::sigh::

This graphic has been floating around the FaceTubes for a couple of weeks:

Can you not feel the panic rising? Is your amygdala not entertained? Dogs and cats living together, etc etc. I for one am the outrage.

Here are the lies and the complete miscomprehension of basic truths.  Pass it on.

(1) DEAR RIGHTWING AMYGDALA-BASED LIFEFORM: WE CAPITALIZE CONGRESS AND CONSTITUTION. We generally spell out numbers lower than twenty, too. Thank you.

(2) That’s right. They were VOTED INTO CONGRESS. By voters. That’s how it works.

(3) It always comes as shocking news to the amygdala-based lifeforms [ABL], but the Bible is a holy text for Muslims too. Just as Christians revere the Old Testament but consider it to have been “superseded” by the New Testament, Muslims consider both Testaments to have been “corrected” and “superseded” by the Q’uran.  In other words, just as an ABL would just as soon not swear on a Torah, Muslims would rather use their own holy text.

(4) As usual, the ABLs have constructed a fictitious universe in which THE TRUTH, THE WHOLE TRUTH, AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH can only be TT,TWT,ANBTT if the swearer puts his LEFT HAND ON THE BIBLE. Anything else completely invalidates the oath, right? Sadly, no: several Christian sects will not swear oaths (mainly because Jesus tells you not to), and even if you look at Presidential inaugurations, Theodore Roosevelt did not use a Bible when taking the oath in 1901. Both John Quincy Adams and Franklin Pierce swore on a book of law, standing in for the Constitution. Lyndon B. Johnson used a Roman Catholic missal. No branch of government requires that anyone swear an oath on the Christian Bible, not even your podunk county courthouse. (The last few times I was on a jury, a Bible was not even offered to witnesses — they just raised their hand and swore — and that was some years ago here in Coweta County, GA.)

(5) Funny thing about “upholding our constitution [sic]”: Article 6, Clause 3 says, and I quote (in its entirety):

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

Let’s repeat that last part for the hard-of-thinking: no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

That’s right, Kenneth, not only is swearing on a Bible not required, such a requirement is prohibited by the Constitution. Which all duly elected members of Congress — Muslims or not — swear to uphold.

(6) Oh, ABLs. Your palpable fear is ridiculous. I will refrain from commenting on the obvious, and that is if we’re being destroyed within our own country, it’s by the rampant corruption, cruelty, and fecklessness of the current administration and those whose amygdalas salivate like so many Pavlov’s dogs at the sound of Dear Leader’s voice.

(7) I’m not sure how much of a Trojan horse two members of Congress constitute. I mean, what are they going to do, charge the chair and just take over Congress? Start issuing fatwas from the well? Whip out their scimitars and force the other 536 congresscritters to convert to Islam on the spot (which, by the way, the Q’uran explicitly forbids, no matter what its practitioners have done in history and don’t even get me started about imperialistic Christian missionaries over the last 500 years).

The whole tsimiss reminds me of those who are shocked by people who wear shorts to church, or who put sugar on their rice, or who don’t put a salad fork on the table: they somehow think that the world they’ve always felt safe in is actually objective reality. No, sweetie, it’s just the way you’ve done it. Dragging religion into it just elevates the stakes, and Jonathan Swift blew that whole idiotic mindset out of the water in Gulliver’s Travels with his spiteful, petty Lilliput, where the two kingdoms go to war over which end of a boiled egg to crack open. He was referring to the religious wars of the 17th century between Protestants and Catholics, but he would smirkingly recognize the ignorant amgydala-based lifeform who created this graphic as a dyed-in-the-wool Lilliputian.

The Republican party has been hard at work for years protecting the sanctity of your right to vote. At least that’s what they claim with straight faces in front of the camera.

Here’s how you know they’re lying.

Republicans want you to believe that your vote is under attack from fraudulent voters, hundreds, thousands, nay millions! of them. They want you to believe that not only do people vote who have no right to do so,^[1] but that the Democrats are deliberately letting those people^[1] into the country to tip the electoral scales in their favor.

This is a lie, of course. There is no any evidence of voting fraud in any state in the U.S. that has affected any election. Here’s a round-up of voter fraud studies from the Brennan Center for Justice, none of which I expect you to go read. Here’s the pertinent quote:

The report reviewed elections that had been meticulously studied for voter fraud, and found incident rates between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent. [Ed: That’s between 3 to 25 votes out of 10,000.] Given this tiny incident rate for voter impersonation fraud, it is more likely, the report noted, that an American “will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls.”

And if the data from multiple studies are not convincing, go look at the Heritage Foundation’s page on voter fraud. The Heritage Foundation is the conservative think tank that is source of much mischief in today’s politics, and — in an ironic twist, the source of key provisions in ObamaCare.^[2]

See the number of PROVEN INSTANCES OF VOTER FRAUD, KENNETH? 1,165!!!!!1!! One thousand, one hundred and sixty-five FRAUDULENT VOTES! PROVEN!!!! Are you not concerned?

No, because you are a sane human being and recognize immediately that the number 1,165 is unaccompanied by any context. Is this in one election? Or is it across the country over a period of years out of hundreds of millions of votes? You can’t tell from their page, nor can you tell if you click on your state: all you get is a list of offenders without which elections they occurred in, nor what years. If you actually download the “report,” you get nothing more than a list of those 1,165 instances, separated out by state. There is no compilation or analysis of data, only dire warnings that this list is a “sampling” of the “many ways” voter fraud occurs.

In other words, complete and utter fuppery.

But let’s back up and pretend that the Republicans are genuinely concerned about voter fraud. Given that the amygdala-based lifeforms that make up the Republican Party need fear and anger to feed their brains, this is not an unreasonable assumption. However, this is not the case.  They’re lying.

Here’s how you know:

Example 1: Here in Georgia, leaving aside Sec. of State Kemp’s documented attempts to purge voters from the roles, we have the example of Randolph County, majority black population. A consultant hired by the county advised them to close seven out of nine^[3] polling places in the county, based on the facts that some of them were underused and others were not ADA compliant.

Example 2: In North Dakota, the (Republican-controlled) legislature passed a “voter-identification law” that “requires that… IDs have street addresses printed on them and specifically bans using a P.O. Box.” And wouldn’t you know it, many Native Americans living on reservations do not have street addresses; they live so far out in the boonies that they have P.O. boxes instead. And in what is an amazing coincidence, Native Americans tend to vote Democratic.

Here’s a photo from our cross-country trip in 2013, taken in Monument Valley, which is not a national park but Navajo tribal land:

See those little white dots in the lower left? Those are trailers. Do they look as if they have street addresses?

So here’s the deal. Sometimes it occurs that after legislation is passed, the Law of Unintended Consequences kicks in and problems that the lawmakers didn’t foresee crawl to the surface. You would hope that we elected smarter people to handle this, but here we are.

If the Republicans’^[4] true concern was legitimate voting, if they had passed that law in good faith, they would react with dismay at the unintended consequences and would quickly and publicly fix the problem. “Oh no, let’s hurry up and get those voting places up to ADA code,” or “Goodness, how could we have missed that? Let’s amend the law to exclude the street address requirement from Native American reservations!”

But they don’t. Indeed, they fight tooth and nail to preserve those unintended consequences.

Because — and follow this closely — these are not unintended consequences. The Republicans pass these laws specifically to exclude certain voters^[5] from voting.

They’re lying if they say otherwise.

Go vote.

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^[1] Brown people.  They mean brown people.

^[2] The individual mandate was the Heritage Foundation’s response to Hillary Clinton’s healthcare proposal back in the 90s. They weren’t about to let all those poor people get free healthcare, so they put in the individual mandate so that everyone would have “skin in the game” (and still allow the insurance companies to feed off our healthcare). After Mittens Romney instituted the plan in Massachusetts and it worked, Barack Obama adapted it for the Affordable Care Act. Suddenly the idea was anathema to the weasels at Heritage because freedumz. Odd, that.

^[3] Seven of Nine? Really, Republicans?

^[4] It. Is. Always. Republicans.

^[5] BROWN PEOPLE, KENNETH!

This popped up on Twitter this morning:

Dinesh D’Souza is of course the right-wing commentator (also convicted felon) who gets his ass handed to him regularly on Twitter by People Who Actually Know Things, but this tweet of his just kind of jumped out at me. (Ocasio-Cortez is the far left congressional candidate in New York, and she’s awfully good at smacking down idiots.)

Ocasio-Cortez’s second comment kind of sums up my reaction to D’Souza, but there’s more to it, I think. His entire attitude — and not just in this tweet — is Ayn Randian to the max: there are weak and there are strong, and the strong are good, vital, and important. The weak are there only to serve the strong.

Look at his language: ‘colony,’ ‘provide resources,’ ‘rule.’  Holy crap, people, it’s unvarnished colonialism, and he means it as a good thing. Remember the TV series V? D’Souza would have sided with the aliens.

That is not a strained metaphor. He is stating pointblank that if our “colony”^[1] has nothing more to provide us — and that is clearly his rhetorical presumption — we should abandon them to their fate now that we’ve stripped them of what we needed. They are of no benefit to us; therefore let them die and decrease the surplus population.

This is a worldview that I cannot understand.  This is a worldview that I cannot “reach out to” or “have a meaningful discussion with.”

This is a worldview that I want to see exterminated.

—  —  —  —  —

^[1] They are not our colony and never were. They were Spain’s colony; they are our territory, and that quasi-legal status is a whole other issue.