (with Democratic help) the country to the sorry state it's in.
They don't need to be compromised with or accommodated. They need to be exposed! The simple truth is that conservative policies, which have been in the driver's seat for a generation and more, are a FAILURE!
There is a mountain of evidence out there that this is so. Once we accept the fact that the Dems don't use that evidence because THEY SERVE THE SAME MASTERS as the Repubs everything becomes clearer.Third party now ! (In reality, it would be a second party)
Right on!
If Obama doesn't suddenly discover any testicles on himself, he's a one termer and we'll all suffer much worse.
No compromise is right!
This article is accurate but assumes that all readers and voters understand what the are being told. I was an honor student in philosophy at a major university and studied constitutional law at the graduate level. I had to apply to the dean of the English dept. to attend a critical thinking class that was only for honor students.
I found out how little I understood of philosophy, critical thinking or law. It is assumed critical thinking is intuitive like being a parent and we know that this is incorrect at both levels. Until we address this issue in education and learning at all levels, you cannot expect a positive outcome in elections.
Faith--anti-rational, anti-woman, anti-science, anti-progress, anti-human--is ALWAYS evil.
Brian,
This is good writing, and entertaining reading!
So much truth to it! Well done!
I think Mark Twain would be so proud!
Bill in Dubuque
The need for more regulation is secondary to the need for more accountability. For example, why do we still have a $75 million cap on oil spill liability?
The big egg scare that gave impetus to the truly Orwellian "Food Safety" law came from a company with several previous citings for poor sanitation but they were allowed to remain in business.
Regulations are useless if not enforced and perpetrators not held accountable.
Bares repeating: The Republicans and the Democrats are two cheeks on the same Ass. Collusion extraodinaire! Guess what we can soon use that paper money for??