Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Pepto-Bismol Breakfast
The Mrs. and I have no children, so I don't have any direct experience with morning sickness. Or at least I didn't until this morning, when Political Animal mentioned ValuesVoter.org's Contract with Congress. I decided I'd go read it, and voila! The 7:00 barf arrived right on schedule.
The contract is, as Kevin Drum describes it, "the wingnut Bill of Rights." It's full of the usual misinterpretations of American history (that the Founders were Bible-thumpers), overheated rhetoric ("Moved by our faith in God and this republican creed we join together now to defend representative self-government against the greatest assault it has ever faced"), and bad legislative ideas (the Constitution Restoration Act, which would forbid the Supreme Court from ruling on anything that acknowledges God as "the sovereign source of life, liberty, or government"--which, if passed, would open the way for any governmental entity to set up a theocracy beyond the reach of law). Not only that, it reads like something written by people who haven't been out of their bunkers in five years. Never mind that they're already in control of two branches of the federal government and on their way to control of the third. Never mind that they control state governments from sea to shining sea. It's not enough, because it has yet to lead to everything they want--and when it comes to moderating their wants and controlling their impulses, these people have all the willpower of five-year-olds. And this manifesto isn't something fringe nutjobs came up with--these demands are squarely within the mainstream of the Republican Party now, to the point at which some of the party's prospective presidential candidates wouldn't look sideways at them.
When you're out of your mind on dope, bad ideas can seem good, bad choices can seem like smart things to do, and your own self-aggrandizement becomes the only meaningful priority. And, as we noted here not long ago, when you're out of your mind on religion, you make the same sort of selfish choices, and the rest of the world be damned.
Recommended Reading: The recent protests against immigration legislation pending in Congress represent some of the most impressive street action we've seen in the United States in a long time. At least since the prewar Iraq protests, maybe since the nuclear freeze marches in the early 80s, and possibly going back to the 1960s. (There ought to be that many people out every weekend in places from Gobbler's Knob to West Overshoe demanding impeachment, but I digress.) But the "debate" over immigration is being played in the media as if it's brown people from Mexico versus "Americans," who are never precisely defined. As Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez wrote this week, there's a lot more to the immigration issue than CNN and the rest are reporting--and the fact that they're getting it wrong is badly distorting the issue for the millions of Americans who only know what they see on TV.
The Mrs. and I have no children, so I don't have any direct experience with morning sickness. Or at least I didn't until this morning, when Political Animal mentioned ValuesVoter.org's Contract with Congress. I decided I'd go read it, and voila! The 7:00 barf arrived right on schedule.
The contract is, as Kevin Drum describes it, "the wingnut Bill of Rights." It's full of the usual misinterpretations of American history (that the Founders were Bible-thumpers), overheated rhetoric ("Moved by our faith in God and this republican creed we join together now to defend representative self-government against the greatest assault it has ever faced"), and bad legislative ideas (the Constitution Restoration Act, which would forbid the Supreme Court from ruling on anything that acknowledges God as "the sovereign source of life, liberty, or government"--which, if passed, would open the way for any governmental entity to set up a theocracy beyond the reach of law). Not only that, it reads like something written by people who haven't been out of their bunkers in five years. Never mind that they're already in control of two branches of the federal government and on their way to control of the third. Never mind that they control state governments from sea to shining sea. It's not enough, because it has yet to lead to everything they want--and when it comes to moderating their wants and controlling their impulses, these people have all the willpower of five-year-olds. And this manifesto isn't something fringe nutjobs came up with--these demands are squarely within the mainstream of the Republican Party now, to the point at which some of the party's prospective presidential candidates wouldn't look sideways at them.
When you're out of your mind on dope, bad ideas can seem good, bad choices can seem like smart things to do, and your own self-aggrandizement becomes the only meaningful priority. And, as we noted here not long ago, when you're out of your mind on religion, you make the same sort of selfish choices, and the rest of the world be damned.
Recommended Reading: The recent protests against immigration legislation pending in Congress represent some of the most impressive street action we've seen in the United States in a long time. At least since the prewar Iraq protests, maybe since the nuclear freeze marches in the early 80s, and possibly going back to the 1960s. (There ought to be that many people out every weekend in places from Gobbler's Knob to West Overshoe demanding impeachment, but I digress.) But the "debate" over immigration is being played in the media as if it's brown people from Mexico versus "Americans," who are never precisely defined. As Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez wrote this week, there's a lot more to the immigration issue than CNN and the rest are reporting--and the fact that they're getting it wrong is badly distorting the issue for the millions of Americans who only know what they see on TV.
