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Edited on Fri Aug-26-05 02:51 PM by arendt
GOP - The party of Money, Maternity, and Mayhem by arendt
When George McGovern ran for president, the alliterative asshole and crook, Spiro Agnew, dubbed the Democrats "the party of acid, amnesty and abortion". Its about time we returned the favor.
You can sum up the GOP as the theocratic party of money, maternity, and mayhem.
Money
For the GOP, money-ness is next to godliness. If you have money, you can do no wrong - mainly because you can tie the legal system up in knots for decades. The GOP attitude is straight out of Sierra Nevada: "Laws, we don't need no steenkeen' laws." And, on the off- chance that legal stonewalling fails, you can either have a line written into a Congressional omnibus bill in the middle of the night; or you can pay for a Presidential pardon. Its all do-able if you have the cash.
The only Golden Rule the GOP lives by is "He who has the gold makes the rules." And they have given the U.S. quite a demonstration of that rule over the last quarter century. First, they bought the media. With the bought media and another pile of cash, they bought the Congress. With control of Congress, they instantly bought their way out of US laws by ramming WTO and NAFTA down our throats. Their penultimate purchase was the stealing of the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004. Their final purchase will be the Supreme Court, which they are about to pack with more worshippers of mammon. And, to transition to our second point, with more worshippers of pregnancy.
Maternity
The GOP can't come right out and say they think women are second class citizens, slaves to the pater familias. Their tactic is to reduce women to the one thing they can do that men can't and don't want to do: be pregnant. So, women are only talked about in a positive light as baby-making machines (and collaterally, as sex objects). Its "Kinder, Kucher, und Kultur" all over again.
But, as the saying goes, for the GOP, life begins at conception and ends at birth. There is absolutely no support for parents in the GOP platform. They want to gut social programs and rely on faith-based initiatives. They may be for maternity, but they sure don't support motherhood.
The ever-more-overbearing Culture Warriors clearly want to reduce women back to breeding stock with no legal rights - especially no reproductive rights. No abortion even in case of rape, incest, or lethal complications of pregnancy. And, no advice whatsoever about birth control. (You think its only abortion they want to outlaw? Wake up!) The idiocy of their chock-full-o-scientific-lies "abstinence only" campaign is on display in an Ohio high school, where 65 out of 490 girls are pregnant. Still, the GOP fanatics stick to their guns (more on that in a minute). They claim these maternities are "punishment" for bad behavior.
If there's one thing the GOP can't abide its uppity women. Their definition of uppity is any woman who isn't barefoot, pregnant, ignorant, and submissive to whatever shitbag claims her as chattel. They want women's political voice silenced, with their husbands speaking for them. That is the message of Promise Keepers, the Southern Baptist Conference, and the non-stop corporate barrage of pregnancy promotion.
This very week, the supermarket magazine covers are full of pregnant Brittany Spears, Jen and Ben's baby, and any other celebrity who might even be thinking about having a kid. On TV, they are rolling out a prime-time series called "Inconceivable" - about problem pregnancies.
This is starting to be a bad remake of John Carpenter's "They Live" without the aliens. (Remember the billboard: "Consume and Reproduce".)
Mayhem
Its not my line, but: "When did matters of Life and Death become matters of Sex and Violence?" We've covered the sex in the last section. Now, let's talk about the cesspool of violent words and violent deeds into which the GOP have thrown America.
As remarked above, the GOP's first purchase was its own, private propaganda machine. In that machine live some of the most violent people ever to be given a public microphone in a democracy. These people aren't interested in discussing important matters. They have no respect for anyone else's ideas. If someone disagrees with their ideas, the response is more and more frequently to threaten to kill that person. Pat Robertson, a 48 carat phony and hypocrite who plays a preacher on TV, called for assasination. The wacko minister Fred Phelps is "going hunting" for the King of Sweden. Ann Coulter wants to kill the liberals, the Moslems, and anyone who calls her on her lies. (Pehaps I left out a fourth "M", messenger-shooting.)
Their next purchase has been legislation that loosens the rules on violence. We have the lunacy of "concealed carry" laws in many states - even in Churches! Who would Jesus shoot? We have military recruiters running violent video game websites. We have vigilante Minutemen terrorizing the Mexican border. We have bounty hunters and trigger-happy SWAT teams (Amadou Dialou). How long before the British example of murdering innocents in cold-blood on suspicion of terrorism is done right here.
But the word "mayhem" connotes more than just violence. The dictionary definition is: needless or willful damage or violence. The GOP has loosed mayhem on America. They have willfully damaged the health care system by interposing the ultimate useless middlemen, the HMOs. They have willfully drained the treasury, damaging our current and future livelihoods. They have looted corporations, with Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom being just the biggest cases. They have encouraged people to fight first and think later, if at all. The media have taught the populace to be rude, crude, ignorant, beer-swilling, voyeuristic, nationalistic louts. Survivor and its ilk are nothing but training classes in Social Darwinistic mayhem and ostracism of "the different".
In short, to impose their ferociously authoritarian state upon the rest of us, the GOP have not scrupled to deliberately disrupt legitimate authority. They are like the drunk who smashes up the house and then demands a divorce because his wife is a lousy housekeeper.
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Someone should print this as a bumper sticker, and give a link on the sticker to where this rant is posted. Everyone should recognize the 3M sloagan as shorthand for the GOP religion, where money is god; maternity is all women are good for; and mayhem is god's way.
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