Republicans or Zealots

Brains can be altered by how they are abused and misused. Most reasonable people would agree. But how do we explain the insanity or zealotry that exists within the Grand Ol’ Party. The evangelical and conservative Roman Catholic fundamentalists are really damaged people.

They are lost and lashing out at reality itself. The base of the Party is to be pitied more than feared. They have literally been conditioned to fear their own brains. Their religious indoctrination has actually destroyed their ability to reason. They literally believe this alternative reality that is far too extreme for even the extreme and it is scary!

“How on earth could they believe (fill-in-the-blank): that global warming is not real, that evolution never happened, that an embryo is a “person,” that the right to carry a gun equals “security,” that President Obama is a socialist, communist, Muslim, the Antichrist, soft on terror, a dangerous man, not a Christian, the wrong sort of Christian or that history text books should reflect America’s “Christian country” status… Moreover, how could they really believe that Santorum could ever become president!

First of all the backbone of the Republican Party is the American Evangelical community and the conservative Roman Catholic community – Zealots. Secondly, the American Evangelicals and conservative Roman Catholics are raised from birth to reject common sense, learning and progress in favor of a literal interpretation of the Bible.

Having said that if your base is a group that has been trained to reject truth in favor of faith in faith. They will believe anything because rejection of what “everyone else believes” is a bedrock article of faith and your very identity. Science has rendered a literal interpretation of any scripture, be it the Bible, Koran, whatever, as impossible. For many religious people this means that they have sought out deeper meanings in a spirituality that depends on a more intuitive sense of meaning and purpose than a slavish attempt to follow texts that have been simply disproven.

The rise of the religious right within religion is designed intentionally to isolate, indoctrinate and “protect” from challenging ideas. Fundamentalist leaders, be they conservative bishops or evangelical leaders, do this because actual true information is no longer helpful to the fundamentalist religious cause. So that cause becomes about controlling the minds of the faithful by cutting them off from other opinions.

Having circled the wagons and gone inward, the Republican Party now speak their own language, have their own culture, and they despise and fear the country they dwell in as virtual strangers. This is a self-imposed exile.

I am old enough to remember similar group like the Citizens Counsel, the Klan and a nut named Hitler, who were able to convince enough people to cause unthinkable devastation to millions to which in hindsight we ask “How could they believe this stuff? Of course, the question is asked after the damage is done! It takes training for years to reject reality.

And that’s my Thought Provoking Perspective…

“Just a Season”

Visit: http://johntwills.com/

AMAZON

Legacy – A New Season is coming!

Mitt the Myth Maker

After winning the New Hampshire primary, Mitt Romney gave us the “Myth of Meritocracy”. This week, Mr. Mitt has given us a new myth – President Obama is a failure. What does he site as evidence for this startling piece of news? The President’s rescue of the American auto industry. Mr. Romney stated emphatically that this decision by President Obama was ill-conceived and serves as a prime example of Barack Obama’s epic fail.

According to Mitt, every American should know that the government loan that helped to keep American car companies afloat will never be paid back. What a waste of money! This indictment would be pretty severe if it had any basis in fact. Of course we know that Mr. Mitt will never allow facts to get in the way of a good story.

The facts are these, Chrysler has already repaid their loan and General Motors (once again the number 1 car company in the world by the way) is paying back their loan on schedule.

So why would Mr. Mitt tell a falsehood in public – a falsehood that can be very easily disproved? He’s just myth making.

LTI Word of the Week – Myth

A person or thing having only an imaginary or unverifiable existence; an unfounded or false notion.

By Jackie Lambert

http://johntwills.com

Legacy – A New Season the sequel is coming!

AMAZON

The Right is Wrong

We all know the Right-wingers are engaged in an ideological battle with the intent to make the rich richer and marginalizing those who are not. This false narrative is being done by using the tried and true method of quoting the Constitution and those good Ol’ Boys, the so-called Founding Fathers, as a convenient way to get the American people or some ill-informed Tea Party types to vote against their own interests.

One of those candidates is Rep. Ron Paul who has lured a lot of these so called “Real American” into that camp by creating a false narrative about America’s Founding, claiming that the drafters of the Constitution wanted a weak central government and one that was equal for all people. But that’s not the real or accurate history.

Ron Paul, the libertarian congressman from Texas who has topped 20 percent in the first two Republican contests, is fond of claiming that the U.S. Constitution was written “to protect your liberty and to restrain the federal government,” thus making modern laws, from Social Security, to civil rights statutes, to health-care reform, unconstitutional. But that isn’t true either.

While the framers of the Constitution in 1787 undeniably cared about liberty, at least for white men, they were also practical individuals who wanted a vibrant central government that would enable the new nation to protect itself both militarily and economically, especially against European rivals.

The broad powers that the Constitution granted Congress were designed to let this central government address national problems that existed then as well as any that would arise in the future. For instance, the Constitution gave control over interstate commerce to Congress in order to counter economic advantages enjoyed by foreign competitors.

Far from Paul’s assertions that the Founders wanted a weak central government, the Founders, at least those at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, understood that a great danger came from having a national authority that was too weak, what they had experienced under the Articles of Confederation, which governed the nation from 1777 to 1787.

The Articles of Confederation embraced the concept of state “sovereignty” and called the United States not a government or even a nation, but “a firm league of friendship” among the states. In the Confederation’s Article II declared: “Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated.” And very few powers were delegated to the federal government.

So, in 1787, the framers of the Constitution led by Gen. George Washington, James Madison and others in the Virginia delegation scrapped the Articles and put forward a very different plan, eliminating state sovereignty and creating a strong central government with broad powers, including control over “interstate commerce.”

The Commerce Clause wasn’t some afterthought it was part of the original proposal outlined on the Constitutional Convention’s first day of substantive business on May 29, 1787. The Virginia delegation had one of its members, Edmund Randolph, include it in his opening presentation.

Virginia’s plan laid out the framework that would later become the U.S. Constitution, transferring sovereignty from the 13 original states to “we the people of the United States” as represented by a new national Republic.

Where Rep. Paul claims the Constitution was designed to let the American people do what they want using the word liberty as his reference point. This is just not true! Unless, of course, he is referring to the people that represent the privilege class of Americans, who happen to be wealthy and white. We needed a government that could co-ordinate commerce in order to compete effectively with other nations. So, from that first day of substantive debate at the Constitutional Convention, the Founders recognized that a legitimate role of Congress was to ensure that the nation could match up against other countries economically.

Many conservatives to include Ron Paul have worked hard in recent decades at constructing an alternative narrative. Claiming that the Founders envisioned a weak national government and were big supporters of states’ rights happen to be a storyline that is simply not supported by facts. Key framers of the Constitution even objected to adding a Bill of Rights to the original document, accepting the first 10 amendments only later as part of negotiations over ratification.

The other thing they cry about is Obamacare. This speaks to Congress’s power to address difficult national problems, like the tens of millions of Americans who lack health insurance but whose eventual use of medical services would inevitably shift billions of dollars in costs onto Americans who must pay higher insurance rates as a result, what courts have described as “substantial effects.”

Paul claims: It certainly is an encroachment on individual liberty, but it is no more so than a command that restaurants or hotels are obliged to serve all customers regardless of race, that gravely ill individuals cannot use a substance their doctors described as the only effective palliative for excruciating pain, or that a farmer cannot grow enough wheat to support his own family. They also pray for fewer regulations to the benefit of the rich.

There are some conservative legal scholars examining the Constitution and precedents who could not find a convincing argument to overturn “Obamacare” and that is because the Founders intentionally empowered Congress to address national economic problems. It was, as the Virginian delegation understood, one of the key reasons for the Constitutional Convention.

Now I say the larger goal of the right-wing is not to uphold the ideals of the Founders, who wanted a vibrant central government, but to reverse government policies dating back to President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. The plan is to return the United States to a pre-Depression “gilded age” of a society divided into a few haves and many have-nots.

And that is my THOUGHT PRROVOKING PESPECTIVE!