“PATRIOTISM IS THE LAST REFUGE OF SCOUNDRELS”AND THE MOST MALEVOLENT SCOUNDRELS RESIDE ON THE FAR RIGHT SIDE OF THE POLITICAL SPECTRUM
I will not soon forget sitting in the living room of our Florida home casually talking about the upcoming 2008 election. Our long time friends have always been conservative Republicans, thus the subject always never came up. However, on this occasion, the husband of my wife’s dear friend, a retired Air Force man came out with an angry comment that he would never vote for a man who did not have his hand over his heart during the pledge of allegiance. The room fell silent and I, of course, had to bite my tongue.
We learned later that it was the National Anthem and not the Pledge of Allegiance for which Obama was standing at attention. Obama, Richardson, Clinton were some of the candidates in Iowa during the primary season and were standing on a platform decorated with several flags during the opening ceremony prior to the rally.
I really did not think anything about it, but apparently there are those who are offended when a person does not pay tribute to the National Anthem by placing his hand over his heart.
On another occasion, the media and the Republicans had cardiac arrests when Obama failed to wear a flag on his lapel during one of the debates. No sooner was the debate over than the Fox hyper-patriotic news staff began to blatantly question the patriotism of Barack Obama. I was livid. Who these empty- suited pretty boys are with perfectly coiffure hair, make-up and voices that were manufactured strictly for the television audience?
On another occasion, Michelle Obama spoke at a rally in Milwaukee and made a comment that sent the conservative commentators into a tizzy. Speaking off the cuff, she said "For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country. And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. And I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction."
Mary Matalin, advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney, radio commentators Monica Crowley, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, and, of course, the entire Fox News-less group began a campaign referring to Michelle and Barack Obama as unpatriotic. They were horrified. The nation, according this herd of patronizing patriots, would not survive under people who are subversives at best and communists at worst.
How can you possibly trust a man who does not wear a flag pin on his lapel, does not place his hand over his heart during the National Anthem, and is married to a woman who is only recently proud of her country? What pompous asses these scoundrels are; what fools who have no idea what true patriotism is and who is and who is not patriotic!
The Conservatives have always considered themselves the real patriots and especially the right wing Christian Conservative who not only believe they have a corner on religion, but also on devotion to country. These are the same people who want to place the Ten Commandments on the Court House walls even though the Ten Commandments are in the sole possession of Judaism. These are the same people go to church, but often do not vote because they think all politicians are crooked.
These fair weather patriots are the member of Congress and the right wing talk show hosts who bad mouthed the Obama Recovery and reinvestment act, and they are the members of Congress who voted against the bill in spite of the dire warnings they received from the top economists in the world who predicted that the U. S. would be financially drowning in red ink that would never wash off.
These red blooded American patriots will pay any price, send any number of troops overseas to fight in a war that was unjustifiable, and yet will not spend their precious tax payer money on improving our educational system, provide health insurance for all Americans, rebuilding our infrastructure, redesign Social Security and Medicare, help fellow citizens who have lost their jobs, health insurance and homes.
These are the people who think that the only patriots wear a military uniform. This is not to disparage those who fight for our country when the threat is real, but it is to assuage the tendency of the Republicans to go to any war anywhere they feel that our nation might, someday, somehow be threatened by a country or a dictator who makes insane remarks about his power and his plans to one day destroy America.
This nation is overpopulated with these scoundrels. Even when members of their own party deviate from policy positions dear to the heart of the far right, they become ferocious critics and fault-finders of their fellow party members.
During the last campaign, John McCain became the target of numerous slurs by the scoundrels who are charter members of this body of renegades who consider themselves in sole possession of both patriotism and Christian values.
Rush Limbaugh blatantly called McCain a threat to “the American way of life as we’ve always known it.” Ann Coulter called the Senator from Arizona and the flag bearer of the Republican Party into the November, 2008 election “a Democrat.” And even the “fair and balanced” newscast in February of 2008, ran a picture of McCain with the hurtful addition-- (D-AZ) -- i.e. Democrat from Arizona.
Rick Perlstein of The Nation wrote a fascinating piece from the left’s perspective of the perverted manner in which the scoundrels on the right were tar and feathering the Republican candidate for president.
Some of the most toxic comments came from the ultra-conservative branch of the GOP. For example, Perlstein quoted Senator Thad Cochran, (R-MS) as saying about McCain, “The thought of him as President sends a cold chill down my spine.” He refers to the publication, Human Events, headed by a herd of Neanderthals that is so far to the right that has nearly fallen off the edge of the flat earth in which they still believe.
On the morning following the announcement by Mitt Romney that he would not longer seek the Republican nomination for president, Human Evens published its round-up of the top stories of the preceding week. John McCain was the main character in 8 out of the 10. One devoted conservative referred to McCain as “the new axis of evil.” Former president Ronald Reagan’s son who apparently was dropped on his head as a child wrote in a piece entitled “John McCain Hates Me,” “there is a huge gap that separates McCain—whose contempt for his fellow humans is patently obvious—and my dad, Ronald Reagan,” and concluded, “He has contempt for conservatives who he thinks can be duped into thinking he’s one of them.”
John McCain transformed himself into a scoundrel during the campaign. He became the “grouchy old man,” who was so arrogant he refused to look at Obama at any point during the second debate as if he were so superior to his African-American opponent that he was not obligated to take notice of Obama’s presence on the platform. In my mind, McCain lost any chance he had of even coming close to winning the contest on that evening. I was embarrassed for him, but I also realized that that is precisely how McCain views himself. After all he is a war hero who served 24 years in the Senate and 21 years in the military and wondered to himself why he should be forced to debate this black man from Illinois who had an impressive educational resume, but had served only 10 years in the Illinois legislature (just like Abraham Lincoln) and was just elected to the U. S. Senate two years prior.
It is believed by many conservative Republicans who cannot seem to connect to McCain that he has been one of those Senators who always thought of himself superior to his brethren in the Republican bond. And that is the very reason they were hesitant to back his candidacy even after he clinched the nomination, to the surprise of many.
Some member of Republican audiences became just as much of a scoundrel as their leaders. One woman captured McCain’s attention and said she could not vote for Obama because he was a Muslim and what is more astounding is that over 20 per cent of the populace also thought the Democratic candidate was a Muslim although it had been disproven by several major independent sources. One Chicago newspaper sent a team to visit the various schools that Obama attended as a youth to investigate if any were affiliated with the radical Muslim terrorist groups.
Audience members in other cities cried out “Kill him,” as the Vice-Presidential candidate, Governor Sarah Palin fed these miserably hungry lunatics with all of the red meat she could muster.
Another crowd of wildly reckless and irresponsible lunatics tried to prove that Obama was not a citizen of the United States although the State of Hawaii certified his birth there.
I came to the uncomfortable conclusion that there are a lot more racists in the country than I ever dared believe. Whether in Florida where I live five months out of the year or Southwestern Ohio where I was born, I ran to people who simply had not come to grips with the very real fact, that while the ancient prototype of an African American pictured an uneducated, unsophisticated, and hapless person who had but a meager knowledge of the English language accompanied by a distinct accent that exposed their limited background to people around them.
Today, Barack Obama is a graduate of Columbia University, the Harvard Law School, and received the singular honor of being the first African American to sit as president of the Harvard Law Review. His wife, Michelle, is a graduate of Princeton University and the Harvard Law School. These are not the same Black people your grandfather knew and ignored.
Clarence Darrow, the famous lawyer once wrote, "True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else." –This is lesson many Republicans have yet to learn. Not only do they tolerate injustice in their own land, many promote it. These super-patriots who drive through the grimy streets of our inner cities, but never lift a finger, a vote or a dollar to clean those streets is a hypocrite. Those who stood by and looked on as millions of Americans suffered from poverty, hunger, unemployment, lack of shelter, and were forced to habitually wear clothes often “borrowed” from the dead bodies lying in the cavernous, dark and despairing alleys during the Great Depression, persistently voted for conservative Republicans who wanted to devote themselves to a small and impotent federal government and to cut corporate taxes, cut capital gains taxes and increase the defense budget as their “final answer” to every political crisis.
Remember when Steve Forbes was running for president a few years ago and pushing a flat tax. The media really did not cover this idea with an degree of diligence or at least enough to recognize that all of Forbes’ investments were tied up in stocks and a flat tax would free him of paying any federal income tax because a flat tax does not level a toll on stock dividends. In other words, Forbes was pushing to get his name off the tax rolls.
It is no different today. The Boehner’s, McConnell’s, McCain’s, the leaders of the Republicans in Congress have not changed their political manifesto one iota since Herbert Hoover’s time—cut corporate taxes, cut the taxes on capital gains, and increase defense spending. This very week [February 16-20, 2009] I heard a Republican who apparently was formerly a member of the House of Representatives talking about President Obama’s $ 268,780,925,000 dollar Recovery and Reinvestment Act, to Chris Matthews on Hardball. In spite of the licking the Republican Party got in the last two elections, even though John McCain ran and lost big time on a “four more years of the last eight years” theme, this yoyo on Hardball had the nerve or should I say the idiocy to criticize Obama’s bill and when asked what he would do if he were Obama’s shoes, he stupidly responded, “cut corporate taxes, cut capital gains taxes, and increase defense spending.”
Many years ago my parents were traveling with some friends in the upper portion of Canada where the paved roads had run their course, and they were setting out on a dirty road. A sign along the side of the road read “Chose your rut carefully because you will be it for the next twenty miles.” That same sign should be posted outside the Republican National Committee, the House of Representatives and the U. S. Senate.”
The Republicans are in a rut and a deep one because they are literally bankrupt when it comes to new and innovative ideas. And yet in spite of their dearth of ideas for running the government, in spite of the very real fact that they have exhibited a paucity of ideas ever since Ronald Reagan who was one of the dumbest president’s ever to occupy the Oval Office and is best known for his infamous propaganda chant, “Government is not the answer to the problems, government is the cause of the problems.”
And it is because the Republican Party simply cannot escape from the shadow of the only man who had any ability whatsoever to speak in pubic, they cling to the same old, outdated and sterile ideas, deficient in originality and lacking in the power of invention.
They still believe that they have a corner on patriotism because they wear a flag pin on their lapels, place their hand over their hears when singing the “anthem,” and that they also have a corner on faith and religion. It is this arrogance that has caused them to fail in the last two elections.
7:41:32 PM 
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