Silencing the President?

Cricket-spitting contest so
successful it will become
annual event in Wisconsin

Well, Obama’s speech to our school children has come and gone. The whole controversy was of course much ado about nothing. That did not keep the right-wing lunatics from trying to actually muzzle the President of the United States, a totally unprecedented, stupid, and outrageous attempt. People could have simply not listened to the President, as people sometimes do, but trying to prevent the President from speaking at all is quite another matter. This was simply another fascist tactic, a continuation of their attempts to shout down speakers at town hall and other meetings, so they would not be permitted to exercise their right of free speech. Instead of having serious discussions about a very important topic, we witnessed chaos, just as they intended. I think their attempt to muzzle those they did not want to hear has backfired. It never should have been allowed in the first place. When the Republican “Brown Shirts” descended on Florida to shut down the vote count with their beating on doors and shouting, they should have been arrested then and there. When nothing happened to them, they now think they can employ the same tactics elsewhere, even to the point of carrying guns to ordinary citizen meetings. The attempt to keep Obama from speaking to our children is merely an extension of this same shameless anti-American behavior.

Speaking more generally, the old adage, “You reap what you sow,” is proving true once again. Having sown the seeds of ignorance, fertilized them, and encouraged them to grow, we are now seeing the outcome. By failing to adequately fund education, disvaluing learning, and encouraging anti-intellectualism for so many years we are now seeing the results. We have a large population that cannot read above about the level of the eighth grade, that by and large doesn’t read at all, that thinks those with an education are no better equipped than those without, that prefers their leaders to be every bit as ignorant as they are, that spends hours of each day being bombarded by such intelligent advertising as talking bumblebees, cookies, vegetables, cars, even the branches of trees, and who watch television programming so stupid and insipid as to deaden brain cells. It is little wonder our country is dissolving into the third world by leaps and bounds. Even if they try to watch “news,” all they find is misinformation and outright lies offered by those with a vested interest in keeping us all at the lowest common denominator. We now lag far behind many other countries with respect to science and engineering and many other things, and certainly behind most Europeans in knowledge of world events. We are, I’m afraid, unusually ignorant people.

Obama, quite soon, is going to have to “fish or cut bait.” Not only will he have to announce tomorrow what he really supports by way of health reform, he will soon have to decide whether to send even more troops to his Afghanistan “Vietnam.” Additionally, he is going to have to decide what to do about Israeli arrogance and their continuing to expand in the West Bank. These are certainly not envious problems for someone to have, and how he tries to deal with them will tell us a great deal about our President. At least it appears he has pretty much given up on his futile attempt at bipartisanship. It has become so obvious that Republicans are not going to act in good faith, and will oppose everything and anything he wants to accomplish, that no other conclusion is possible. Being a genuine liberal, I hope Obama will force through a health care reform, with a public option, without Republican support (just as medicare was passed), and the Republicans will never recover from their attempt to feed the Insurance companies at the expense of the public. Their behavior with respect to the Obama administration, and specifically health care, has been shameful in the extreme. They seem quite incapable of understanding that “American (and White) exceptionalism” and their outdated Social Darwinism are things of the past, just as they seem to be unaware that we are now in the 21st century, not the 18th or even 19th or 20th, and that the rest of the world is increasingly passing us by. Their irrational fear and hatred of anything Obama is so intense they seem willing to sacrifice the nation itself.

LKBIQ:
We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

TILT:
Most lemur species feature female dominance.