Category Archives: Random Blogging

Can Anyone Explain This?

Scott DesJarlais is a rabidly pro-life congressman from a reliably red district in Tennessee. He’s also a doctor who cheated on his wife with at least two of his patients, and was caught on tape encouraging one of them to have an abortion. In a rational world, you’d expect him to lose the primary election following those revelations. You’d be wrong.

I’ll let Ed Brayton (Dispatches from the Culture Wars) take it from here…

“Rep. Scott DesJarlais, who pressured a woman—one of two patients he admitted having affairs with—to get an abortion in the 1990s, appears to have narrowly avoided becoming the fourth Republican incumbent to lose a primary this year. With 100 percent of precincts reporting on Thursday, he led state Sen. Jim Tracy by 35 votes—34,787 to 34,752. (The results are not official and a recount is possible, although the state has no law mandating one in such circumstances.) The abortion revelation emerged after DesJarlais’ 2012 primary, when the only thing standing between him and reelection in the deeply Republican district was a token Democratic candidate in the general election.

But after his reelection, the dominoes continued to fall. Divorce transcripts released two weeks after the race revealed that he and his first wife had decided to abort two pregnancies. That proved a problem for the congressman, who is adamantly pro-life: Per his website, “Congressman DesJarlais believes that all life should be cherished and protected. He has received a 100% score by the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), the oldest and the largest national pro-life organization in the United States.”

My favorite part of this was that his opponent put out an ad calling attention to DesJarlais’ hypocrisy and this was his response:

DesJarlais spokesman Robert Jameson called the piece “just the sort of disgusting gutter politics we’d expected from [U.S. House Democratic leader] Nancy Pelosi and her allies in Washington.”

Yeah, that’s disgusting. No, not the fact that he cheated on his wife multiple times despite his allegedly “pro-family” principles. Not the fact that he did it with his patients, which can get your medical license yanked and is probably the single biggest ethical breach a doctor can make. Not the fact that he encouraged one of his mistresses to get an abortion despite his self-declared opposition to abortion. No, it’s disgusting to point out that vile behavior. But remember, DesJarlais is exactly the kind of guy who lectures liberals about moral relativism and says his religious values guide him.

If those things don’t disqualify you from winning an election full of allegedly pro-family, pro-life voters, what the hell could possibly do so?

My question exactly.

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Crazy and Scary

Crazy Republicans are making life miserable for the dwindling number of rational party members, and the same phenomenon (often involving the same people) is giving Christians a really bad name.

Loony tunes example number ten zillion:

Several news sites have reported on a rant by Christian Radio Host Rick Wiles, in which he shares his hope that the Ebola epidemic spreads to the US and “wipes out every last atheist and gay person in the country.”

“Now this Ebola epidemic can become a global pandemic and that’s another name for plague. It may be the great attitude adjustment that I believe is coming… Ebola could solve America’s problems with atheism, homosexuality, sexual promiscuity, pornography and abortion.”

Leave aside the decidedly “unChristian” desire to see people with whom you don’t agree die in agony (what was that thing about “turning the other cheek”?), what leap of “logic” leads this zealot to believe that a horrific disease will be selective, and that its selectivity would be based upon his version of biblical “truth”?

Talk about creating God in one’s own image…

What’s really terrifying is that it is only a small step from this sort of faith-based delusion to a desire to help “God’s work” along, by bringing a pathogen to the U.S. and unleashing it. If you think that possibility is far-fetched, consider what the KKK, skinheads and other True Believers have been willing to do to protect their own racial or religious hegemony.

It’s time for the good Christians–and the good Republicans–to take their religion and their party back from the lunatics who are currently dominating the public face of both.

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Shameless Promotion

Earlier this year, Georgetown University Press published my monograph Talking Politics: What You Need to Know Before You Open Your Mouth as part of their new “digital shorts” series.

It is a brief (approximately 35 pages) description of basic legal, constitutional, economic and scientific information that I would argue is absolutely essential for anyone wishing to understand–or navigate– 21st Century America.

Here’s the flyer Georgetown recently issued, which includes an offer of a discount from the already very reasonable price.

Click here to download flyer

Consider this my  shameless attempt at marketing..Where else can you get a civic literacy “Cliff’s Notes” for under $5?

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About That Persecution of Christians and White Folks….

Those Christians who are so certain they are being persecuted remind me of teenage girls who are endlessly worried about what other people think of them, and just POSITIVE that everyone is talking about them behind their backs. (The truth, in both cases, is considerably less exciting: most of the time, no one is thinking about them one way or the other, since most people have lives–or at least more interesting topics for discussion.)

I’ve been fascinated for several years by Christians’ assertions of victimization (evidently any erosion of absolute hegemony is destabilizing), and I am completely bemused by an emerging companion phenomenon —the war on white people.

The most recent example is here. I knew Dee Dee Benke “back in the day” and remember her as an enthusiastic Republican, but not a hateful one. If she actually tweeted that she was in the sun trying to “brown up” in order to get “free health care, food, pad, fiestas” either she’s changed or I didn’t really know her.

Then there’s Congressman Mo Brooks, who recently accused Democrats of waging war on white America. (I think that’s called projection…). He’s evidently not the only one. If you really want to get depressed, google “war on white people.” There are some terrifying nut cases out there, and they have internet access.

Maybe all the whining, self-pity and faux victimization is intended to distract the rest of us–to keep us from noticing the racism, sexism and overwhelming fear of modernity that has replaced reason, cognition and elementary humanity in the conservative movement.

Psst..guys…It’s not working. We can still see you.

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Calling It Like He Sees It

Norm Ornstein has a recent column in the Atlantic, in which he considers what has happened to his–and my–former political party. Ornstein, for those unfamiliar with him, is a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, and a longtime and respected expert on Congress.

The most interesting, and important, dynamic in American politics today is the existential struggle going on in the Republican Party between the establishment and the insurgents—or to be more accurate, between the hard-line bedrock conservatives (there are only trace elements of the old-line center-right bloc, much less moderates) and the radicals…

As for the party leaders, consider some of the things that are now part of the official Texas Republican Party platform, as highlighted by The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg:

That the Texas Legislature should “ignore, oppose, refuse, and nullify” federal laws it doesn’t like.

That when it comes to “unelected bureaucrats” (meaning, Hertzberg notes, almost the entire federal workforce), Congress should “defund and abolish these positions.”

That all federal “enforcement activities” in Texas “must be conducted under the auspices of the county sheriff with jurisdiction in that county.” (That would leave the FBI, air marshals, immigration officials, DEA personnel, and so on subordinate to the Texas versions of Sheriff Joe Arpaio.)

That “the Voting Rights Act of 1965, codified and updated in 1973, be repealed and not reauthorized.”

That the U.S. withdraw from the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank.

That governments at all levels should “ignore any plea for money to fund global climate change or ‘climate justice’ initiatives.”

That “all adult citizens should have the legal right to conscientiously choose which vaccines are administered to themselves, or their minor children, without penalty for refusing a vaccine.

That “no level of government shall regulate either the ownership or possession of firearms.” (Period, no exceptions.)

Texas, of course, may be an outlier. But the Maine Republican Party adopted a platform that called for the abolition of the Federal Reserve, called global warming a myth, and demanded an investigation of “collusion between government and industry” in perpetrating that myth. It also called for resistance to “efforts to create a one world government.” And the Benton County, Ark., Republican Party said in its newsletter, “The 2nd Amendment means nothing unless those in power believe you would have no problem simply walking up and shooting them if they got too far out of line and stopped responding as representatives.”

One might argue that these quotes are highly selective—but they are only a tiny sampling (not a single one from Michele Bachmann, only one from Gohmert!). Importantly, almost none were countered by party officials or legislative leaders, nor were the individuals quoted reprimanded in any way. What used to be widely seen as loony is now broadly accepted or tolerated.

There are all sorts of theories about why the Grand Old Party has lost its collective mind. I’ve offered a few on this blog. But whatever the reasons for the departure from reason and elementary common sense, the fact of that departure is beyond dispute.

And infinitely depressing.

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