Daily Kos Week in Review: Inhuman Events
Memo to Republicans: you have no business celebrating the Fourth of July. That was the word this week from one Kossack, who charged that today's "degenerate, treasonous" GOP spits on the Enlightenment values that the Declaration of Independence embodies.
As usual, each headline is preceded by the blogger's name or pseudonym.
Troubadour: It's a self-evident truth that Republicans are disgusting
Few documents in world history have united resounding moral clarity with long-term political success and human liberation, but even among that class the United States Declaration of Independence soars...And the degenerate, treasonous, corrupt nightmare that is the 21st-century Republican Party has turned every last bit of it on its head...
...[I]f Republicans ever bothered to read the Declaration rather than just mindlessly trying to wield it as a symbol...of power, they would probably denounce it as Communism or at very least naive, bleeding-heart nonsense. It dares to say that rights spring from humanity rather than from money, power, and bottomless malice toward their fellow human beings - the only sources of Republican political influence - and it further dares to say that these facts are obvious. This is why Republicans cannot tolerate or permit open, substantive debate whenever the power exists to sabotage, corrupt, or derail it, because they will always lose when their ideology is subjected to even the slightest intelligent scrutiny. They represent the Anti-Enlightenment - the darkening of the human mind and extinguishing of rational free will beneath unexamined impulse in furtherance of power. In place of arguments, they can offer only an unending and infinitely varied river of bald-faced lies, distractions, fallacies, and thought-terminating cliches.
The Declaration says that life is an inherent right of a person, and you may not kill them simply because you find them inconvenient, or want something they have, or hate them for being different than you. Republicans reject this self-evident moral absolute with the sneering contempt of a predator enjoying its prey's squeals, and take evident pride in the execution of innocents and people medically incapable of responsible judgment - they feel it shows how tough they are that they place zero value on any human life that isn't theirs or directly kindred to them...
Not even the British monarchy against whom we fought in war comes close to reflecting the mentality of Republicans - in point of fact, the British monarchy of the 18th century was far more civilized, humane, and rational than the GOP today...
Crashing Vor: A few questions for the GOP base
...You fuckin' stupid or what? Want me to spell it? You read, right? Know numbers and shit?...
I know there's some shit you do know. I see you poring over the gun magazines and hear you talking about relative muzzle velocities and takedown loads. Since you're so smart about guns, you do know that, since George Bush left office, gun laws have gotten less strict, how it's easier now to travel and go on vacation with loaded and concealed pieces, right? Or are you just fuckin' stupid?
I notice you've still got private health insurance. I see your boy's still on your policy, too, even though he's out of school. So I figure you understand the law you call Obamacare didn't end health insurance as we know it, right? Nobody's sent you to any death panels, have they? You dig it's the same system with a little more access, don't you? Or are you just fuckin' stupid?...
Or is it something else?
Are you pretending to be stupid, playing a big, old stupid game of stupid, hoping that if everyone stays stupid enough, maybe they'll vote against a guy who you don't happen to like? Is that it? Hoping stupid's gonna win the day?
Even worse, are you trying to make other people stupid, so they'll vote the way you want them to?
There's no sin in being stupid, though there is a price. But trying to make other people stupid for your own game, yeah that's a sin. Pretty damn serious one, too.
So, are you fuckin' stupid? Or fuckin' evil?
RobLewis: The rich are proudly pro-feudalism
...[T]he filthy rich and their bought-and-paid-for politicians seem to have gotten a lot more blatant lately about just telling the rest of us "Screw you. We're no longer even pretending that some gift we want will have those wondrous (if elusive) trickle-down effects...We're taking what we want because we can, and that's it"...
The poster boy for this "new callousness" is, of course, Mitt Romney...
But I think something else may be going on, and it's this: the Right has simply picked all the low-hanging fruit in their campaign to restore feudalism. All they've got left are things that are so egregious that there's simply no way to put a middle-class-friendly face on them. Thanks to their BFF Supreme Court, they can now buy any election they want, so why waste time even pretending to care about the 99%?...
Killer of Sacred Cows: The Aurora shootings tie in with American exceptionalism
...[W]e keep seeing the MSM talking heads endlessly speculating on why [Holmes] did it. But notice - nobody is going to bring up "the American Culture Is Violent" as a reason, because that would mean it's not just about this one crazy lone gunman, but about US. And that means we might have to change.
The problem with that is getting past the mental and emotional resistance of those who continue to believe that we're the best country in the world, the best culture ever produced by human beings, and the best everything else...
It's the American culture of violence that allows a dipshit like Louis Gohmert, (R) Idiotsville, to claim that more violence will somehow solve the problem of violence and to know that the majority of his supporters will agree with him...It's very likely the American culture of violence that causes people like James E. Holmes to do what he did - one person on my Facebook page said "I find it interesting that the automatic reaction is that this is diminished mental capacity, instead of a reaction to a system." That's because we can't handle the fact that diminished mental capacity often comes about AS a reaction to a system...
