October 2005, " Greetings from Idiot America!" (look how far we've come!)

[David Sky]

Here's an interesting SEMI- LONG piece from Charles P. Pierce, which appeared in Esquire in 2005.

Just kind of explains a lot of the stuff we see going on in right wink politics today, and where it all comes from.

"Creationism. Intelligent Design. Faith-based this. Trust-your-gut that. There's never been a better time to espouse, profit from, and believe in utter, unadulterated crap. And the crap is rising so high, it's getting dangerous."..............


"Let's take a tour, shall we? For the sake of time, we'll just cover the last year or so.

A federally funded abstinence program suggests that HIV can be transmitted through tears. An Alabama legislator proposes a bill to ban all books by gay authors. The Texas House passes a bill banning suggestive cheerleading. And nobody laughs at any of it, or even points out that, in the latter case, having Texas ban suggestive cheerleading is like having Nebraska ban corn.

James Dobson, a prominent conservative Christian spokesman, compares the Supreme Court to the Ku Klux Klan. Pat Robertson, another prominent conservative preacher, says that federal judges are a more serious threat to the country than is Al Qaeda and, apparently taking his text from the Book of Gambino, later sermonizes that the United States should get with it and snuff the democratically elected president of Venezuela.

The Congress of the United States intervenes to extend into a televised spectacle the prolonged death of a woman in Florida. The majority leader of the Senate, a physician, pronounces a diagnosis based on heavily edited videotape. The majority leader of the House of Representatives argues against cutting-edge research into the use of human stem cells by saying that "an embryo is a person.... We were all at one time embryos ourselves. So was Abraham. So was Muhammad. So was Jesus of Nazareth." Nobody laughs at him or points out that the same could be said of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, or whoever invented the baby-back rib. And, finally, in August, the cover of Time -- for almost a century the dyspeptic voice of the American establishment -- clears its throat, hems and haws and hacks like a headmaster gagging on his sherry, and asks, quite seriously: "Does God have a place in science class?"





Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0207GREETINGS#ixzz1ZGj67GTJ

This kind of craziness has been going on for years and years now, some of us just didn't pay it as much attention in 2005, or maybe how I forget!!!!

Anyway, it's a fun read, if you like Charles P Pierce.

[safeinOhio]

1. It was all explained in 1964, Harper's Magazine.

Please read the details.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paranoid_Style_in_American_Politics

It is an adaptation of the Herbert Spencer Lecture he gave at Oxford University in November 1963, and was first published in the November 1964 issue of Harper's Magazine, then was the titular essay of the book The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays (1964). It was originally presented when the conservatives, led by Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater (1909–1998), were on the verge of taking control of the Republican Party. Liberals feared this might be the advent of extremism in politics, so Hofstadter tried to put the movement in historical context.<4>

[David Sky]

3. Thanks for this contribution..yes, we have seen these kinds of

phenomena in American politics ever since the early days. But somewhere between 2000 and 2009, while Bush was in office until Obama took office, the paranoid, anti-intellectual folks figured out how to profit and keep millions of dollars from espousing this Dinosaur with a saddle and religion versus science kind of idiocy, and they learned how to turn the prominent news media, from Time magazine to Fox News, (or ABC CBS NBC, CBN or other living room babysitters of the stupid folks) into their most pervasive spokespersons.

As an aside, I studied Richard Hoffstader in college, while Charles P Pierce was about 11 years old. Just to put Goldwater in perspective with the author of my original selected column. Sometime while Bush was President, the news media got into bed with the crazies, because it boosted ratings, made for sensationalist television news, and ensured that the already half paranoid viewers would not change to the Science Channel's explorations of the life-cycle of butterflies.

[abq e streeter]

2. Absolutely outstanding.Thank you for posting this.

Looked at the length of it and figured I'd read snippets and eventually finish in a couple of days . Instead, I couldn't stop, and read the whole piece just now. Says it all pretty much, doesn't it?

[David Sky]

4. Pierce is a genius at pulling it all together, yes!

And he's fun to read.