The “Republican” Idea of Freedom: Forced Sterilization of Women, and No Privacy for Anyone.

Starting with the poor, but not stopping there.
We’ll let this senior GOP official lay out his party’s “conservative” vision:

“You put me in charge of Medicaid, the first thing I’d do is get Norplant, birth-control implants, or tubal ligations,” said Russell Pearce on his weekly talk radio program. Then we’ll test recipients for drugs and alcohol, and if you want to [reproduce] then get a job.”

He also suggested Spartan accommodations and strict rules for anyone who received government housing assistance.

“Ever live in a military barracks?” he said. “You’ll maintain your property in a clean, good state of repair, and your home will be subjected to an inspection at any time, possessions will be inventoried. If you want a plasma TV or an X-Box 360, then get a job.”

Got that? Forced surgery, like they do in China, and did in Nazi Germany. No Constitutional rights, like they do in Russia and Iran. You will have no rights at all, none, zip, nada. That is the Repub agenda, and has been for the entire century (remember the Patriot Act?).

Why the f*** is anybody voting for these Fascist bastards? And why the f*** isn’t everybody voting against them? Christ on a ballot box, people, we need to wake the f***ing f*** up.

Mr. Blunt and Cranky

“Sovereign Citizen” found mentally incompetent.

An Ohio man named Mark Kulis, who was busted for having his house wired up with half a dozen bombs, a terrorist to be precise, has just been committed to 6 months locked up in the nut hatch in the hopes that he can be brought a bit closer to sanity. The hope is that he can at least understand that he has been doing illegal and dangerous things to himself and those around him. And with that understanding, be tried for his crimes in accordance with the law.

This writer is struck by the similarities between this “sovereign citizen” and many others in our world today. It seems that frustration causes people to create alternate realities in their minds, and they live in those fantasylands instead of the world around them. A couple of examples:

Number A: Fox “News” viewers are, most of us have found, living in a dream world – one in which Commander Stuffed Flightsuit won the Global War on Terror, white people are superior, poor people are evil, and Obama is everything bad/nothing good. And you Can. Not. Reach. Them. Not with logic, not with facts, not even with what is happening to themselves and their children. No, the echo chamber has captured their minds, and they cannot absorb anything from outside of the Cones of Silence in which they dwell.

Letter 2: Vladimir Putin and his Petersburg Posse have convinced themselves that their lives suck because of the collapse of several Russian empires, and that the way to un-suck said lives is to create a new and improved Russian empire. So far, it’s not going very well for anyone, but that isn’t stopping them. In their minds, they are hammers pounding on nails, and the fact that the problems are, say, open-heart surgery instead of nails does not register. They see nails because they want to see nails, and they swing their hammers, breaking people and countries in the real world that they refuse to see.

These are only two examples of many, of course. And it’s a problem. We cannot lock up hundreds of thousands of people in psych wards, no matter how badly they may need treatment. And until the lot of them wake up from their dreams, the entire planet is at risk.

Just as the poor, deluded Mr. Kulis could have blown up the houses of his neighbors along with his own because of what he firmly believes to be true, people like John McCain and Vladimir Putin could blow up the planet. They may have a more socially acceptable version of insanity, but they aren’t any more sane than he, and their insanity can kill a lot more people.

Until we all live in the same, evidence-based, real world, we are at risk. All we can do is reach the reachable and teach the teachable, and hope that’s enough.

Mr. Blunt and Cranky

If You Don’t Know the Meaning of a Word, Don’t Use the Word

People often tag politicians with labels that may or may not fit.  Sometimes they are exaggerations, sometimes they are accurate, and sometimes they leave one scratching one’s head.  Following are three definitions, and two Prexies to whom one or more of the labels have been applied:

Nazi:  shorthand for “National Socialist German Worker’s Party”; believed in the inferiority of Jews, Gyspys, Blacks, and pretty much anybody who wasn’t  a lily-white Aryan; also that when in doubt, ask yourself “What Would Adolph Do?”

Communist: member or supporter of the Communist Party; believes in a theory or system of social organization based on the holding of all property in common, actual ownership being ascribed to the community as a whole or to the state.

Socialist: An advocate or believer in socialism; a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole.

A whole helluva lot of people used to call Gee Dubya Bush a Nazi. Pretty clearly, he was not (yes, yes, we all know about the family history. Mr. Blunt and Cranky’s paternal grandfather used to run factories that made tanks in WWII, but he can neither build nor drive a tank himself.  Not everything gets handed down via DNA, ya know.), but people said it anyway, even though it was and is patently obvious that he is not a Nazi.

Quite a few people call Barack Obama one or all of the three. Pretty clearly, he is not.  If he were a Nazi, he would have to consider himself at least half-inferior. If he were either a commie or a socialist, he wouldn’t have kept the piles of money he has made over the years. Nonetheless, people say it anyway, even though it was and is patently obvious that he is none of these three things.

Disliking politicians is a venerated and longstanding practice, and this writer likes to think he does it well. He also likes to think he picks labels that actually make a wee bit of sense, and that match up with the actual meanings of the labels. But then, Mr. B & C rarely watches network “news” programs and never listens to the pundits on talk radio, so he has an advantage in that he gets less propaganda and fewer lies crammed into his skull on a daily basis.

Plus, he reads a friggin’ dictionary when he wants to know the meaning of a word.

Next time: What do they mean when they say “never”?