Malpractice

The Republicans have been fishing for votes in the shallow end of the IQ pool for over a decade now. I suppose the inevitable question is whether they have hooked stupid or stupid has hooked them. Either way, they now own it. What is amazing to me is how eager they are to display this stupidity. Anyone who advises the majority party in the House of Representatives to file a frivolous law suit against the President of the United States is guilty of political malpractice, and any attorney who advises the majority party in the House of Representatives to file such a suit is guilty of legal malpractice. But here we are; the party of stupid is actually going to file such a suit! From a legal standpoint, it is doubtful that the House of Representatives has the standing to file such a suit. From a political standpoint, the worst thing that could happen to the Republicans would be if a judge rules that they do have standing and the case is allowed to move forward.

The real problem for the Republicans is that their justifications for filing this suit are based on lies. Without the lies the Republicans have no grievance, and if they try to present those lies in court the truth will come out. Come on folks, the delay in implementing the individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act is the sort of administrative decision many Presidents have made in order to work out the kinks before a program takes full effect. It is also well established that President Obama did not ruin Medicare in order to pay for the Affordable Care Act, nor did he eliminate the work requirement from welfare. Furthermore, if the court rules that a President who issues an executive order is exceeding his authority, it will mean that most of our Presidents since WWII have exceeded their authority. In fact some Republican Presidents, such as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, have issued more executive orders than has President Obama. But none on that means anything to the Republicans, because they are too intellectually bankrupt to acknowledge any history or to think about what any given precedent could mean to them in the future.

The one thing you can bet on is that when the results of this suit prove to be unsatisfactory to the Republican base, there will be a great wailing and rending of all reason as those sanctimonious idiots accuse the judge or judges of having a liberal bias. There will also be a demand to relitigate the case in a different forum, meaning impeachment in the House of Representative and then a trial in the Senate. We all know how well it worked out for the Republicans when they impeached Bill Clinton!  Suicide anyone?  The self destruction of the Republican Party could be amusing if they do not take the political structure down with them. Therein lies the danger. If the GOP succeeds in removing President Obama from office, no Presidential election results will ever be considered final again. The Democrats have to have control of the Senate to prevent that!  Even then the Republicans will squander valuable resources on the frivolous law suit and outrageous impeachment precedings, while our economy will continue to suffer from the neglect and obstructionist tactics of the Republican Party.

Hold The Drama Please

Once more the media has cranked the drama up to absurd levels. No less than Andrea Mitchell was expressing her bewilderment and horror over President Obama’s refusal to visit the border where all those children were crossing into Texas from Mexico. She made it sound as though the President was fiddling while Washington was burning. Other supposedly objective reporters and pundits were also shaking their heads as they talked about the “optics.” What they meant by optics is nothing more than political eyewash. It did not look good for President Obama to stay away, they said. It made him look like he did not care. Some Republicans actually said this was Obama’s Katrina. But, of course, those Republicans simply do not get it and never will. What made President Bush’s fly over seem so callus was “You’re doing a heck of a job, Browny,” Barbara Bush’s comment about those poor people camped out in the Superdome being better off than they were in their homes before the storm, and the obvious neglect leading up to the storm!

I do not think we can call anyone on television a news reporter today. At best they are news casters and at worst they are salespersons. I am sure President Obama wishes his crystal ball had told him all those kids were coming. If he had known, he could have prepared for the crises by asking congress for the same funds they say he does not need in order to deal with the problem today. The fact that Republican Congressmen refuse to do what needs to be done about this and other immigration problems is a lot more important than political eyewash. So why is the news media calling President Obama’s refusal to provide them with the sight bites they demand a failure of leadership? Could it be that real neglect and intransigence are not as dramatic as the crap the demagogues can make up and the news casters can stir up? Got to draw the marks to the pitchmen, you know! It is all about selling the products.

Damn The Facts, Full Speed Astern!

The Republican Party is the party of extremes. It is the party that contains the most exploitive members of our society and the most exploitable members of our society. Not surprisingly, the exploitable members are mercilessly exploited and used as tools by the exploitive members. Amazingly, this relationship is symbiotic in its own fashion; which is to say that the exploited are willing victims, who feel grateful for anything that feeds their paranoia and their dark view of this world. Trying to reason with those masochists, or trying to present any facts that will make them realize they are being abused is a fool’s errand. They honestly believe that being the victim is a virtue, and it takes a very evil person to attack their virtue with inconvenient facts.

To those exploited people on the far right everything is a matter of faith; they rarely let a thought interfere with an established opinion, and they never let a fact change a belief. They are quick to brand as a heretical RINO anyone who would object to the excommunication of Galileo, Darwin, climatologists, gynecologists, psychiatrists, physicists, and/or instructors who dare to teach the empirical method or sex education. This is why the Republican Party has been dubbed the stupid party, and that is not good for the exploitive Republicans who need a viable national party to do their bidding. Unfortunately for the exploiters, reigning in the idiots they have been using as their attack dogs is a difficult thing to do. The bottom line is that the people who are so easily exploited are also so nihilistic and vicious that they are threatening to cause a catastrophic implosion of the Republican Party. At this point I am inclined to say good riddance. Nature abhors a vacuum, and a new party will emerge.

Impeachment

Last week I received an e-mail from some well intentioned people asking me to support their effort to impeach the five reactionary injustices comprising the majority on what is arguably the worst Supreme Court ever. I am certainly sympathetic to their grievances. There is no doubt that the decisions which have given the oligopoly the power of an oligarchy, have blurred the separation of church and state, and have eliminated the protection of some of our most basic civil rights are egregious decisions that are threatening to throw us back into an era so many people worked so hard and sacrificed so much to leave behind. That concerned citizens should seek a remedy for the damages being caused by those unjust decisions is perfectly understandable, but I object to the efforts to impeach Injustices Roberts, Alito, and Kennedy for the same reason that I objected to the impeachment of Bill Clinton and would have objected to the impeachment of George W. Bush. I cannot bear the thought of reasonable people thinking that I am acting like a liberal version of the dumb asses who are calling for the impeachment of President Obama.

Impeaching and removing anyone from his or her office or position is an extreme remedy. Please do not misunderstand what I am saying here. I do not think there is an equivalency between the Judicial reaction-ism of the Robert’s Court and the judicial activism of the Warren Court, but there was a large percentage of people who objected so strongly to the judicial activism of the Warren Court that they called for the impeachment of Chief Justice Warren. If it had been left to the public to decide, it is quite possible that Chief Justice Warren and other liberal justices would have been impeached. The point I am trying to make is that our founding fathers were correct in seeing the danger of a court that is too easily swayed by public opinion and/or political concerns.

So when is impeachment justified? You may have noticed that when I stated my objection to impeaching the Injustices on our present Supreme Court I did not include the names of Injustices Thomas and Scalia. There is a very significant difference between a Justice who makes horrible and harmful decisions because that Justice is a mindless ideologue and a Justice who makes horrible and harmful decisions because that justice has a conflict of interest. Injustices Thomas and Scalia fall onto the latter category. The fact that they refuse to recues themselves from cases in which they have a clear conflict of interest is a violation of judicial ethics. Furthermore, the decisions they have consistently made in those cases are precisely the decisions that confirm the biases you would expect to see as a result of those conflicts of interest. This smacks of corruption on their part, and it fully justifies the remedy of impeachment and removal from the court. My advice to the group that sent me the e-mail is to narrow your goal.

Still The Supreme Injustices

Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., et al v. Kathleen Sebelius. The majority opinion in this case speaks for itself. The five supreme injustices have once more demonstrated why historians will judge this court to be the worst ever! Freedom for them means freeing up businesses to exploit us and intrude in our lives. Please do not call this retrogressive court “conservative” because that is highly insulting to real conservatives. I am not going to mince words here. The five supreme injustices that form the majority of this court are the reactionary tools of the oligopoly!

Please support the people in your state who are trying to pass a constitutional amendment overturning the absurd ruling that corporations are people. Corporations have profit margins rather than souls.