Rick Santorum, whose Google problem has been well documented — don’t bother clicking on those links , since they all go to the same place ; I merely link to exacerbate Rick Santorum’s well-documented Google problem—really blew it in the GOP debate last night.

The moderator sandbagged him with a YouTube question from a gay soldier serving in Iraq, and Santorum did his Santorum thing, saying that the repeal of DADT was “social engineering” and that if he were elected President he would reinstate DADT.

The audience, of course, booed… the gay soldier. Of course. Nothing to say about that except that the Republican base seems intent on completing their devolution into knuckle-dragging yahoos.

Let’s talk about “social engineering.” That’s Republican code for “lifting of statutory discrimination against People Who Are Not Like You And Me,” and here I am speaking as an upper middle class white male, which to the Republican brain is the only possible You and Me that could be considered.

So what would you call it if you enacted a law to suppress a naturally occurring segment of the population in an organization, to hide them utterly, and if they dared show themselves, expel them from the organization? In other words, you crafted a law to make sure that this naturally occurring segment of the population vanished. What would you call that? That would seem to me to be the quintessence of “social engineering.” But that certainly will never occur to the Republicans. (Actually, I’m sure it has. They’re just manipulating the yahoos.)

The rest of the GOP field last night maintained a discreet silence. After the debate, when asked about the booing, the only comment from anyone, including Santorum’s people, was that the booing was “unfortunate.”

I’ll say it was unfortunate, only not in the way that the GOP minions want you to think they meant it. They didn’t mean that it was a shame and a disgrace to the Republican party that audience members for their Presidential candidate debate booed one of our troops. They meant that it was unfortunate that the rest of the nation saw what knuckle-dragging yahoos their candidates are trying to appeal to.

“Unfortunate.” Really? That’s the best you can do, boys? What about “My candidate condemns in the strongest terms the lack of respect these audience members showed one of our fighting forces. There is no place for this kind of homophobia in my Republican party.”? Did we hear anything approaching the sort? Will we ever?

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the modern Republican party. Vote for them at your peril.

From the Huffington Post:

Newt Gingrich, who is currently mulling a presidential bid in 2012, said at a political event in South Carolina (12/16/10) that most of America’s problems can be blamed on the “leftist news media,” Hollywood, tenured academics, overpaid federal workers, and unemployed people.

As opposed to Bush’s two wars; unregulated, criminal financial shenanigans; GOP obstructionism in Congress; and feed-the-rich tax policies?

Or as opposed to a disgraced has-been who deliberately poisoned America’s political discourse with his vituperative buzzwords?

Putz.

Honey, please. Today at school someone , the same person as usual , forwarded another of those emails. This one, thankfully, was not political in nature, just the old one about cell phone numbers being released to telemarketers. I dutifully found the Snopes.com link and replied to all without comment, other than to say, “This is an old one.”

But I’m commenting here. Jesus H. Spaghetti Monster, people, where are your brains?? If there were a looming deadline of such awful significance, wouldn’t you have read about it in the newspaper? Seen it on the news? HEARD ABOUT IT FROM ONE OF YOUR RANTING NUTJOB RADIO FROTHERMOUTHS???

Years ago, before the intertubes were invented for the purpose of keeping the unwashed in a turmoil of anxiety, these things were spread orally, over lunch at work. I remember my own lovely first wife, who is far more skeptical than the run of the mill executive, coming home breathless with horror at the kidnapping of a little boy by mysterious women with canvas bags in the restrooms at the mall. (Need I say that the little boy was white and the kidnappers were black?)

We were all to beware sending our children to the restroom alone, of course, because those people lurked everywhere. Pretty horrific stuff for any parent, to be sure.

After one tiny frisson, however, my rational brain kicked in. I pointed out to MLFW that if such a kidnapping had taken place, wouldn’t that be the only thing on the news for weeks? Had we seen anything like this in the newspaper? She did the grinding-gears-because-because-but-it’s-such-a-good-story! face and realized that I had to be right. Again.

The current emailer just replied to my reply with, “IT’S NEW TO ME!!!!” I can’t tell whether she’s offended that I have—once again—exposed her to the entire school as a panicky, credulous git, but darling, the fact that you’ve never encountered information before doesn’t mean that you have to take it at face value. Quite the reverse, IS WHAT I’M TRYING TO TEACH YOU HERE.

Onward to the midterm elections. ::sigh::

I saw —yet again—one of those bumper stickers the gist of which is “Like your freedom? Thank a veteran.” These things drive me nuts.

Let me see if I can parse this whole thing. First of all, I find the sentiment to be a snide bit of conservatism. (Hold that thought.) The implication is that without our armed forces deployed in Iraq, we would soon find ourselves without freedom of the press; that unless we use our soldiers to invade and occupy somewhere, we will no longer be able to hold free elections.

Such thinking is of course incredibly bad thinking. Our armed forces have not been engaged in any kind of conflict the outcome of which would have affected our system of government since 1865. Everything since then has been wars of empire or wars of strategy. Even the invasion of Afghanistan, which could be justified in terms of self defense, was not occasioned by any threat to our actual constitutional structure, nor would we have lost any of our rights had we decided not to tackle the project. I will say nothing of Iraq.

I think it likely that the teabagger on the other side of that bumper would offer the rejoinder that, in our current two wars at least, we’re “fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.” To which I would reply, that’s not freedom you’re worried about, sweetheart, it’s safety. Those are two different things. You know, the things Patrick Henry was quick to distinguish one from the other: “Give me liberty, or give me death.”

And even that kind of thinking is ludicrous, not to mention cowardly. No one in their right mind suggests that any of the Islamic extremists are prepared to invade us. What are the teabaggers thinking is going to happen, Baghdad Dawn? I suggest those people check under their bed every night, and then sleep tight and leave the rest of us alone.

Yes, certainly, the extremists are constantly plotting to harm us. No question. But it’s also true that all such plots have been foiled by careful police work, not by armed incursions either “over there” or here. And it’s also true that our military response to the problem has served as our enemies’ greatest recruitment tool. So thanking a veteran for keeping us safe is offbase as well.

So does this mean I hate our military? Of course not. The men and women who choose to serve in our armed forces are mostly people with a vision of service. I respect that more than a teabagger would believe possible.

However, I distrust our military, and in that I don’t think I am alone. It seems to me, from my reading of Max Farrand’s Annals of the Constitutional Convention, that most if not all of the founding fathers were of the same opinion. And certainly our greatest general-Presidents believed as I do. Can you imagine George Washington or Dwight Eisenhower suggesting that patriotism required us to, in effect, idolatrize our army?

Our founding fathers were clear on the subject: funding is to be restricted and controlled by the Legislative; the armies and navies are to be commanded by the Executive, a civilian. There is no independent military, and this arrangement is the source of our liberty, not the use of firepower. One only has to think of places such as Turkey, Pakistan, Chile, to realize that our liberty excludes our army from our freedoms. And that is why we remain free.

Oh, and how am I so sure that it’s a conservative bumpersticker?

You’re welcome.

Today at school we received one of those forwarded emails that are ludicrous on their face but which a certain portion of the population treats as gospel. It was this one, about the U.S. Mint removing the slogan “In God We Trust” from the new dollar coin.

IT HAS BEGUN! the email shrieks, and the person who sent it to the whole faculty prefaced it with “I know at least one of you will go to Snopes, and it has already checked out.”

Well, I can take stuff as personally as the next Teabagger, so with narrowed eyes and wrinkled lip I headed straight to Snopes, where of course the entire email is reproduced in its entirety and debunked as completely false. Quel surprise. I replied to all, which is what I always do. I never, but one day I’m going to, say, “I dare you to forward this!!!1!1!”

I also did not write nor send the following email:

Dear troops:

This is ridiculous. Every single one of these emails y’all forward so breathlessly is FALSE. Every. Single. One.

Has it not occurred to you that you are being lied to? That someone is lying to you? For reasons of their own? And those reasons include keeping you riled up, angry, outraged at what “they” are doing to “our” country?

I cannot be the only person on this campus with a BS detector. For Moloch’s sake, people, we are educators, and it behooves us to be more skeptical than it seems many of us are. You should immediately question any email that comes to you that contains anything that is “outrageous.” Because, as I’ve already stated: Not. One. Of. Them. Is. True…. Ever.

More than that, you should be teaching our students to be just as skeptical as you are. Hell, you should be teaching them to be as skeptical as I am. That is our job as educators in a free nation.

The people who create these emails are counting on your being gullible idiots. I don’t know who they are (although I have suspicions) and I don’t know what they want you to buy or vote for (although I have suspicions), but I know they want you to buy or to vote for something. And they’re willing to lie to you to keep you outraged enough to do it. The only question now is, how gullible an idiot are you?

Cheers,

Dale

Thank you, dear reader, for listening.

So Rand Paul, teabagger extraordinaire, wins the Republican senatorial primary in Kentucky and goes on Rachel Maddow’s show to do his victory lap. (I know, right?)

So Maddow asks him if he would have voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He says no. While he is in fact not in favor of discriminatory practices, the government, he says, has no bidness telling restaurants whom they must serve.

Well. Hilarity ensues, of course, but my favorite rightwing burble is Senator John Cornyn (R, naturally-TX, of course) He said

Maddow’s inquiry was a “gotcha question.” “If I’m walking down the street minding my own business and somebody sticks a microphone under my nose about a law that was passed 40 years ago, without more detail — I think it probably caught him a little bit by surprise,” Cornyn said in Paul’s defense.

Honey, please. Paul had 15 minutes to explain himself, and this is after giving the same answer to a newspaper and to NPR, and he acquitted himself admirably. He said exactly what he believes. As for his being “caught by surprise,” if that is so, then I say good on Rachel Maddow for exposing this guy for an even bigger idiot than he already appeared to be.

My question for Cornyn at this point: Do you seriously want this specimen on your team in the Senate? Really and truly, do you??

I think I’ve found our problem.

Senator Lindsey Graham, who was a JAG and even serves as a Senior Instructor at the Air Force JAG School, on the idea of legislation to strip citizens accused of terrorism of their rights as citizens:

Even if you’re an American citizen helping the enemy, you should be viewed as a potential military threat, not some guy who tried to commit a crime in Times Square.

No, Lindsey, no, you’re missing the point. That’s exactly how it should be viewed: as a crime in Times Square. Such a violent act does not require that we elevate its perpetrator to some holy-warrior status. Nor does it require that we cue “The Star-Spangled Banner” and smear our faces with Special Forces make-up and scream, “Wolverines!” (Look carefully at that quote page, and be very afraid.)

Idiot.

God in Heaven.

Go ahead. I’ll wait.

Can you imagine the hubris involved in this project? It staggers the mind. For one thing, it reminds me of this (t-shirts available here).

I, of course, am no Greek scholar or even anything halfway resembling a Christian theosophist, so I breathlessly await their free-market translation of this passage, or of this one, which of course comes right after one of their prime examples of how Bill Clinton Barack Obama has subverted all meaningful religious instruction since the Synod of Hippo.

Get me the President on the phone. I’ve just had an insight that’s bloody brilliant in re: negotiating with our new BFF, the Republicans, over the stimulus package.

I am reminded of Green Acres, that masterpiece of American absurdism, whenever Oliver Douglas went to haggle with Mr. Haney. Oliver would behave in a rational manner, starting with a low bid, and then when Mr. Haney countered with something higher, attempting to meet Mr. Haney somewhere in the middle.

Except it never worked like that. Every time Oliver would raise his offer, Mr. Haney would respond by raising his. Rather than the paradigm of honorable compromise that Oliver was following, Mr. Haney saw that he didn’t have to give anything away because his opponent was willing to give up what he had started with.

This is in fact what is happening now with the Republicans and the stimulus package. President Obama stated his goals with the stimulus package, and the Republicans immediately made a counteroffer: more tax cuts. The President offers to cut taxes, the Republican counter with “no contraceptives!” And so it goes.

Instead, the Current President should enter that room with the Republicans this afternoon and deal with them like Lisa Douglas: they say to ditch the contraceptives, he returns with raised taxes. They respond with OK, you can keep the contraceptives. He responds with draconian regulation of Wall Street. They say, OK, Clinton-level income tax rates, but that’s our final offer.

You see how that works? When you’re dealing with Mr. Haney, you have to be Lisa Douglas.

Hm. Haney. Cheney. Mere coincidence? I think not.