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Thursday, August 12, 2010

And the dumb get dumber

I suppose that I should find it no surprise that the most conservative, most hateful candidate for governor, Nathan Deal, won his party's primary runoff this week in Georgia.  In a state whose largest city has one of the largest gay populations in the nation, there is certainly at least a 10% demographic of gays here.  So Deal's win is both frustrating, and frightening.  The vitriol-filled ads he ran in the runoff versus Karen Handel showed him to be an ultraconservative, homophobic hatemonger, willing to go to any extreme to win, and likely to do the same to appease the hateful Christians and Tea Party Taliban who supported him.  If he wins the November general election, who knows what will happen next.  Politicians these days are quick to change their views whenever the winds of political chance shift.  Deal is a cut-of-the-same-cloth as Sarah Putin and the rest of the Tea Party Taliban.  The Republican far right has their candidate machine in high gear and it's churning out new clones every day.  This is what happens when you cater to the lowest common denominator rather than to try to lift society to new heights.  Will Deal be the next one to promote secession from the Union?
On a different tangent, but one that will certainly work to serve the best interests of the ultracons, a new poll shows that most Americans now do not want the Federal government to fund or support the installation of high speed internet lines, something which the governments of many technology-leading nations has done to the benefit of its citizenry.  South Korea comes to mind, as well as...of all places...Romania(!), both of which have far higher internet speeds than the US.  Why wouldn't ultracons want high speed internet in everyone's home?  Because knowledge is power, and when a person can see that the world is marching on at the rate of 1 second per second, the ultracon's desire to go backwards to a mythical place and time, such as the 'Ozzie and Harriet' period, starts to come undone.  In the ultracon world, ignorance is power.  Ignorance keeps their constituency from knowing how much they're lied to on a daily basis by the ultracon media giant Faux News.  Ignorance keeps money flowing into the ultracon treasuries, much of it filtered through churches.  Ignorance allows them to spew lies, hate and vitriol without fear of the truth coming out.  Ignorance breeds suspicion, and in words from the film 'Brazil', "Suspicion breeds confidence".  
I'm always amazed at how ignorance has kept politicians from understanding that at some point, people will find a way to learn the truth.  That the actions of the conservatives to keep themselves in power at the expense of the voting public will some day come to light.  That the lie about progressives or liberals creating Big Brother can be disproved by simply asking and answering this question:  Was it a conservative or a progressive who created the Department of Homeland Security, Big Brother if there has ever been one on American soil?  Which bloc is responsible for rights-limiting laws, for attempting to foist itself on private citizens through wiretapping?  Which bloc is it that repeatedly tries to block freedom of speech, a woman's right to choose, and the right of every American to marry?  Make no mistake about it, Big Brother is here, now, in this time and in this place, and its name is the Republican Party.  It even brought its sibling, the Tea Party Taliban, to enforce a nationwide ignorance on the citizenry.  Rather than move ahead, they want to move the country backwards.  Rather than enhance the individual liberty of Americans as they falsely claim, they have instead created laws to bind the hands of those Americans they feel threaten the institution of marriage most:  Gay Americans.  Who are their mouthpieces?  Three time divorcĂ©e Rush Limbaugh, for one.  Or how about a man who served divorce papers on his dying wife in her hospital bed, Newt Gingrich?  Who vociferously supported the ban?  Mr Wide Stance himself, Larry Craig.  Who collected vast sums of money to fund those campaigns?  Mr Escort Lover Ted Haggard.  
Wake up, America.  Stop pretending to be offended by things that don't affect you anyway, like gay marriage.  If you have a strong marriage, how does gay marriage affect you?  If you have a weak one, still, how does it affect you?  Stop pretending that the opinions spread by radio and television commentators are facts.  Stop acting like we can go back in time.  Pull yourselves up out of the miasma of talk-show-quality journalism and READ.