Wingnuts On Parade

Yesterday was a red-letter day: this year's Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, convened in Washington, D.C. Billed as "the Largest Annual Gathering of Conservative Students, Activists and Policymakers," it is the right's lunatic fringe on full, proud and open display.

By all accounts, it's pretty much the nonsense you'd expect: Conservatives are the real Americans, Obama is taking us to hell in a handcart, science and rationalism are naughty, victimizing the powerless=Good, empowering the powerless=Evil, that sort of thing.

But one bit of reportage really caught my eye, this from Christopher Beam of slate.com:

...the next speaker, John Bolton... recalls the time during the campaign when Obama said Iran was just a "tiny" threat. "Is the loss of one American city picked at random—Chicago—is that a 'tiny' threat?" He delivers this line like Kevin Nealon's Subliminal Man. This brings the house down.

Let's, for the moment, disregard the fact that Bolton has misquoted President Obama on the "tiny threat" reference, and let's also disregard the apparent glee that "real Americans" feel at the thought of Chicago being destroyed, Sodom-and-Gomorrah-style. Instead, because it's been sticking in my craw for a while, let's focus upon the current right-wing monomania concerning Iran.

To the heart of the matter: Even assuming that Iran possessed both nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles capable of reliably delivering them to any given city in the U.S., why in the world would they launch said attack? It is a certainty that any such attack would result in the total annihilation of Iran, its reduction to a charred radioactive cinder, the deaths of a huge percentage of its populace. I find it hard to believe that this is what the leadership of Iran desires, and I am supremely confident that they are capable of "doing the math," so to speak.

"But, Wade," you say, "their President, Ahmadinejad, is a crazy fundamentalist and says terrible things about destroying Israel!" True enough... and he has about as much power in Iran as does John Bolton in the United States. The Presidency of Iran exists only to provide a certain amount of "democratic" sheen to what is a de facto dictatorship.

No, the real power in Iran resides in the person of the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. The military, the press and the judiciary all answer to Khamenei and are dependent upon him for their positions. And, though he is a despot, he is also a rational actor who wishes to retain his power, just as did the many Soviet Premiers who did not launch nuclear attacks upon the U.S. -- and for the same reason: their assured destruction, should they do so.

Though Iran is, indeed, a major regional power -- one that has been further empowered by the ill-advised U.S. invasion of Iraq -- and poses a direct threat to certain aspects of American policy in the Middle East, it is not about to start a nuclear war with the world's sole superpower. Either the right-wing wackos are too stupid to recognize this reality, or they are baselessly fear-mongering concerning Iran.

In either case, why would anyone listen to them?

Why Sports Matter To Us

A couple weeks ago, Sports Illustrated reported that perennial baseball all-star Alex Rodriguez had used steroids earlier in this decade. Since then, the sports reporting establishment (especially the ESPN Hype Machine) has been going nuts, examining the story and every tiresomely conceivable repercussion of it, ad nauseum.

Why so much teeth-gnashing and garment-rending when most people take the availability and use of performance-enhancing drugs to be a matter of fact in the entertainment industry known as sports? I think that it has everything to do with how we Americans see sports in relation to ourselves and our own lives.

We are all familiar with the great American myth: Work hard, be honest, have a better idea (or realize an old idea in a better way), keep trying and everything will work out for you. The level playing field of America's marketplace will see that you rise to the top.

But, of course, that myth is nonsense, pure hokum. We have all seen cheaters prosper, have seen well-connected incompetents rewarded, have seen capable people discounted or discarded because they are from the wrong side of the tracks, are from the wrong family, are the wrong sex, or race, or age, or sexual orientation. That supposed "level playing field" is easily distorted by social prejudices and by the power that great accumulated wealth wields.

In harsh truth, you can strive all you want. Whether or not you succeed is, to a great degree, completely out of your hands.

But, in sport, we Americans like to believe that the great American myth still survives as an actuality. We want to believe that if you have done the hard work that enables you to hit a pitched ball consistently well, to adeptly shoot a basketball through a hoop, to throw a football with pinpoint accuracy, then your utility as a player will be obvious and you will be rewarded.

At its best, sport is an idealized version of America, in which the rules are the same for everyone once they step onto the playing field -- just as they are supposed to be (but never are) in our everyday lives.

And so when players (or coaches or officials) cheat, conspire with gamblers, take illicit performance-enhancing drugs, they are not merely breaking the rules of the game or the laws of the nation; they are betraying our own finely-constructed fantasy version of the nation. They are destroying our house-of-cards view of the United States of America.

Nothing can be so jolting as coming face-to-face with reality. No wonder we react so badly.

Jocularity, Jocularity

Nope, not Photoshopped; it seems that hackers in several different places have taken to messing with road warning signs, alerting motorists to such looming dangers as raptors and zombies. Transportation officials have their undies in a bunch over it, of course, but I'd be willing to bet that these signs grab the attention of motorists to a far greater degree than do ones containing run-of-the-mill traffic messages.

What can I say? This just makes me deeply happy.

Prayer (And Hitler Comparison) Is The Last Refuge Of A Scoundrel

Yesterday, I spent a good hour and a half listening, as is often my wont, to Crazy Christian radio, this time in the person of Brannon Howse, host of "Worldview Matters." Said program is a show dedicated, it seems, to promoting a "biblical worldview" of all matters, as somehow magically divined by Mister Howse.

Yikes.

What first caught my attention was Howse's laughable, biblically-inspired "list" of parallels between Hitler's Germany and Obama's America. Kinda funny how the insane Nazi comparisons are brought out by wackos on both the far left and far right, depending upon just whom happens to be President at any given moment. Reagan? Nazi comparisons. G.H.W. Bush? The same. And Clinton... and G.W. Bush... and now Obama. The mind fairly boggles at the unoriginality of these idiots.

But that was, really, just your garden-variety wingnuttery; what really gave me pause was a listener phone call that Howse took. The gist of the call was the caller's literal belief that the Second Amendment authorizes citizens, should they see that the government is "doing wrong," to use firearms to shoot government officials.

Let me be crystal-clear: I AM NOT EXAGGERATING, NOR AM I MAKING THIS UP! If anything, I am using far more mild and rational language than the caller used.

Seriously, did someone just say that the Second Amendment tells you to kill the President, should you disagree with him or her?

I sat, mouth agape, speechless.

And what did Brannon Howse say to dissuade the caller from her psychotic belief? Not a damn thing. In fact, he said that it was, verbatim, "a good call."

This is modern Christianity? Jesus must currently be weeping tears of blood.

Heroes Come Cheap These Days

Okay, so noted retard Michael Phelps got caught smoking the reefer. As a result, he's lost endorsements, been suspended by USA Swimming (whatever the hell that is) and is making the rounds on his apology tour.

Why the foofaraw about a bong hit? Because of all the "kids who look up to him as a role model and a hero," according to a statement from the swimming organization.

And that, of course, begs the obvious question: Why in the world is this moron a role model or a hero?

Sure, he can swim fast. Yippee. If I need to transport a small object out to the middle of a lake PDQ, and if there is no boat available, he'll be the first one I call. Short of that, I fail to see the utility of his particular skill set, much less the heroism in it.

Athletes are paid vast sums to play kids' games, and I understand that; the economic value of their endeavors is evident in the throngs they bring in to stadiums and arenas. I admire their physical prowess. But are they heroes? No.

If your child must have heroes, point him or her toward those who have demonstrated courage in their beliefs during trying times, toward those who do difficult, dangerous and necessary jobs for shit wages and without complaint. Toward a soldier, a teacher, a civil-rights organizer, a fireman, an artist.

Not toward the Michael Phelps' of the world.

The GOP Fiddles While Rome Burns

February 4, 2009, News Item: Senator Jim DeMint, a Republican from South Carolina, introduced an amendment to the stimulus bill that would have, had it passed, utterly stripped all actual economic stimuli from the bill -- instead turning it into another massive tax cut for the wealthy. The amendment was defeated, but with 36 of the 41 GOP Senators voting for it. That's 87.8 percent of all Republicans in the Senate.

87.8%!!!!

February 6, 2009, News Item: The United States economy lost 598,000 jobs in January, according to the Department of Labor. That makes 3,600,000 jobs lost since the official beginning of the current recession in December of 2007.

*****

As columnist and Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman has pointed out repeatedly, there are no monetary policy solutions left for the Fed to try; interest rates are already effectively at zero. We can attempt to vigorously stimulate the economy, or we can follow the lead of Herbert Hoover, rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Can you guess which alternative the still-filibuster-capable Republicans prefer? I knew you could. They just continue on as though the last eight years never happened, as though this economic crisis descended upon the world from outer space, rather than being a direct result of the disastrous policies that they continue to attempt to foist upon us to an even greater degree.

And if we descend into economic oblivion, into a Second Great Depression? I'm sure that they believe that they can use it as an effective electoral tool, blaming it all on Barack Obama and the Democrats.

As far as I'm concerned, the only question left to ask is: "Why do conservatives hate America?"