Only paranoid fantasies about a scary black man who happens to be president could inspire the elevation of such a sorry bunch of Republican presidential wannabes as we are currently witnessing. It is a bit of a surprise that Sarah Palin hasn’t yet done a cannonball dive into this sleazy pool, since she is no worse (or better) than the rest, it hardly matters what she does. Michelle Bachmann has received considerable attention in the initial phases, although it is hard to tell if the media is making fun of her (see the Newsweek cover) or she is managing to do that all by herself. I heard a sound clip of Bachmann announce in her usual shrill manner that the American people so fed-up with the Obama administration that they are “roaring.” No they’re not—it is fringe politicians like herself who are. The louder they “roar,” the more people think there is something wrong. The fact is, the only thing that is wrong in Washington D.C. are politicians like Bachmann who are all “roar” and zero substance. It was also recently revealed that Bachmann once worked for the IRS; she tried to explain this away by claiming that in order to know the “enemy,” she worked as an “undercover operative.” The Star Wars films were full of stilted dialogue, they did give us one useful line to describe this episode: “Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him (or her)?”
There has been a “revelation” that Bachmann is an alum of Oral Roberts University, a bastion of white-bread Christian conservatism—or rather fanaticism. It turns out she did “research” for one of her mentors, John Eidsmore, in relation to a tome on the alleged indivisibility of church and state, as allegedly intended by the Founding Fathers. Most historians and mainstream Christian theologians are not sure, which Eidsmore responds to with curious doublespeak: The secular and religious worlds represent “two kingdoms… each has different responsibilities. The church’s responsibility is to teach biblical principles of government and to drive sinners to the cross by convicting them of their sins and to teach believers the principles of godly living. The function of the state is to follow those godly principles and preserve a system of order… but one law that governs both.” Eidsmore isn’t talking about separation of church and state here, he is advocating a theocracy along the lines of Iran—and he is America’s Ayatollah. It is obvious that it is not religion that motivates such people, but worldly power. Bachmann has also praised another Oral Roberts alum, David Barton, as God’s gift to mankind. While Eidsmore can only be accused of associating with modestly white supremacists outfits like the Council of Conservative Citizens, Barton has openly flirted with the LaPorte Church of Christ, claiming that he isn’t aware that it is a neo-Nazi “church.” Barton has been accused of inventing history and using made-up quotes he applies to the Founding Fathers, who he claims were fanatical Pentecostals—speaking “in tongues” and believing the Bible is literal truth—and who conceived the Constitution as a religious rather than a secular document. The chair of the history department at Messiah College, John Fea, has described Barton as having “just enough historical knowledge, and just enough charisma, to be very dangerous.”
At least we now know why Bachmann knowledge of history has frequently been the subject of bafflement. Based upon the very un-Christian tone of her various public pronouncement and her opposition to social welfare programs and health care reform, Bachmann also seems to have the intolerant, Old Testament eye-for-an-eye worldview that completely dispenses with Jesus’ New Testament ideals that were supposed to replace it—thus calling into question whether she and people like her are actually “Christian.” So who are the Republican alternatives? Mitt Romney ironically, seems the most “normal” of the bunch in appearance and tone, but policy-wise, he is indistinguishable from the rest. It is true that he made one effort to “differentiate” himself: He has been the only candidate to make the blunder of telling us that “corporations are people.” Bachmann has at least avoided taking this very unpopulist view to “the people” she is trying to con into believing she is “for them.” While Union leaders generally speak for the majority of their membership, a few men and women in a boardroom can hardly be said to speak for the majority of low-wage laborers who make them rich.
Americans are of course rightly concerned with the direction of the country, although I’m not certain many of them are properly informed as to the reasons why. I watched with incredulity the utter hypocrisy of an “expert” on the Wall Street Journal website claim that high debt was “killing” growth. Why was it “killing” growth? Not because it prevented a business “climate” conducive for hiring, but because if debt is above the “safe” threshold of 50 percent of GDP, there isn’t enough “cushion” for increased government spending. Huh? Is he not saying that the function of government is in line with the policies of Obama and the Democrats? The only thing missing is agreeing that the wealthy should pay more taxes to help finance government-created job programs. Recall that in 2006 George Bush boasted that his massive tax cuts for the rich had led to a “robust” economy; this was an utterly lie. What he did create during these “good times” was a massive increase in national debt and lower revenue as a percent of GDP, and when the bottom inevitably fell out, the Obama administration had only limited room to maneuver, both politically and substantively.
And so we have the utterly decrepit line-up of Republican would-be presidential nominees who are so apparently deaf, dumb and blind to their party’s policy mistakes of the past that they only promise to do even worse? When a Fox News’ “moderator” at one of the Iowa “debates” asked who among the prospective Republican presidential wannabes would refuse to accept a debt reduction package that was 10 parts budget cuts to even one part revenue increases, all raised their hands like children begging for candy. All seemed to be playing to the tune of the Tea Party movement, meaning a slovenly servitude to tired right-wing taking points that were once merely propaganda lines not taken with great seriousness after elections, and still tend to have little correlation with current and future realities.
I found an interesting story, which seems to be a little off-track, but does have some relevance to this discussion. In David Grann’s book, “The Devil & Sherlock Holmes,” there is a chapter concerning a Texas man named Cameron Willingham, who was executed in 2004 for the arson/murder of his three young children, made more emotional, and the perpetrator more culpable in the public’s eye, because the victims were little girls. But the “evidence” to justify the charge of deliberate arson with intent to kill was based on discredited forensics. CSI-type television shows proliferate the airwaves, giving the “science” a certain credibility, but it is as much subject to human misjudgment and error as old-time flatfoot crime investigation techniques. Gerald Hurst, a renowned fire investigator, examined the documents of the original arson investigation a few months before Willingham’s scheduled execution, and was shocked to find its conclusions based on amateurish analysis of what amounted to old wives’ tales about the fundamentals of fire characteristics. Hurst’s report was given to the state Board of Pardons and Parole for a petition of clemency, which was denied. The board, referred to as a “legal fiction” by one appellate judge, apparently never read the report, and in any case, the board’s “job” wasn’t to consider new evidence that might suggest innocence, but merely to insure that the trial was “regular.” Gov. Rick Perry subsequently refused to give a thirty-day stay of execution for a more legitimate examination of Hurst’s report. Willingham would go to the electric chair insisting on his claim of innocence. The year after Willingham’s execution, charges of numerous instances of forensic misconduct and errors that sent innocent people to jail forced the state to set-up a commission to investigate those claims, in which the Willingham case was among the first on the agenda. A subsequent report written by a scientist named Craig Beyler concluded that the evidence for arson in that case had “no scientific basis…ignored evidence that contradicted the theory, had no comprehension of flashover and fire dynamics, relied on discredited folklore, and failed to eliminate potential accidental or alternative causes of the fire.” Beyler further characterized the original investigation as “denying rational reason”—rather more the reasoning of “mystics and psychics.”
This report was never given a public airing. In an addendum Grann added to the paperback edition of his book, it was noted that:
“Days before the government commission on forensic science was scheduled to hear testimony from Dr. Craig Beyler about his findings, Governor Rick Perry removed the body’s long-standing chairman and two of its members. Perry insisted that the three commissioners’ terms had expired and the changeover was ‘business as usual.’ But the chairman, Sam Bassett, who had previously been reappointed and had asked to remain, told the Houston Chronicle that he had heard from Perry’s staffers that they were ‘concerned about the investigations we were conducting.’ Another of the removed commissioners told the Associated Press that Perry’s office had informed her that the Governor was ‘going in a different direction.’”
Rick Perry, in effect, did not want the world to know that Texas’ “perfect” record for executing only guilty people was maybe not so perfect after all. Apparently Perry’s famous Christian “morality” and ethics was no match for his political cynicism—if it meant that he would have the death of an innocent man on his conscious.
This is the man who like a coward avoided the Iowa debates and straw poll so he would look “good” in comparison to these political fraudsters. Conservative columnist David Brooks recently said it was time to take Perry “seriously,” not because he thinks Perry is the best candidate (Brooks apparently prefers the guy with the more Byronic profile, Romney), but because his fringe views are more in keeping with typical Republican primary voters. Brooks doesn’t go into much detail concerning Perry’s predilections, which would if properly exposed by the Democrats and the media would make Bachmann and her wild-eyed countenance on the cover of Newsweek seem the height of sanity. At the moment, polls suggest that Perry is the strongest candidate to face-off against Obama, but for the moment this appears to be because he’s a new face, and voters really don’t know him very well.
So what is there to know about Perry, besides that he sounds like the fry of a cross pollination between George Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger—which probably explains his frequent complaints about “intellectual elites,” especially in government. Myself, I had no idea who he was until he embarked on a PR stunt in 2009, threatening articles of secession from Barack Obama’s Socialist States of America. Some people saw this as a shrewd political stunt; others merely saw it as the opening salvo of the Republican fringe losing its grip on reality. After the Iowa straw poll which more or less solidified the sense that the potential Republican nominees were ossified relics of the Jurassic Age vying for the title of mind most stoned, Perry decided the time was right to jump in—right in the front lawn of right-wing extremism, South Carolina. I heard some snippets of his announced quest for the presidency, although I barely understood what he was saying most of the time. The things I did find somewhat comprehensible only suggested that his idea of “separating” himself from the other potential nominees was to prove himself even more disturbing in his irrationality. There he was, speaking of President Obama as if he was the American antichrist, absolutely antithetical to everything any 100 percent, “real” American—meaning right-wing white—believes in. OK, so we’ve heard that before, and his Southern/Neanderthal drawl reminds those who are historically astute that although most people don’t consider Perry’s state “Southern,” in fact most of its Anglo “natives” are descended from immigrants from the slaveholding South with its accompanying racial attitudes; Texas was in fact an eager participant in the Confederacy during the Civil War. His smearing of Obama’s “elitist” education seemed intent on feeding into the racism of his poor, undereducated or unemployed white listeners looking for scapegoats, as well as an attempt to obfuscate doubts about his own intellect. Everything he preceded to attack Obama on—health care reform, taxes, immigration policy, importing European-style socialism, Israel, jobs—had the taint of hypocrisy when not simply out-right lies. Any liberal or progressive will tell you that Obama has been a “disappointment” to them, and such attacks from the right are less rooted in truth than the belief that there is a core of voters who, mostly out of ignorance and prejudice, instinctively regard the federal government as a shill for minorities, and naturally that plays well before a white audience in South Carolina.
So it was no coincidence that Perry made his intentions known that he was tossing his spurs into the presidential nomination race in South Carolina, that bastion of state’s rights, rebellion and racism. Perry’s extremism naturally plays well there, and few of its white voters will find anything to complain about in his anti-intellectual and malevolent tome “Fed Up!” In what is essentially his political “manifesto,” we find Perry fossilized in a pathological, almost dictatorial addiction to “states’ rights”—which in the past has meant rigid class structures, slavery, Jim Crow, school segregation and the brutal treatment of working people; in his world, politicians do not put their boots on the people’s necks—they just help the economic elites do that. Perry’s ideological extremism seems frozen in time and place, ignoring cultural, technological and social changes that far exceeded their visions; they certainly did not foresee—or rather did not care—how large corporations would co-op government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” Those words, of course, are not derived from the Founding Fathers but are the closing words of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which probably explains why Southern politicians find the concept so odious. Perry also calls health care reform the “enemy” of freedom, and insists that the only function of the federal government is defense, which of course contradicts the preamble of the Constitution. In his book, when he is not blathering about the evils of federal government, he comes off like a tin-pot dictator eager to play with his war toys.
Perry the politician has never lost an election, which only proves that a majority of people in Texas think less is more. People will say there is “more” to the man; see how Texas’ economy has outpaced the rest of the country, see how low its unemployment rate is, see how the state’s budget is balance. Outside of MSNBC and Paul Krugman, no one in the mainstream media has pointed out that these claims are mostly myth; here in the state of Washington, there is constant handwringing by major employers like Boeing concerning taxes, yet according to the Tax Foundation, the state has the 11th best “tax climate” for business in the country—higher than Texas’ 13th place. I’ve written about this before, in response to an Economist story claiming that the Texas “dream” had replaced the California “dream.” Texas in fact not only has a higher unemployment rate than high-tax New York, its projected budget deficit is over a third greater than its projected revenue—far more than some of the worst hit states. Low-tax, low-service Texas with a $1.2 trillion GDP could easily resolves its budget deficits by very modest tax increases, but this would not be an auspicious time for Perry to make such a move. The current state Republican “answer” to the budget deficit is further reducing education funding and eliminating health care funding—and this in a state where low-wage jobs prevail, and predictably has the highest percentage of people without health insurance in the country. Oh, and let’s not forget that Texas shares the dubious honor with occupying the lower rungs, along with the rest of the South, on quality of life indicators.
What else? Perry has made much of his opposition to “wild spending” by the federal government, yet his own DC lobbyists managed to extract from a Republican Congress more than a little in questionable largesse. In 2005, $1.5 billion was somehow found in a Republican energy bill to fund something called the “Ultra-Deepwater and Unconventional Natural Gas and Other Petroleum Resources,” earmarked for a “consortium” located in disgraced Rep. John DeLay’s district. Just the title itself sounds reeks of a complete waste of money. Texas also receives more federal money—10 percent of the total—than any other state through less unsavory means. Billions go to its 15 military installations and the Johnson Space Center, and the fact that its low public services spending—especially in health care—requires the federal government has to step in and fill the gap; in fact, Texas receives more money from the federal government than any other state—10 percent of all federal money going to the states. The reality is that besides federal dollars for this welfare state, oil and natural gas jobs and profits are for the time being keeping the state afloat. Underneath all the happy talk is a rotting public services sector ill-equipped to deal with a real economic crisis. Poverty is high, infant mortality rates are high, and the number of people without health insurance is infamously high. Statemaster.com places Texas 45th out of 50 states in its “livability” index. A right-wing CNBC “study” claimed that the Texas was number one for business, but it came in at 29 on its own quality life rating—failing to live-up to CNBC’s claim that states with "good" business climates also have good quality of life; in fact every Southern state is proof that this claim is a myth.
Perry isn’t very sharp on history or social issues, either. After the unveiling of the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial, Perry was asked if had anything to say about the fact that his latest stop in South Carolina was coincidently the location of the Friendship Nine lunch counter sit-ins. Perry obviously had no clue what the questioner was referring to; this should come as no surprise, as Perry—and David Barton, no less—was instrumental in formulating the Texas curriculum standards which essentially white-washes U.S. social history, shoehorns in fundamentalist religious dogma and virtually eliminates any mention of non-white Americans (it’s “multiculturalism”). Perry gave the stock answer that the country had come a long way in civil rights—except that he neglected to mention that the people he spoke for still had plenty further to go; He followed this up by reprehensibly attempting to associate the continuing plight of the minority community—for whom in “good” as well as bad times it always seemed “bad”—with the poor, beleaguered, allegedly over-taxed corporations who were sitting on $2 trillion in cash reserves. Perry lack of sensitivity for the struggles of minorities for equal rights and opportunities in this country—let’s not forget that Texas was a slave state—demonstrates conclusively that his vision extends no further than the “welfare” of the people who share his skin color and insular worldview.
Perry’s religious views, meanwhile, are no less disturbing than Bachmann’s—in fact more so. While the “mainstream” media assaulted Obama’s connection to Rev. Jeremiah Wright non-stop for weeks (while ignoring Sarah Palin’s bizarre religious affiliations), Perry’s religious beliefs and connections have been treated as typical Christian fundamentalism that deserves no further comment, despite the fact that it very much informs his view of policy. As Forrest Wilder of the Texas Observer reported, Perry isn’t merely a religious fanatic, but believes that he is on a “mission from God,” thanks to the “prophecy” of some very scary people who “urged” him to run for president. Perry’s religious beliefs appear to encompass Dominionism and Christian Reconstruction, ideologies which at their core are essentially governance by religious law, such as practiced in Iran or by the Taliban. Of course, there is a limit to where such governance can be successfully applied in this country, and critics both Christian and secular have accused these ideologies of being anti-democratic and even neo-fascist. According to Wilder, two Texas pastors named Tom Schlueter and Bob Long told Perry that God had a “grand plan for Texas,” and “a chain of powerful prophecies had proclaimed that Texas was ‘The Prophet State,’ anointed by God to lead the United States into revival and Godly government.” Perry was apparently anointed to lead the misguided flock to the “promised land,” based, of course on sharia law, Christian-style.
People should be concerned, if Perry does take his “religion” as seriously as he claims. Schlueter, Long and their movement—called the New Apostolic Reformation—believe that Democrats are “controlled” by Jezebel and three lesser demons; believers “even claim to have seen demons at public meetings.” They might be dismissed as crackpots, except that the “Reformation movement so potent in its growing fascination with infiltrating politics and government. The new prophets and apostles believe Christians—certain Christians—are destined to not just take ‘dominion’ over government, but stealthily climb to the commanding heights of what they term the ‘Seven Mountains’ of society, including the media and the arts and entertainment world. They believe they’re intended to lord over it all. As a first step, they’re leading an ‘army of God’ to commandeer civilian government.” According to Wilder the “commander” of this Army has been decreed to be Perry.
Now, whether Perry himself has a messianic complex or is delusional is a matter of opinion. It seems to be part of the terrain in Republican territory. Fantasy is fact, and fact is fantasy. One thing is for certain: Everything we have been told about Perry’s “accomplishments” and his “character” do not stand-up to too close scrutiny. Whereas we can at least say George Bush seemed down-to-earth, Perry seems to believe that he is on a mission from God to reduce and eventually eliminate humanist-minded government, just as the Republicans in the House have conducted symbolic votes to eliminate Medicare and strangle Social Security into a slow death spiral. God, it seems, only approves of guns, war and death. The poor can go to hell.
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