Dumbing Down of Republicans

Today Donald Trump, a human road apple, is a leading contender for the Republican nomination for President. Trump's issue has been President Obama's "missing" long form birth certificate (now made public after the President's special request). This must be the dumbest political issue of my lifetime.

I've been thinking about how things got so bad.

Until 2010 the Republican Party existed as a conduit to pass laws that would transfer money from poor people to rich people. It took smart Ivy League lawyers to pull off this fraud. As recently as George W. Bush that was still the party's core function. But Republicans could not run on theft from the poor as an issue.

To win elections, the Republicans had to mislead voters, and, in theory, the less informed the voters were, the better the Republicans would do. We're familiar with how they went about dumbing down voters: Fox News, a stress on racism, laws to hamper registration of young voters, defunding public schools, etc. The problem with this 30 year campaign is that it turned into a slippery slope. The Republican party ended up way too dumb. Now it has produced the Tea Party (right wing populists), who run Republican policy. Wall Street is appalled--the Teabaggers are on a path to destroy the American government and the world economy, because they know nothing. They don't listen to the corporate oligarchy that manages America.

The Wall Street Republicans have a problem.

An example of current stupidity is the attempt to appeal the California court decision against Proposition 8 (forbidding gay marriage) on the grounds that the judge who made it was gay. Here is the reasoning. The judge was gay. The issue was gay rights. Therefore, the judge was biased.

This is an interesting new standard without legal precedent. Let's see how if might work.

If the Prop 8 judge had been straight, that would also have been a bias. Only a bisexual judge would have been fair.

In cases involving racism,unbiased multiracial judges would be required. In cases about the rights of women, only transgendered judges could render evenhanded verdicts. Cases involving religion would be tried by agnostics. And so on.

I doubt if this will catch on.

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What the Republicans did was follow Wall Street Karl Rove's strategy, which was to maximize the stupid vote. The stupid soon took over the Republican primaries, to Rove's dismay, defeated Wall Street incumbents and elected raving loonies to public office.

What does this illustrate? The law of unintended consequences.

Gary Goss

The Loony Bin: Ayn Rand

A y n R a n d (rhymes with Cain Band) was a Russian with a terrible first name and a wandering eye who became known for developing a teenager's "philosophy" called objectivism. She moved to the United States in 1926 and eventually wrote (quite badly) THE FOUNTAINHEAD and ATLAS SHRUGGED.

Rand is popular at the moment in some rightwing circles and (I am guessing) among advocates of open marriage who horse around with each other Back East.

All you really need to know about Rand's beliefs is that she advocated egoism and unrestricted capitalism, making her a favorite author among CEOs of major corporations, disastrous economists, and happy libertarians, who read her (correctly) as a ruthless rightwing anarchist seeking absolute freedom at the expense of the less fortunate.

In recent years we have seen her ugly beliefs being applied to living flesh by lamebrains like Alan Greenspan, Ron Paul, Rand Paul and Corporate Republicans in general. In Rand they claim to find a justification to tax the poor and subsidize the super rich. They ignore her atheism. She's again the rage. Meanwhile, I wish she were dead.

Actually she is dead.

Ayn Rand was a dim-witted self-centered cougar, but I doubt if she wanted us to tax the poor and subsized the rich. I can't say for certain. She was long ago dismissed by experts in fiction and by experts in philosophy. Life is too short to spend weeks of it studying the trash she generated. She's not part of an education.

In the human comedy we all enjoy, we can take a certain pleasure in watching, once again, how easily deluded we are. My suggestion is that we name all our cats "Rand" and then get back to living together. (Could that be the reality Rand of Russia missed: that humans live together?)


Gary Goss

The Devolution of Republican Leaders

I remember when many of us thought President Eisenhower was of barely normal intelligence, because he seemed inarticulate. That was wrong, of course--Eisenhower had been smart enough to cope with Hitler, Roosevelt and Churchill. He was inarticulate in public because (my theory) he was hiding a sharp personality behind a grinning boyish charm, even at age 70. That much self-censorship would make most people trip on their tongues.

Next we thought that Gerald Ford was stupid. In fact, we said, Nixon had named Ford as his Vice President because nobody would ever remove Nixon from office if the alternative was a thickheaded dunce who had played football without a helmet. President Ford was the first man of whom it was said that he couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time. Chevy Chase achieved fame by playing Ford on Saturday Night Live as a fool who repeatedly fell over furniture and landed on his ass. Compared to some recent political leaders, though, Ford now looks like the dean of graduate studies.

George W. Bush is commonly thought to be the most stupid President in American history, although not the most stupid major candidate, who remains Dan Quayle. I once saw Quayle in person. He had a single mixed expression, fear of punishment combined with puzzlement. It was the look of a man who could not spell his own name and had been beaten on top of his gong for it. Example: when he addressed the United Negro College Fund, whose slogan is "A mind is a terrible thing to waste," Quayle said, "You take the UNCF model that what a waste it is to lose one's mind or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is."

But Quayle is a paradigm of informed wisdom compared the what the Tea Party has coughed up on the lawn in the last two years. Now we are down to slobs set on ending contraception on the grounds that having sex once every nine months more than meets their copulatory needs. They wave Confederate flags, stare with hogs' hungry eyes, and tell you slavery wasn't so bad. After 2010 they rode into Washington, two to a mule, on saddles made of recycled toxic waste, determined to destroy the federal government, sack the world economy, and reverse events that had once taken place at Appomattox Courthouse. They live in an alternate universe composed of twaddle.

It's enough to make you wonder why democracy failed in Athens, replaced by an oligarchy of wealthy families, unless that sounds familiar.

Celebrating Slavery

I noticed recently that the White Republican South has launched a five year official celebration of the Civil War, which they started about 150 years ago. This is roughly the equivalent of Germany hosting a five year celebration of the Holocaust.

Like many others, I tend to let dim the horror that was slavery, when four million people were held in conditions that allowed torture, murder and rape. The viciousness of this crime against humanity stains American history--or it would if we talked about it. For the most part the North is silent, part of the bargain we made when we brought the South back into the union, a major mistake. (Consider what our government would look like today without the South.)

About 40% of our people believe that the South went to war to preserve states' rights, which is almost a half-truth. The South fought to preserve one right, the right to extend slavery into the new states, where the tide was running against them. To build an army, the South initiated the country's first draft, a one-year term for poor farmers that was soon extended to last the duration of the war.

Two of my great-grandfathers, I can say, fought as privates to free the slaves. I doubt if they would have been pleased to see a five year celebration of those who fought for what General Grant called the worst cause known to history.

No doubt the most celebrated rebel will be General Robert E. Lee, a noble-looking slaver, considered at the start of the Civil War to be among the South's ten best military leaders. No one then thought him the best. That honor went to Albert Sidney Johnston, killed at Shiloh. Jefferson Davis called his death "the turning point of the war." It now seems likely that, like Stonewall Jackson, Johnston was shot by one of his own draftees, perhaps by accident.

In any case, Robert E. Lee went on to defeat about eight Union generals, each of them fourth-rate. Lee had no opposition. As a general Lee was active, imaginative, rash and headstrong. When he finally met a second-rate general, Meade, at Gettysburg, Lee got crushed. Once Grant got hold of Lee--Grant won every battle he ever fought--the noble slaver was beaten like a rented mule.

We're going to hear a lot of rubbish about the great Bobby Lee in the next five years. I'm gritting my teeth.

Dewey Defeats Truman !

As you may have read, a Republican county clerk, Kathy Nickolaus, in Wisconsin found, in the aftermath of Justice David Prosser's reelection defeat, an additional 14,000 votes, which reversed the loss and gave her former boss for 13 years a resounding victory.

By late afternoon, Nickolaus had also taken authorities to Jimmy Hoffa's body, missing since July 30, 1975. Hoffa, who had once led the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, was found buried under the football stadium in Green Bay. She next found Judge Crater, missing since August 6, 1930, living in a suburb of Madison.

By midnight, with the help of Karl Rove, Ms. Nickolaus had located the missing section of Franz Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, the Lost Ark (containing the stones on which the Ten Commandments had been written and Aaron's rod and a petrified jar of manna), and enough loose votes to elect Thomas E. Dewey President of the United States in 1948.

She went to bed satisfied. We congratulate Ms. Nickolaus on her remarkable day.

Oahu

I hear complaints that President Obama doesn't bargain like a hard man from Chicago. That's right. He isn't from Chicago. He bargains like a man from Oahu.

Healdsburg Owls

Baseball fans may be aware that a Giants fan made the mistake of attending opening day at Dodgers Stadium, where a group of Dodger fans beat him down in the parking lot. He is now in a coma with brain damage.

For some years I worked on Long Island, and I recall well the last time I went to a Mets game. My wife and I took our two little girls, fans of the club, and once we were seated I realized that we had taken them to what amounted to an outdoor saloon filled with drunken louts. When they weren't pouring beer into their mouths, they were shouting obscenities. The Mets lost.

After the game, we got onto the train with the other fans, and again we were surrounded by obnoxious drunks, including one in particular, a guy wearing glasses, who spent the trip cursing loudly (being manly, no doubt) and making racist remarks--he attributed the Mets loss to the one Black player on the team, Mookie Wilson, (who had played very well). Our car was parked at the first stop, and as I got off, I had to pass the loudmouth, so I rammed my shoulder into him. To my great pleasure, his glasses popped off and fell into the crack between the train and the platform, where they could not be retrieved. We could hear him grieving as we walked away.

Meanwhile, many years later, some friends took me to a minor league game, where the crowd was small, friendly, relaxed and totally enjoyed a losing game under a soft evening sky. I am now hooked on minor league ball. I mention this because Healdsburg has an unknown minor league team that will be playing this summer. You might want to google the Healdsburg Owls.