2016: Will It Go Down As History's Worst Year in Politics, Or The Most Entertaining?

Nine months of backstabbing, lies, hypocrisy, contempt, bad jokes and slander.

In other words, politics as usual. But with Donald Trump and the political Christian Right in the arena, 2016 may be more entertaining than usual.

I've often said that America has made an entertainment out of religion and a religion out of entertainment: take away all of our rights as American citizens, but never, ever even think of taking away our right to be entertained. References to entertainment pervade our daily lives, with politics always being referred to as a circus.

The trouble with political entertainment is that it lessens serious issues, makes them boring in comparison and therefore not worth thinking deeply about: they are reduced to simple platitudes that are digestible to mass consumption: abortion, environment, climate change, marriage equality, immigration, terrorism, gun control are all placed amongst bombast and spectacle, super expenditures on ad campaigns, stellar endorsements and awesome rallies plastered with flags and slogans and logos.

The Real Political Arenas: Twitter and Facebook

Today, what you tweet (and re-tweet) is just as important as what you say in a long-winded political speech. The number of "friends" and "followers" on Facebook are just as important as numbers in the polls. The impact of social media has been used by politicians in the past, but its usage in 2016 will be phenomenally important. Applause and cheering at political rallies may be immediate gratification, but so are "likes" and re-tweets.

CHRISTIAN NATION? Studies Set Fire To The Christian Right's Pet Ideology And To Right Wing Candidates' Talking Points

In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. [Jefferson, in letter to Horatio G. Spafford, March 17, 1814]

"America is definitely a Christian Nation." So says the Christian Right's Official Pseudo-Historian, David Barton. Many people believe it, and most of today's GOP Presidential hopefuls are depending on that belief. 

But what if that statement is based on a 50-year-old assumption and not today's reality? Candidates like Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee might be counting on a force that really isn't there - with a meme that is not quite true.

The Christian share of the U.S. population is declining, while the number of U.S. adults who do not identify with any organized religion is growing, according to an extensive new survey by the Pew Research Center.

So America is not as Christian as it used to be which, according to previous studies, was not as Christian as David Barton thought it was in the first place. The decline in Christian numbers is disturbing to many evangelicals such as Franklin Graham, Pat Robertson and Tony Perkins, but it is disastrous to politicians like Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, Rand Paul, Bobby Jindal and Ted Cruz.

Gallup:

Over time, the group of Americans who are dissatisfied and want religion to have less influence has consistently been larger than the group who are dissatisfied and want it to have more influence. The gap between these groups grew bigger as overall satisfaction with the influence of organized religion dropped in 2005.

In its State of the States report, Gallup also divulged that the highest level of people who attend church regularly is a rather meager 51% (Utah) and goes down to 17% (Vermont, which will burn in hellfire). This does not bode well for Presidential hopefuls like Huckabee and Jindal who are putting all their eggs into one Evangelical Christian basket.

Salon.com

It’s a narrative [America is fundamentally a Christian nation] that is fundamentally wrong. Yes, the majority of Americans identify technically as Christians, but a deeper look at how our people act, believe, and think shows that we’re not at all a “Christian nation,” but a largely secular nation that suffers a small but vocal minority of theocracy-minded conservatives. And not just that, but that the secular-minded majority is getting even bigger and more secular all the time.

The Theocratic Set

 

Today's Republicans still think that pandering to the Christian Right with "Christian Nation" banners and speeches will get them votes. And while it is a meme that comes disastrously close to reconstructionism and theocracy, they seem to think that America will not look past those speeches - and who organizes them. David Lane, the man behind theocracy's (Christofascism's) support of Bobby Jindal and Ted Cruz, has squarely put Evangelicalism on the path to theocracy. While calling for 1000 pastors to seek public office, he has also curried favor with Ben Carson and Rick Perry. If ever there was an architect behind "America Is A Christian Nation," it is Lane, not David Barton who wields the real power. The reaction (or strategy) that Lane has had regarding the new studies is not yet known, but rest assured he is concerned.

Ted Cruz

Rick Unger (Forbes):

Cruz embarked on his march to the White House before a crowd of some 10,000 students at Liberty University— a number that would have been terribly impressive for such an event were it not for the fact that attendance was compulsory —where the Senator would spend the first part of his speech extolling the virtues of Jesus Christ and the importance the Christian faith played in keeping his family together.

Cruz does not seem to know (or care), that his "family" is on the wane: it may still be strong in Texas, but the CN (Christian Nation) talking point is weaker beyond its borders than he cares to admit.

Rick Santorum

Back in 2012, Rick Santorum's campaign was almost single-handedly derailed by one pastor.

Pastor Dennis Terry introduced Rick Santorum to Southern Baptist voters with the CN meme:

“This nation was founded as a Christian nation…there’s only one God and his name is Jesus. I’m tired of people telling me that I can’t say those words. […] If you don’t love America and you don’t like the way we do things, I’ve got one thing to say — Get out! We don’t worship Buddha. I said we don’t worship Buddha. We don’t worship Mohammed. We don’t worship Allah. We worship God. We worship God’s son Jesus Christ.”

We can bet, however, that Santorum ( who rarely learns from his mistakes) will keep CN alive during his campaign.

Mike Huckabee

Huckabee could rank as the most out-of-touch candidate with the collective mind of the American public (remember the Duggar support backlash). He would never, for example, believe a word of this WSJ survey:

A new SURVEY conducted by the Wall Street Journal and NBC News has found that more Americans would be comfortable with a gay or lesbian president (about 61 percent of respondents) than they would with an evangelical Christian president (only 52 percent).
Furthermore, only 37 percent said they would be uncomfortable with a gay or lesbian person in the highest office in the country, while 44 percent said they would be hesitant about an evangelical Christian running for president.

Ignoring The Causes

Clinging to a Christian Nation ideology may be disastrous for today's Presidential hopefuls, but it is downright stupid for Christofascists to uphold it and even dumber for them to ignore the real causes.

While blaming the declining numbers on the overall moral decay of the country, the candidates and Christian Right leaders will dodge the real reason: Millennials are leaving in droves simply because they can't stand thinking that some day they might actually be like the Evangelicals they've come to dread: the crackpots and charlatans and ranters, the bigots and zealots and hate-mongers who have ruined religion for so many. Think Cindy Jacobs, Pat Robertson, Bob Jones, Jerry Falwell, Benny Hinn and a host of others who have used the Bible as a weapon and refer to a jealous, vindictive God abandoning the nation for things like same-sex marriage. 

Or they might be leaving because they know too many Betty Bowers. 

The Lost Weekend - Or The (Warped) Shape Of Things To Come

Reading about the Republican Clown Car is depressing, making one want to crawl back into bed on Monday morning, pretending that the weekend just didn't happen. Showing just how low American politics has sunk, presidential hopefuls packed Iowa with snipes at each other and two (almost) viable candidates not present: Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney.

Rick Perry wasn't there either, so he sniped at himself - by being himself.

Present:

There was the Theocrat Clown Mike Huckabee. The Senate Clown, Ted Cruz. The Former Senate Clown, and Theocrat Clown wannabe, Rick Santorum. The Koch Brothers Clown, Scott Walker. The (hopefully) Forgotten Clown, Newt Gingrich. The Bridge Scandal Clown, Chris Christie. The Uncle Tom Clown, Ben Carson. 

And The Sarah Palin Clown, Sarah Palin.

They talked and joked about Hillary Clinton and downgraded Obama. Ho hum. Oh, and Benghazi must have been in there somewhere. It HAD to be there! 

All-in-all it was really a lost weekend, lost to sub-standard politics and Palin "bizarro" (as the London Times put it). 

Back to bed.

CPAC For Laughs: It's The Only Way To Take It.

Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin and Paul Ryan walk into a bar...

Except the "bar" was last week's CPAC, and the unintended hilarity proved that Conservatives (read: anybody not a commie-pinko-leftist) can't take a joke - because they ARE a joke.

In terms of intelligent dialogue, CPAC was almost painful: yes, Bachmann actually said that about the Tea Party, setting the tone for the whole affair. Rand Paul got the most applause, actually, because quoting Pink Floyd was, well, cool:

And did they get you to trade
Your heros for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
And did you exchange
A walk on part in the war
For a lead role in a cage?

To hell with the fact that most of Pink Floyd's lyrics railed against capitalism and the establishment that Paul's form of Libertarianism is trying to bring back. Yeah, it was real cool, man. Obama-bashing at it best!

Of course, while paling in comparison to Rand Paul's eloquent and oh-so-timely address, others did their best to regale the politico-culture war troops with their bravado: Mitch McConnell, for example, entered waving a rifle and Sarah Palin read her own version of Green Eggs and Ham:

I do not like this Uncle Sam, I do not like his health care scam;
I do not like these dirty crooks or how they lie and cook the books;
I do not like when Congress steals, I do not like their crony deals;
I do not like this buy-in man, I do not like ‘oh yes we can’;
I do not like this spending spree, we’re smart, we know there’s nothing free;
I do not like reporters’ smug replies when I complain about their lies;
I do not like this kind of hope and we won’t take it ‘nope, nope, nope’

The crowd didn''t seem to care that Palin might be mocking Ted Cruz as well. Of course, SHE didn't know she was mocking Ted Cruz. Using one of the iconic political buffooneries of the last decade to lambaste the current administration only seemed to prove that conservatives are stuck in one gear: stupid. 

Speaking of stupid, Paul Ryan told a fake story about a little boy and his love of lunches in paper bags. "The left is making a big mistake here. What they’re offering people is a full stomach and an empty soul." Unfortunately, while the totally untrue story had wings among CPAC attendants, Ryan had to admit to his fakery. They don't call him Lyin' Ryan for nothing!

And on the environment ...

Alex Epstein of the Ayn-Rand worshipping Center For Industrial Progress... said that it was silly to ask if humans are behind climate change, because that assumes that "if man did change climate, it would be a bad thing.”
Epstein added that if you are worried about man-made climate change, you are displaying “a prejudice against the man-made” or as he likes to put it, “human racism.”

CPAC: Working hard to make conservatism cool with the video, ‘N*gga, please’ Yes, you read that right. Real Story's full story about Raymmar Tirado's attendance at CPAC can be reader in the title, and the offending video is here. (I didn't want to dignify it by embedding it - see for yourself). It's all about "reverse racism" and how blacks are just as racist as whites. It purports to show how divisive reverse racism is by being divisive itself. So for a political group that's striving to "reach out to minorities," the video was the most counterproductive thing imaginable. 

And speaking about minority outreach, the "diversity" panel was a bit sparse.



CPAC's hilarity overflowed out into the streets and down the road to other PACs:

SPLC:

The Family Research Council’s executive vice president, Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin (retired), was caught on a “hot mic” following a panel yesterday at the National Security Action Summit, which was held just down the street from the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Boykin could be heard, in an awkward attempt at humor, telling a reporter from Israel that “Jews are the problem” and the “cause of all the problems in the world.” Boykin told another reporter that President Obama identifies with and supports Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood and uses subliminal messages to express this support.

Even laugh-fests must come to an end, and Ann Coulter brought everyone back to reality and declared:

“Amnesty is forever and you got to vote for the Republicans one more time and just make it clear; but if you pass amnesty, that’s it, it’s over and then we organize the death squads for the people who wrecked America.”

Of course, Ann Coulter(geist) can put a damper on anything.

Republicans Devolving: It Goes Beyond Creationism

There is new evidence that the Republican Party is devolving - dragged down to the state of neanderthal by Evangelical Fundamentalist Christians.

PEW Research:

     "There are sizable differences among partisan groups in beliefs about evolution. Republicans are less inclined than either Democrats or political independents to say that humans have evolved over time. Roughly two-thirds of Democrats (67%) and independents (65%) say that humans have evolved over time, compared with less than half of Republicans (43%).

"The size of the gap between partisan groups has grown since 2009. Republicans are less inclined today than they were in 2009 to say that humans have evolved over time (43% today vs. 54% in 2009), while opinion among both Democrats and independents has remained about the same."

     

The below PEW chart shows who are the culprits in this move backwards:






White and black evangelical protestants contribute so much to the cause of Creationism that it is hard to separate them. The groups populate the entirety of Southern Baptist Convention (16 million) as well as all other Fundamentalist Christian denominations (e.g., Assemblies of God). They are also the most vocal in (conservative) politics and have recently challenged the separation of church and state so as to openly preach politics from the pulpit.*

It is ironic that while Republicans claim a rise in Creationist beliefs, their support from the Christian Right has waned in regard to other issues like marriage equality: they have found out that when pandering to the Christian Right, you must hold strong on ALL its beliefs ... or else. They have also found out that the problems of teaching Creationism must be tackled at the local and state level first, since America's diversity counterbalances Fundamentalism: America may indeed be a Christian-majority nation, but it is fast becoming a nation of "no particular affiliation."

Andrew Sullivan:

     "An alarming study by the Barna group looked at the mass exodus of 20-somethings from evangelicalism and discovered that one of the major sources of discontent was the perception that “Christianity was antagonistic to science.” Anti-evolution, and general suspicion of science, has become such a significant part of the evangelical identity that many people feel compelled to choose one or the other. Many of my most talented former students no longer attend any church, and some have completely abandoned their faith traditions.

Whither go the youth, so go conservatives and the Republican Party. William F. Buckley would not be amused. 

The Turn-Off Point

When the Republican Party will become tired of being a pawn of the Christian Right and capitalism remains to be seen: indeed, it may never recuperate from the devolution (and never get tired of capitalism). Some pundits think that it has already reached the turn-off point with its growing (but grudging) acceptance of gay rights. This, however, is an illusion: Christian Right hold-outs like North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas will uphold the banning of same-sex marriage and the right to proselytize with Creationism (as a kind of science) until their cows come home.

They continue into the darkness willingly. Will they ever be seen again ... as intelligent homo sapiens?


*Although Catholic priests and bishops have been vocal, the emergence of Francis' doctrine of reaching out to the poor and not to politicians will definitely have its effect.

Wacky Is As Wacky Does: Ten Crazy Christofascist Quotes From The Values Voter Summit.

Sen. Ted Cruz Easily Wins Values Voter Summit 2016 Presidential Straw Poll

That headline alone should tell you what last week's Values Voter Summit was like: it was really a Christofascist hate fest that brought about rousing applause from Tea Partiers, FOX News diehards and the American Family Association (a sponsor). It also brought about gaffaws and WTFs from the rest of the country.

By now, everyone on this political planet knows that Cruz was heckled (a lot), showing that there might have been some people in attendance with a modicum of brain cells, but the rest of the three-day show was littered with homophobia, misogyny, silly fits of righteous arrogance, and hyperbole fit for panderers to the Sun King.

The similes and metaphors were ridiculous to the extreme:

Ryan Bomberger: Homophobia Is A Myth, Gays Are Like Kleptomaniacs

“The absurdity of terminology like homophobia; so for the people who cohabitate, if you don’t agree with that behavior are you a cohabiphobic? Or if you disagree with someone who has a habitual stealing problem, are you a kleptophobic? That’s the insanity of this; tolerance demands anything but tolerance, just complete formality to someone’s sense of poll-driven morality.”

So FRC's Peter Sprigg is not homophobic because he wants every homosexual jailed? Bomberger's reasoning is certainly a bit twisted. Ooops, that makes me Brombergerphobic.

Jim Bob Duggar Compares US To Nazi Germany During The Holocaust

Everyone likes a good Holocaust story (except maybe Holocaust deniers), but Jim Bob Duggar* simply inserted a story for no other reason than it had the words "Nazi" and "Holocaust" in it.

In the hutzpa department, pundit Sandy Rios gave us these gems:

Anybody Know an Ex-Gay? They're Fabulous!

Rios has constantly given the number of ex-gays in the thousands. Nobody raised their hand.

The Matthew Shepherd Murder Was A Complete Fraud

This was thrown out to the audience simply because it was the 15th anniversary of Matthew Shepherd's death. She was basing here accusation on a recent book that has been questioned by journalists and family members alike.

Carson: Obamacare 'Is The Worst Thing That Has Happened In This Nation Since Slavery

As a black physician-politician, a FOX News "contributor", Benjamin Carson fits the bill for conservatives who need to seem intelligent and less racist. Unfortunately, Carson's hyperbole is so off base that any credibility seems remote. He also hates the possibility that somebody might be able to afford him.

Parker: Gay People And 'Enemies Of God' Should 'Keep It Private'

The problem with Star Parker: nothing is private. The former addict/prostitute plays her sordid past and conversion like violins - actually more like an entire symphony. Her born-again-ness has been worked to death, but it has not given her the right to tell anyone else to shut up.

Jackson: Next To Jesus, America Has Been 'The Greatest Blessing Given To Mankind'

E.W. Jackson is ratcheting up his campaign for Lieutenant Gov. of Virginia by giving American exceptionalism a boost. Now if he could just get rid of the "EEEW" factor of his other statements about gays and abortion, the man radical Right wingnuts consider "the future of conservatism" he might not be so far behind in the polls.

Santorum: Contraception Mandate Is A 'Descendant Of The French Revolution'

Rick Santorum's rant about how the French Revolution was based on Liberty (Good), Equality (Good) and Fraternity (Bad) and therefore Obamacare is insidiously bringing on another form of French Revolution is almost painful to watch. Your brain battles his phraseology to come up with a kernel of sense and loses.

Lila Rose Likens Her Anti-Abortion Activism To Malala Yousafzai

Did we say Sandy Rios had hutzpah? If she did, then Lila Rose had unmitigated gall - insulting unmitigated gall. Rose links Planned Parenthood to Satan and demonizes pro-choice people everywhere she goes. Yousafzai has a Ghandi-like quality that Rose cannot even begin to touch upon. 

Capping the crazy was, of course, the Queen of Christofascist Crazies, Michele Bachmann. Here is her now famous "Obamacare is Death Care" speech that will go down in the annals of ... whatever. 

*Jim Bob Duggar is the reality TV star of "Nineteen and Counting" wherein he and his wife show people how to properly and righteously overpopulate the earth.