You've probably heard of Ayn Rand. Most people have these days. She was the author of such inexplicably widely-read "novels" (really, barely-disguised political diatribes) as "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged". Her books are currently enjoying something of a boom among those who misguidedly believe they would be in the self-righteous community of "Atlases" at Galt's Gulch. The novels themselves are of only passing interest, being long, melodramatic and mediocrely written. Rather, it is the "philosophy" at the core of the novels which bears attention.

Hear ye, hear ye, I come to bury Rand, not to praise her. While numerous conservative thinkers (and, oddly, Neil Peart) have lauded Rand as a philosopher, few academic institutions include Rand or Objectivism as a philosophical discipline. Conservatives, such as Chris Sciabarra, tend to believe that the academic left decries Rand due to her anti-communist, pro-capitalist slant. Like much of the witterings of conservatives who presume to know what the left thinks, that presumes firstly, more power than the academic left has had in decades; secondly, assumes that the left was universally pro-communist and anti-capitalist, something which has never been true and thirdly, that Rand was saying anything worth studying. She wasn't. Rand's "philosophy" was the same defence of endless greed which mankind has been engaged in for eternity, the same attempt to place a moral cover on pure selfishness that has long been pursued by any number of exploiters down the centuries. Nietzche was, and is, pilloried for saying "God is dead", Rand is lauded for effectively saying "the self is God". There is nothing new here, save perhaps for the self-delusion that allows so many professed "Christians" to adhere to a philosophy that glorifies greed and athieism. There is also a cult-like deification of Rand by her followers and "swarming" of those who dare criticise her which reminds one very strongly of Scientology (and Glenn Beck followers but that's another matter).

There is another name for those who hold that the only proper moral consideration is the happiness of the self; for those who view empathy and compassion as weakness; who view selfishness as the only virtue: Psychopaths.

Contrary to popular belief, the psychopath is not automatically violent. Rather, the psychopath is defined by a near-complete lack of empathy. Robert Hare (who created the widely used "Hare Psychopathy Checklist") describes psychopaths as "instraspecies predators" who use a combination of charisma, manipulation, intimidation, sexuality and violence to satisfy their own desires. The more human qualities of conscience, empathy, remorse or guilt are either completely absent or extremely limited. It must be repeated that the psychopath is not necessarily violent. Indeed, many are not because their lives have never placed them in a position where violence was the only means to satisfy their desires. Many businessmen (and therefore, many politicians) profile as psychopaths because they exhibit the core characteristics or some section thereof. Ayn Rand should also be considered a psychopath.

Hare's checklist lists certain personality factors as indicative of psychopathy. The average person will perhaps exhibit one or, at most, two. The psychopath will exhibit all but on or two. In no particular order, these items are Glibness/superficial charm. After her writings became popular, Rand collected around herself a group of cultists who virtually worshipped her. However, shallow affect, the psychopath's charm is only ever superficial. As one comes to know and understand the psychopath more fully, the charm which initially attracted one to them is revealed as only skin-deep. In this, Rand was entirely textbook. She was described by most who knew her best as a bitter, friendless child who grew into an equally bitter and acidic woman. Grandiose sense of self-worth would certainly fit Rand. A woman who names her beliefs "Objectivism" out of a belief that any reasoning person who observes the objective truths of the world would necessarily come to full agreement with her would probably qualify. The fact that her little cult were required to memorise her works and discounted as "imbecilic" and "anti-life" if they asked questions simply seals the deal. Her sincere belief was that thinking freely would automatically lead to total agreement with her views. The ruthless policing of her cult would also qualify her under the Cunning/manipulative qualifier. Patholigical lying is one that Rand is probably innocent of. So far as we know, there is no reason to believe she was a pathological liar. Lack of remorse or guilt and Callous/lack of empathy could be described as "Ayn Rand syndrome". These two qualifiers are really the core of her books, philosophhy and worldview. In one of her books (The Fountainhead), her "hero", Howard Roarke, blows up a housing project he designed when a minor alteration is made and then orders the jury to acquit him (the fact that, as an architect, Roarke was presumably contracted for his work and therefore, it wasn't "his" anymore piddles all over the supposed respect for property too). In Atlas Shrugged, her ode to the super-rich which imagines them going on strike against progressive taxation, Rand describes the rest of the world (without whom, let us not forget, the super-rich would be unable to make anything) in such niceties as "savages", "refuse" and "immitations of living beings". When one of the strikers engineers a train crash (because they don't just strike but commit acts of terrorism too), Rand makes it clear that she believes the murdered victims deserved their fate because they supported progressive taxation. A stewing hymn of Nietzchean will-to-power, misanthropy, failure to understand economics, feudalism and sexual politics verging on the obscene, Atlas Shrugged is full of this stuff. Her heroes spend their time both insisting that they are the heroic producers (and without labour, what are they producing exactly?) and bemoaning that others do not worship them as such. In her spare time, Rand was an admirer of serail killer William Hickman (I'll spare you the details of his crimes save to say that they were brutal even by serial killer standards), describing him as "a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy"; "other people do not exist for him and he does not see why they should" was her evaluation of his crimes and Rand considered this worthy of praise. Finally, on the personality factor, there is Failure to accept responsibility for one's actions. Since our record of Rand's life isn't fully detailed, it's difficult to say how much she satisfied this one. Certainly, when her lover Nathaniel Branden found another partner, she blamed him rather than herself or her increasingly poisonous views. We shouldn't sympathise with Rand as injured party too much here, she was herslelf married to someone entirely different and cruel enough to carry on the affair without regard to discretion. Indeed, if the only duty of the superman is to please himself, Brendan was acting according to Rand's ideals and she should have applauded him. She once said the the USA should be a "democracy of superiors only" with "superior" being defined as "rich". One scarcely needs to point out that such a system wouldn't be democracy at all but oligarchy and interestingly elitist for all her followers claim to despise elitism.

One doesn't need to work very hard to diagnose Rand. Her life and writings paint a vivid picture of psychopathy so clear and obvious that it is only surprising so many miss it. She was a phonomenally damaged woman for whom one can feel an element of pity (an emotion that disgusted her) even while aware of how terrifically dangerous she and her philosophy was and are. Rand herself died alone except for a hired nurse. Her deranged views had driven away anyone who might have been close to her. Like L. Ron Hubbard, however, her lunatic ideas have spawned a cult that would turn all of us into happy little psychopaths; a cult that includes many of the world's foremost economists, politicians and rabble-rousers (Beck again, although "intellectual terrorist" might be more appropriate). Like George Orwell, Rand imagined a dystopian world characterised by the powerful's exploitation of the powerless. Unlike Orwell, Rand wanted to live there.

Ann Coulter once said that liberals "take a perverse joy in lying", that liberals actively enjoy telling untruths. She was, of course, wrong about liberals (as she would have difficulty even understanding a thought process so different to her own) but I am increasingly of the opinion that her remarks were correct if applied to conservatives (projection, in other words). How else can one explain the warped version of reality which so many conservatives carry around in their heads? I'm not talking about subjects which reasonable people can disagree on, like the existence and disposition of god(s) or the merits of direct democracy. Those are issues without clear answer which reasonable people can have a discussion about. I'm talking about believing and not just believing but vehemently defending beliefs which are provably, factually wrong. Believing something which is untrue would be understandable if it were done out of ignorance but such people, when exposed to the facts, will vehemently attack or dismiss them and often the messenger as well. In an individual, this would be considered mental illness (and in the case of some, such as Glenn Beck, that would be an accurate description) but the mental health community is understandably reluctant to label whole swathes of the public as crazy. If someone believes they are being followed by a man-eating hedgehog, you can just give them a heavy stick and a chair to stand on and let them get on with it but when a whole section of the public is holding beliefs which are no less crazy, those beliefs somehow become an accepted part of the public dialogue. For example:

- Fascism is a left-wing ideaology
I think it was Goldberg who started this one. Since the end of WWII, fascism has been identified as a right-wing (right-fringe, really) ideaology. There has never been any significant doubt about that. It's only fairly recently that some conservatives have decided that everything unpleasent is teh fault of the left and so, fascism must be a left-wing ideaology. Partly, this is based on the mistaken belief that state control of everything was the aim of communism, rather than the result of communism being unworkable in the real world. It's the same mentality which claims that because I dislike legal abortion, child molestation and homosexuality, all those things must be caused by the teaching of evolution, which I also dislike. One can find the same mindset in those who tout that the Weather Underground proves that the left is more likely to be violent while forgetting, for example, Timothy McVeigh. It's rewriting history, stealing history really, for use as partisan political points. And while we're on the subject:

- Obama is a socialist/communist
This one is based on a misreading of history so obvious that it must have been deliberate. To claim that Obama, a wimpish moderate in any sane world, is socialist in any way is not just wrong but outright insane and yet, it persists. And it persists because most people don't actually know what "socialism" means. They don't understand that when socialism says "communal ownership of the means of production and distribution", it means ALL the means, not just an interest or equity in a few firms which would otherwise have collapsed. But the right-wing media machine doesn't like that reality and so, they endlessly promote the lie that any communal ownership of anything is automatically socialist. Part of me wonders if this societal case of the fallacy of the excluded middle is the result of decades of Cold War rhetoric or simply the decades of propoganda on behalf of capitalism or if there is even a difference between the two.

- Republicans have been better for minorities
There are two strands to this one. The first is based on a very selective misreading of history. There certainly was a time when Republicans were the better party for minorities, that's inarguable. The Democrats, pressured by a group of conservative Southern members known as "Dixiecrats" were rotten for minorities for some time. But this reading of history ignores everything that's happened since integration, when the Dixiecrats almost universally defected to the Republican party. Since then, the Democrats have (overall and in general) been better at minority rights. And minorities know it. There was a time when black people almost universally voted Republican, seeing it as the party of Lincoln. These days, better than 90% of black people vote Democrat. Which brings us onto the second strand of this argument. This strand holds that minorities typically vote for Democrats because Democrats give them more "government hand-outs". Now, firstly, let's remember that it was Bill Clinton who ended welfare as an entitlement program (for which, I don't think he's been criticised enough) but secondly, notice the inherent bias and racism in the allegation. It assumes that A) government can never do anything good and B) that black people will vote for Democrats because they're all lazy work-shys who depend on "government hand-outs". Sometimes, for those less overt with their racism, some vague theory about a "culture of dependence" will be added.

Those are just three examples of what could be dozens. Indeed, so devoted are conservatives to their alternate universe view of reality that I could write a book on the subject (and may yet do so). To be a conservative, it seems, is to be a conspiracist; to believe that there exists some secret cabal of leftie elites constantly rewriting the world in their favour (at which, the leftie responds "have you seen us? We can't even keep a radio station running"). This is what psychologists call "projection", the seeing of one's own faults in others and it is agravated by the conservative trend toward "purity" i.e. calling oneself a Republican means accepting all these points wholesale or we'll call you a RINO and make you a non-person in the party. A whole faction of the populace believes that Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and President Obama are left-fringe radicals (and "left-wing radical" now means anything to the left of Bush who really was a radical) and if you call these people crazy, which would seem the obvious reasponse, they start screaming about Stalin labelling people insane and protesting their patriotism (every kook, crank and domestic terrorist in American history has proclaimed their patriotism). You cannot reason with these people because they have left reason entirely behind. Rather, their allegiance to this talking point version of reality is closer to that of a religion or cult, their accusations of liberals worshipping Obama as a messiah just more of their endless projection (and nowehere is this more true than of Glenn Beck's acolytes who swarm liberal publications whenever an article is unflattering of Dear Leader). The conservative model is well established by this point: Lie about something until you convince a small portion of the populace, force publications to label well-established facts as controversial and then shout "teach the controversy!" and rely on social pressure to do the rest.

So, how can they be beaten? I'm honestly unsure. Education would be an obvious point but children spend far more time learning the talking point reality at home than they do learning the reality-based version at school and the textbooks of those schools are now largely drawn to Texas standards and already corrupted anyway. Conservative control of the media is now so pervasive and so entrenched that we should expect no help from that quarter either. I wish I had an answer but every future I envision ends up with the USA accepting a version of reality entirely at odds with the one the rest of the world accepts.

Well, in all but name anyway. It's called Domestic Partnership but it's considered identical in law. They can even marry in full dress uniform like straight people if they so choose.

Total effect? Need to build a few more married couples quarters. Otherwise zero.

The ramifications of yesterday's Citizen's United decision are difficult to comprehend. In one fell swoop, in a decision which relied on no precedent or legal rule, the Supreme Court of Justice Roberts destroyed any and all limits on corporate financing of campaigns. No, it's too big. Let's walk back a little and take a brief look at how we got here.

In a decision in the nineteenth century, a no less misguided Supreme Court decided that corporations were, in certain important respects, persons and thus entitled to some of the protections laid out in the United States Constitution. Too much ancient history for you? OK, perhaps you'd feel better if we only went back about thirty years. It was about thirty years ago that the public began to be fed an endless diet of anti-union propoganda. Not coincidently, that coincided with the rise in Washington of a class of politicians who believed Ayn Rand was right; that corporations should be entirely unregulated. My opinions on Rand are fairly irrelevent here (although I believe she may be the most evil woman in history) but what that led to was a systematic dismantling of the limits on corporate activities that had been put in place after the Great Depression (also caused by corporations). Those politicians, in union with a media almost completely controlled by the right-wing, preached that the corporation was your friend and the public, so forgetful, so endlessly trusting, believed them.

Perhaps you would say that, since today's decision was made by judges, not politicians, that political movement is irrelevent. Sadly, that's untrue. Judges are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Congress. Because of that, the only judges considered for selection are those whose worldview matches that of their selector. President Reagan would not have even considered a judge who was pro-choice, for example. Confirmation is a little more complex but, given the Republican minority's effective current veto power (via their unprecedented lockstep filibuster on absolutely everything and no, wingers, the Democrats were nowhere near this bad to Bush) can be worked around. Bush just went with recess appointments (and it's unclear whether that was even meant to apply to judicial nominations). The lifetime appointments given the Supreme Court justices were originally meant to insulate judges from political pressures. In reality, they've done exactly the opposite and simply given a lifetime term to any justice's political biases.

Ah, now we can get to the ramifications of the decision. Keith Olbermann did a good job of scratching the surface in his special comment yesterday but, given the time limits of his medium, he could go only so far. Let's start with these: A lowering and eventual abolition of corporate taxes and, shortly thereafter, of taxes on the rich who run those corporations. How about the abolition of minimum wage laws? From now on, your salary will be whatever the corporation decides to pay you. Think you can go to another corporation and get paid better? Good luck. With corporations in control of Congress, expect ever more incentives to move jobs overseas. You're going to be competing for jobs with ever more people and if you won't take that job for fifty cents an hour, there's someone who will. Oh yeah, your taxes are going to go up as well. With the lowering and elimination of corporat tax and taxes on the wealthy, the money has to come from somewhere and it's going to come from you.

Oh, you think the politicians wouldn't go that far? Sorry, you will now choose your politicians from a pool of candidates funded (and therefore, vetted and approved) by the corporations. The corporations now control whether your politicians get elected and that means that politicians will do whatever the corporation demands. From now on, you don't have a senator from California, you have a senator from Aetna or Wellpoint or... Well, pick a corporation.

The dream of the corporations is and always has been to have a class of people rich enough to buy their crap and a much larger class poor enough and desperate enough to work for pennies to make their crap. So you can kiss any form of healthcare reform goodbye. If you get sick, tough luck, you're fired and out to starve in the gutter. Any and all forms of employee protection will go. You will now be employed for as long as the corporation wants you, at whatever wages they want to pay. Forget workplace safety laws, forget employer funded healthcare. Forget the enviroment too. The corporate sector has always resisted enviromental protections and now, they're in a position to do something about it. Forget same-sex marriage, some red meat thrown to the evangelicals while the corporations take over. Reproductive choice will go the same way and, since the corporation always wants to lower wages, ever more people competing for ever fewer jobs is always in their interests. Forget banking reform too, there are few corporations more powerful. Credit card reform is the same story. Oh, and forget consumer protections as well. So your drugs may or may not work anymore. Expect more wars, expect a draft or "national service" because the corporations that manufacture bullets and bombs and all that fancy equipment are still corporations, after all.

Think I'm being too alarmist? Perhaps. But look up the position of the average person during the Great Depression, or the Dark Ages or any age where those with the gold ruled openly. Your wages have already stagnated for years. Now, with nothing to stop them, they're going to start falling. Expect the few remaining rules on media ownership to be swept aside as well. The corporations need to control those to control you, to keep you distracted.

So who can you turn to to save you? Sorry, there's not much better news here. A Supreme Court decision, through the doctrine of stare decisis, establishes enforceable law for all courts within US jurisdiction. Through the principle of judicial review, any law passed by Congress will have to be compatible with this decision or it will simply be overturned, either by the Supreme Court or by a lower court with no choice but to follow this precedent. You could try for a Constitutional amendment, the Supreme Court can't overrule that but the chances of getting a Constitutional amendment through Congress with the current Republican veto are nil and if you think a lter Republican Congress will do so, you're dreaming. The Republican party has become the political arm of the business lobby and, through the right's control of the media, has managed to convince much of the populace that that's a good thing.

Enjoy your remaining time to complain about this on the internet as well. Because Net Neutrality will shortly become a thing of the past. And if you think "the people" are going to rise up and institute a revolution, forget it. History shows us that revolutions only happen when people's basic needs are threatened or removed and even then, it's only fifty-fifty. Bread and circuses. If the bellies of "the people" are full and they have, say, American Idol to distract them, they may grumble but, chances are, they won't do anything about it. They'll go to the polls every few years and cast their vote for the corporate-approved shill who sounds slightly better than the other corporate-approved shill. The people of Germany didn't rebel against Hitler, nor did the people of Rome rebel against Nero. Until the food stops coming, there will be no revolution and even if there was, who do you think makes your guns and bullets? I can make ammo, as can a lot of firearms hobbyists but the gun you need to fire them comes from those same corporations and, incidently, the chances are fairly good that you'd be too busy fending off the poor bastards now starving in the streets to take up arms against the corporations.

Amid all the accusations of socialism and communism the right has been throwing around lately, it seems that fascism has snuck in by the back door (shh, don't tell the wingers, they think fascism was a left-wing ideaology). Mussolini, the original fascist leader, once said that fascism should more properly be called corporatism as it represented the union of state and corporate power. "The people" or, as I like to call them, "the mob" may not know this because their education has been woefully limited and they have been lied to their whole lives but corporate control of the political sphere is the very definition of fascism. There might not be tanks in the streets (as people seem to believe fascism requires) but it's fascism all the same. You now live in a fascist country.

Let me put this in simple terms so that it cannot be misunderstood: The American experiment is over, it failed. Government of, by and for the people is done. Legislators are now for sale to the highest bidder. Government is now (as Olbermann brilliantly said) of the people, by the corporation, for the corporation. If you want to know what the future looks like, read some William Gibson or the rulebook for the roleplaying game Shadowrun (although, sadly, you won't get the magic). You have, generously, five years to destroy this monstrous decision, to save your country and the dream of America. If this decision is not overturned, cut down or otherwise circumvented, your entire way of life is over.

Get to work.

"Saint Peter, don't you call me 'cause I can't go / I owe my soul to the company store" ~ Johnny Cash

OK, we all knew he was a douchebag but even so... From HuffPo (all emphasis mine):

"Meanwhile, on his Twitter page, Warren seemed to question the fuss. "Globally last yr 146,000 Christians were put to death because of their faith. No one, except Christians, said anything," he wrote.

* * * * *

Rick Warren, the pastor who delivered the invocation at President Obama's inauguration, is once again on the defensive -- this time for his work with a Ugandan pastor who would like homosexuality to be punishable by death.

Newsweek tried to get Warren's reaction to the anti-gay work of Martin Ssempa, a Ugandan pastor who has come to his Saddleback Church multiple times. (Warren has distanced himself from Ssempa in general terms, saying the Ugandan minister does not represent him or his church.) Warren wouldn't reject the idea:

But Warren won't go so far as to condemn the legislation itself. A request for a broader reaction to the proposed Ugandan anti-homosexual laws generated this response: "The fundamental dignity of every person, our right to be free, and the freedom to make moral choices are gifts endowed by God, our creator. However, it is not my personal calling as a pastor in America to comment or interfere in the political process of other nations." On Meet the Press this morning, he reiterated this neutral stance in a different context: "As a pastor, my job is to encourage, to support. I never take sides." Warren did say he believed that abortion was "a holocaust." He knows as well as anyone that in a case of great wrong, taking sides is an important thing to do.

Ssempa has also burned condoms "in the name of Jesus," helping roll back a highly successful anti-AIDS campaign in Uganda.

-------------------------------------------------------

I'm pretty sure he's pulling that 146K number from his ample ass. I'm also pretty sure Jesus would have dropkicked this guy.

In today's LA Times(1), Orrin Hatch (R-Cigna) promises "holy war" to halt the healthcare bill. A couple of days ago, Rush told his listeners they were in a "war without bullets". Beck told his listeners that they were the teenage girl and the government was Roman Polanski. One presumes he didn't mean that the government was going to make visionary, innovative films. No, he meant the government is going to rape you.

Holy war. "War without bullets". "Whites of their eyes". That repugnant Dachau poster. "I'm a proud right-wing terrorist". The rampant racism of the Birther clowns. Am I crazy or is anyone else noticing a pattern here?

The right loves to equivocate. They love to claim that the left were just as bad to Bush, the Democrats were just as hyperbolic and obstructionist. Both claims are untrue, of course, but they're par for the course on the right. What is new is the increasing level of militancy in the rhetoric; subtle (and sometimes overt) allusions to violence. The left, who were routinely accused of being unpatriotic for criticising Bush (who the right pretend to have always been against now) didn't go anything like this far. Perhaps a few posters in the underdepths of the webway posted violent fantasies but in the left as a whole, it didn't happen. And yet, after less than a year out of power, the right are coming within a hairsbreadth of actually inciting assassination.

Look, let's be honest. Obama is a black guy and there are enough unreconstructed racists in the USA that there was always a chance that one of them would take a shot at him. The Secret Service says that threats to the president have quadrupled since Obama took office. The right would have us believe that's just because normal Americans are angry at the president for, well, something (they seem unable to decide what their complaint is) and you can guarantee that, if some nut takes a shot at Obama, they'll do the same dance of deniability: A brief, insincere denunciation of the violence and then straight back to hatred and near-enough justification of that same violence. The same way they did with Scott Roder. The same way they did with the Town Hall lunatics. Since this president took office, they have stopped at nothing to paint him as illegitimate, dangerous, even alien. They've done everything but outright say that, since the president is such a monster, you might as well take a shot at him.

Oh, I know I'm not supposed to say that. You're not supposed to talk about the distinct possibility that some maniac will absorb the violent rhetoric tacitly encouraged by the right and act upon it. But the rhetoric is there and it is violent (Sean Hannity's site a while back had a survey asking it's readers what kind of revolution they'd prefer). And there is a distinct possibility that someone will act upon it. The Secret Service are dedicated to their jobs but they're only human and it only takes a moment for a maniac to get lucky. And if he does, the right will soothe themselves with the thought that the left would have been just as bad to Bush.

I'm not sure what can be done about this. The yappers like Beck and Limbaugh have already made a big noise about their First Amendment rights and you can be certain that if anyone even asks them quietly to dial it back, they'll ramp it up even further. And the 20% crowd will follow them right over that cliff. Just... notice how extreme, how violent the rhetoric has become and realise that these people cannot be negotiated or compromised with. As far as they are concerned, the proper order of the universe is to have Republicans, white Republicans (not all of the criticism is racial but the racial factor is certainly adding heat to it) in charge of everything. Anything else is abomination and must be brought to an end by any means necessary. And I mean any means, the word is an absolute here. If the worst happens, the yappers will make a pretence of their sorrow... and then they'll be straight back to attacking with exactly the same tactics, exactly the same vitriol and the 20%, their followers will quietly toast the shooter with beer. The right these days loves to talk about having a fifth column of communists in the Whitehouse. That's crap, naturally, but it occurs that you may have a literal fifth column of would-be domestic terrorists and a much larger faction that would apologise and cover for them.


(1) http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-wor...

"I predict KSM will walk and it will be all Bush's fault"

Up until a couple of months ago, I worked for a fairly well-known spirituality website. I was laid off a few months ago (because of a Fox buyout the previous year) which exacerbated my already deteriorating mental health, so I'm now on the British equivelent of disability but I still pop in from time to time. Just glancing around, saying "hi" to old friends, that kind of thing. And I happened to glance onto the Politics board. Naturally enough, there was a thread about KSM and the other two being brought to NYC for trial.

And then I read the line reproduced above. Startled me. The poster is a hardcore right-winger of the kind that was cheerleading Bush through his very worst excesses but now pretends they never liked the guy ("Bush wasn't conservative", you know the kind) so I knew he wasn't being serious. He was trying to innoculate Bush from the (legitimate) criticism of how he handled KSM's interrogation. And this is a good illustration of how wingers think: It's the playground view that saying something in a sarcastic voice makes it untrue. I don't think KSM will walk for a second but if he did, Bush would bear the majority of responsibility because he ordered the man to be frickin' tortured. So it would be largely Bush's fault. So what the poster is trying to do is roughly equivelent to saying "oh yeah, and I suppose the sky is blue too?". It's playground stuff, five-year-old mentality.

And then I read further and what emerged was that the right, on this board anyway but I think it's a fair representation, want KSM to walk so they can blame Obama for it. And then they're talking among themselves, predicting the left will throw ticker-tape parade's for KSM and celebrate his walking away. They actually believe that the left actively hates the USA, actively wishes it harm.

I knew, on some level, that the right often thought this but it's startling to see it written down. And I think this explains a lot about the current level of political discourse, the vitriol and obstruction: The right are seeing themselves as being at war, with the left as an invading army and how do you deal with an invading army? You stop them in their tracks, no surrender, scorched earth and kill as many as you can. No compromise, no negotiation, no discussion, just fight. And that's why they're abusing the filibuster on absolutely everything; why getting anything done has gone from 50 votes plus the VP to a de facto 60 vote minimum; why the vitriol on the right has esculated to such terrifying levels; why guns are showing up at rallies; why there's the continual march on the Capitol. And that's why none of the right would raise issue with that disgusting Dachau poster at Bachmann's moron march, because they already consider themselves to be at war. And it's frightening because if a faction of the country, say 20%, are viewing themselves as actively at war with a domestic fifth column, it's only a matter of time until the bodies start piling up. Now, about this time, the right start saying that the left were just as bad to Bush, the Olbermann was just as bad as Beck is being, etc, etc. I'm not sure whether they're lying or if they're actually suffering a psychotic break from reality but either way, it's not true.But how can you make them see that? If you try to point out that they are believing things which are provably not true and that's usually a sign of schizophrenia, they start going on about how Stalin locked people up under the pretext of insanity. If this is a mental disorder, it's a totally self-protecting one. How can you possibly get through to people like this? How can you make a grown-up get their fucking shit together when you're not allowed to hit them? I can throw down as well as anyone but smacking them around, while satisfying, just serves to reinforce their self-delusion of being at war with a domestic enemy.

Guys, this is really fucking frightening because there is no reasoning with these people. This isn't just difference of opinion or politics, we could work with those. It's not just stupidity either, this is outright paranoid delusions. This is believing that one if being followed by a man-eating hedgehog. And these people are now at a boiling point. Many of them are armed and they genuinely believe (because Beck has told them to) that the people in power are ultraleft fascists actively trying to destroy the country. How can you possibly reason with that?

Up until a couple of months ago (bloody Fox buyout), I worked for Beliefnet for many years so I had a chance to study this at length.

First off, let's be clear: We're not talking about the majority of Christians. Roughly 80% of the US describes itself as Christian in some form but only around 25% are Biblical literalists. So there's about 55% of the country who are Christian in some form but aren't represented by people like Pat Robertson. Nor is the problem fundementalism in itself. Both the Amish and Quakers are fundementalists but neither feel any compulsion to tell others how to live their lives.

Now, I'm not Christian (I'm actually a Luciferian Satanist) but I have read the Bible several times in several editions and the values espoused by the type of fundie you're talking about are a long way from what Jesus actually taught. Jesus taught compassion ("What is done to the least of these), tolerance (the Samaritan), church-state seperation ("Render unto Caesar") and what economic views he expressed are closest to a kind of proto-socialism. I don't need to show you how the views of teh Religious Right conflicts with those.

And the reason is because they aren't drawn to Christianity by it's teachings. Rather, what you have in a group of people who feel alienated by modernity and who are also what Altemeyer described as "authoritarian followers". The uncertainty and change of modern society leaves them feeling alienated and so, they seek to cling to something which is, in their view, certain and unchanging - fundementalist Christianity. They choose Christianity purely because it's the dominant faith in the US. If they were raised in Israel, they'd be Jewish. If they were raised in, say, the UAE, they'd be Muslim. But their's is a form of Christianity based far more in politics than in faith.

Both Frank Schaffer (from the religious side) and David Brock (from the political arm) have written about how the movement we refer to as the Religious Right became, during the eighties and early nineties, a subsection of the Republican party. How positions on things like taxation were based not on the teachings of Jesus but on a pre-existing conservative ideaology which would then be supported by a few Bible passages twisted out of context and meaning. Essentially, they're the American Christian version of the nationalist Islamic groups which sprang up across the MidEast in the seventies and eighties (NOT terrorists, they're something different). For this nationalism, I call them the Cultus Americanus.

The Cultus Americanus (one could also call them Reaganists since they're feelings about him are about one step from outright idolotry) pay lip service to Jesus but their teachings are far more influenced by an amalgamation of ultraright nationalism, ultraconservative social views and lasseiz faire economics. None of these are unique to the Cultus but the Cultus stamps "JESUS APPROVED" on the package in order to sell it to the masses. Essentially, the Cultus raises American Exceptionalism to a faith in it's own right. Their aims are not to be better people or to have a guide for one's own life (as normal faiths provide) but to tell others how to live their lives. They don't want the kingdom of God, they want to inherit the earth.

I was going to use today's column to have some fun poking Rush Limbaugh over the sycophantic "interview" he preached on Fox news. But then, I heard that same-sex marriage has been overturned in Maine. Maine of all places. There are three areas that any bookie would have expected same-sex marriage to be uncontroversial: Southern California, Washington DC and New England. Well, Prop H8 took away same-sex marriage in Cali and left the couples that got married in that brief period it was legal (including my friend Buffy of The Gaytheist Agenda and her partner) in a kind of limbo. DC passed Ref 71 which, as I read the law, gives same-sex couples everything except the word "marriage". I can live with that, that's the same arrangement we have here in Britain. And then came the other result.

Et tu, Maine?

Let me get this straight: New England is one of the more reliably liberal areas of the country, the rest of New England has legalised same-sex marriage or something equivelent and 58% voted to decriminalise pot. Were all the potheads freakin' stoned and thought their "yes" meant they were affirming gay rights? Because the numbers I'm seeing (58% for decriminalising pot, 52% for screwing over gay people) means that at least some of the stoners must have voted for this abomination. Did we all take a big dose of hypocracy today, kiddies? Were you guys so high that you couldn't distinguish lies from facts? Could you not have waiting until after voting to take a half-dozen bong hits?

And don't think I'm exclusively picking on the stoners either. Everyone who voted for this absurdity needs to get clocked with a clue-by-four. I mean, you look at any open forum on gay marriage and lo, doth the bullshit wax forth. We've heard everything from teaching your kids sodomy (horseshit) to some weird guy on HuffPo who seemed to be under the impression that gay people could have offspring genetically engineered to actually be the biological children of two men or two women (which won't be a problem for at least twenty years and genetic engineering on that level was banned under Clinton anyway) to teaching your kids that gay people exist. I hate to tell that last group but they're going to find out sometime. It's weird how obsessed these people are with the sex act. They act like kids knowing gay people exist means having to explain the technicalities of gay sex to them. What's wrong with "some boys love other boys"?

And let's not even get started on the moral atrocity of putting human rights to the whims of the popular vote in the first place. Have we not got the message yet that the PoliSci fiction of the informed voter carefully weighing the issues is bullshit? The average voter is not very intelligent, actively distrustful of intelligence, distrustful of change, petty and cruel. No, I'm not a big believer in democracy, I've met too many humans. If you put the option of doing the right thing to the plebians, the plebians will usually vote against it. I back democracy not because it's a good option but because it's the least bad option. If it had been left to the popular vote, slavery would have continued much longer and interracial marriage might still be illegal. And 52% of Maine voters just voted to make it illegal for gay people to have the same chance at happiness (or permanency, depending on your experiance of marriage) as straight people. Stop letting the people decide human rights, the people are frickin' morons! They believe bullshit! The ridiculously monikered NOM puts out bullshit that churches will be forced to marry gay couples and over half the public laps it up! OM NOM NOM! Gay marriage threatens the sanctity of marriage? How the fuck does that work? Do you even understand what "sanctity" means or the fact that, for most of human history, marriage was the transfer of property? And don't give me that bullshit about your religious beliefs. My religious beliefs aren't being passed into law and mine don't involve violating the fucking Constitution. Yes, the state has a vested interest in promoting families, no arguement there. But did it ever occur to your brain-trists that A) gay people form familes too and B) no families are going to break up because the gay couple down the block are suddenly the married gay couple down the block.

I often wonder if gay people aren't being far too civil about this. The movement is trying to win their rights with lawsuits and public opinion. And don't misunderstand me, that's very laudable, very civilised and noble. But the public are morons and your SCOTUS is dominated by conservatives, at least two of whom don't give a shit about the law. There is something in the human psyche that seems resistant to treating something as a right unless it's forcibly torn from teh fist of the opressor. So I often wonder if the gay rights movement wouldn't have gotten further if there'd been a bit more forceful expression involved. The most conservative estimate of the gay population is about three million and an accurate estimate is probably three or four times that so let's have a Million Queer March on the Whitehouse. Let's put a few pink triangles on poles and set fire to them, just to make the comparison obvious to the terminally dense. Ellen is apparently going to be a judge on American Idol but let's get RuPaul on Monday Night Football, let's have Chris Kanyon doing play by play on Monday Night RAW. They think marriage is a step too far, let's go a mile too far, let's shove gay people down their throats until they're so sick of the subject that everyone grows the fuck up. Forget the lawsuit, let's have some fucking riots.

Cheeses fucking christ on toast; Maine, for fuck's sake!

And I'll tell you why: The Republican party is currently having a quiet civil war within their own ranks between the reasonable old-school "country club" Republicans and the batshit insane teabagger crowd who are hellbent on destroying Obama even if it means destroying the country in the process. Currently, the lunatics appear to be winning and many of those up for election tomorrow are from the lunatic fringe.

If they win (and they might because much of the public is pissed at the Democrats in Congress for not getting the public option done already), then the Republican party will interpret that as a signal to run further to the right. They'll interpret an electorate that is either apathetic or pissed at Dems for not being liberal enough, interpret that as a reason to get more conservative and go full steam toward the right fringe. That's exactly what they did after the Gingrich landslide which worked for a while but led directly to W and the bloodbaths of 2006 and 2008 and it may work for them for a little while here as well but the further they run to the right fringe, the further away they get from the centre where political battles are won and the more their radicalism frightens people. Importantly, as well, the US is not the same as it was during Gingrich's time. A whole new population has come of age and they're mostly social liberals, the minority population is much larger and much more politically active and the most recent Republican admin before Gingrich was Reagan/Bush and as bad as they were in many ways, they weren't anything like the visible public calamity of W.

So, that's what I think will happen. They'll interpret any victory in the wrong way, run harder to the extreme right, scare the piss out of everyone reasonable and all the minorities, get absolutely whooped in 2012 (we're talking Reagan-Mondale whooped) and the party will be pretty much done for at least a generation (if it doesn't split).

Under the NHS, there are sometimes short wait lists for non-emergency operations. That's unfortunate and we are always trying to reduce the waiting times but, importantly, that surgery will get done in time and without any additional expense (or, if you have the cash, you can call up BUPA and skip the waiting time). And you're covered for everything. No lifetime cap, no cutting off of care. The only time the words "pre-existing condition" come up is when your doctor is checking that what he's about to prescribe you isn't going to aggravate something else you have and while your doctor might well ask a lot of questions, none of them are going to affect you right to care, he's just figuring out the best kind of care for you.

If you call your doctor, 95% of the time, you'll get an appointment that afternoon or, at worst, the following morning. If he prescribes you drugs, you take that to the pharmacy and you pay a small contribution (currently about $15) towards the cost of the drugs; the young, old and poor are exempt from that fee (I don't pay it because I'm on disability) and, if you need them for a prolonged period, there's various pre-payment discounts. Apart from that, your out of pocket expenses amount to the occasional roll of antacids or bottle of asprin. The doctor enters the details of your treatment into his records and every week, the details are transmitted to a central source which then reimburses him. Some doctors employ special software to speed up the process but that's not required, it's just something they do for their convienience and you can do the whole thing by hard copy although, obviously, it takes a bit longer.

I suffer from Type III Clinical Depression, known as Major Depressive Disorder in the States. It took me a long time to work up the nerve to tell my doctor how I was feeling (fear of disclosure is common to depression) and I had to be forced into it by my SO in the end. When I did explain how I was feeling, my doctor asked me a few questions, prescribed me some meds, personally booked an appointment with the local psychiatrist and ordered me to come back and see him every week. I waited three weeks to see the psychiatrist. I now take 225mg of Effexor and 10mg of Zyprexa daily (actually, generic equivelents, plus 15mg Lansaprozole for a completely unrelated stomach condition), see my doctor every two weeks and my psychiatrist every two weeks (carefully arranged so I never go longer than a week without seeing one of them) and I'm gradually doing a little better. I'm still self-harming but not as often or as badly. All of this support costs me nothing, just the taxes I've already paid and the taxi fare it cost to get to the doctor that first time (I have a fear of public transport). Subsequent trips to the doctor or psychiatrist are subsidised.

Here, the average tax rate is 22% (plus 8-9% National Insurance, our version of Social Security). Part of that supports the NHS. Now, I'll be the first to admit that the NHS isn't perfect. It's difficult to think of anything that could be but let me tell you about the NHS. The annual operating budget is a shade over $2000 dollars per citizen (around 60 million citizens) per year. Most of that comes from taxes but some comes from indirect taxes. For example, I smoke. A pack of Marlboros (my preferred straight, I normally smoke roll-ups) costs about £5.50 here. Of that, about £4.50 goes to the NHS to pay for treating smoking related illness. And I'm fine with paying that. I have a habit which could be damaging to my health so I pay a bit extra to cover the cost of treating my health. Seems perfectly fair to me. There's a tax of a couple of pence on a pint of beer or about a pound on a bottle of spirits for much the same reasons. With junk food, it's easier to tax the corporate profits but they chuck a bit into the kitty as well. It's important to point out that care isn't cut off if you go over that $2000 budget or the NHS exhausts it's funds, that happens sometimes. The budgeting office of the NHS just goes to the government and says "we need this much more" and they get it. The budget is just used to give a rough idea of where the "sin taxes" (the ones on alcohol, tobacco, junk food, etc) should be set next year.

Try finding a private insurance plan that covers you for everything for that price. Extrapolating up, the annual cost to run a USHS (for lack of a better term) would be around $600 billion a year, not counting start-up costs. Perhaps you want to go the French route, usually ranked as the world's best system? That brings the price up to $900 billion. Sounds expensive but not when you consider that the combined costs of Medicare, Medicaid and private insurance is $2.3 trillion and a combined system would replace all three. Nor do you need to limit yourselves to those two systems. Other nations have different methods of administering and paying for their healthcare systems. You could easily set up a short-term committee to study the existing systems and then mix-and-match parts, taking the delivery model from this one and the funding structure from that one (for example, we tried on-the-day-only appointments here for a while. Doesn't work), until you come up with something special and uniquely American.

It's been a real interesting week, watching you guys from across the pond. President Obama points out something that everyone in their right mind already knew, that Fox is a Republican propoganda mill and people would be wise to keep that in mind, and suddenly the freakin' world's coming to an end.

First came the lie that this was in some way a violation of freedom of the press. Satan save me from sanctimonious conservatives moaning about freedom of the press. Have the Obama admin pulled Fox's license like Hugo Chavez (and what a disappointment he's turning out to be)? No. Have they shut down FNC? No. Have they even shut off access and kicked Fox's guy out of the Whitehouse press pool? No, they haven't. The closest they got was trying to refuse to give an interview to Fox. Wow, truly a draconian act. Here's a newsflash for the idiots: Freedom of the press does not equal automatic access. If I start up a podcast, does the president automatically have to come on when I invite him? Of course not. He's the president, he's a busy guy. He has every right to refuse to give interviews to any media outlet he likes (and, incidently, they have every right to report that)

Then there was the lie that this was an "unprecedented" move. Horseshit. DimBulb's admin used to call out NBC and MSNBC all the time, they all but accused the New York Times of treason! Conservatives like to use that to try and claim that MSNBC and Fox are equivelent. Bzzz, sorry, you're still fucking wrong. First off, MSNBC isn't half as liberal as you like to think. Yes, Olbermann and Maddow are liberals and Ed Schultz tends to lean to the left. Chris Matthews doesn't have an intellectual stance consistent enough to be called a leaning but he seems to have a crush on Obama right now so let's throw Tweety in there too. MSNBC also has Joe Scarbrough, a guy who has been seriously mentioned as a Republican candidate for president in 2012 (and the GOP could do a lot worse) every morning for THREE FREAKIN' HOURS! OK, Joe's not a batshit conservative like most of the GOP right now but he's a pretty conservative guy. Does Fox put an avowed, outspoken liberal (say, Mike Malloy) on for three hours every morning? Of course they fucking don't. Watch MSNBC for a day and chances are, you'll see Pat Buchannon at least a couple of times. Now, Pat's a weird guy, he's very right-wing and he also happens to be rampantly racist (contrary to some opinion on the left, the two don't automatically go together). But you see him on MSNBC and he's usually treated respectfully. Hosts might disagree with him (I have yet to understand why Pat and Rachel Maddow are good friends when they agree on precisely nothing) but he's treated in a respectful fashion. Pat's so reactionary, he could be nicknamed Paleolithic but he gets treated nicely by this supposedly liberal network.

Recently, Fox has tried to draw a dividing line between their "opinion" shows and their "news" shows. That's bullshit too, there is no division. Fox's "news" section is just as biased as their prime-time line-up. This has been proven so many times that you have to be either indescribably stupid, insane or stubbornly resistant to reality to ignore it. Every story, on any show is slanted in a conservative direction. Look up the "Moody memo", go and do some fucking research, they admitted this in fucking court! On MSNBC or CNN, their news shows are straight-up news. If they have a slant, it's slightly to the right (most US news has a rightward slant) but they genuinely try to report on things objectively. On Fox, everything is actively slanted to favour the Republicans and attack Obama. And spare me the outrage about Fox breaking the ACORN or Van Jones stories. I don't carry a flag for either of them but both of those were complete non-stories that Fox went hysterical over until the Whitehouse gave in (I wish they'd stop doing that). From Hannity (who makes no pretence at neutrality) to Bill O'Lielly (who's relationship with the truth has only ever been accidental) to Glenn Beck (I want to stop picking on Glenn because he's so obviously ill), these guys are vastly further to the right than Olbermann, Maddow or Schultz are to the left. Hannity is about two steps from being an outright fascist; Beck is so far gone that he appears to be channeling the ghost of Joe McCarthy and trying to cope by mainlining LSD. Olbermann's a liberal, sure, but he's not sobbing on tv and calling people every name he can get away with (barring George Carlin's famous seven words). There is no equivelency between the two prime-time line-ups. MSNBC's is centre-left, FOX's is frothing right-fringe. And their straight news shows are just as bad, they're just slightly more subtle. Media Matters (yes, I know Bill-O says they're an extreme-left outfit but he says that about anyone who disagrees with him) has loads of stuff on this, showing how Republican talking points get endlessly repeated by Fox in both their opinion AND news shows.

Fox's apologists (and Bill-O, who's viciousness hides some deep insecurities) like to point to their ratings as proof of their accuracy. I'm sorry, what? First off, how does the fact that people like your product prove it's accurate? There is no connection between the two. Secondly, yes, Fox has very impressive numbers. So did Jerry Springer. Ratings have nothing to do with quality. Springer did bonanza numbers, Oprah still does. Is anyone really claiming that Ford make better cars than, say, Rolls-Royce? Or that Dell make better computers than Alienware? Of course not. Sales (and ratings are, in the end, sales) have nothing, zip, zero to do with quality. All Fox's numbers prove is that there is a market for news (and sometimes outright lies) with a heavily conservative bias. And Fox isn't just reporting the news with a rightward slant. They're actively making news with a rightward slant. The Teabagging parties were pushed endlessly on Fox, complete with links on their website of where to go. Beck's 9/12 march of the morons was created, promoted and owned by Fox. The Van Jones non-story was "broken", pushed and promoted by Fox, created by Fox. Obama isn't calling out Fox because they "ask the tough questions". He is calling out Fox because they have been attacking him 24/7 over bullshit charges since before he was even in office. Fox have made barely any pretence that their mission is now to destroy Obama by any means necessary. And I do mean "any", the word is an absolute in this instance. Beck is already about one step away from outright treason. He might not have fulfilled all the technical legal requirements to be charged with treason under the letter of the law but under the spirit of the law, he's guilty as hell. But there I go again, picking on the ill. Incidently, anyone remember Fox's Half-Hour News Hour, their conservative answer to The Daily Show? Does CNN have comedy shows on it? That show was Fox's admission that they have a conservative slant. As comedy shows go, I thought it was hit-and-miss. Had some very funny sketches (Lorenzo Lamas defending the Bush line on 9/11 was a hoot) and an awful lot of dross. Shame they didn't get longer to work out the teething problems. But the important point is that Fox felt an obligation to "balance" the liberal slant of The Daily Show by putting on a conservative comedy show. Fox is a conservative propoganda outlet, case closed.

And that's fine. Advocacy journalism has a long and honourable history. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle led to the creation of the FDA (not his intention but we'll take results here). The British Daily Star was founded as a crusading socialist newspaper, specialising in exposing abuses of power (sadly, it's now fallen to tabloid status). There is nothing wrong with advocacy journalism. But don't lie about it. Be out and proud. Say up front that you are a conservative news outlet and you cater to a conservative audience and we wouldn't have this problem. You say openly that you come at things from a particular direction and there's no problem with that, we take that into consideration when we decide whether to watch your shows. That way, you're the conservative network, MSNBC boots Joe Scarbrough across to you guys and rebrands itself as the liberal network and CNN returns to calling it right down the middle. Everyone's happy.

Because they're always incredibly nationalist as well. Or "Reaganism" perhaps as their attitude towards him is about one step from outright idolotry.

I'm not Christian but I've actually read the Bible and I think the Biblical character of Jesus was based on a real man, exagerated and mythologised by the passage of the centuries but here's the thing: I've read The Bible, several times and in several editions and the stuff Jesus actually taught doesn't bear much comparison to the values the Cultus Americanus preaches. Jesus taught about things like tolerance and compassion (the Good Samaritan) and church-state seperation ("Render unto Caesar"). What economic views he expressed were closest to a kind of proto-socialism and, all through his teachings, there is a consistent vein of concern for the poor and opressed.

All these things are anathema to the Cultus Americanus. They can try to justify it with absurd wordgames (usually, outright denials of the socialist elements and anti-government ranting) but it seems that what they have constructed is effectively a new religion. One which, like Mormonism, grew out of Christianity but is distinct enough to qualify as it's own's entity. The Cultus Americanus isn't a faith which was brought into politics, it's a faith which exists to provide divine approval for a pre-held political agenda, an intertwining of the religious and political spheres (which worked really well for the Romans).

Frank Schaffer talks about this in Crazy For God, how what started as a religious movement very quickly became a vehical for the right-wing of the Republican party and a method of claiming that God supported your political agenda. David Brock mentions his observations of teh same thing in Blinded By The Right although from a different direction (unlike Schaffer, Brock was part of the political arm, watching this transition from the outside) and what one is left with is the impression of, not just the use of religion to manipulate politics ("Got mit uns") but the creation of a mostly new faith from the deliberate mixing of the two. Think Sean Hannity, the views he expresses are sheer Cultus.

It's fascinating to watch, from a historical and theological basis but terrifying to share a planet with.

The most Christian person I ever knew was a guy called Ralph. He trained to be a priest until he met his wife and, observing that one could not serve two masters, left before taking his vows but retained his faith. His day job is an adviser for the SCAB (Citizen's Advice Beureu, a British institution providing advice about pretty much anything to anyone who asks; the S denotes a branch placed on a college or university campus) and on his days off, you can usually find him assissting some charity or other. We've joked occasionally that the guy is so saintly that he probably has dismembered hitchikers in his freezer. I've known the guy for years. With me, because he knows that I'm interested, we debate theology and history but I've never known him bring the subject up unless someone asks his opinion. Our discussions have gotten to incredibly heated shouting before but when it's over, he'll be happy to shake your hand and share a beer with you. When teh Tube was bombed a couple of years back, he was the first guy I knew trying to help the victims but also the first counselling against an esculation of violence.

Or I think of my Grimmer (grandmother). She was very devoutly Christian and she spent her whole life looking after children. First as a pediatric nurse, then running a home for disabled and disturbed children who'd been taken into care and finally, by being given a grand old Victorian house by the local council and filling it with disabled and disturbed foster kids. Some of those kids went on to be adopted by loving families. Others went on to college or apprenticeships (this was back when an apprenticeship gave you a valuable trade you could make a living from). I know for a fact that it wasn't easy, with the council always shaving allowances and reducing budgets and I know that she drew a great deal of strength and inspiration from her faith but, again, I never heard her preach to anyone or even mention it unless asked. When she died, about five years ago, we tracked down a few dozen of the kids who had passed through her care and some of them had gone on to make grand careers and names in local politics, most had just gone on to have the normal quiet, mostly happy life but all of them remembered her with fondness.

Those are the people I think of as "Christians", that's what I think the term should mean at it's best. A way of living one's own life, not a stick to force other's to live theirs.

America was a healthy baby,
born in blood and pain but then,
aren't all babies?
Healthy but like all young life,
she was fragile,
and her parents worried.

As she grew, America struggled,
with redskins and blackskins,
and with herself.
And as she grew, she dreamed,
she imagined goals for herself,
and her parents worried.

Soon, she left her home to learn,
she met the one who shared her heart,
her name was Liberty.
And for a time,
the two were happily inseperable,
But still, her parents worried.

Her parents went to their grave,
the way all flesh must go,
and America mourned.
Her safety shattered, her innocence gone,
a feeling we all share eventually,
and her parents still worried about her.

For years, they grew and prospered together,
America and Liberty,
taking the world by storm.
They went to the stars and then to the moon,
they made all equals,
and her parents worried.

So how did it come to this?

America's children lie dying,
murdered by the suits they paid for their care,
she lies cold each night.
America has done things,
she never thought she could,
and her parents worry.

She has tortured bones and torn flesh,
squeezed the lifeblood from the earth she walks,
sold everything she believes in.
She doesn't know herself anymore,
doesn't recognise the life she leads,
and her parents worry.

And Liberty's a whore,
raped in an alley and left to die,
expiring in the smell of piss and beer.
America hasn't room left in her heart to care,
too frightened of what she can do to do anything,
and her parents worry.

When she feeds the poor, they call her a saint,
when she asks why her children are hungry,
they call her a commie.
And the man in the window,
sobs and weeps at phantoms,
and her parents fear.

They tell her she's mad or bad or worse,
for wishing her children,
a better life than she had.
America is old now and she cannot remember,
a time when she dared to hope for something else,
and her parents shed tears.

Cold and alone and jumping at shadows,
America slumps defeated, not by others,
but by herself.
By her arrogance and her carelessness and her denial,
that she had failed those dreams of long ago,
and she asks out loud,
to no-one in particular,
"How did it come to this?"

It's been an interesting week in politics. First off, President Obama was awarded the Nobel Prize For Peace. While it's fair to say that the award came as a surprise to pretty much everyone except possibly Bo Obama, the right's attack on, well, everyone, went totally beyond the pale. One suggested renaming it the "Yasir Arafat Prize", many suggested Obama should turn it down (it's unclear if that was even possible); a great many made the claim that since the Nobel Committee had awarded the prize to Jimmy Carter and Al Gore, that the prize was now meaningless. The presumptions here need to be dealt with in order.

Firstly, let's deal with the "questionable" awards of the past. Yasir Arafat won the award in conjunction with Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres for their attempts to find a solution to the Israel-Palestine mess. So if one is going to decry Arafat's award, one also has to decry the award going to Rabin and Peres. I could at least respect such a "pox on both their houses" approach as intellectually consistent. Jimmy Carter won the award for decades spent promoting peace and alleviating poverty. Both these concepts seem to be anathema to the right these days but those of us in the sane world tend to think they're good things. Many of the right-wing attacks on Carter pointed out that he was an ineffectual one-term president. To which, the only reasonable response is"So what?". It's an example of the kind of blinkered US-centrism that has made the American right so despised in the rest of the world, that we should be expected to disregard Carter's other achievments because he failed in the presidency. Outside the United States, Jimmy Carter enjoys near-global love and respect and has for years. The Nobel Prize, while much deserved, was only the icing on the cake. So Carter eminently deserved the award. And yet, it was interpreted as an award for being Not Bush. Then came the slams at Al Gore. Now, again, I'm aware that the US right prefers to deny the fact of global warming but in the sane world, we accept that it is happening, that humans are largely to blame and that we desperately need to do something about it. Al Gore has spent decades trying to get the world to wake the fuck up about global warming. While he never claimed to invent the internet, he did champion the legislative tools which expanded DARPAnet into the modern internet (along with the technical achievments of Tim Berners-Lee and the guys at MIT), something which has transformed life more than anything since the invention of the automobile. So again, we have someone who throughly deserved the award and again, we have someone whose award was interpreted as being Not Bush. Then there was the argument that the Nobel Committee are biased because they've awarded the prize to more liberals than conservatives. Really, this says far more about the mindset of conservatives: That they deserve equal prizes just for showing up.

Was the Peace Prize ironic, given two ongoing wars? Absolutely and that irony was lost on no-one. Was the Nobel Prize premature? Certainly. However, the intention seems to be that, by giving Obama the award at this point, he will be forced to act in a way which makes him worthy of it. Also, the hypocracy of Republicans who cheered when the US lost it's opportunity to host the Olympics and booed when the president of the USA won the Nobel Prize has been lost on no-one except them.

Then we had the ongoing healthcare clusterfuck. There is a scene in the film adaption of Interview With The Vampire where a helpless and naked victim is surrounded on a Paris stage by a dozen or more hungry vampires. They pause for a moment, letting us register her terror and vulnerability. Then they fall on her, a dozen vampiric rats strugging for a spare inch of flesh. That's the image that comes to mind when I think of healthcare in the USA. The free market only works when you're free to walk away from it. When walking away from the market means great risk to your life and/or health, the market isn't free. That's basic Keynesian economics. And so, when it came to reforming healthcare, we got... what? I'm still not entirely sure wher this disgusting process of sausage-making is going. For reasons best known to Obama, the single-payer option (true universal coverage, which works pretty well here in the UK) which was the genuinely left-wing option was taken off the table before negotiation even started which has allowed the right (and their Big Insurance paymasters) to paint the limited incremental Public Options as something to the left of Stalin. And I'm not just talking about the Teabag crown here (the latest is that Glenn Beck claims the Million Moron March totalled 8.2 million people and was led by Moses. Then he cried). Mainstream Conressional Republicans are arguing that a Public Option would amont to government takeover of healthcare. Oh, and Big Insurance has already effectively promised that rates will continue to skyrocket regardless. Only in the USA are the people so terrified of their government that they won't let it do anything.

Then there was Orly Taitz. The US's most high-profile racist and queen of the (racist) Birther Movement was fined twenty grand, essentially for contempt of court and wildly unethical practice in violation of all legal standards. Orly effectively told the judge to shove it and accused him of being part of a conspiracy to surpress her. I'm starting to think this woman is clinically ill, the accusation that any detractor is part of a conspiracy against them. Orly actually presents a problem to us. The problem is that, the more we point out that the Birther Movement is entirely founded on the racist assumption that a black man can't possibly be a "natural-born citizen", the more it allows the right, always eager to nail itself to the cross, to claim that we are painting any criticism as racist. It's absurd, naturally. We know that not all criticism is race-based and most of us are getting pretty adept at spotting the code words these days ("welfare", "community" and these days "ACORN").

Then there was Obama's pondering whether to put more troops into Afghanistan. Um, why are we fighting the war in Afghanistan again? Yes, I know it was a response to teh horror of 9/11, I'm actually not going to criticise Bush for that as I think any nation capable of responding militarily would have done so but what is the objective supposed to be here? Are we trying to get Al Queda or the Taliban or both? Are we going to try turning Afghanistan into a western-style democracy? Since we are fighting a war in a country which has ever been the graveyard of empires, what is the final END > IF here?

Finally, there was President Obama's address to his gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans supporters. I'm not sure what to say about this one. It was a largely form speech, the kind where you only have to change a few particulars to fit the occasion. Given the cavalcade of catastrophes dumped on Obama's lap by the previous administration, I suspect most are willing to give him a little time to get to gay issues (specifically, rather than genpop issues which also affect gay people, such as healthcare) but, at the same time, they would also like to see some movement on those issues, no matter how slow it has to be to accomodate the president's busy schedule. Personally, I want the asinine Don't-Ask, Don't-Tell policy repealed or nearly so by the New Year. That's my personal benchmark. While I know Obama is not a supporter of equal marriage rights and so a push for those rights shouldn't be expected from him, I also want DOMA repealed or overturned by the end of his first term. I suspect Obama would like to leave the choice of whether to push for DOMA's overturn until after the midterms but DC's move to legalise same-sex marriage may force his hand. The problem Obama has here is that there really is no upside for him. I can sit here and say that I believe legalising same-sex marriage to be a legal and moral imperative (yes, I think it is immoral to deny same-sex couples the rights of marriage, conservatives don't have an exclusive claim on morality) but I'm not trying to be re-elected and wouldn't stand a chance if I ever stood. For Obama, if he comes out strongly against overturning DOMA, he pisses off the LGBT activists and allies who worked so tirelessly to help elect him. They won't jump to the Republicans but they might well stay home in 2012. On the other hand, if he comes out too strongly in favour of repealing DOMA, he alienates the moderates (forget the Religious Reich, they already want him dead). In addition to that, Obama's DOJ has argued in favour of DOMA (their obligation, as I understand it) and done so in the most reprehensible terms (certainly not their obligation). How Obama intends to square this circle is anyone's guess.

And we haven't even had time to get to Oklahoma attempting to brand a scarlet A on the foreheads of those seeking abortions; the increasingly chance of war with Iran; Mike Moore's latest film; Alan Grayson's gobsmacking counter-attack on right-wing smears or Tom Delay leaving Dancing With The Stars. What a wild week!