Crush Rush’s Mush
March 2, 2009
The Republic Party’s slide into irrelevance is going into overdrive. The totem of the acceleration of that slide is the full emergence of Rush Limbaugh as the de facto spokesperson of the slogan-blindered extreme right that has become the core of what was once a “grand old party,” but what is now a group of petty and puerile partisans.
Rush Limbaugh’s speech this past weekend at the CPAC had the whiff of the crushed limburger that his name evokes. His invocation of the U. S. Constitution could gain credence only among those whose ignorance of that document is as profound as his is.
When he claims that the Obama administration’s current policies, especially the economic ones, are crafted by individuals who have no proof that it works, he is saying no more than anyone could say about any attempt to navigate waters that previously had been uncharted. Of course, what he fails to say is that the solutions that he and his minions are offering have been revealed as solutions that do not work. So, given a choice between a daring policy whose success remains to be demonstrated and a timid policy whose failure has been demonstrated, only a fool or a demagogic panderer would extol the latter. Limbaugh qualifies as both.
Until a new generation of Eisenhower-inspired Republicans emerges, the current Republic Party, under the leadership of charlatans like Limbaugh, will remain moribund. If it persists in this current path, it will take a well-deserved step into extinction.
The Commandment for the Ten Commandments Monument
February 25, 2009
In the discussions surrounding a monument to the Ten Commandments, why is there no one who realizes that a sculpture of the commandments is itself a violation of the second commandment [“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image” (Exodus 20: 4)]?
“Democrat Party” Must Be Eradicated
February 14, 2009
As the GOP legislators paint themselves more and more into a corner of irrelevance, it is past time to mention one of their verbal tics that has been bothering me for quite some time. The locution at which I bridle is the persistent designation of the Democratic Party by the contemptuously crafted designation “Democrat Party.” That they have not been called on this before is shameful. It is time to give them a taste of their own medicine. Therefore, I call on all those who care about correctness and civility in political discourse to adopt the locution “Republic Party” for the GOP and to persist in that designation until the Republic legislators mend their linguistic ways.
Unhappy (Election) Returns
May 7, 2008
The furor of outrage against Lake County, Indiana, for turning in its election results slowly is another example of the misplaced priorities that so pervade our political and journalistic scenes. The mania for early returns puts undue pressure on local election boards. We have become a society that is incapable of delayed gratification, even where that is appropriate and desirable.
Television networks so greedy for a “scoop”—in an electronic age in which the very notion of “scoop” is anachronistic and atavistic—still rush to predict winners even if their doing so could skew results in places whose polls are still open when the predictions are made.
It is past time for us to eschew this kind of insidious narcissistic self-aggrandizement at the cost of reasoned political discourse.
If I had my way—I will worry, or let the Supreme Court worry, about the legality later—I would enact legislation prohibiting any state or television network from releasing any results or predictions on a given election day until the last precinct of the last state to vote on that day is closed.
Wright or Wrong?
April 28, 2008
There is something paradoxical about the current notoriety that has been foisted on the Reverend Jeremiah Wright by ignoramuses on both the right and the left whose blindered viewpoints have eventuated in a perniciously unfair tainting of the candidacy of Barack Obama through the most unjustly insidious guilt-by-association reasoning that we have seen in many a decade in what passes for our political discourse nowadays.
Of course Pastor Wright has the right—perhaps he would say, with some justice, the prophetic duty—to speak his mind. Furthermore, much of what he speaks is informed by a kind of rough erudition whose major defect is that it is more ideological than one would prefer. In addition, when he speaks of national policy, the scattered bizarre opinions should not obscure the fact that many of his observations are incisive and cogent, and there is an experiential competence that lends them some credence.
However, the attacks against him have given him a wider platform and credence than is appropriate. When he steps outside spirituality and broad national and international policy into specific and concrete social and political issues, he goes awry.
This is where the paradox becomes manifest. I have in mind, most especially, his sojourning into the territory of educational theory and so-called learning styles. He rightly has excoriated the “separate but equal” principle enunciated in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. Nonetheless, when he declares that blacks, say, are “different, not deficient” and when he presents the questionable right brain/left brain educational theories as secular gospel, he is unknowingly defending what is nothing more than a cosmetically camouflaged—and equally insidious—“separate, but equal” doctrine of his own.
“Different, not deficient” sounds nicer than “separate, but equal,” but its sound is hollow when one recognizes underneath it the old Jim Crow wine in a new bottle.
The result is that his myopic critics—through their very criticism—have lent his comments here a credence that they do not deserve. His supporters, whose reaction to the criticism is to defend whatever he said as uncritically as those who misinterpreted him in the first place lashed out at him with a broad whip, may be more sympathetic—for historical reasons—than his detractors. Unfortunately, they are unknowingly in collusion to contribute, from a different side, to the lack of intelligent discourse that continues to poison our political universe.
The upshot of this is to perpetuate the larger paradox that since the civil rights movement, since desegregation, blacks at large have been worse educated than many blacks were who were educated prior to Brown v. Board of Education. Those well-educated blacks were educated by black teachers in segregated schools who held their students to rigorous standards and whose educating was not compromised by bogus educational theories that are no less racist for being articulated by a black pastor than they would be if articulated—in different words—by a white bigot. Furthermore, in the last half century, when our public schools experienced the steepest decline in quality of any time since their inception, all students have been worse educated, but those from disadvantaged ethnic minorities have suffered more damage than others because they have had greater obstacles to overcome.
Let us not forget—when all is said and done—that none of this has anything to do with Barack Obama, who is his own person. Because Neptune orbits the sun, we do not accuse it of being hot.
Bushie Language Alert: “robust”
March 18, 2008
Beware. Whenever Bush or any of his minions describes an event, phenomenon, or policy as “robust,” one can be certain that the actual state of affairs is either stagnant, moribund, or defunct.
