Conservative Madness

Conservatives Really, Really Need To Follow Limbaugh’s Advice

March 19, 2013 By mario piperni

As Republican’s go through the soul-searching painful exercise of figuring out why they suck as a political party, here’s hoping they follow the advice of Rush Limbaugh. On the same day that the RNC released a post election report that called for the GOP to modernize and be more open to Hispanics and women, Limbaugh had this to say:

“The Republicans are just totally bamboozled right now, and they are entirely lacking in confidence, which is what happens to every political party after an election in which they think they got shellacked. They think they got landslided, and they didn’t, but they’re acting like they did, and they think they did.”

…

“They think they’ve gotta rebrand and it’s all predictable. They gotta reach out to minorities. They gotta moderate their tone here and moderate their tone there. And that’s not at all what they’ve gotta do.”

And the kicker…

“The Republican Party lost because it’s not conservative.”

Right!

Republicans need to be even more conservative than they’ve been for the last five years! In Limbaugh’s world, there can never be too many forced vaginal probes to show “slutty” women who’s really in charge of their bodies. Gays and lesbians? Demonize them to your heart’s content.

Round up those 11 million lazy, undocumented immigrants and fill up the cattle cars!

In Limbaugh’s world, polls indicating that 58 percent of Americans are now in favor of same-sex marriage can and should be ignored. As should the fact that Hispanics make up the fastest growing voting demographic in the U.S.

Piss on polls and piss on facts and truth and decency and whatever else messes with one’s narrow-minded, bigoted, ignorant, xenophobic beliefs.

Yes, ignore it all and push for more stringent conservatism. There’s a winning hand if ever there was one.

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Filed Under: Conservative Madness Tagged With: limbaugh

The Christian Taliban Strikes Again

March 14, 2013 By mario piperni

Don’t even think of engaging in sex if you’re single. It’s reserved for married people only. Really.

Who says? The Family Research Council’s (FRC) Pat Fagan does.

The court decided that single people have the right to contraceptives. What’s that got to do with marriage? Everything, because what the Supreme Court essentially said is single people have the right to engage in sexual intercourse. Well, societies have always forbidden that, there were laws against it. [...]

It’s not the contraception, everybody thinks it’s about contraception, but what this court case said was young people have the right to engage in sex outside of marriage. Society never gave young people that right, functioning societies don’t do that, they stop it, they punish it, they corral people, they shame people, they do whatever. The institution for the expression of sexuality is marriage and all societies always shepherded young people there, what the Supreme Court said was forget that shepherding, you can’t block that, that’s not to be done.

These maroons are praying daily for the Inquisition to make a comeback.

What’s really interesting is how conservative Christian groups like the Family Research Council demonize Islam. The FRC refers to Islam as a “fanatical religion” and speaks of the evils of the dreaded sharia law. From the FRC website:

In our country, many may not want to hear about the dangers of Islam. However, George Orwell once said that Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. We have that right. Speak up.

Here’s what the Quran says about pre-marital sex.

Quran 25:68-70 “And those who invoke not any other god along with Allah, nor kill such life as Allah has forbidden, except for just cause, nor commit illegal sexual intercourse (zina) and whoever does this shall receive the punishment. The torment will be doubled to him on the Day of Resurrection, and he will abide therein in disgrace; except those who repent and believe and do righteous deeds, for those Allah will change their sins into good deeds, and Allah is Oft Forgiving, Most Merciful.”

Quran 17:32 ”And come not near to unlawful sexual intercourse. Verily, it is a faahishah (a great sin) and an evil way.”

[Quran 24:2] The woman and the man guilty of adultery or fornication flog each of them with a hundred stripes: let not compassion move you in their case, in a matter prescribed by Allah, if you believe in Allah and the Last Day: and let a party of the Believers witness their punishment.

Not much difference between that and, “society never gave young people that right, functioning societies don’t do that, they stop it, they punish it, they corral people, they shame people, they do whatever.” The Christian Taliban indeed.

The Family Research Council has correctly been designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. We can safely add ‘hypocritical crackpot’ to the designation. Oh, and someone needs to tell these assholes that 80 percent of unmarried evangelical Christians claim that they’re having sex. That should get a few heads exploding over at FRC headquarters.

Note: A clarification on my illustration above…because I’ve been asked a number of times. I’m not stating that Christianity preaches hate. (Although a case can be made that the Old Testament does exactly that in many instances.) My point is that many individuals and groups (Family Research Council, for example) use Christianity to preach their brand of hate.

The hate is not in the cross. The cross is in the the hate.

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Filed Under: Conservative Madness, Religion

The Right’s Irrational Hate

November 8, 2012 By mario piperni

Now that Republicans have been soundly beaten at the federal and state levels, and President Obama has won a decisive second term, will the right allow compromise and reason to enter the political process?

Don’t count on it.

They’re filled with pure irrational hate. There’s no reasoning with them. There’s no…hell, let me just quote Kyle Reese from the film Terminator.

Listen, and understand. That terminator is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.

Same thing.

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Filed Under: Conservative Madness, Crazy Talk

The Real Barack Obama

September 27, 2012 By mario piperni

Except for the part about MSNBC (not sure what that’s about), the following is as close a reflection of my own thoughts on Barack Obama as I’ve come across.

Mark Lilla:

Whenever conservatives talk to me about Barack Obama, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. But what exactly? The anger, the suspicion, the freestyle fantasizing have no perceptible object in the space-time continuum that centrist Democrats like me inhabit. What are we missing? Seen from our perspective, the country elected a moderate and cautious straight shooter committed to getting things right and giving the United States its self-respect back after the Bush-Cheney years. Unlike the crybabies at MSNBC and Harper’s Magazine, we never bought into the campaign’s hollow “hope and change” rhetoric, so aren’t crushed that, well, life got in the way. At most we hoped for a sensible health care program to end the scandal of America’s uninsured, and were relieved that Obama proposed no other grand schemes of Nixonian scale. We liked him for his political liberalism and instinctual conservatism. And we still like him.

Read the entire piece which is an excellent take down of conservative scholar Charles Kessler’s I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberlism.

Another snippet:

Had the Supreme Court overturned the Affordable Care Act, the right’s fever would not have dropped one degree, nor, I predict, will the patient come to its senses if the president is defeated in November. Is there a doctor in the house?

True. Nor would Republican angst and looniness over the last four years been any less fervent had it been Hillary Clinton who claimed victory in 2008 instead of Barack Obama. Obama’s blackness only added another element for conservatives to latch on to. For the right, it’s never really been about Obama. It’s about not having a Republican in the White House to push the conservative agenda forward. That’s all.

(h/t: TheDish)
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Filed Under: Barack Obama, Conservative Madness

Empirical Data Has No Meaning For Conservatives

July 7, 2012 By mario piperni

Here’s a piece that offers up some great insight into why Republicans keep on proposing the same failed economic policies that brought the country into the worst recession of the last 70 years.

Josh Barro at Bloomberg:

These days, they [conservatives] especially love Austrian economists, such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. [...]

There are two big reasons today’s right loves the Austrians. One is that Austrian economists reject empirical analysis, and instead believe that you can reach conclusions about correct economic policies from a priori principles. It’s philosophy dressed up as economics; with the Austrians, there is never any risk that real-world events will interfere with your ideology.

The other big advantage is that the main Austrian thinkers, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, are dead, so they can’t argue with your interpretation of their work. This is especially important with Hayek, who got sort of squishy later in life.

And that is how so many on the right have pulled off the remarkable feat of going through the 2008 crisis and its aftermath without revisiting any of their policy views. [...]

But if you have Mises at your side, you “know” that empirical findings have no bearing on what policy should be. Leaning on Austrian thinkers is a great way to avoid further thinking.

“A great way to avoid further thinking” should be the tagline on just about every proposal Republicans offer up. Cutting taxes has been proven to have little impact on creating jobs (see chart below) while deregulation of the financial sector was a big reason for the Wall Street/banking fiasco. Yet conservatives reject the empirical data and cry out for more tax cuts for the wealthy and greater deregulation.

Furthermore, conservatives claim that the Obama stimulus was a failure in the face of empirical analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and three private economic analysis companies which say otherwise.

• CBO: Between 1.3 million and 3.6 million jobs saved or created.

• IHS/Global Insight: 2.45 million jobs saved or created.

• Macroeconomic Advisers: 2.3 million jobs saved or created.

• Moody’s Economy.com: 2.5 million jobs saved or created.

How refreshing it would be if Republicans could just once say, “Hey, we screwed up. Let’s adapt our economic policies to match reality and fix them.” But they don’t. Instead they keep on proposing the same policies over and over again while ignoring the data that points to their failure.

How can anyone take them seriously?

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Filed Under: Conservative Madness, economy