They're Stark Raving Mad!

Last weekend, after Gavin Newsom defeated the attempted Republican recall, I was back at the Democratic club's booth at the farmers market. During the weeks leading up to the recall election the magalomaniacs were bellicose, obnoxious, and often in my face. So I expected magalomaniacs, dyspeptic from an over indulgence of sour grapes, to come spew their bile at me. I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that they came nowhere near me. I was also pleased by the number of people congratulating us and expressing their pleasure over the failure of the recall. But the celebration was short lived as reality set in. An agitated lady came up to us. She was pointing in the general direction of the Republicans, and she said: “They're insane, those people down there are insane. They're stark raving mad!” She told us that she had been accosted by a harpy who was screaming inane conspiracy theories and insisting that Trump had actually won the presidential election. The assessment of the those Republicans being insane was spot on. Unfortunately, it is evident to me that the entire Republican Party has gone stark raving mad!

I am sorry but insanity is the only plausible explanation for the self destructive actions of the Republican Party. How else do you explain why they are encouraging their followers to die of stupid by not getting vaccinated and by opposing the wearing of masks. I am not being hyperbolic here. Taking the vaccines and other measures to get the pandemic under control is literally a matter of life and death. Not being content with this deadly idiocy, the Republicans are also threatening to destroy our economy, and that is not an exaggeration either.

It is bad enough that the Republicans are threatening to shut down the government by filibustering the budget bill, but they are going way beyond that. Moscow Mitch is saying that he and other Republicans will prevent us from raising then debt ceiling again. Lets take a look at the debt ceiling.  At best it was and is a sop to the dumb asses. The debt ceiling dates back to WWI and was supposed to make it easier to finance the war through the sale of bonds by removing the requirement for congress to approve each issuance of the bonds to be sold. The problem with the debt ceiling, however, is that it does not serve its intended purpose. Rather than preventing us from incurring the “dreaded” debts it gives the economic terrorists, who falsely claim to be conservatives, a convenient way to repudiate our debts and thereby blow up the world's economy! The last time the Republicans used the debt ceiling as a weapon against the Democrats the credit rating agency, Standard & Poor's, downgraded the credit rating of the United States, stripping the world's largest economy of its prized AAA status.  This was a wake up call. The consequences of destroying the full faith and credit of the United States are so dire that even the Koch brothers told Ted Cruz we had to raise the debt ceiling the last time he threatened to oppose raising it.

Does Mitch McConnell have dementia? Has he forgotten that the financial backers of the Republican Party stand to lose billions of dollars if Moscow Mitch carries through on his insane threat? I know I keep saying this regardless of the fact that the Republicans have been ignoring the will of the majority for decades with no consequences, but there has to come a time when the people say enough. The Republicans are literally killing people, and they are taking away the right to vote. They are a real and very grave threat to our democracy and our economy. They are opposing the will of the majority by trying once more to overturn Roe v. Wade. They are opposing all measures to deal with climate change, and they oppose economic policies that more than 60% of the voters favor. How much further can the Republicans go before the voters grant them their death wish? Clearly it is essential for us to get rid of the damn filibuster so that we can protect the economy and the democracy of this nation. If the corporate Democrats, such as Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, refuse to do what needs to be done, then they must pay a high price for not protecting this country from the lunatics!

Babbling At Planet Earth

More than ever we poor earthlings are being bombarded with the irrational, hateful, and fearful babbling of the right wing. No place or person is spared from this onslaught. Even in deep blue California there are little dumb assistans that serve as sound boxes shouting out the disinformation with all the fanatical fervor one expects of deranged, true believers. To be a Republican today you must slavishly repeat the absurdities promoting and/or reflecting the fear and loathing base Republicans so desperately crave. “All your problems are caused by those other people, those brown or black people, those foreign people,” the Republican demagogues say. “Furthermore, getting vaccinated against the Covid virus will do terrible things to you, and mandating the vaccinations and/or masks will destroy your freedom and our democracy” (even though some vaccines, such as the one for small pox, have been around since the seventeen hundreds). Those demagogues falsely claim that compulsory vaccinations are unconstitutional, but the legal precedents could not be clearer.  As early as 1905, in the case of Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11, the United States Supreme Court ruled that laws mandating compulsory vaccinations are constitutional, and this decision has been upheld in numerous cases over the decades. Ah, but in the right wing alternate universe laws and logic do not matter. It would never dawn on someone afflicted with the right wing mental disability to ask why the Covid vaccine would be so dangerously different than all the vaccines that have been required by schools and other institutions for decades.

Unfortunately, it is not just the rejection of science that makes the Republicans so dangerously, and viciously stupid. What makes them so dangerously stupid is their rejection of any fact or reality that contradicts what they want to believe. One of the factors that allows the right wingers to shut out all inconvenient truth is the fact that they tend to live in clusters we rational beings refer to as dumb assistans. This clustering is important because one of the most prominent features of the right wing mental disability is the inability to process information or evidence that seems abstract or remote. For instance, right wingers will believe that any election they lose in California cannot be a legitimate election even though 46.5% of registered voters in California are Democrats, 24.1% are Republicans, and 24.1% state no part preference,. They will believe the election is fraudulent even though surveys show that 52% of voters stating no party preference lean Democratic, and the last time a Republican was elected governor was in 2006. The right wing Republicans refuse to believe that California is a deep blue state because all of their friends and probably their family members are Republicans, and if you have the right wing mental disability your anecdotal evidence always beats any empirical data.

One of the more remarkable consequences of these Republican delusions is the inability to understand that merely smearing Gavin Newsom in their effort to recall him is not enough. Rather than offering a viable alternative to Newsom, the Republicans are voting for an extreme right wing idiot who denies climate change, is an anti-vaxxer, dumps on immigrants, and thinks white people should be compensated for losing their slaves after the civil war. As an old white guy, it is not my place to tell anyone how to be black, but I do not think anyone, and particularly a person of color, should advocate compensating former slave owners for losing the “property” taken from them. Gavin Newsom could not be given a greater advantage than the one that now allows him to run against Elder.

Voter Fraud! The Republican demagogues obviously know how unlikely it is that Californians will recall their Democratic governor. I say this because several days before the election the Republicans began their assault on democracy by screaming voter fraud! Everyone who has a triple digit IQ and is not suffering from the Right Wing Stupid disability is saying no, it is the Republicans who are trying to commit the fraud! Their unconscionable cry of voter fraud is an incitement evoking images of the attempted coup de'tat of January 6. It is a tactic right out of the fascist playbook, and it is as un-American as you can get. The Republicans are dying of stupid, and they are trying to take democracy and Democrats with them!  They would rather meet us all in hell than to share power with the emerging minorities!

I watched the election returns with great anticipation last night. California is a blue state, and I was sure that it would do the right thing. I was not disappointed. Congratulations California! Kudos to my fellow citizens! The shrieking and babbling from the alternate universe still assault our ears and the danger posed by irrational and paranoid people is still too real, but our feet are firmly grounded on planet earth as we chart a course based on reality.