The Illogic of the Passionate Right

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Let’s discuss the Right Wing of the Republican Party. There is not much left of the Republican Party but the Right Wing. And who are they?

Sarah Palin is a darling of the Right Wing. It is difficult not to be insulting when speaking of this lady. She is a lovely person with a nice family. But she has no business being in politics. Politics is governance. And governance is, therefore, serious business despite all the political jokes and all the haranguing by people like Rush Limbaugh who makes government sound like some kind of party in Las Vegas. People’s lives are at stake, and their incomes and their children’s futures. If you make serious mistakes, to which Sarah Palin’s seeming lack of knowledge would presage, you should not be in a position to affect people’s lives. She, for example, maintained erroneously that the health care plans in the House and in the Senate, or perhaps one of them…she didn’t specify but simply, again erroneously, referred to them as “the President’s plan” would include panels of doctors and bureaucrats who would decide on whether someone would live or die. This is nowhere in any legislation, but she could potentially be in a position of governmental power and not know that, which would be significant. And if she does not know that, a very simple issue, how could she be expected to deal with the issues of long-term Social Security viability or Medicare provisions that she might or might not recommend. She clearly has no background in anything, no education, no reading, not even any learned experience, apparently, from her couple of years as governor of Alaska, a state with a population less than the Greater Omaha area.

William Kristol is a significant member of the Right Wing. He is the editor of the Weekly Standard, a long-time publication advocating a weak central government and a virtually unlimited and unregulated gun ownership and usage and a strong military with the power in the Presidency to simply declare war on another country at will and for the unlimited power of the very wealthy to control all political messages. This may sound like Germany, 1933, but it is actually his position. He would, we can assume, stop at executions of political opponents. Therefore, he would say, he does not quite advocate the same as those political regimes. But he approved of all those aspects of the Bush Administration, including Karl Rove’s attempts to bring all regional U.S. Attorneys under control of the White House.

Given the educational system these days, we must apparently point out that the significance is that, under those circumstances, i.e., White House control of all regional U.S. Attorneys,  the President would be able to order anyone in any state investigated, indicted and arrested at any time. That includes just before elections, as Rove tried to do prior to elections. Another of Rove’s policies was to bring in a group of people who believe the same thing as Kristol, mentioned above, to approve all District Judge appointments. Given the fact that part of the approval process was both compatible religious and imperialist political theories, that part, the establishment of political courts, is not unlike Germany in 1933 also.

Those two are probably sufficient examples of  the kinds of people on the Right Wing. So now we go to the people on the street who have been campaigning, and in the context of following the political philosophy of Palin, Kristol and Rove. The Right Wing of the Republican Party espouses certain principles demonstrated by the previous Administration, namely, a) you need no knowledge of outcomes, merely a belief that you are right based on your own opinion, or facts that you create to confirm your opinion b.) political power, violence, and total control are components of one theory of governing that is acceptable in a democracy, and c.) it is part of governing to take control of all aspects of government, the domestic enforcement of justice issues, i.e., the prosecutorial and court systems completely filled with people of your political persuasion, qualified or not, and then rule rather than govern, creating classifications of people to be shown privileges or favoritism based on their loyalty to the Party.

In order to do this and yet maintain a theoretically free, democratic society, it is necessary to deliver messages about what is happening to the people in such a way that they will not object. In such a society, large numbers of people will not be in control and the actions of the government will ultimately damage their lives. The next step, therefore, is to deliver messages…not necessarily factual…that will persuade these people not to object, or demonstrate or revolt. The way to do this is by distraction, created by attacking and demonizing anyone who opposes you.  We have almost reached that situation. We now have enough private Right Wing media organizations who spread the messages that the Republican Party now wants people to hear that we can see the results of that success.  In Germany 1933, they confiscated the radio stations and put in their own propagandists, much like modern day Rupert Murdoch has done.

We now see people in the streets assembling and speaking freely who are carrying signs asking for their right to assemble and speak freely. This does not cause questions to be raised in the media, or even laughter, but reinforcing messages that this oxymoronic behavior is normal. So now we have people using their freedoms to complain that they do not have them. They create signs about a President who seems fanatically obsessed with impartiality that, paradoxically,  show him as a dictator. They complain about a government as being Socialist or Communist while that same government is trying desperately to create stability for the vast number of the marchers who have been hurt by wealthy, elite, financial interests.

The only logic one can take away is that, for some incomprehensible reason, these people do not want a recovery from recession, nor do they want to prohibit a speculative boom and bust  in the future, but ask that it be allowed to happen again. And the media supports that position. If they did want help, and not from a “Socialist” government, then wouldn’t logic demand that they be picketing Wall Street offices, health insurance companies and petroleum industry conglomerates? Or, on the other hand, if they felt that it was, indeed, government that caused their problems, since those problems began roughly in 2001 when there were surpluses that would go from the $181 billion in 2001 to $700 billion in 2008, and ended up in January of 2009 with $11 trillion in debt and a budget shortfall of  $1.76 trillion? Shouldn’t they be attacking that President and that Vice President, and those Members of Congress, especially all those that were elected before 2006, all those Republicans who controlled everything? There is something missing and it seems to be basic logic.

There are alternative explanations. All these people are just plain stupid. All these people are just plain racists. All these people, without exception, are Right Wing paid propagandists. Otherwise, the only explanation is that they have been persuaded by the  specious arguments of the Republican Right Wing through the endless stream of lies in the messages that they receive. One would think that,  if they have been lied to and they discover that they have been made to look stupid, look racist, look totalitarian–that they would be very, very angry. And not with a good and decent President, whose only fault seems to be that he tries to be too bi-partisan.