Veering toward insanity

Elderly British couple serve cake,
cheese, and wine, to celebrate
their refrigerator’s 50th birthday.

Having long ago written off any chance for the long-term survival of our species, I believe we are now approaching a level of mass insanity that makes me wonder even about our short-term survival. Would you ever have imagined a time when apparently substantial numbers of people in the United States do not want their children to hear a motivational talk by their President? I have just been told that the Bonners Ferry School Board apparently voted 5-0 to tell our Superintendent to not allow our school children to hear Obama! I hope this is not true, but I fear it is. This is a very conservative community, but I did not realize until just now it might be veering so close to insanity. This is by no means the only community that is ostracizing Obama. This has to be totally unprecedented, to say nothing of so fundamentally silly as to make you wonder where such people even come from. Apart from the racism that I’m sure is part of the reason, there is another reason having to do with widespread ignorance being stoked by irrational fears being deliberately promulgated by “leaders” of the Republican Party. Most Presidents talk to students at some point, Reagan did (and actually mentioned to them cutting taxes), Bush the First did, likewise, and asked them to help him. No one worried about them “indoctrinating” anyone. Part of this is just current Republican politics, do anything and everything to bring down Obama. Obama’s speech to the children is supposed to be released in advance on Monday (I guess they just couldn’t wait to find out that Obama was going to tell the children to stay in school and work hard). Pawley of Minnesota says he is worried about Obama’s ”intentions and motivation,” a crock of BS if ever there was one. What I find of most interest about all of this, is that these Party spokespersons are themselves often totally ignorant of what they are talking about. There are many examples of this in the past few months.

Remember Sarah Palin’s mockery of providing funds for fruit fly research, the very type of research that was being done to learn more about the health problems of one of her own children. Then there was Bobby Jindal’s mockery of funds for studying volcanoes, two weeks before a volcanic eruption. And don’t forget more recently when another one of these uninformed loudmouths railed against socialized medicine and ended by proclaiming, “but leave my medicare alone.”Similarly, just the other day another one, speaking to a 44 year-old man demanded to know, “If medicare is so great why aren’t you on it.” There is also dear old “Buster Keaton-like” Senator Grassley of Iowa who proclaimed, “I’m against a public option because we stand for choice.” At least Buster had the good sense to keep his mouth shut. Then there is “Marvelous” Michelle Bachman, anti-abortionist, who cried out emotionally, “I will never allow the government to tell me what to do with my body,” or something to that effect. More recently she has claimed that Democrats want her out of office, “Because she might become President.” She has also said that she would run for President “If God tells me to,” and health care reform can be defeated by “prayer and fasting.” In this she joins disgraced Governor Sanford who now refuses to resign “Because God tells me I am doing the right thing,” or something to that effect. John McCain has made a career of making fun of serious scientific projects by labeling them “pork,” either because he did not understand them or because he had massive pork projects of his own to hypocritically tout. Mike Huckabee recently reported that Obama wants people, when faced with serious decisions about end-of-life issues, to just “take a pain pill and go home and die.” Several Republicans have reiterated the claim that Obama’s health care plan is really a plot to kill old people, and/ or women with breast cancer, and/or children with handicaps, and/or even Republicans. To say these people do not know what they are talking about is absolutely true, unless they do know and are just deliberately lying. I think what is happening is that they are so opposed to Obama they just blurt out anything without even bothering to think about what they are saying, or the possible consequences of it. When they say they do not believe in the theory of evolution, as some of them, like Huckabee do, it is obvious they do not know what they are talking about. They might know they don’t believe in it, but they have no idea what it is or what it is all about. Similarly, the “tenthers” in Georgia claim the tenth amendment gives them the right to refuse to participate in a Federal Health Plan, and perhaps even the right to secede. They do not know what they are talking about. And surely no one believes that Obama can truly be compared with Hitler. And when they accuse Obama of socialism, it is obvious they don’t know socialism from, as someone suggested, botulism. Like DeLay, they don’t engage their brains and their mouths simultaneously. Either they just don’t know what they are talking about, or when they do, they are lying. I guess George W. Bush, our first retarded President, set the standard for Republicans to just carry on their babbling no matter what, our country be damned. After all, what do we need health care for anyway? Why should we try to do anything about the recession? The free market and privatization has worked so well, why try to change it? Look around, insanity, it’s spreading by leaps and bounds.

LKBIQ:
In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.
Mark Twain

TILT:
It is said that the purest salt in the world comes from the Himalayas.