Re: [FairfieldLife] The Republican Party Is Turning Into A Cult

[gullible fool]

 
That's two cults I've left behind.
  
"Love will swallow you, eat you up completely, until there is no `you,' only 
love." 
 
- Amma  

--- On Wed, 8/19/09, Sal Sunshine  wrote:


From: Sal Sunshine 
Subject: Re: [FairfieldLife] The Republican Party Is Turning Into A Cult
To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com
Date: Wednesday, August 19, 2009, 8:38 PM









On Aug 19, 2009, at 2:12 PM, do.rflex wrote:
 

Something strange has happened in America in the nine months since Barack Obama 
was elected. It has best been summarized by the comedian Bill Maher: "The 
Democrats have moved to the right, and the Republicans have moved to a mental 
hospital."

LOL...gotta love it! 
Bill hits the spot every time.



Sal






  

Re: [FairfieldLife] The Republican Party Is Turning Into A Cult

[Sal Sunshine]

On Aug 19, 2009, at 2:12 PM, do.rflex wrote:


Something strange has happened in America in the nine months since  
Barack Obama was elected. It has best been summarized by the  
comedian Bill Maher: "The Democrats have moved to the right, and the  
Republicans have moved to a mental hospital."


LOL...gotta love it!
Bill hits the spot every time.

Sal

[FairfieldLife] The Republican Party Is Turning Into A Cult

[do.rflex]

The Republican Party Is Turning Into A Cult

Something strange has happened in America in the nine months since
Barack Obama was elected. It has best been summarized by the comedian
Bill Maher: "The Democrats have moved to the right, and the Republicans
have moved to a mental hospital."
The election of Obama -- a center-left black man -- as a successor to
George W. Bush has scrambled the core American right's view of their
country. In their gut, they saw the US as a white-skinned, right-wing
nation forever shaped like Sarah Palin.


When this image was repudiated by a majority of Americans in a massive
landslide, it simply didn't compute. How could this have happened? How
could the cry of "Drill, baby, drill" have been beaten by a supposedly
big government black guy? So a streak that has always been there in the
American right's world-view -- to deny reality, and argue against a
demonic phantasm of their own creation -- has swollen. Now it is all
they can see.

Since Obama's rise, the US right has been skipping frantically from one
fantasy to another, like a person in the throes of a mental breakdown.
It started when they claimed he was a secret Muslim, and -- at the same
time -- that he was a member of a black nationalist church that hated
white people. Then, once these arguments were rejected and Obama won,
they began to argue he was born in Kenya and secretly smuggled into the
United States as a baby, and the Hawaiian authorities conspired to fake
his US birth certificate. So he is ineligible to rule and the office of
President should pass to... the Republican runner-up, John McCain.

These aren't fringe phenomena: a Research 2000 poll
  found that a majority of Republicans and Southerners say
Obama wasn't born in the US, or aren't sure. A steady steam of
Republican congressmen have been jabbering that Obama has "questions to
answer." No amount of hard evidence -- here's his birth certificate,
here's a picture of his mother heavily pregnant in Hawaii, here's the
announcement of his birth in the local Hawaiian paper -- can pierce this
conviction.

This trend has reached its apotheosis this summer with the Republican
Party claiming en masse that Obama wants to set up "death panels" to
euthanize the old and disabled. Yes: Sarah Palin really has claimed --
with a straight face -- that Barack Obama wants to kill her baby.

You have to admire the audacity of the right. Here's what's actually
happening. The US is the only major industrialized country that does not
provide regular healthcare to all its citizens. Instead, they are
required to provide for themselves -- and just under 50 million people
can't afford the insurance. As a result, 18,000 US citizens die every
year needlessly, because they can't access the care they require. That's
equivalent to six 9/11s, every year, year on year. Yet the Republicans
have accused the Democrats who are trying to stop all this death by
extending healthcare of being "killers" -- and they have successfully
managed to put them on the defensive.

The Republicans want to defend the existing system, not least because
they are given massive sums of money by the private medical firms who
benefit from the deadly status quo. But they can't do so honestly: some
70 percent of Americans say it is "immoral" to retain a medical system
that doesn't cover all citizens. So they have to invent lies to make any
life-saving extension of healthcare sound depraved.

A few months ago, a recent board member for several private health
corporations called Betsy McCaughey noticed a clause in the proposed
healthcare legislation that would pay for old people to see a doctor and
write a living will. They could stipulate when (if at all) they would
like to be withdrawn. It's totally voluntary. Many people want it: I
know I wouldn't want to be kept alive for a few extra months if I was
only going to be in agony and unable to speak. But McCaughey started the
rumor that this was a form of euthanasia, where old people would be
forced to agree to death. This was then stretched somehow to include the
disabled. It was flatly untrue -- but the right had their talking point,
Palin declared the system "downright evil", and they were off.

It's been amazingly successful. Now, every conversation about healthcare
has to begin with a Democrat explaining at great length that, no, they
are not in favor of killing the elderly -- while Republicans get away
with defending a status quo that kills 18,000 people a year. The
hypocrisy was startling: when Sarah Palin was Governor of Alaska, she
encouraged citizens there to take out living wills. Almost all the
Republicans leading the charge against "death panels" have voted for
living wills in the past. But the lie has done its work: a confetti of
distractions has been thrown up, and support is leaking aw