Know Your Enemy: Right-Wing Nuts, Protecting a President from Free Speech, The Free Market, Religious Right and Wrong, Iraq Full Circle & Voter Fraud

You've probably never heard of Jim Goodnow, but Jim is a veteran who owns a bus, The Yellow Rose, that he uses to haul Iraq Veterans Against the War around the country.

Friday night he pulled into a New Jersey truck stop to get some sleep and someone torched The Yellow Rose. Jim is OK.

Let this be a lesson for all of us. We are not dealing with rational, sane people, when we're dealing with the Right. Let's face it, these people consider the draft dodging, drug addicted, liar Rush Limbaugh a great American patriot.

The majority of the Right is made up of people who need to be led, need to be told what to do, told what to think and have and have a strong belief in the infallibility of their convictions, which have been given to them by somebody else.

So if you think that sweet logic is the way to reason with the Right, dream on.

For the last seven years the Right has gotten everything they wanted and the results are obvious. They have achieved their goals. The fact that they have ruined the country and done away with our Constitution is of no consequence when compared to getting what they want.

Think I'm hyperventilating here? OK, how's this for irony.

With the original First Amendment "Freedom of Speech" looking on, admirers of
the U.S. Constitution in the Washington D.C. National Archives Building today
were ordered to leave for wearing tee-shirts reading "Impeach Bush and Cheney."

Make you sick? It should.

The Right is always telling us how bad government regulation is. The rest of us are expected to follow certain rules. Why is it so good for us, but so bad for business. It's simple, unbridled greed doesn't function well when regulated. The laissez faire free market system, just like mercenaries, is more trouble than it's worth unless it's well controlled.

We're learning once again why government needs to protect capitalism from
itself.

Back in the 1930s Franklin D. Roosevelt came to the rescue of the
so-called "free market" with a series of new programs and regulations to restore
trust in the nation's financial and corporate institutions, whose excesses had
thrown the country into the Great Depression and ruined the financial well-being
of millions of Americans.

Roosevelt and many of the reformers of his day recognized that the
interests of business don't exist in a vacuum, that the fortunes or misfortunes
of businesses can have a profound impact on even the most innocent of
citizens.

Laissez faire advocates like
the late Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman protested, saying that nothing should
"interfere" with the "free market" and that unfettered competition would right
the marketplace. History has proven them wrong.

Time and time again, corporate America has shown that greed, unless
checked by government oversight, will unjustly ensnare the unwary.

I know this is somewhat rude, but just how stupid do you have to be to believe the crap put out by the Right? Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of room for improvement on my side. But if it's just pure evil you're looking for, look to the Right.

They've wrapped themselves in the flag for years, masquerading as some sort of uber-patriots and ever since Ronald Reagan they've been passing themselves off as uber-Christians to boot.

BTW, how's that working out?

Fortunately for the Right, hypocrisy is apparently no longer frowned upon by the Religious Right.

Mike Huckabee
campaigns as an ardent upholder of traditional marriage. On his website
he says he led the move in Arkansas to adopt the practice of "covenant"
marriage, and that he supports amending the U.S. Constitution to prohibit gay
people from marrying. He and Mrs. Huckabee say
they believe in the New Testament edict that “a wife is to submit herself
graciously to the servant leadership of her husband.”

But if you can tell a lot about a man by the company he keeps then it
appears that Huckabee’s moralizing about the sanctity of marriage
is mainly just for show. For example, he takes advice on political strategy from
Dick Morris, the sleazy Fox News Clinton-hater who was outed in a tabloid
magazine over a decade ago by his paid mistress — and who was one our nominees
last year to the GOP
Adulterers Hall of Fame.

Huckabee
has tried to keep his relationship with Morris on the q.t. (He even lied
about it to George Stephanopoulos.) On the other hand, he was brazenly
unashamed to have former Sen. Tim Hutchinson, one of Arkansas’ most notorious
adulterers, serve as his surrogate in television interviews in Iowa and New
Hampshire.

What makes Hutchinson’s betrayal of his
wife particularly scandalous is the fact that, like Huckabee, he is an
ordained minister as well as a Republican politician who won elections by
presenting himself as an adherent of moral values, including, of course, the
sanctity of marriage.

I've never been overly concerned about the Religious Right. Here in Eastern Oklahoma, which BTW, is a shining jewel on the buckle of the Bible Belt, we just about have a church on every corner. Now all these churches are reading out of the same book and they are all reading something different. Oh yeah, they also think that all the others are going straight to Hell.

So this facade that the Religious Right puts up about all the Christians in this country belonging to some monolithic movement is a crock. Case in point, no matter how well you brainwash your children...

WASHINGTON — Much of the national leadership of the Christian conservative
movement has turned a cold shoulder to the Republican presidential campaign of Mike Huckabee, wary
of his populist approach to economic issues and his criticism of the Bush
administration’s foreign policy. But that has only fired up Brett and Alex
Harris.

The Harris brothers, 19-year-old evangelical authors and speakers who grew
up steeped in the conservative Christian movement, are the creators of Huck’s
Army, an online network that has connected 12,000 Huckabee campaign
volunteers, including several hundred in Michigan, which votes Tuesday, and
South Carolina, which votes Saturday.

As you can see, even the people who have banded together to replace our Constitution with their religious beliefs, don't even get along with each other.

How about the Right's magnum opus, the Iraq War? Well after months of BS, the folks who perpetrated this deadly farce, finally settled on removing Saddam and the Baath Party as the reason for the sacrifice of life and wealth in Mr. Bush's little war. Where are we five years later? Reinstating the Baath Party.

BAGHDAD - Iraq's parliament passed a benchmark law Saturday allowing
lower-ranking former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath party to reclaim government jobs, the first
major piece of U.S.-backed legislation it has adopted.

Traveling in Manama, Bahrain, President Bush hailed the law as "an
important step toward reconciliation."

So we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars, and they were worth something when this started, and we are responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths just to try to get things back like they were before we invaded. Brilliant!

The Right has another brilliant plan, making sure that only the right sort of people get to vote. In other words, Republicans.

There's a war on across the country over who will be allowed to vote in
2008. One of the key battles in the election was fought on January 9 before the
Supreme Court.

The case is called Crawford v. Marion County Election Board. It tests
an Indiana statute, passed in 2005, requiring voters to present a
government-issued ID before they can cast a ballot. The law is aimed at alleged
fraudulent voting by unregistered or noncitizen voters. Republicans insist that these
voters pose a major problem, despite the fact that every systematic study of the
question has concluded that this kind of fraud--called "voter impersonation"--is
all but unknown in the United States right now. In fact, authorities in Indiana
could not point to a single case of voter impersonation in the state's history.

The more restrictive the law, the greater the likelihood that it will tip a
close election by turning away legal voters--mostly the poor, minorities and the
elderly. It's not a coincidence that these voters tend to vote Democratic. In
fact, the State of Indiana, in its filings with the Supreme Court, admits that
the litigation represents "politics by other means." This flippant attitude
toward the right to vote permeates the state's argument. Unfortunately, the
Supreme Court has shown signs that it shares the view that turning voters away
from the polls is constitutionally unimportant.

Now don't be thinking that all this will go away after we have a Democrat President, it won't. Greed is an incredibly powerful motivator to these people and they will do whatever it takes to have things their way. Hang in there, we'll fight them and we'll beat them.

Enjoy your Sunday, you know that Monday's going to pretty much suck.