David Vitter watch, day 2137, give or take

Today is a great day in the annals (two Ns, so shut up!) of Republican lying adulterers. Mark Sanford (R-only a sin to be a Democrat) will never again be seriously challenged by a Democratic candidate.

According to those exit polls, Mr. Sanford held a three-to-one lead among voters who described themselves as liars, cheaters, or sleazebags.

Once again, the majority of a conservative electorate has proven more committed to ideology than to the personal virtue they bullshit about whenever Ted Kennedy is the topic of conversation.

No big loss, really. Colbert Busch was never going to hold that seat past 2014. Now the Republicans are stuck with Sanford.

Maybe he, Vitter, and their role model, Newt Gingrich, should rent a limo with the up-suspension package and triple date. Oh, the stories they could tell to entertain their dates!

Cassandra had it easy

Our species has had wild success in the natural world, to such a degree that much of the world draws its nature from our designs. Most of that success has come in the past few tens of thousands of years. Often, we self-flatteringly credit our intelligence for this result - when we're not claiming even more self-flatteringly that god made us special.

We have souls, fer chrissakes. That makes us and us alone eligible for eternal paradise. God made us in his own image, so we're like so goddamn good-looking that it's a wonder satan doesn't hit on us. (Oh, right, he does. Yeah, in your hairy butt cleavage dreams.)

So we have to be the most intelligent species that ever could exist. We have to believe in human exceptionalism. We can't admit that eating and breathing and fucking and shitting and dying make us pretty much exactly like every other mammal, reptile, or amphibian that ever lived. Where's the wanking self-flattery in that!

In thirty years, we Americans have gone backward on accepting the plain truth that humans have existed longer than 10,000 years:

[T]he ”prevalence of this creationist view” has remained essentially unchanged since 1982.

The underlying Gallup poll shows that both religiosity and Republicanism damage American reason, but the damage doesn't stop there by any means. Four in ten Democrats believe god spat in a handful of dust and made Adam, navel-free and special. Never mind anything we might have learned since a bunch of scientifically illiterate Jews found their promised messiah. Never mind that Genesis is so filled with errors of fact that Bible literalism is falsified.

One thing that has changed in the past three decades: The profusion of fools in media has increased the ability of fools to assert they know things that just ain't so. Their tribe tells them to know nothing, and they do, not quietly, not ashamed of their ignorance, but ardently asserting it. They aren't stupid. But they willfully deny confirmed truth. They choose to bear the tribal markers of that chosen ignorance with pride.

It's not our intelligence that has made us successful, not in the sense of our ability to do science. Science is extremely recent, too recent to have been the evolutionary goal of our intelligence. Not many people can do it - or even understand it.

The big brains that permit us the pre-scientific intelligence to dominate the world, to proliferate across it, to alter the landscape and the atmosphere, evolved because social cooperation was so important to a weak and slow primate - perhaps the least physically imposing large primate. Weapons were (and are) important, but we needed language most of all. No one of us could bring down a mammoth. We needed a tribe. It took a village.

Tribalism has been very successful, and conservatives try to sneak it back in even when we've excluded it:

 In 1990 a colleague at the College of Charleston, where I was a math professor, pointed out that the South Carolina Constitution prohibited atheists from becoming governor.

Since the U.S. Constitution bars religious tests for public office, I asked a local ACLU lawyer how this obviously unconstitutional provision could be removed.

South Carolina's wackaloon voters were not going to elect an open atheist anyway. It's doubtful they would even consider someone who professed evolution guided by god. But it was tribal to continue the plainly illegal prohibition, the treatment of a group of citizens as second class, as outside the tribe:

I assumed, in my political naïveté, that state officials would consent to bring South Carolina into compliance with federal law. They didn’t. Governor Carroll Campbell said, “The South Carolina Constitution was fine as it was because this country was founded on Godly principles.”

When a social scientist tells you that conservatives are loyal and value authority, that sounds positive. But it isn't. Loyalty to the tribe can destroy ardor for the truth. Valuing authority to the exclusion of all else inevitably puts shameless shamans and charlatans in charge. Or royalty, if there's any difference.

In the immortal words of Kay:

A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.

I've been expecting too much rationality from our society and our politics. Most humans just aren't built to examine their cherished beliefs. They're built to rationalize in order to stay right with the tribe.

Cassandra had it easy.

Apocalypse never

Even the teabaggers are tired of teabagging.  Once Donald Trump jilted the birthers and other sordid wingy nuts and went back to his shitty, neo-feudalist TV show, even Nimrata "Nikki" Randhawa Haley, the wingnut governor of the wingnuttiest state, South Carolina, couldn't draw more than 10, I mean 8 teabaggers.  And who knows how many of them were simply luckless passersby.

Maybe the teeming hordes of blissful idiots all stayed home to wait for Jesus to rapture them.  No such luck, though.

Christ stood them up too.

Eight!  Though that's still not the single digit I'm offering them...

Freedom of my religion

Jim DeMint, like fundamentalists of a certain stripe, doesn't believe in the freedom of each person to make religious choices unhindered by government. This is what we mean when we call these people the American Taliban:

Speaking at a church rally in Spartanburg, South Carolina, DeMint told attendees people quietly told him he should not back down from a position he took in 2004 that openly gay individuals and single mothers who are involved in a sexual relationship should not be allowed to teach. He did not weigh in on whether unwed men should be allowed to teach.

"(When I said those things,) no one came to my defense," he said, according to the Spartanburg Herald-Journal. "But everyone would come to me and whisper that I shouldn't back down. They don't want government purging their rights and their freedom to religion." [emphasis added]

DeMint argues here that the government abrogates his rights by permitting someone else the free exercise of religion. It's an astonishingly stupid point of view, yet one that's very common among religious conservatives. (Conservatism, bad for you!)

And what the hell is a "church rally"? Sounds as though the IRS should be revoking more tax exemptions...

Total war

There is no blow too low for a South Carolina Republican when an election is at stake. Really, it was only a matter of time before the fundies there would attack the religious sincerity of Nimrata "Nikki" Haley.

These politicos are thoroughly tribal. They're not allowed to attack her off-white color any more even in the state that originated the great treason of 1861. She is a convert to Christianity, too conveniently they think, but they know that she's still the other.

It's almost enough to make me root for a wingnut libertarian. Well, maybe not almost - but as close as I get.

Mediaocre

On a daily basis, big media resolutely fails to pull back the curtain on the great and powerful Oz. The alleged Nikki Haley affair is a case of our credulous media's eagerness to accept bullshit with a bow on it as if it came from Tiffany's.

Will Folks is not a blogger. He is a political consultant who runs a rightwing news site. In any case, calling him a blogger (big-media-speak for pipsqueak upstart, by the way) is not informative. Doesn't everyone have a blog by now?

Folks is also not credible as a supporter of Nikki Haley. Nonetheless, the press dutifully prints his claim in every story. When he says he outed his alleged affair with Haley as a proactive step because the story was being shopped to the media, he can't possibly be credible. If he were really to try "getting ahead of the story," he wouldn't milk it for daily attention with promises of proof and death-of-a-thousand cuts delivery.

Folks has also claimed that he went public to protect the wife he married after the alleged affair. Surely someone in the editorial chain is married or has had an intimate relationship. "Honey, I had an affair with someone before we married, and I'm going to publicize it to protect you." Look, this is bullshit so runny you couldn't even tie a bow on it without first injecting drilling mud and huge amounts of concrete.

I have no idea whether Folks and Haley had sex. In fact, I have no idea what Folks is claiming and Haley is denying.

He says they had an "inappropriate physical relationship." Did she hug him a little too long? Did she spank him like a bad boy? Did he massage her feet with peppermint cream?

She denies having an affair. Well, what does she mean? Would it be o.k. if they necked a little but never did it? I'm sure her husband wouldn't approve, but would such a small dalliance count?

If they weren't both in the anti-sex base of the anti-sex party, I wouldn't care what they did. But I'd still care that the media is less concerned about finding out what's true than it is about repeating what everyone says and then shrugging - with both shoulders for balance.

We Americans have a political culture that seldom rises above the throes of puberty. Part of the reason why is that our media culture is about putting a bow on gossip and calling it news.

Mom in the patriarchy

With Dad off hiking the Appalachian Trail, someone has to keep order.

Click image for full David Cohen cartoon.

AK-47 won the American Revolution

Someone's holding a gun lobby to Lindsey Graham's head. Graham (R-you thought he could be both from South Carolina and sane? Ha) sacrifices this burnt offering on the altar of the NRA:

“I think you’re going too far here,” said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina at a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday. He was speaking in opposition to a bill that would keep people on the F.B.I. terrorist watch list from buying guns and explosives.

This is a guy who thinks he can't get any more heterodox on any topic, and his model for orthodox is Jim DeMint (R-teabaggers' first Presidential candidate). Graham keeps going:

[He] pointed out, “when the founders sat down and wrote the Constitution, they didn’t consider flying.”

Though of course the founders did all keep their budget Chinese AKs over the fireplace, and their superiority over ancient British musket meant they didn't need to venture up to Saratoga except to bet on the ponies. Yorktown was just some movie-maker's wet dream. The whole revolution was done in a couple of months - to account for the awful transportation infrastructure of the time, though I'd bet they in fact were wishing they could fly even then.

Valley Forge? George Washington was just an SOB, holding back the AKs so he could get to know Lafayette better.

You mean the founders didn't consider automatic weapons either when they wrote the Second Amendment? Unbelievable! Where was the NRA?

If Democrats had any sense of reciprocity, they'd be on all the talk shows saying, "Republicans want to arm terrorists." They wouldn't even be lying.

Slightly more fair-minded: Republicans would rather kiss the NRA's ass than keep automatic weapons and high explosives away from car bombers and other terrorists.

Give Graham the last word in poseur tough-guy security against terrorists:

“I am all into national security. ... I want to stop reading these guys their Miranda rights,” he said.

This climate did change

Lindsay Graham (R-what passes for semi-reasonable, especially in the lunatic politics of South Carolina) didn't bolt from his work with John Kerry on carbon emissions and climate change because of some poisonous and high-handed change in the Senate calendar by Harry Reid. (Note to journalists: The fact that Graham claimed that is, ahem, a lie, though you're all far too whipped to say that.)

Graham found the excuse he needed to go full metal wingnut to appease the ignoramus caucus, now the dominant Republican faction. He had previously pushed to speed up on immigration reform. What he really wants is to regain the good graces of his teabagger constituents. Absent Reid's own electoral need to respond to his neighboring state's new law on driving while Mexican, Graham would have found something else - "Your necktie, Mr. Majority Leader, is an obamanation, uh, abomination up with which I shall not put!"

None of this flanking right will work for Graham. Not only did he once say something agreeable to a Democrat - and you know the Democrat Party is bent on the satanic destruction of the Holy United States of Neo-Confederate America - Graham also isn't married to an acceptably deferential Southern Baptist woman with whom to play hide the salami. Instead, he's a bachelor, so there are three choices, none of them acceptable to the ig-caucus:

• He ain't gittin' none.
• He's a goddamned fornic-, fernicat-, furni-, aw hell, playboy, and that means he ain't p-whipped like me.
• He's one a them other kinds a teabagger, the kind that oughta be stoned - and I don't mean on no pot - stoned according to our lord Jesus Christ the prince of peace's dad, who sure as hell wasn't no damn hippie freak believer in not castin' the first stone at them types a folks.

What changed for Graham was Doug Hoffman, Marco Rubio, and now - incredibly - three even wingier candidates who find Utah's Bob Bennett to be not frothingly extreme enough, at least in part because they would prefer to be living through the Second Great Depression right about now. Hey, they have a year's food stockpiled, right? Graham doesn't want to follow Dede Scozzafava, though she is far more moderate than he is, nor especially Charlie Crist.

Teabaggers and the Republican right - you couldn't pry them apart with a crowbar - want fire and brimstone from their pols. No more laws! The Ten Commandments are enough (even though there are actually 11 or 12 of them, but who's counting?). Not even laws based on Republican proposals, and especially never any real liberalism.

What they want is more of the aptly named Jim Dement, sorry, DeMint. And Republicans everywhere are falling all over themselves to give the crazy extreme wingnuttitude to them.

Never out of date

Even though in 1996 Bill Clinton triangulated drastic welfare reform to the delight of Republicans, attacks on shiftless lazy leeches stray dawgs are far too appealing to Republicans and their ignoramus constituents to ever let go of them.

And damn if America doesn't spend trillions of dollars a year on foreign aid when we can't even pay our own bills at home...

There are people who believe both these canards.

Conceding South Carolina

South Carolina Republicans are gleeful because they're going to save "Joe" Wilson's seat in Congress. Whoop-de-doo.

Democrats don't need another Blue Dog , and that district is not going to elect even a moderate.

Censuring "Joe" casts in high relief the difference between Democrats and Republicans, and that helps Democrats. Helping South Carolina Republicans, who were going to win everything that matters in the Palmetto bug state, is a small price to pay.

Drama queen

Mark Sanford (R-SC) will take stimulus money after all, but he does not have to be happy about it. He just wants the federal government to leave him the hell alone - just as long as he gets on TV being left alone.

This is possibly the dumbest thing yet said by an elected official about the stimulus:

The stimulus "may or may not work," Sanford continued. "But wouldn't it make sense if it doesn't work to take 10 percent of that to pay down debt so that our finances are in stronger order, so that if it doesn't work, and if the storm is still raging 24 months from now, we're in a stronger financial position to spend more, to issue more debt, to do a whole host of things that would help people at the state level?"

Pretty much, I'm going to save my raincoat in case it's still raining in 2 years, so that then I can keep myself dry!

Frank Morgan, the schools superintendent in rural Kershaw County, likened Sanford's proposal to spend stimulus money to pay down debt to "trying to pay off your mortgage while your kids are starving."

Viagra for the Confederacy

Because the two bestest times of all time were the Civil War and the Great Depression, a couple of Confederate/Republican golden oldies are sweeping the nation. Well, not exactly the nation, but the Republican back benches in those citadels of enlightenment, Montana, Oklahoma, and South Carolina.

Some dipshit two-bit Oklahoman would be happy to condemn his fellow citizens to become Okies.

From Montana to South Carolina, lawmakers in mostly red states have pushed ahead with measures calling for state sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment, saying the federal government has overstepped its bounds with the stimulus package. The states are calling for the right to ignore laws they deem unconstitutional.

This is what gets them excited. I hope there's not little blue pill for it, although they are trying to deal with their political impotence.

Look, we settled this in 1865 after killing and maiming hundreds of thousands of loyal Americans and people whose children would once again be loyal Americans. Some of the latter were my relatives.

You states rights idiots don't have the power to unilaterally declare a federal law unconstitutional, as if you can even spell it. It doesn't matter what bullshit law you pass in Oklahoma or South Carolina (perversely proud home of Fort Sumter) or Montana or at your local militia meeting.

Of course, I guess we thought we had this settled even before the Civil War, when in the 1780s we ditched the Articles of Confederation in favor of the stronger government in the Constitution.

Why is CNN covering this fake and bullshit-filled trend? You don't think Lauren Kornreich called up Republicans in every state legislator, do you? The Republican press machine must have issued a release, which she dutifully typed up.

Stockholm Syndrome

The North Vietnamese tortured John McCain. Now he acquiesces to the continuation of Duhbya's CIA torture policy.

In 2000, Duhbya and the Bushists engaged in some of the vilest political character assassination against McCain. Now McCain makes common cause with one of the men who viciously abused him.

It appears that there is no depth to which John McCain will not stoop in pursuit of his overweening ambition. It's sad, really.

Becomes what he forswore

The Republicans lie even when they're lying. No one should any longer expect them to be fair to their opponents, but if their first tales are not juicy enough, they pump them up without limitation by silly things like facts.

John McCain had this done to him by the Bushists in 2000 in South Carolina. Now, he is trying vainly to do the same to Obama.

He has flushed his conscience down the toilet in the name of ambition. He has become a Bushist in every way.

Of course, compared to acquiescing to continued torture by the CIA, he had already much more visibly lost his bearings. It would be sad, a tragic flaw, except that it's so infuriating.

Despite all this, McCain will not be Thane of Cawdor. He will have to live with the damned spot for the rest of his days. He could have been a man and still lost. He chose to dishonor himself.

The delusional McCain?

Apparently, Cindy McCain has forgotten the way the Bushists' allies slimed her daughter and her family in South Carolina in 2000. As a parent, I would find that unforgivable even with the White House at stake. (Another reason I'll never be President!) There is no way I could ever greet warmly the man who permitted my daughter to be used against me the way Bushists used Bridget against John McCain.

Still, according to Cindy, what Obama is saying about her husband is worse. Bullshit. There are a large number of what Karl Rove would call character issues that Obama has left alone against John McCain:

• Cindy's drug addiction (without legal consequence)
  
• John's infidelity
• John's temper
• John's gambling
• John's rambling
• John's dismal flying record
• John's dearth of academic achievement
• John's willingness to exploit the protection of his admiral father
  

Yet Obama is running the "dirtiest campaign in American history." I suppose it's only natural for people who believe in Republican economics - we earned our inherited wealth - to believe that they are entitled to their own facts.

But Cindy's lack of perspective could only come from someone who has always had the field tilted in her favor and who can't remember as far back as 2000 - or chooses not to.

Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

Approved messages

Tom Bevan "shake[s his] head when [he sees] people driving around my neighborhood with their faded Kerry-Edwards bumper stickers on." Huh? That's what's amazing?

It's the Duhbya stickers that amaze me. There goes someone with the courage of his convictions, I think. An idiot, but he's not backing down, so he has a real kinship with Duhbya.

Bevan is weighing in on South Carolina's 'I Believe' vanity plate. Of course, his source is an op-ed that elides the key fact that other religions can't get a plate with words on it and so are discriminated against.

Again, this is really simple: Christians can have their vanity plate if the law permits everyone else to have a vanity plate under exactly the same rules. Oh, and the rules can't be contrived to exclude everyone else. Ixnay on saying that whatever worldview is the majority (as if we didn't know) can have its plate.

Can't wait for the pentagram

South Carolina's Christian license plate is a clear establishment of religion by the state government, and it's obviously unconstitutional. It puts one religion above all others, which is exactly what the establishment clause of the First Amendment was meant to prevent.

If the South Carolina government really wanted to get right with the Constitution, they could fix the defects of this law and keep their stained glass plate by simply allowing atheists and all other religions their own plates under exactly the same rules. I for one am really looking forward to the Wicca plate.

In all of this, Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer plays as if Christians are set upon in South Carolina. Some martyr he is, pandering to the majority. And he still expects us to swallow his bullshit claim that this might hurt him politically!

Update (7/10): CNN has taken the story down (though their search feature still finds the old URL, but Google has it cached here, at least for now.

Do as I say

... not as I do.

As close as anything, this is Duhbya's creed. Culture of responsibility, my ass.

Unshared prosperity

The Washington elite, press and politicians, don't usually get just how divided the country is by Republicrat economic policies that beggar the poor and the middle class to keep the financial markets in gravy. That way, they can fling off a few inconsequential (to them) campaign contributions to keep the cycle rolling.

This report hooks readers with race:

Mr. Mattingly added that, in a county where the large businesses are run by white men and “ancient parochial attitudes” persist, voter enthusiasm for Mr. Obama had a logic that went beyond simple loyalty.

But class is the underlying fact made visible by skin color. This is why Democrats must be class-conscious, why I support John Edwards, and why I prefer Obama to Hillary, even if a Clinton supporter gave this perfect quote:

“She’s about better pay and education for the kids,” Ms. Willis said.

Update (4/16/2011): Minor edit to clarify.