Why I Can't Vote Republican

One of my recent columns provoked a fine discussion including an interesting question from the right. The left talks about bi-partisanism, the reader said, but when did they last vote for a Republican? My answer is that my first national vote was for a Republican, and I voted for a local Republican in the last election, but I would not vote for any Republican on the national level now. The reason is morality.

You think that’s a shocking statement? After all, the G.O.P. is the moral majority, the opposition to abortion, and the party of church-goers, isn’t it?

I think morality is better displayed by seeking truth than by opposition to abortion or by wearing religion on your sleeve. The pro-life morality breaks down in the refusal to relieve a child raped by her father, and in unquestioning support for the death penalty and unnecessary war. Immoral behavior too often hides behind religious boasting. Morality, to me, is striving to live up to ideals by seeking to make the way the world is be closer to the way it ought to be.

The Republican Party has been the party of short-term self-interest for at least thirty years, and I can’t vote for that. After Eisenhower, the G.O.P. has nominated one slow-witted caricature after another and then let a network of very intelligent Machiavellians run the country behind the scenes. The only requirement for a president seems to be a certain ability to wave the flag and look pious.

The way the G.O.P. machine works its Karl Rovian black magic through a media network designed to broadcast any lie that will advance its march toward domination is enough to turn any moralist’s stomach.

Our right wing friends constantly decry the “liberal press”, but I defy anyone to point out a liberal media network as insidiously vicious as the FOX News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck matrix that is underwritten by the “damn the truth, full speed ahead” support that people like our own (thankfully slipped away in the night) Vince Jericho lend it on the local level throughout the nation. It is a network of disinformation that leads by the nose those voters who buy into any sound bite that meets their emotional approval, and it is horribly dangerous to the future of democracy.

Any party that maintains such a media propaganda machine to support the kind of back-stabbing, ends-justify-any-means campaigns the G.O.P. constructs has strayed so far from any acceptable definition of morality that it will never capture a single vote of mine on the national level, and that’s the bottom line.

What’s essential for this nation is not the voter’s undying support for his party no-matter-what, but his or her constant striving to make that party adhere to truly moral behaviors and attitudes. When that happens I, too, will join the moral majority. In the meantime, as long as the G.O.P. continues its present tactics, their opposition will have my vote, and I’ll remain loyal to the moral minority.

Why Not Vote Republican?

One of my recent columns in Springfield, MO’s News-Leader provoked a fine discussion including an interesting question from the right. The left talks about bipartisanism, the reader said, but when did they last vote for a Republican? My answer is that my first national vote was for a Republican, and I voted for a local Republican in the last election, but I would not vote for any Republican on the national level now. The reason is morality.

You think that’s a shocking statement? After all, the G.O.P. is the moral majority, the opposition to abortion, and the party of church-goers, isn’t it?

I think morality is better displayed by seeking truth than by opposition to abortion or by wearing religion on your sleeve. The pro-life morality breaks down in the refusal to relieve a child raped by her father, and in unquestioning support for the death penalty and unnecessary war. Immoral behavior too often hides behind religious boasting. Morality, to me, is striving to live up to ideals by seeking to make the way the world is be closer to the way it ought to be.

The Republican Party has been the party of short-term self-interest for at least thirty years, and I can’t vote for that. After Eisenhower, the G.O.P. has nominated one slow-witted caricature after another and then let a network of very intelligent Machiavellians run the country behind the scenes. The only requirement for a president seems to be a certain ability to wave the flag and look pious.

The way the G.O.P. machine works its Karl Rovian black magic through a media network designed to broadcast any lie that will advance its march toward domination is enough to turn any moralist’s stomach.

Our right wing friends constantly decry the “liberal press”, but I defy anyone to point out a liberal media network as insidiously vicious as the FOX News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck matrix that is underwritten by the “damn the truth, full speed ahead” support that people like our own (thankfully slipped away in the night) Vince Jericho lend it on the local level throughout the nation. It is a network of disinformation that leads by the nose those voters who buy into any sound bite that meets their emotional approval, and it is horribly dangerous to the future of democracy.

Any party that maintains such a media propaganda machine to support the kind of back-stabbing, ends-justify-any-means campaigns the G.O.P. constructs has strayed so far from any acceptable definition of morality that it will never capture a single vote of mine on the national level, and that’s the bottom line.

At this point I have no great love for either party. What’s essential for this nation is not the voter’s undying support for his party no-matter-what, but his or her constant striving to make that party adhere to truly moral behaviors and attitudes. When that happens I, too, will join the moral majority. In the meantime, as long as the G.O.P. continues its present tactics, their opposition will have my vote, and I’ll remain loyal to the moral minority no matter what party's candidate I vote for.

Moral Clarity

The growth of the tea party is the most glaring evidence of the pain poor governance has inflicted on the people of the country. When the right wing, a group heavily conditioned to stay in line, is moved by its government to rise up as the tea party against that government in ways that it has so long and loudly proclaimed as unpatriotic, it is obvious that something is terribly wrong.

To those on the left, though, these protestors seem to have finally seen the need to escape without finding the door. Their cries of protest are defeated by their lack of direction. Their generalities – smaller government, moral leadership, etc – lack specificity while calling for a return to the “good old days”.

The “good old days” of a chicken in every pot sound good to the left, too, but the “good old days” of pre-Social Security and Medicare - both positions expressed by tea party candidates who recently elections to state and national office – do not. That call is for a return to the county poorhouse and death by neglect. Such ideas lead us backward, not forward. What improvement lies within them?

A wonderful book, “Moral Clarity”, by Susan Neiman, Director of the Einstein Forum, discusses the rift between left and right in great depth. In extremely limited synopsis - she says that the right, as followers of David Hume, cling to the notion that mankind needs religion because it is incapable of internally governing its own behavior in a moral fashion. The left, as followers of Immanuel Kant, cling to the notion that ideas and ideals are each person’s guides to morality and that good governance explores the potential for ideas and ideals to achieve moral balance in society.

This right wing caution, she asserts, urges us to hold to known quantities – stability and security guaranteed by those whose abilities have put them in socially superior positions - as opposed to accepting the assertions of dreamers whose ideals tell them that “things” ought to be better. Such caution, however, may lead to security, but not to growth and social improvement.

We must be “realistic” the right tells us, and not follow the unproven dreams of idealists, but the expectation that an idea must contain from the outset a proven solution to a problem is absurd. The purpose of ideas is not to solve problems so much as to identify them and act as steps toward their resolution through political debate and compromise.

Poverty, for instance, remains a problem among our African-American population, but it is not as severe a problem as the slavery that preceded it. Nor is it the same problem it was before Dr. King dragged the white population into the harsh light of racial reality through the prism of Alabama State Trooper billy clubs wielded against his ideas.

Society advances through the evolution of ideas into realities. A movement striving to stifle those ideas is a return to old days that weren’t really all that good.

The U.S. is Guiltier than WikiLeaks

Here’s an interesting tidbit published by CLG News.com on November 30, 2010:

WikiLeaks: US Senators call for WikiLeaks to face criminal charges --'WikiLeaks presents a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States.' 28 Nov 2010 Members of the United States Congress reacted with fury at WikiLeaks on Sunday, calling on the group to be designated a "Foreign Terrorist Organisation" and urging the United States government to pursue a prosecution. "Leaking the material is deplorable," Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, a Republican, told Fox 'News.' "The people at WikiLeaks could have blood on their hands ... People who do this are low on the food chain as far as I'm concerned. If you can prosecute them, let's try."

I don’t disagree with Senator Graham that to the extent that such leaks as this one endanger lives the crime should be prosecutable. But where was Senator Graham’s when the Vice President of the United States’ outed Valerie Plame in retaliation for her husband’s opposition to the Iraq war?

For that matter, I think politicians who are willing to violate the Constitution they swore to uphold by imprisoning and/or torturing people without proof of criminal action should be open to prosecution – not to mention those who manufacture evidence in order to take the nation into war.

Now don’t you wingnuts start screaming at me for that last one. I am not just talking about George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, (Although I’m betting that they are the first people who came to mind when you read that sentence.) but also include our current president’s continued persecution of untried prisoners. There’s no way to prosecute the following, but calls to war from Teddy Roosevelt’s ouster of King Kamehameha to give an American corporation control of Hawaiian fruit production to insurgencies in South and Central American nations and LBJ’s Gulf of Tonkin incident were also criminal. (For a compilation of these offenses see: “Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq” by Stephen Kinzer. Times Books, Henry Holt and Company, New York. 2006.)

The point is that our country has used boogey man enemies to stir up support for war after war. By comparison Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks publication of classified documents is a pretty minor offense. Apparently Pfc Bradley Manning actually downloaded the info and gave it to WikiLeaks – maybe even conceived the idea himself – but his fate will still be little more than an echo of another of our favorite diversions – prosecuting someone at the bottom of the ladder so those at the top can go on pulling their deadly shenanigans. In effect, he may be more of a whistleblower than a traitor.

The fact is that the number – if any – of lives endangered by these leaks doesn’t come close to the number wasted by our invasions of other countries. By that measure this young man’s transgression is a drop in a sea of official sins that we will continue to support by ignoring them.

Amnesty International Calls for American War Crimes Investigation

On September 17, 2001, just six days after 9-11, President G. W. Bush authorized the CIA to set up secret detention facilities in other countries. Now in his memoir, he has clearly stated that he was part of the process authorizing "enhanced interrogation techniques" (read torture) against detainees in those facilities. He also named others who were involved.

On November 11, 2010 Amnesty International, a London-based group that has done a lot of excellent work over the years, called for a criminal investigation based on that admission. On the 18th, the UN echoed that call. It is a call that should be heeded.

If it should happen the ramifications would shake this nation from Washington, D.C., where President Obama is still operating those facilities, to right here in Springfield because SWMO's own John Ashcroft will be among those who will have to explain their roles.

Of course there will be a lot of backroom bargaining – to put it politely – between the call for investigation and the day when the United States government refuses to participate. It might become a rather bloody public debate or – more likely – a story quietly buried on the back page if reported on at all. Certainly the American press – not so leftist after all – will not print the whole story. The U.S. has long pretended to be supportive of the UN and the World Court, but has always denied them the right of judging us. That certainly won't change in the face of this mess. It will take pressure from the rest of the world to make it happen.

As a child of the forties and fifties I remember comic books, cartoons and movies that showed caricatures of Japanese soldiers and told stories of their barbarous ways. We were pretty carefully taught that one of the things that separated us from them (aside from the broadly drawn racial characteristics) was that they tortured prisoners while our soldiers did not.

No matter how skillfully our leaders might maneuver their way out of the limelight on this one, the fact is that the nation that filled our heads with stories of its righteousness in WWII as compared to the savagery of the Germans and Japanese has now moved to an official policy allowing torture - a sad slide from a moral ideal (whether ever true or not) into a pit of immoral slime from which there is no honorable escape other than to admit guilt and beg forgiveness.

America owes it to the world to allow an investigation and agree to accept its findings. It's the only realistic way to regain the moral high ground our lapse into barbarity has stolen from us.

My bet, though, is that we won't do it. Instead we will continue to posture as though we never lost that ground. We might fool ourselves with such posturing, but we can't be our own judge. The rest of world, watching our continued vanity, arrogance and hypocrisy on full display, will judge us harshly. We have lost their respect for good reason. We could gain it back, but I'm betting we won't.

I’m Fed Up Too, Billy

In his recent campaign for Congress Billy Long picked up the tea party chant "I'm fed up" and made it his tag line. Well, Billy, I'm fed up too.

I'm fed up with politicians who go to Washington pledging not to take earmarks and upon arrival declare that they will bring home all the money they can get their hands on ala Rand Paul. (Who got a knot jerked in his tail!)

I'm fed up with politicians who pledge to work for their constituency but link up with outfits like Halliburton and big oil companies bent on continuing their rape of the planet. Gee, Billy, what newly elected politician do suppose has done that?

I'm fed up with politicians who will spread any lie they think will get them traction. Lies like "Obamacare" is a government takeover of health care that will establish death panels and cut Medicare coverage. I'm completely fed up with politicians who say they will repeal "Obamacare" when they know darn well they can't and wouldn't if they could because it suits their private insurance industry friends from whom we must all now buy health coverage. While they say they're against this law because it forces purchase of a product, they will be working behind the scenes to modify it so that the forced purchase won't also force the insurance companies to provide the coverage required by the new law.

I'm also totally fed up with politicians who claim they will work for the needs of the people but argue that those who make significantly more than the average person should be exempt from taxation that could help those out of work get through tough times. It seems to me that if those on top were true patriots they would be not just willing but eager to contribute what they could to the well-being of the nation. Instead of patriotism they display only hunger for more wealth and power. I'm fed up with them, Billy, and the politicians who betray their constituencies to toady up to them.

And I'm fed up, too, with politicians who say they want to restore the Constitution, but support a Supreme Court that grants corporations human rights as unidentified, unbridled campaign spenders. I'm also fed up with an Executive Branch that usurps the powers of Congress and spies on the people.

Politicians who say they want to restore ethics but do nothing to stop the runaway system of false attack ads and huge advertising budgets that take the influence of the common voter completely out of the equation ought never to be reelected.

Yes, I'm as fed up as you are, Billy, so I want you to know that I, along with a great many Ozarkers, will be watching very closely to see how Congress goes about its business, and the next election will be even harder on those who said they were going to clean things up but don't than it was on those they just replaced. Keep watching.

What Now?

We survived the off-year elections, but will we survive the next two years?

Chances are we've just elected a do-nothing Congress, so our odds for survival may be better than you think. After all, the theory says, a Congress that can do nothing can do no harm.

I'm not so sure. One of the first problems they'll argue about is whether or not to extend the tax cuts the Bush administration put in place. The Democrats will argue that they should be continued for the middle class, but rescinded for high earners. The tea partiers will argue for extension of all cuts. If they win the day the cuts will all stay in place, but the consequence will be that the government will have to borrow money to cover the shortcoming in revenue – exactly the kind of borrowing that helped toss away our surplus in the first year of the Bush administration. They will have won their taxation argument, but deepened the deficit as a result. If they allow the tax, their angry base will accuse them of ignoring public demand for low taxes. Either way, they could be hoisted on their own petard.

The big problem, of course, is still the economy. We should note that on November 5, two days after the election, the Department of Labor announced an upturn in employment levels, GM announced its intention to buy back the government's investment in its stock, Detroit announced that truck sales are up and global stock markets surged in response to the "Fed's" buy of $600 billion in Treasury bonds. Our new electees have no claim on these accomplishments, though if the upturn holds they will surely try it later.

Still, we have a long way to go and the jobs lost over the last ten years will never return. Our manufacturing based economy has gone the way of the dinosaur. That's why the only way out is forward, and that's where the argument against government involvement falls apart.

Government created the highway system that enabled freight hauling to make available the consumer goods that drive our economy. Government created the G.I. Bill after WWII that gave us a college educated, home owning middle class. Government created the space program (ERTS-1) that gave rise to Landsat and, ultimately, the internet.

Yes, corporations built the manufacturing base, but there was government assistance involved in that, too. Given free reign, existing big corporations will do more to guard their present positions than to find new ways of competing with those positions. Government R&D and infrastructure investments in alternative energy sources and other sustainability oriented endeavors would do us a great deal more good, including new jobs, than curtailing social programs could possibly accomplish.

The plus side of the election is that the two sides must now work harder at working together. The question is will they take us forward or backward? Stay tuned.

Don’t Vote Them In

The first president I remember is Harry Truman. My favorite, Ike, was Republican. I've seen a lot of changes since then and seen several national neuroses, but until now I never thought I'd seen national insanity.

C'mon folks. Taxation is necessary, and godless Socialism isn't the problem. The problem is we are being robbed, and if you've bought into it you're blind to it.

Did anyone really think that Obama or anyone else could clean up this mess in two years? We are faced with economic and environmental disaster brought on by short-term policies favoring individual wealth over all other considerations. That's what's destroying both the American conscience and the middle class.

On September 17, the News-Leader reported that in 2009 poverty increased to 14.3% from 2008's 13.2%. The country is blaming Obama.

A new study released by the research and consulting firm Spectrem Group says the number of millionaires in the U.S. increased by 16% in the same year. So is Obama to blame for this, too? (http://www.spectrem.com/ProductInfo.aspx?productid=AFFLUENTMARKETINSIGHTS2010)

Unemployment remains over 10%, 12 million more home foreclosures are forecast, wages are dropping and college grads are competing for jobs flipping burgers. Department of Labor data says that if this continues, the income gap in the U.S. "will resemble that of Mexico by year 2043." What's really happening is that the widening gap between haves and have-nots is destroying the middle. (http://www.workplacefairness.org/sc/incomegap.php) (http://www.sustainablemiddleclass.com/Gini-Coefficient.html) (http://www.workplacefairness.org/sc/incomegap.php)

The problem is not the so-called "socialistic" policies of the Obama administration but the "welfare at the top and cheap labor at the bottom" policies of the right. To compound the error, tea party carping about going back to the "good old days" before Social Security and Medicare not only offers no solutions, but adds to the problem.

Voting current politicians out of office makes sense for the country, but only those from any party seeking to reinstate tax cuts for the top and remove initiatives for those in the bottom and middle, i.e. hard-line republicans, rogue democrats and tea partiers.

The policies of the present administration have been vilified by sound bites from the right, but facts show the country is making a slow but sure turn-around from the cliff's edge that trickle-down economics has brought us to.

Elect a group of wing nuts like Rand Paul (KY), Joe Miller (AL), Dan Maes (CO), Sharron Angle (NV) who favor abolishing income tax, Social Security and Medicare, and our own tragi-comedy team, Billy and Roy, who will belly up to the lobbyist trough, kill regulations on financiers and corporations in the name of smaller government, and reduce upper crust taxes, and they'll turn this country back toward the brink of disaster at breakneck pace.

Social Security is a universal safety net, Medicare a lifesaver, and "Obamacare" morphed from a 1993 Grassley/Hatch Republican proposal to counter "Hillarycare". (http://trueslant.com/rickungar/2010/03/27/hatch-and-grassley-poster-boys-for-gop-hypocrisy/)

Tea partiers talk of revolution, but "Taking our country back" a hundred years isn't revolution. It doesn't even make sense. Vote only for those who will take us forward.

Left, Right, or Just Wrong?

It has been said that if a politician moved far enough to the right he'd get to the left (and vice-versa). With the emergence of the tea partiers, I began to ponder whether or not that was correct.

The far lefties and the tea partiers do agree on a few things like: concentrating power into too few hands creates problems for the people; the country has moved so far from its original constructs that we are on the verge of needing a revolution; and the people need to wrest power from entrenched politicians (Congress) in order to salvage what potential still remains for the nation.

The differences between the two perspectives re-emerge though, when you consider that the solutions offered from the left include reinstating taxation that tries to reduce the split between the upper classes and the working classes by asking for higher contributions from those who make the most, wage controls designed to return to the wage differentials of the fifties and sixties, and reduction of military spending while solutions from the right call for tax regulations designed to grow corporate strength, smaller government - which translates to relaxed regulation of banking and other financial industries, reduced investment in social programs, and steady or increased investment in defense and other security measures.

In short, the tea partiers seem to feel that any attempt to reduce military, defense or homeland security spending is unpatriotic while the left feels that excess spending in those areas is eating into our ability to take care of our own increasingly needy citizenry.

We all share the goal of a thriving economy with work for everyone, but the dividing line comes from the left believing that the way to do it is to empower the bottom end of the spectrum while the right believes that the way to do it is to empower the top end.

So far, though, what we've created is a system that tends to create a lower class that is dependent on welfare and an upper crust fattened by reduced regulation and tax breaks (hidden welfare) and favored by a constant source of cheap labor; none of which gives the poor a means of pulling themselves up or the nation a stable platform for security. So why are we, the middle class, living in a lopsided welfare state where the bottom gets welfare and the top gets welfare, but the middle just gets the squeeze?

It seems to me that if we want the nation to revitalize we need to devise a way to grow production from the middle. It's probably just campaign season hype, but I was encouraged recently by news of John Boehner's willingness to consider tax legislation that provides support to small businesses even if it ultimately means the end of the Bush tax cuts for the upper crust. If it isn't just hype, maybe it's the beginning of actual bipartisanship.

Well, I can dream, can't I?!

Tar Sands Oil

A friend recently characterized President Obama as a modern day Lincoln because he is faced with a nation more divided than it has been since then end of the civil war. In the face of citizens divided right against left and a Congress at loggerheads across the aisle, Obama has succeeded in passing significant legislation just as Lincoln succeeded in quelling the revolution and managing the nation at the same time.

Whether you like him or not you must admit, as the CSA had to admit of Lincoln, that this president has a way of getting his way.

In much of this I have agreed with him, but he is about to accomplish a goal that I think is a great mistake. He will take advantage of our national addiction to petroleum to achieve bipartisan legislation by funding a new pipeline to bring tar sand oil into the U.S. from Canada as soon as he can ram it through Congress.

It won't take Lincolnesque diplomacy to do it either, because it fits in with the right wing desire to feed our appetite for cheap gasoline plus something they can point to as evidence of their bipartisan cooperation – in the face of their obstructive efforts to make this president fail. The more liberal wing sure won't fight it because they also recognize that "cheap oil at any price" has become our national motto.

We pay one of the world's lowest prices for gasoline at the pump, but ignore the fact that our government subsidizes oil well development and production so that the gasoline producers don't have to charge us the actual cost of that production. (http://cleantech.com/news/node/554) Even more insidious is the ecological cost involved.

The recent BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico was so graphic an example that it actually caused us to consider the wisdom of deep water drilling for, golly, almost three days! The ecological cost of tar sands extraction is even greater, but it takes place on Canadian soil not ours, so we can conveniently ignore it.

As Wikipedia puts it in their synopsis of 89 links related to greenhouse gases - "Making liquid fuels from oil sands requires energy for steam injection and refining. This process generates two to four times the amount of greenhouse gases per barrel of final product as the production of conventional oil. If combustion of the final products is included, the so-called "Well to Wheels" approach, oil sands extraction, upgrade and use emits 10 to 45% more greenhouse gases than conventional crude."

The indigenous peoples of Canada are up in arms about it, (http://www.ienearth.org/) but we are willing to overlook the true cost of our oil as long as the price at the pump is affordable.

The ultimate cost, as with all of our polluting practices, is the destruction of the planet, but what's that compared to being able to drive anywhere we want to any time we want to?