Serious Scalpels and Mendacious Machetes



I'll Give It to the Republicans.... 200% of What They Want!



I knew there was a reason my email from the President announcing his re-election campaign got jammed next to a Proactiv ad in my spam folder last Monday.  It's because he is going to be proactive for a change, and give a speech on the deficit in just three more days!  We don't know the details yet, but his point-man, David Plouffe was all over the TV jabberfests this morning to tout it.


I just looked over a written transcript of Plouffe on "Meet the Press" and was able to formulate a rough idea as to the predictable uplifting vagueness (inspiroratory) we can expect. Plouffe used the words "moving/going forward" a total of nine times, and "come together" for a grand tally of seven -- in just the first few minutes.  Therefore, we can rest assured that the Obama speech will contain lots of winning the future and bipartisan bullshit.  We'll hear more sermonizing on shared sacrifice, historic cuts, visiting our national monuments and national parks, marriage counseling tips to stop all the bickering, lots of ideas on lots of tables, as well as a bit of David Brooksian S&M drivel on the joys of pain and belt-tightening.  And it will not be complete without some philosophical hovering above the fray, with Obama talking about Democrats and Republicans as if he were not partisan himself.  Actually, he is, but it's Republican-lite, and that is not an official party (yet). But I am counting on at least one pointed, blaming dig at Congress and how "the American people" are fed up and sick of "the way things are done (by others) in Washington".  And that "we" (meaning they) will do better, because that's why we/they were sent to Washington, to do better.


Paul Krugman, who was pretty dismayed by Friday's Democrat capitulation on the budget, writes on his blog that he dreads the speech and wouldn't put it past Obama to call for privatizing Medicare.  Since that is what Paul Ryan wants too,  Obama might do what Obama does best, and start negotiating by preemptively offering Republicans twice what they're asking for and then settling for 400 percent. He still hasn't figured out his job description.  But many are calling him Mediator in Chief, and those are the ones who are being kind.


The only thing we are being told is that Obama will use a selective scalpel to slice and dice, as opposed to the vicious machete of Paul Ryan and the Austerian Hordes.  Paul Ryan was also on TV this morning, and he was every bit as vague as Plouffe.  And yes, the pundits are still calling his plan to privatize, and thus kill, Medicare "bold."  I think it's only because they don't know how to spell, or pronounce, chutzpah.  H-u-t-s-p-a.  Here are some more synonyms the vocabulary-challenged chattering class might consider for Ryan's budget plan:  reckless, overreaching, brazen, overweening, rash, unmitigated gall, mendacious, nasty, brutal, vicious, moronic, math-challenged, politically suicidal.  It sure makes whatever death by a thousand sterile incisions Obama is planning under the anesthesia of his rhetoric seem painless in comparison.  But maybe that's the whole plan. 

Was the Shutdown Threat All About S-E-X?

In the wake of the near-shutdown of the government, it is becoming crystal clear that the fight was never about money and austerity and deficits. It's about ideology. The cause celebre this go-round was Planned Parenthood and abortion. But it goes beyond reproductive rights. It goes to the heart of the arch-conservative mantra that Sex is Bad.  It's particularly bad, in their view, when it involves the unmarried, the transgender, the gay, the unemployed, the minority.  Let's face it. People like Mike Pence and Rick Santorum and all the goons of Right Wing World don't like the idea of taxpayer money being used, even obliquely, to help people have fun, particularly when it comes to their sex lives.

Title X is a government program that gives about a quarter of its funds to Planned Parenthood, and the rest to other clinics for low-income people throughout the country.  It specifically does not fund abortions, because that is illegal under federal law.  What it does pay for, however, are family planning for both men and women, STD screening, HIV/AIDS, Diabetes, hypertension and cancer screening.  The services are for  ALL people -- married or single, gay or straight. Planned Parenthood offers all of these in addition to abortion services that it funds through private means, adding up to only about three percent of its total program. 

Title X pays for birth control pills on the taxpayer dime and Planned Parenthood does not demand a marriage certificate when women come in seeking the pill. Thus, in Republican World, they are promoters of promiscuity and orgies. Planned Parenthood is also known for its compassionate treatment of transgender patients.  Planned Parenthood supplies free condoms to its clients, thus promoting even more unrestrained sex.  See where this is going?  Way, way beyond the right to life movement. 


Since the radical right culture warriors are also anti-gay and many seem to have sexual phobias of all kinds, could the threatened government shutdown have been about homophobia as well as misogyny? Nobody's telling, but it wouldn't surprise me. 

 Christian fundamentalism as a force in American politics has never died.  The religious fanatics still haven't gotten over the repeal of DADT. Their dogmatism and their demogoguery trump rational thought. It wouldn't shock me if they actually thought that the "X" in Title X stands for X-rated, instead of the number 10.  The right wing crowd probably never studied Roman numerals in school because those numbers are un-American.

The Radical Right is Easily Confused & Obsessed With Sex 

And speaking of Rome, if I didn't know better, I'd swear the Vatican might have a hand in this too.  The American bishops tried to kill the affordable health care act due to abortion issues.  Could this be payback time from the mighty lobby of men in mitered hats?  Nothing would surprise me at this point.  If you'd told me a week ago the government would be shut down over Pap smears, I wouldn't have believed it either.


And then there's the cultish Abstinence Movement, which espouses just saying no as the proper right wing method of birth control. Bristol Palin, teen mom, is the poster child of that movement, or revirgination campaign or whatever you want to call it.  Conservatives even have weird debutante-type affairs called "Purity Balls" in which fathers parade out their daughters in some vaguely creepy chastity sweepstakes.  Daddy's Little Girl is Daddy's Little Girl until marriage do them part.

Not a Planned Parenthood Alumna

And if you still don't believe how far right we've come as a country, take a gander at what President Nixon wrote when he signed Title X into law one Christmas Eve long, long ago: (and Dickie, from all accounts, was one repressed Oedipus "my mother was a saint" Complex dude):

He Put the Planning Back in Family Values

ON JULY 18, 1969, I sent to the Congress a message proposing the creation of a Commission on Population Growth and the American Future. The Congress acted promptly on my proposal and the act establishing the Commission was signed by me on March 16, 1970. The Commission is now functioning: its interim report will be due in the spring of 1971, and its final report will be submitted in the spring of 1972.
 
At the same time, I called for a national commitment to provide adequate family planning services within the next 5 years to all those who want them but cannot afford them. It was clear that the domestic family planning services supported by the Federal Government were not adequate to provide information and services to all who want them on a voluntary basis.
 
To implement this national commitment, I asked for expanded research in contraceptive development and the behavioral sciences, reorganization of family planning service activities within the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and legislation which would help the Department to implement this important program by providing broader and more precise legislative authority and a clearer source of financial support. The National Center for Family Planning Services was established in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare shortly after my message.
 
The bill before me today, the "Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970," completes the legislation I requested in my message on population. This measure provides for expanded research, training of manpower, and increased family planning services. In addition, it provides for the development of family planning and population growth information and education.
It is noteworthy that this landmark legislation on family planning and population has had strong bipartisan support. I am confident that by working together-at Federal, State, and local levels--we can achieve the goal of providing adequate family planning services within the next 5 years to all those who want them but cannot afford them.
 
I am proud to affix my signature to this important legislation and share this pride with so many who have worked so hard toward its enactment."
 
Wow.  A Republican president proposed what would today be called a socialistic public health law and it was promptly approved in a bipartisan manner by Congress. If Tricky Dick were in office now, Mike Pence would be calling him a Marxist.  No, wait.  Mike Pence would never have been elected to anything except maybe treasurer of some tiny local chapter of the John Birch Society.  And amazing, isn't it, that presidents actually thought up bills to send to Congress all on their own and didn't just shrug and tell them to hash it out among themselves and stop acting like children?

And now we have another down-to-the-wire save, passage of a budget nobody even had the chance to read before voting. And it is merely a stop-gap "bridge" cure, a massive kick-the-can down the road for another week.  At the rate we're going, we won't have a real budget till it's time to vote for next year's. And these hard-right fundamentalists who seem to have a spooky sway over the Democrats who outnumber them aren't going away.  The Democrats are rapidly becoming superfluous in this whole mess we call a government.  The Culture Wars have joined the Class War in what increasingly appears to be a descent into fascism.

The Tainted Cheesiness of Paul Ryan

I don't know who's worse:  pathological zombie politician Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, or the alleged intelligentsia who are cheerleading his "seriousness, courage and bravery".   I am still trying to recover from the David Brooks column in yesterday's Times that treated this two-bit hack like the second coming of Christ.


Read instead the running commentary of Paul Krugman in his New York Times blog for a piece-by-piece evisceration of the Ryan Manifesto of Death by a Thousand Cuts.  After Professor K called out Ryan's (via the Heritage Foundation) projection of only a 2.7 percent unemployment rate in coming years to vindicate his fictional deficit cure, it was mysteriously cut from the online Heritage Foundation version.  But Krugman has posted a screenshot of the original.


The obvious point of the Ryan plan is to Scare Us All To Death, as well as start a generation war between Millennials and their grandparents.  Ryan is fine with leaving Medicare alone for the 55-plus crowd around today, but if you're in the unlucky below-55 age group, you will only get a few thousand bucks to buy crappy junk insurance when you retire.  Meanwhile, you'll be paying to keep old geezers on life support through your payroll deductions. It's the tried and true "divide and conquer" formula all bosses and overlords use to keep their disgruntled workers and subjects in their places. Pit colleague against colleague, private sector versus public sector, young  college graduate minimum wage McDonald's hamburger flipper against the Grandma living in retired "comfort" on his FICA/Medicare deduction dime.  Destruction of the social safety net is the goal. "Family values" in GOP-speak is of the Corleone/Tony Soprano variety only. 

 It's also the old propagandistic bait and switch trick of cutting social programs in order to "save" them -- so as not to burden our children and grandchildren with our bills. We must die for our sins.  Come on.  The real burdensome crowd are the kleptocrats who want to keep their tax cuts for eternity and live off the rest of us like the bloated leeches they are.  It's the class war, stupid.  And speaking of war -- not a mention does Ryan make of our three (official) wars and their terrible cost in money, lives, limbs and mental health.

Ryan is a fall guy being paraded out by the Republicans to provide a sideshow. As my friend Kate Madison pointed out yesterday in her comment on Brooks, he is so despised in his native Wisconsin that he is not expected to even win re-election next year, let alone remain House Budget Committee chairman. 

The Ryan Show is like a Grade Z horror flick that's so bad, it's funny.  What the GOP is really banking on is the  possibility that their outrageous demands for a trillion dollar cut will so scare the spineless Democrats that they might even get a third of what they're asking for. Little Paulie a Whiz Kid?  Cheez Whiz is more like it  -- and that amounts to sacrilege in the Dairy State, the birthplace of labor unions. His artificial cheese product of a budget is held together by intellectual emulsifying agents that don't stand a chance when exposed to heat and light.  He has cheeted with the facts. His mendacious manifesto and his fellow Republicans are becoming as unglued as xanthum gum left out in the rain.