Calhoun’s Can(n)ons
for August 23, 2012
“When someone shows you what
he is, believe him.”
If you’re
still a member of the Grand Old Party, please accept my most sincere
condolences. Yes, it is a shame. It was only 158 years old, in the prime of
its life, and now it’s dead – killed off by idiots.
I mean,
Congressman Akin? Really? Guy’s on the House Committee on Science,
Space and Technology. How the hell did that happen? Science? A guy who thinks women’s bodies can kill off
sperm when they’ve been “legitimately raped” but not so much if they’ve only
been illegitimately raped. Really?
Missouri,
you have a lot to answer for. Put a
paper bag on your head and go stand in the corner. (Stop smirking, Oklahoma. You’ve got “Inhofe,” the climate-change
denier. That state’s drought-riddled corn
is no longer as high as an elephant’s eye because the bright golden haze on its
meadow is smoke from a state that’s burning up due to global warming. Honestly,
were do the Republicans get these guys? )
O.K. I
admit it’s been comic watching all the mainstream GOP bigwigs scrambling away
from Akin – Noooo, don’t know that guy, never heard of him – while at the same
time they were begging him on bended knee to drop out of the race --- Plueeze, plueeze Todd, you’re killing us. For some weird reason they thought maybe
voters would confuse a God-driven theocrat like Akin with “mainstream”
Republicans and recoil in horror.
Which
actually is funny since at the same time the party big wigs were trying to
strong arm Akin out the door like some flea-infested loon, the party platform
committee itself was voting on a plank that supported Akin’s views perfectly
– no abortion with no explicit
exceptions for cases of rape or incest – legitimate or not.
Which gives
hypocrisy a bad name. Makes people think
that your party is in such philosophical disarray, or so full of liars that you
can’t figure out what the hell you stand for except for one overriding Grand Old
Principle: Say anything to win at all costs by
any means necessary.
And anyway,
it does no good to paint Akin as some lone-wolf, God-obsessed loony outlier. He’s joined at the hip with Vice-presidential
pick, Paul Ryan. They’re spiritual twinsies.
Ryan co-sponsored a bill that defined fetuses as “people entitled to
full legal protection,” which would have to treat abortion and some forms of
birth control as murder, backed bills that would cut off federal money for
Planned parenthood and the Title X family planning program, voted for a constitutional
amendment to ban same-sex marriage and voted against a bill that would expand
federal hate crime laws to cover sexual orientation.
In short,
Akin is no outlier. His beliefs are
totally compatible with the Republican Party, the party platform and the Vice
Presidential nominee, a Veep who, if elected, would be one heartbeat away from
the Presidency and/or be the tie-breaker in a divided congress.
Doesn’t get
more central than that.
As for the
Presidential nominee, well, Romney noted that “His [Akin’s] words with regards
to rape are words that I can’t defend.” He
made no comment on the ideas behind
the words, just parsed the verbiage, then scampered for the door.
And that’s
the problem. Nobody’s doing the
follow-up questions anymore. Like, How
is it possible, in this day and age, for a man to head up a committee with the
word “science” in its title, yet be so abysmally ignorant about basic
biology? Or are we meant to believe that
he’s just an isolated case, some ignorant theocrat toodling on the edges of the
conservative fringe?
That might
be a pleasant fiction to be spoon-fed, but it’s hard to reconcile with this:
Akin’s mind-set is clearly in lock-step with a huge number of his Republican
colleagues and is aligned with the Republican party platform, so that’s the
real question: Has the GOP finally become
the radical theocracy it dreamed of becoming when it used Christian evangelicals
as a tool to gaining more political power?
I mean, who
could forget the 1990’s and the “Abramoff-Norquist-Reed triumvirate?”
[Norquist? Grover Norquist? Yes.
You think these people go away?
They don’t. They get reborn and
return, again and again.] Remember the lobbyist
Jack Abramoff and the “Christian
Coalition’s” evangelical poster-boy, Ralph Reed, scheming to fleece several
Indian Casinos by using Reed, with his scrubbed cherubic face and publicly
professed Christian piety, as the front-man? At the time, using Reed as judas
goat to deliver the Christian right votes to the Republicans must have seemed
like a good idea. But twenty years
later, I suspect the law of unintended consequences is becoming clear: Theocrats answer only to God, not party
bosses – the godly tail now owns the
GOP elephant.
And the
tail is wagging.
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