The Nature of Things

There really is no excuse for Michele Bachmann. One wonders what ever possessed the good people of Minnesota to elect her to represent them. Of course, the good people of Minnesota might reasonably respond with a question of their own: What possessed the people of Texas to elect Louis Gohmert to represent them? They really are two of a kind and neither of them is competent to serve in elective office of any kind, in my opinion. The two are almost always found using the same hate-filled rhetoric and chasing the same chimera that only they and their kind can see. They are at it again. This time their bug-a-boo is the Muslim Brotherhood . "The Muslim Brotherhood is taking over the country and must be stopped from forcing Sharia law on all of us!" Bachmann, Gohmert and a couple of their fellow wackadoodles have sent letters to the inspectors general of five government agencies demanding that they investigate infiltration by the Muslim Brotherhood into the highest reaches of the f...

Like many in the country I suspect, I continue to be obsessed with the story of the violence that occurred in Tucson on Saturday. In reading further today, I came across a note about this story which I may have heard about when it happened last year but I had frankly forgotten it. It seems that after the vote on the health care reform bill last year, the Democratic National Committee was concerned about the vitriol and threats that their party members were receiving and the violence that had been perpetrated against some of them and they drafted a "bipartisan" statement rejecting such vitriol and calling for civility in politics. They presented it to their opposite numbers at the Republican National Committee and asked them to join the DNC in issuing the statement. The statement read, in part: As leaders of our respective national parties, we want to speak to all Americans about the importance of conducting our political debates in a manner and tone that respects our poli...

Politicians and pundits are tripping over each other to pronounce themselves shocked, shocked over the attempted assassination of an elected Member of Congress and the killing and wounding of several of her constituents at a public event in Tucson yesterday. Why should they be shocked? This is just the natural consequence of the irrational hate speech that is the prevalent means of communication in a certain quarter of our political landscape these days. If you are in any doubt as to which quarter I am referring to, it is the far, far right - those people whose heroes are folks like Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and the multi-billionaires like the Koch brothers who finance and manipulate the tea partiers. When these people constantly urge their followers "don't retreat, reload," or admonish them to take "Second Amendment remedies," or say things like, "If ballots don't work, bullets will!", what exactly did they exp...

The U.S.A. is a fractious country. There are always various political and social factions in the nation that pull and push against each other and engage in hyperbole and sometimes outright lies when describing their opponents. Only once in our history has all this hatred actually boiled over into a shooting war, although there have been some other skirmishes that have come close, and periodically some militia movement somewhere in the country will decide that it is ready to begin the next war against the federal government. The phrase "delusions of grandeur" springs to mind. For the most part, all of this heat is contained. The First Amendment is a powerful escape valve. People who are able to congregate and freely speak out about whatever is bothering them - even if it is complete twaddle - have more difficulty building up steam for actual violent action. Their steam escapes through the mechanism provided by the Founders of our country. Those old guys really were pr...

You might not ever guess it from reading my opinions expressed here, but I try - I really do - to be tolerant of others, even people with whom I disagree. I make an effort to give everyone the benefit of a doubt when it comes to the sincerity of their beliefs and I try to understand what has led people to the views that they hold. But there are some few people for whom I refuse to make that effort. Fred Phelps and his hateful flock at the so-called Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas are some of those people. This "church" claims around 75 members, most of whom are related to the leader Phelps. This congregation believes in a gospel of anti-homosexuality which asserts that America has embraced "fags" and because of that God is punishing the nation by killing its soldiers. Phelps adage is "Thank God for dead soldiers," and he and his flock carry this message to the funerals of members of this nation's military service who have been killed. T...

Did you hear the latest about Ann Coulter ? It seems that she was scheduled to give speeches in a series of Canadian universities, but when some of the students at those schools heard about it, they decided to exercise their right of free speech and peacefully (It's the Canadian way.) protest her coming to their schools. Apparently, thousands of the students joined in the protest. They did not want this noted purveyor of hate speech on their campus. Now, Coulter is a bold proponent of free speech, so you would think that she would rejoice in the Canadian students exercising their rights. You would be wrong. It seems she is only a proponent of HER freedom to speech, but not if she feels threatened in any way. Apparently, she did feel threatened by the peaceful Canadian students because now she has canceled her speeches rather than face them. Of course, Coulter and her ilk were never long on physical courage. It is why you will almost never find any of them serving in any mil...