The current Republican catchphrase at their convention is “We Built It”—which of course, is a typical right-wing deception. People of the Caucasian persuasion are supposed to understand it as a coded phrase, but in reality it refers to the modern day robber barons, like the Koch brothers and the completely unprincipled Mitt Romney—who unlike Barack Obama sprung from wealth and privilege, and has stayed in it, and wants you to help him and his friends to continue to frolic in it without anyone telling them it is unseemly when so many are barely scraping by. Unfortunately, there are too many people in this country who prefer to look at the world through a prism of bigotry and paranoia, and foolishly aid and abet that “cause.”
Republican deception was on full display last week when Missouri Republican and U.S. Senate candidate Todd Akins had the bad manners to enunciate the Tea Party social agenda, which apparently encompasses the belief that rape is not a legitimate reason to sanction abortion. Frankly, there are few legitimate moral reasons to sanction abortion, but Akins made the mistake of insisting that this decision should not be left up to a woman’s “conscience.” Most Republicans are too conscious of upsetting the women’s voting cart in a presidential year to actually say such things out loud, and hypocritically denounced Akins for what a great many of them believe in private. Paul Ryan, a conservative Roman Catholic, holds similarly extreme views on abortion; if Romney is a devout Mormon, he is probably aware of that faith’s dictum: "In today's society, abortion has become a common practice, defended by deceptive arguments. Latter-day prophets have denounced abortion, referring to the Lord's declaration, ‘Thou shalt not kill, nor do anything like unto it.’" Although church leaders recognize “special circumstances,” abortion should be considered only after consulting with church elders and have the decision ‘confirmed’ after “earnest prayer” to the highest authority.
The problem is that Republicans are trying to isolate the issue to one man, when it isn’t that at all. Such beliefs are labeled as “crazy” talk by most on the left, and only extremists on the pro-abortion side believe that the extreme views of the right have a chance of becoming the law of the land. Nevertheless, it doesn’t hurt to be vigilant: You can’t fall asleep on these people—a Republican Senate majority with a like-minded president only needs to add another Scalia or Thomas to the Supreme Court to turn this country into a corporate/fascist state that views privacy and civil rights as “unconstitutional.” Why not? This court already decided that a corporation is a person, and that certainly isn’t in the Constitution. According to the Bloomberg news agency, “Republican drafters of their party’s 2012 platform reaffirmed support for a constitutional amendment banning abortion that would allow no exception for terminating pregnancies caused by rape.” Either this could indicate a “disconnect” between the Republican hardcore who want to get “right” with their version of God and those who simply wish to maintain the political, economic and social control by the current demographic majority, or perhaps it is pure cynicism—a sop to the Tea Party. Probably the latter, but even one more justice added to current mix intent on imposing his or her narrow-minded social ideology on others is capable of turning the country into a Hieronymus Bosch nightmare world.
The bottom line is that people like Akin is less the problem than the Tea Party “movement” that controls the Republican Party today—a so-called movement that just coincidentally emerged with the election of a black president, revealing itself to be nothing more than one of a long, dreary line of extremist, paranoid xenophobic enterprises. These were the people who believed that Native Americans were “savages” who needed to be exterminated from the land, and no doubt shared the opinion of a supposed leading light like Benjamin Franklin in opposing German immigration, because Germans were believed to be culturally so foreign that they would be unable to assimilate into American society. On occasion, right-wing extremists were able to coalesce into a political movement, such as the xenophobic “American” Party, better known as the Know-Nothing Party. The Tea Party is just a variant of this repellent “tradition”—but in this case cobbled together so that they can be led and exploited by shadowy figures in the background with their own agendas (like the Koch brothers).
Despite the fact that Mitt Romney, Karl Rove and other establishment Republicans called on Akins to step aside, they have no real moral authority, having willingly lost control of the party and message to Tea Party extremists. Proof of this is that while Rove threatened to cut off contributions to Akins, his Tea Party supporters quickly filled the shortfall by “pouring in” donations to his campaign, according to Akin’s twitter page. Why would they do this if they were “outraged” by Akins’ abortion stand? The answer: They’re not.
This election is not between Obama and Romney, but between moderation (it’s a joke to call Obama’s policies anything else) and mindless extremism. I don’t believe that the choice the country has to make is that hard to figure out.
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