It came as no surprise to me to hear that the GOP had chosen Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington State to rebut President Obama's State of the Union. They have made it clear that they are sincere about proving to women that, well, there are Republican women. It also came as no surprise that they had chosen a women that pretty much nobody had heard of. After all, this is the bunch that delivered us Sarah Palin in 2008, and we are all appreciative of that choice. The GOP could have had another comedic coup had they chosen Michele Bachmann in 2011, but they went and let her represent the Tea Party rebuttal:
Sadly, we all were so focused on the fact that her eyes were trained, in the distance, on those aliens that only she can see that we missed her sincerely spoken words of Tea Party misinformation. I can only imagine whoever was running the GOP into the ground back then sighing with relief that instead they had gone with male robot Paul Ryan.
But the election of 2012 caused the Republican party leadership to reconsider. With the words of Todd Aiken and his subsequent loss still stinging, leaders like Bobby Jindal of Louisiana urged his fellow republicans to stop being "the stupid party." By this he meant, of course, that they should stop letting the American people know what they really think. As we have seen since then, those old white men continue to loudly fault the poor for their poverty, the undereducated for their lack of success, and women for their menstrual cycles.
What to do, what to do? The problem being that since nothing is going to convince these guys that they might be wrong, they have apparently come to the conclusion that if women were to hear one of their own speak nonsense, they might not notice that it's nonsense.
So, just as in the not-too-distance past, the GOP found Marco Rubio to talk trash about immigration and Tim Scott to defend the denial of voting rights protections, they hunted and found a woman little known nationally to speak for them.
Cathy McMorris Rodgers has a voting record any Tea Partier would be proud of. She is a strong supporter of all those rich white men, against not just the Affordable Care Act, but Medicare and Medicaid, prefers subsidies to the rich to subsidies to the poor, and opposes women's rights to medical privacy -- by which I mean abortion and contraception services. Like her brothers-in-arms, she opposes equal rights and protections for LGBT, undocumented workers, American Indians, and, let me say it again, women.
I am looking forward to hearing what Rodgers has to say tonight, although to be honest I might not be able to get through it. I am confident though that in Rodgers the GOP has found exactly what they are looking for: someone to represent the men of today's republican party.
I am less likely today to believe that American democracy is foolproof than I was before the turn of the century. Strange circumstances have upset the balance of what should be a strong and balanced system of government. Until we lived through it, I doubt we would have thought believable the "election" of George W. Bush in 2000 by the Supreme Court. Without the swaggering and incompetent Bush administration, I believe the perpetrators of 9/11 would have been caught before the attack, and consequently, without 9/11, there would certainly have been no second term for this idiot president and his evil minions.
So when I read Christian Nation by Frederic C. Rich, I did not chuckle at the absurdities of its premise. Like Philip Roth's The Plot Against America and Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here, this work of fiction sets up an alternative history in which just that strange bit of credible chance leads to the falling of our democracy.
What if John McCain had won in 2008 and then died in office? In ordinary times we would not foresee a takeover by Christian fundamentalists. Yet here we are, where during the Bush years promotion to federal positions were granted to graduates of Christian diploma mills and anti-science agendas were pursued with confidence, and some troubling successes.
And now, despite a more rational leader, we have seen states take on the fight to ban abortion, to form state militias, to legislate against science. We have an immobilized Senate and a radical right-wing House; our Supreme Court majority boldly rewrites the Constitution to an agenda that they claim is conservative, but is actually so only when convenient. And we have a gun lobby that is untouchable.
We attempt to resist through democratic means the tyranny of these radical forces, who fight tirelessly in the name of their Christian god. But where we fight with rationality and restraint, our opponents are enflamed not by the light of logic but by the irrational fire of fear and greed and hate and fueled by the dollars of corporate wealth.
Could it happen here?
It's a gripping book, and I urge you to read it.
Hey, wait - it's only been two years! One of the most decent things W. had done was disappear after President Obama's inauguration. One of the happiest sights I'd ever seen was this former president's backside. I know, it meant I couldn't wear my "Somewhere in Texas a village is missing its idiot" t-shirt anymore, because hallelujah! it wasn't true anymore. He may still be lost, but now he's found.
And then the inevitable bad news. The smaller Bush had moved up from reading The Pet Goat to "authoring" a book. I say "authoring" because, as he admitted :
"I have written a book. This will come as quite a shock to some. They didn't think I could read, much less write."
Sarah Palin at least admitted to having a ghost writer. But if you believed in weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, I guess you might buy a book written by W., himself. But be forewarned, if you do buy the book, every penny of the profits will go to Bush.
Not even a penny to stock his presidential library. That's right, our tax dollars will continue to pay for this guy's infamy. So, instead of actual cash, which, thanks to eight years of the Bush presidency, I am quite short of, thank you very much, I would like to donate my very own books. These are documents of the eight years that were painstakingly, even lovingly, collected by me, and I will be sending the "former president" a photo so that he can find a suitable location.
