From the compassionate conservative wing of the Republican party, Rep. Larry Pittman of North Carolina speaks out.

“We need to make the death penalty a real deterrent again by actually carrying it out. Every appeal that can be made should have to be made at one time, not in a serial manner,” Pittman wrote in the email. “If murderers (and I would include abortionists, rapists, and kidnappers, as well) are actually executed, it will at least have the deterrent effect upon them. For my money, we should go back to public hangings, which would be more of a deterrent to others, as well.”

How long before execution by guillotine for liberals and atheists is proposed by Republicans?

The surprise or concern is not that wingnut politicians say stuff like this. Republicans have been running on CRAZY for a while now. No, the real worry should be that enough Americans voted for this guy to get him elected.

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Saw this on Bartcop and at first glance, I thought it was cute but somewhat of an oversimplification…

…and then on further reflection, I realized it was in fact an accurate depiction of the Republican mindset. They would never admit as much but every policy proposal they make is geared toward helping the rich at the expense of the middle class and poor. The entire claim to fame of trickle-down economics, for example, as put forth by conservatives is that top-bracket tax cuts leads to a vibrant economy, more jobs and higher wages for the working class. Thirty years of trickle-down economic policies tells a different story but that doesn’t faze these people. They never let facts mess up a good story.

If you’re a Republican lacking either a fat bank balance or an umbilical cord, at least be aware that your political party doesn’t give a damn about you.  And if you think differently, then you deserve exactly what you get from the politicians you elect into office.

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Yes, Virginia, there was a time when a degree of sanity did exist within the ranks of the Republican party, a time when sanity had not yet been overrun by delusion and madness…

“Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them.”

~ Barry Goldwater, November 1994, as quoted in John Dean, Conservatives Without Conscience (2006)

And now the religious right has been joined by the Tea Party crowd whose understanding of compromise and its crucial role in a functioning democracy is as deficient and dangerous as that of the Pat Robertsons of the party.  I would go as far as to suggest that the Teapublicans in Congress pose a greater threat to the welfare of Americans than the combined efforts of every terrorist group in the world.  The first requirement in dealing with danger is recognizing its presence and no one has a problem understanding that terrorists pose a threat.  Not so with recognizing the danger presented by the slew of Tea Partiers in Congress where only a handful of conservatives have come to realize the destructive role these people play in making Congress an even more dysfunctional body.  As well-meaning as some within the Tea Party may be, their dogmatic and intolerant attitude to compromise and understanding (as that of the religious right), only aids in weakening the political system.

Incidentally, I just finished reading Dean’s Conservatives Without Conscience over the holidays.  It’s a good read if you’re at all interested in the evolution of the conservative movement and learning how the Republican party turned into the authoritarian entity it is today.  Dean’s culprits are the religious right and the neoconservative wing of the party which have moved the GOP so far to the right that he believes the core principles of conservatism have been trampled upon and left unrecognizable – so far to the right has it shifted, says Dean, that he, a Goldwater conservative who has not altered his basic conservative beliefs, now finds himself stranded at the left of center.

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And I did want to say thank you to all my readers and a sincere wish that the new year (and if we’re to believe the New Agers interpretation of the Mayan calendar, our final year as we know it) is a good one.

Thank you.

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You would be forgiven if you did not know whether you should laugh or cry at the farce unfolding in Congress these days.  The latest is Republicans’ handling of the payroll tax cut extension which passed in the Senate but is being blocked by House Republicans – a performance so botched and ugly that it drew the wrath of the Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial board.

GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell famously said a year ago that his main task in the 112th Congress was to make sure that President Obama would not be re-elected. Given how he and House Speaker John Boehner have handled the payroll tax debate, we wonder if they might end up re-electing the President before the 2012 campaign even begins in earnest.

The GOP leaders have somehow managed the remarkable feat of being blamed for opposing a one-year extension of a tax holiday that they are surely going to pass. This is no easy double play.

The WSJ makes a valid point, all the while hoping McConnell is successful in making Barack Obama a one term president.  Working on the premise that ‘if Obama wants it, it must be wrong‘, Republicans have opposed everything Dems have proposed whether or not it contradicts their own stated goals – in this case, tax cuts.  The end result of such foolish and irresponsible behavior is the sad display which took place in the House this morning.

Someone suggested that in light of Republicans’ policy of doing the exact opposite of anything the President proposes, what would be the the right-wing’s response to Obama suggesting that leaping off tall building is hazardous to one’s health. Want to take a guess?

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This is just about right.

The prospect of Donald Trump moderating a debate is what finally made things click.

It occurred to me the other day as I was leaving a comment elsewhere: if someone had written a TV show and the plot followed the current Republican primary, I would have some serious problems with it. Namely, I would pan the show as unrealistic. A joke. Liberal Hollywood’s parody of what the Republican Party is. Herman Cain? Who the hell acts like that. There is no way that a party would seriously give a serial-adulturing, ideologically muddled, lobbying-compromised former House Leader a shot at the nomination. Hollywood couldn’t devise a more repugnant figure as the potential head of a party that they want noting to do with.

…

The degree to which the GOP seems to really be becoming as unhinged as the Democrats always said it was is actually somewhat hard to determine except out of hindsight (if Romney wins the nomination and runs a conventional campaign, this will all be forgotten and the equivalent of an adolescent phase and not any sort of genuine threat to the republic). Indeed, it’s that my entire adult life I have heard over and over again that the GOP is truly unhinged that makes me skeptical that it’s genuinely true, all evidence to the contrary, in a “boy who cried wolf” sort of way. I’m still in wait-and-see mode. If anybody but Romney (or Huntsman or maybe Johnson, haha) gets the nomination, at this point, they will have made their critics case for them. (I am thinking of the GOP as a “they”; this is not a promising sign).

Few people aside from hardcore conservatives view the Republican party’s performance over the last three years and, more specifically, the last three months, as anything other than the antics of an unhinged group of people firmly detached from reality.  Herman Cain?  Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry?  Embarrassing.

There have been few conservatives willing to stand up and call out the madness for what it is in the way that a David Frum or Andrew Sullivan have.  Most conservative have allowed their irrational hatred for a centrist Democratic president to become an excuse for taking a drastic hard right turn.  How else does one explain allowing a corrupt and unstable nutcase to become the governor of Florida?  Or worse, allowing a transparent, self-promoting flim-flam pizza man to spend a month leading the Republican primary field?

One word: unhinged.

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If you were fortunate enough to miss Saturday’s GOP foreign policy debate, you might be interested to know that in your absence…

• Herman Cain wants to bring back the age of torture because, in his wisdom, waterboarding isn’t really torture. It’s simply an “enhanced interrogation technique.”
• Michele Bachmann concurs, as does Rick Perry who emphasized his overwhelming approval of waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques by stating, “I will defend them until I die.”  Mr. Executioner obviously loves his torture.
• Mitt Romney would impose “crippling sanctions” on Iran to prevent them from developing nuclear weapons and should that fail, then he’d take military action.  Another war, this time with Iran.  Lovely.
• Newt Gingrich liked the idea but he wants even more done.  He proposes “taking out their scientists” and “breaking up their systems, all of it covertly, all of it deniable.”  I’m not sure how “deniable” it would be now that Gingrich has spilled the beans on his grand covert scheme.  Blabbermouth.
• Rick Santorum is all for war too but he took it one notch higher.  He proposes supporting an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.  You know, ‘bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.’
• As for Rick Perry, he wants to start all foreign aid at the zero dollar level and have nations prove that they are worthy of receiving US dollars.  He included Israel in the mix.
• Herman Cain of “ubeki beki beki beki stan stan” fame and, no doubt, the foreign policy wonk on the stage, believes that the “president has been on the wrong side in nearly every situation in the Arab world“  and as a result that Arab Spring thing, well, “has gotten totally out of hand.”  Apparently, Cain believes that too much democracy is not a good thing.
• The highlight lowlight of the evening, I believe, was Michele Bachmann proposing that the US needs to adopt communist China’s approach to dealing with its citizenry.

“The ‘Great Society’ has not worked and it’s put us into the modern welfare state. If you look at China, they don’t have food stamps. If you look at China, they’re in a very different situation. They save for their own retirement security…They don’t have the modern welfare state and China’s growing. And so what I would do is look at the programs that LBJ gave us with the Great Society and they’d be gone.”

Smart, because once you dismantle socialist programs like Medicare, replacing it with the Chinese model makes so much sense.  Michele no doubt believes that a little more suffering for those shiftless 99ers would do them good.

So there you go.  Sleep well knowing that the fate of the planet could one day be in the hands of any of these lovely people.

Final point.  CBS should be banned from ever sponsoring another debate.  It was horrible.  The moderator was inept, continually cutting off answers in mid-sentence and preventing any flow in the exchange.  Having eight clowns debating issues of which they had little understanding was bad enough without CBS doing their best to make the event even more insufferable.

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A report put out in September by the Interior Department and U.S. Coast Guard, found that BP, Deepwater Horizon, Transocean Ltd. and Halliburton were jointly responsible for the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster which claimed 11 lives.  And so it was only fitting that Democrats sitting on the House Natural Resources Committee which is holding hearings on the report, would ask that the CEOs of the aforementioned companies appear before the Committee.  When all four CEOs refused to appear, Democrats put in a subpoena request.

True to form, Republicans blocked the request.

Republicans on the House Natural Resources Committee on Wednesday rejected an attempt by Democrats to subpoena the CEOs of BP and the other companies blamed for last year’s massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), the ranking Democrat on the committee, offered a motion to subpoena the CEOs of BP, Halliburton, Transocean and Cameron. But in a 17-13 party-line vote, every Republican on the committee voted to table the subpoena request.

 “Republicans have put the CEOs from the companies responsible for the worst offshore oil spill in our history into a witness protection program, when they should be helping to produce these witnesses before the committee so they can answer questions about their spill,” Markey said in a statement after Wednesday’s vote.

“For these companies,” said Markey “CEO doesn’t just mean Chief Executive Officer, it also stands for Continuing to Evade Oversight.”

And once again, Republicans have shown that they are little more than a wholly owned subsidiary and/or lackey of big oil.  For Republicans, stuffing their campaign coffers with BP contributions takes precedence over human lives, the environment and billions of dollars in damage and cleanup in the Gulf area.

It’s gotten to the point where there is nothing that Republicans can or cannot do that would surprise many.  Like the sociopathic entity they are, the GOP flaunts its psychopathic personality and lack of a social conscience in almost all they do.  Their inability to feel shame and empathy, irresponsible behavior,  narcissistic and pathological lying all point to a political party which has lost its mind.

In this specific regard (as someone pointed out), let them change the BP signs to Republican Oil and get it over with.

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My, my…Pat Robertson, televangelist and bigot extraordinaire, has said something I actually agree with.  Robertson is concerned that the current crop of Republican presidential nominees are going to crazy themselves right out of the general election next year.  Here’s how he put it.

I believe it was Lyndon Johnson that said, ‘Don’t these people realize if they push me over to an extreme position I’ll lose the election? And I’m the one who will be supporting what they want but they’re going to make it so I can’t win.’ Those people in the Republican primary have got to lay off of this stuff. They’re forcing their leaders, the frontrunners, into positions that will mean they lose the general election. Now whether this did it to Cain I don’t know, but nevertheless, you appeal to the narrow base and they’ll applaud the daylights out of what you’re saying and then you hit the general election and they say ‘no way’ and then the Democrat, whoever it is, is going to just play these statements to the hilt. They’ve got to stop this! It’s just so counterproductive!

Well, with the GOP nominees talking about 999 and 666, 20% flat tax rates, abolishing the EPA, the FDA, the IRS, FEMA and the Department of Education, slashing Medicare and Social Security, building electrified and double walled fences with moats at the border and promoting birther nonsense…it might be too late for any of them to reenter the world of the sane.  One can only hope that enough of the uncommitted are paying attention to the craziness coming out of the Republican primary.

CO-HOST: Pat, this is from Anne who says, “My husband has always been a flirt and loves to talk with other women he finds attractive. He says he would never cheat on me but his actions are starting to get to me. What should I do?”

ROBERTSON: Anne, first thing is you need to make yourself as attractive as possible and don’t hassle him about it. And why is he doing this? Well, he’s doing it because he wants affirmation that he is still a man, that he is attractive — and he gets an affirmation of himself. That means he’s got an inferiority complex that’s coming out. And he’s not gonna cheat on you. He’s just playing.

But you need to not drive him away or start hassling and hounding on him, but make yourself as beautiful as you can, as fun as you can, and say let’s go out here, let’s go there, let’s go to the other thing.

Yeah, that’s it…he’s just “playing”. Interesting.

I think the message to take out from all this is that when someone as loony as Pat Robertson advises you to stay away from extreme positions, you might want to listen.

Update:

A reader sends in the following clip of a Robertson beaut.

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Krugman:

According to Public Policy Polling, only 21 percent of Republican voters in Iowa believe in global warming (and only 35 percent believe in evolution). Within the G.O.P., willful ignorance has become a litmus test for candidates, one that Mr. Romney is determined to pass at all costs.

So it’s now highly likely that the presidential candidate of one of our two major political parties will either be a man who believes what he wants to believe, even in the teeth of scientific evidence, or a man who pretends to believe whatever he thinks the party’s base wants him to believe.

What does it say about Americans, or more specifically, about Americans who support a candidate who expresses blatant anti-science beliefs?  What does it say about the future of a country attempting to compete in a world where countries are placing greater emphasis on science and the new technologies fueled by advancements in science?

Science should be a politics free zone safe from manipulation and bias by those who carry a political agenda.  And yet, here we are in 2011 where individuals gets demonized by right-wing ideologues, liars and fools for simply supporting the overwhelming consensus on climate change by the world’s scientists.

Only in a place Galileo could ever fully understand would the science of evolution and climate change be hot topics in a political campaign.

But the odds are that one of these years the world’s greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge. And, in a time of severe challenges — environmental, economic, and more — that’s a terrifying prospect.

Madness.

UPDATE:

Here’s proof that long after rising sea levels have turned New York City into a modern day Atlantis and the last remaining polar bear has left for that big ice floe in the sky, there will still be some climate change deniers screaming out, “Hoax!!”

A few conservative Roman Catholics are pointing to a dozen Bible verses and the church’s original teachings as proof that Earth is the center of the universe, the view that was at the heart of the church’s clash with Galileo Galilei four centuries ago.

“Heliocentrism becomes dangerous if it is being propped up as the true system when, in fact, it is a false system,” said Robert Sungenis, leader of a budding movement to get scientists to reconsider. “False information leads to false ideas, and false ideas lead to illicit and immoral actions — thus the state of the world today.… Prior to Galileo, the church was in full command of the world, and governments and academia were subservient to her.”

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I was going through some archives looking for an older post of mine and came across this Chris Britt toon I published back in November 2010.

Nine months later and the base is still yelling, “STAND UP TO THE BULLY!! GROW A SPINE AND LEAD!”

Unfortunately, there is more to this particular bully than simply standing up to him.  When your opponent is borderline insane – nix that – when your opponent is totally insane, it gets a bit trickier.  I know.  I’ve had experience with a crazed and delusional sociopathic stalker and if I’ve learned anything from it, it’s that Republicans exhibit many of the traits of a sociopath.

[The] sociopath [...] shows a lack of regret in his or her actions. A major personality behavior trait is the violation of the rights of others.

Research has shown that the sociopath is usually a person with an abundance of charm and wit. He or she may appear friendly and considerate, but these attributes are usually superficial. They are used as a way of blinding the other person to the personal agenda behind the sociopath’s behaviour.

Anyone who has had the unfortunate experience of dealing with sociopaths, eventually comes to learn some basic facts.

1. YOU CANNOT REASON WITH THEM.

The debt crisis nonsense highlighted this first point.  There was nothing which President Obama or Dems could possibly have offered Tea Party Republicans that would have satisfied them.  Sociopaths adopt a righteous stance and no degree of fact or logic could dislodge them from their beliefs.

2. THEY PLAY THE VICTIM CARD

Stand up to a sociopath and call them out on their actions and they instantly cry foul.  When Vice President Biden accurately compared Tea Party negotiator’s tactics to those of a terrorist, the right-wing freaked out.  Case in point was Sarah Palin who called Biden’s remark “vile” and “quite appalling”.  Yes, that’s the same Sarah Palin who is fond of making the claim that the President of the United States “pals around with terrorists”.

3. PSYCHOLOGICAL PROJECTION

Here’s how Wiki describes it:

Psychological projection or projection bias is a psychological defense mechanism where a person subconsciously denies his or her own attributes, thoughts, and emotions, which are then ascribed to the outside world, usually to other people. Thus, projection involves imagining or projecting the belief that others originate those feelings.

Projection reduces anxiety by allowing the expression of the unwanted unconscious impulses or desires without letting the conscious mind recognize them.

Point out that Herman Cain exhibited bigotry in his stance over Muslims, and you are immediately called a bigot or racist for daring to call a black man a bigot.  Point out that Sarah Palin is an airhead and you are accused of being misogynistic.  Point out that Republican tactics in Congress are hurting the country and you’re accused of being unpatriotic.  You get the idea.

So what is my point here?  Simply this: These are not normal times and the President is facing an opponent who plays by a unique set of rules – rules which they create and change which each new crisis, real or contrived.  An opponent who has no interest in compromise or debate or reasoned dialog.  An opponent whose actions are dictated by a singular purpose: take down this President.  And if that means crashing the economy into a brick wall, or watching more people join the ranks of the unemployed or destroying an entire middle class of Americans, so be it.  In their sick and twisted minds, the end always justifies the means.

So every once in a while, progressives need to take a step back and come to grips with what it is this President is facing.  Their frustration is understandable but screaming out, “GROW A SPINE!!”, while satisfying in the moment, might not be the most constructive approach to the matter.

Dealing with insanity requires a cooler, calmer approach.  Stand up to them, yes.  Speak of truth and facts but know that you are not addressing the crazies.  They’ll never understand because…well, because they’re crazy.  Progressive’s and liberal’s only hope lies in ensuring that moderates and independents don’t fall for the slew of lies and misinformation put out by the right-wing’s well-oiled noise machine.

I can think of no better words to describe the current state of U.S. politics than to quote the opening paragraph from Dickens’ A Tale Of Two Cities.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

The age of foolishness, indeed.

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