[Peace-discuss] Republicans, Religion and the Triumph of Unreason

[unionyes]

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> " Last week,
> one of the Republicans sent to disrupt a healthcare town hall
> started a fight and was injured - and then complained he had no
> health insurance. I didn't laugh; I wanted to weep. "
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>> Republicans, Religion and the Triumph of Unreason
>>
>> How do they train themselves to be so impervious to reality?
>>
>> By Johann Hari
>>
>> August 19, 2009 "The Independent" -- Something strange has happened
>> in America in the nine months since Barack Obama was elected. It has
>> best been summarised by the comedian Bill Maher: "The Democrats have
>> moved to the right, and the Republicans have moved to a mental
>> hospital."
>>
>> The election of Obama - a black man with an anti-conservative
>> message - as a successor to George W. Bush has scrambled the core
>> American right's view of their country. In their gut, they saw the
>> US as a white-skinned, right-wing nation forever shaped like Sarah
>> Palin.
>>
>> When this image was repudiated by a majority of Americans in a
>> massive landslide, it simply didn't compute. How could this have
>> happened? How could the cry of "Drill, baby, drill" have been beaten
>> by a supposedly big government black guy? So a streak that has
>> always been there in the American right's world-view - to deny
>> reality, and argue against a demonic phantasm of their own creation
>> - has swollen. Now it is all they can see.
>>
>> Since Obama's rise, the US right has been skipping frantically from
>> one fantasy to another, like a person in the throes of a mental
>> breakdown. It started when they claimed he was a secret Muslim, and
>> - at the same time - that he was a member of a black nationalist
>> church that hated white people. Then, once these arguments were
>> rejected and Obama won, they began to argue that he was born in
>> Kenya and secretly smuggled into the United States as a baby, and
>> the Hawaiian authorities conspired to fake his US birth certificate.
>> So he is ineligible to rule and the office of President should pass
>> to... the Republican runner-up, John McCain.
>>
>> These aren't fringe phenomena: a Research 200 poll found that a
>> majority of Republicans and Southerners say Obama wasn't born in the
>> US, or aren't sure. A steady steam of Republican congressmen have
>> been jabbering that Obama has "questions to answer". No amount of
>> hard evidence - here's his birth certificate, here's a picture of
>> his mother heavily pregnant in Hawaii, here's the announcement of
>> his birth in the local Hawaiian paper - can pierce this conviction.
>>
>> This trend has reached its apotheosis this summer with the
>> Republican Party now claiming en masse that Obama wants to set up
>> "death panels" to euthanise the old and disabled. Yes: Sarah Palin
>> really has claimed - with a straight face - that Barack Obama wants
>> to kill her baby.
>>
>> You have to admire the audacity of the right. Here's what's actually
>> happening. The US is the only major industrialised country that does
>> not provide regular healthcare to all its citizens. Instead, they
>> are required to provide for themselves - and 50 million people can't
>> afford the insurance. As a result, 18,000 US citizens die every year
>> needlessly, because they can't access the care they require. That's
>> equivalent to six 9/11s, every year, year on year. Yet the
>> Republicans have accused the Democrats who are trying to stop all
>> this death by extending healthcare of being "killers" - and they
>> have successfully managed to put them on the defensive.
>>
>> The Republicans want to defend the existing system, not least
>> because they are given massive sums of money by the private medical
>> firms who benefit from the deadly status quo. But they can't do so
>> honestly: some 70 per cent of Americans say it is "immoral" to
>> retain a medical system that doesn't cover all citizens. So they
>> have to invent lies to make any life-saving extension of healthcare
>> sound depraved.
>>
>> A few months ago, a recent board member for several private health
>> corporations called Betsy McCaughey reportedly noticed a clause in
>> the proposed healthcare legislation that would pay for old people to
>> see a doctor and write a living will. They could stipulate when (if
>> at all) they would like care to be withdrawn. It's totally
>> voluntary. Many people want it: I know I wouldn't want to be kept
>> alive for a few extra months if I was only going to be in agony and
>> unable to speak. But McCaughey started the rumour that this was a
>> form of euthanasia, where old people would be forced to agree to
>> death. This was then stretched to include the disabled, like Palin's
>> youngest child, who she claimed would have to "justify" his
>> existence. It was flatly untrue - but the right had their
>> talking-point, Palin declared the non-existent proposals "downright
>> evil", and they were off.
>>
>> It's been amazingly successful. Now, every conversation about
>> healthcare has to begin with a Democrat explaining at great length
>> that, no, they are not in favour of killing the elderly - while
>> Republicans get away with defending a status quo that kills 18,000
>> people a year. The hypocrisy was startling: when Sarah Palin was
>> Governor of Alaska, she encouraged citizens there to take out living
>> wills. Almost all the Republicans leading the charge against "death
>> panels" have voted for living wills in the past. But the lie has
>> done its work: a confetti of distractions has been thrown up, and
>> support is leaking away from the plan that would save lives.
>>
>> These increasingly frenzied claims have become so detached from
>> reality that they often seem like black comedy. The right-wing
>> magazine US Investors' Daily claimed that if Stephen Hawking had
>> been British, he would have been allowed to die at birth by its
>> "socialist" healthcare system. Hawking responded with a polite cough
>> that he is British, and "I wouldn't be here without the NHS".
>>
>> This tendency to simply deny inconvenient facts and invent a fantasy
>> world isn't new; it's only becoming more heightened. It ran through
>> the Bush years like a dash of bourbon in water. When it became clear
>> that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, the US right
>> simply claimed they had been shipped to Syria. When the scientific
>> evidence for man-made global warming became unanswerable, they
>> claimed - as one Republican congressman put it - that it was "the
>> greatest hoax in human history", and that all the world's
>> climatologists were "liars". The American media then presents itself
>> as an umpire between "the rival sides", as if they both had evidence
>> behind them.
>>
>> It's a shame, because there are some areas in which a conservative
>> philosophy - reminding us of the limits of grand human schemes, and
>> advising caution - could be a useful corrective. But that's not what
>> these so-called "conservatives" are providing: instead, they are
>> pumping up a hysterical fantasy that serves as a thin skin covering
>> some raw economic interests and base prejudices.
>>
>> For many of the people at the top of the party, this is merely
>> cynical manipulation. One of Bush's former advisers, David Kuo, has
>> said the President and Karl Rove would mock evangelicals as "nuts"
>> as soon as they left the Oval Office. But the ordinary Republican
>> base believe this stuff. They are being tricked into opposing their
>> own interests through false fears and invented demons. Last week,
>> one of the Republicans sent to disrupt a healthcare town hall
>> started a fight and was injured - and then complained he had no
>> health insurance. I didn't laugh; I wanted to weep.
>>
>> How do they train themselves to be so impervious to reality? It
>> begins, I suspect, with religion. They are taught from a young age
>> that it is good to have "faith" - which is, by definition, a belief
>> without any evidence to back it up. You don't have "faith" that
>> Australia exists, or that fire burns: you have evidence. You only
>> need "faith" to believe the untrue or unprovable. Indeed, they are
>> taught that faith is the highest aspiration and most noble cause. Is
>> it any surprise this then percolates into their political views?
>> Faith-based thinking spreads and contaminates the rational.
>>
>> Up to now, Obama has not responded well to this onslaught of
>> unreason. He has had a two-pronged strategy: conciliate the elite
>> economic interests, and joke about the fanatical fringe they are
>> stirring up. He has (shamefully) assured the pharmaceutical
>> companies that an expanded healthcare system will not use the power
>> of government as a purchaser to bargain down drug prices, while
>> wryly saying in public that he "doesn't want to kill Grandma".
>> Rather than challenging these hard interests and bizarre fantasies
>> aggressively, he has tried to flatter and soothe them.
>>
>> This kind of mania can't be co-opted: it can only be overruled.
>> Sometimes in politics you will have enemies, and they must be
>> democratically defeated. The political system cannot be gummed up by
>> a need to reach out to the maddest people or the greediest
>> constituencies. There is no way to expand healthcare without
>> angering Big Pharma and the Republicaloons. So be it. As Arianna
>> Huffington put it, "It is as though, at the height of the civil
>> rights movement, you thought you had to bring together Martin Luther
>> King and George Wallace and make them agree. It's not how change
>> happens."
>>
>> However strange it seems, the Republican Party really is spinning
>> off into a bizarre cult who believe Barack Obama is a baby-killer
>> plotting to build death panels for the grannies of America. Their
>> new slogan could be - shrill, baby, shrill.
>>
>> Copyright 2009 Independent News and Media Limited
>
>
>
> - -- 
> The Financiers & Banksters have looted untold trillions of our future 
> earnings.
> Their bureaucratic police & military goons are here to make us all pay for 
> it.
> Forever.
> Well FORGET THAT. Let's get it *ALL* back from them -- and more.
>
> **Socialist revolution NOW!!**
>
> Build the North America-wide General Strike.
> TODO el poder a los consejos y las comunas.
> TOUT le pouvoir aux conseils et communes.
> ALL power to the councils and communes.
>
> And beware the 'bait & switch' fraud: "Social Justice" is NOT 
> *Socialism*...
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