No More Holiday Spirit
Republicans in the Senate are blocking any movement on the extension of unemployment benefits, and want cuts in food stamps. The House won’t even take it up.
The Senate is trying to block negotiations with Iran with new rounds of sanctions, because they apparently think war is the only answer – even if they aren’t very clear what the question is.
Tennis players at the Australian Open are being subjected to conditions that the US military thinks is too extreme for basic training.
A retired cop guns down a man for texting during the previews in a movie theater.
There really does seems to be a lot of very negative vibes in the world at this moment and the campaign season hasn’t really gotten under way.
We really need to start adding Xanax instead of 4-methylcyclohexane methanol to the water supply to calm people down.
4 comments
“What godforsaken bastard,” I asked myself, “would deny a family whose breadwinner had been unable to find work for 99 weeks the minimal amount to put food on the table for the kids?” And then I answered myself, “Someone who never had to work for a living; that’s who.” Unfortunately, that’s a pretty good description of most of the Republans [sic… an ‘ic’ for an ‘ic’] in Congress… and, in all honesty, some congressional Democrats, though not as many.
I helped the local county Democratic Party clean up after the office flooded during a storm a dozen or so years ago. Among the volunteers was a recently former Republan. I asked him, why former? While we mopped, he told of a conversation with the chair of the county GOP, in which the topic was needy kids. The chair, said the newly minted Democrat, remarked with a shrug that it was those kids’ own fault: they just hadn’t chosen their parents well. The recent Dem was fed up and switched parties. I wonder how many, if any, of the remaining GOPers today would have that much moral fiber.
There is a nasty streak in some Protestant denominations that believes in predestination, i.e. at birth you are already selected for heaven or hell, and there isn’t much you can do about it. You are told to live like you are one of the selected, but if you fail it is because you were supposed to fail and there’s nothing that can be done to change it. They believe that the poor are supposed to be poor, so there is no point in attempting to help them.
This attitude is in direct conflict with the words in the New Testament, but that doesn’t seem to penetrate.
They really don’t understand how anything works, so they believe whatever their leaders tell them without question. They are the basis for mobs, as they are readily manipulated by demagogues who appeal to their fears.
Steve, I probably know the guy you’re talking about, the GOP chair person who said the kids didn’t choose their parents well. He wasn’t the GOP chair then but he told me the same thing in, hmm, must have been ’91 or so, when I was soliciting donations of children’s books and maybe an Apple computer for an inner city school classroom and pressing the meat in one of his get togethers. Luckily not everybody there was a jerk like him, scored some good stuff there from more charitable types. But anyhow, when he said that, I just stopped dead in my tracks and said, “What? Children don’t choose their parents.” And he said to read some obscure French philosopher who said they did. Well, I’m not French, and I’m a practical man, not a navel gazer, but he was the host so I mumbled something noncommittal and moved on, because I was clearly in the presence of crazy that had disappeared up its asshole and one thing I’ve learned in life is that there’s no discussion with crazy. And he rose to the top in today’s Republican Party, at least in Harris County? Why am I not surprised?
Uhm, yeah, I used to be a Republican, way back in the days when it was possible to be a moderate Republican. Why do you ask?
‘Tux, back in my contracting days, most of the people I worked with were Republ[ic]ans, and a majority of those were what I would call moderate. Many of the moderates were personally charitable (i.e., gave through their church; helped people as appropriate, etc.) but institutionally uncharitable (i.e., were convinced that any arbitrarily selected poor person, or lower-class person, in any given situation, would behave less responsibly than they would).
I can tell you from direct personal experience both with lower-class people in my own certifiably lower-class upbringing and middle-class people after my university degrees “qualified” (heh) me for a technology career, that the entire notion that poor people are lazy relative to better-off people is unmitigated bullshxt. But that’s what a lot of them who were Republan believed, in the face of all day-to-day evidence.
If you want to know more, and have a strong stomach, read John Dean’s (yes, THAT John Dean) Conservatives without Conscience. Don’t expect easy reading in any sense of the word.