Oooh, nuance!

This weekend, as I was watching the TeeVee, I was struck by how many happy shiny people are SO EXCITED about Veterans' Day. Why? Sales, baby! Nothing like Veterans' Day to bring out the bargains, right, Consumer - er, Citizen?

I wonder if this guy is looking forward to shopping at Macy's today?



Support the troops. Bring them home.

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about the insidious replacement of facts with faith in all areas of life, but most harmfully, in politics.

How many times has President Bush said he prays for this or that group of people? Yet our compliant press never questions him further after he invokes his "faith." Journamalists and pundits even ask politicians if they pray for the troops. What difference could that possibly make? Are the troops less dead because Nancy Pelosi or anyone else prays for them? Are their wounds less grevious, are their hearts less broken, are their families less destroyed? And what about the millions of dead, wounded and displaced Iraqis? Have prayers helped them?

But no one seems to ask those questions - they're taboo in our current faith-based society. Apparently, professing faith is a magic wand that waves all responsibility away and stops all brains from processing. It's amazing how none of the traditional media point out that some of the world's most nefarious politicians claimed to have faith. Hitler comes to mind - not only was he possessed of a terrifying faith in the German myth of the Superman, but he was also insistent on establishing Christianity as the One True Religion.

I am so proud of the founders of our country for putting a firm separation between church and State into the Constitution. But thanks to the far-right Fascist movement that has taken over our discourse, we now need a separation of faith and state.

We have gone so far backwards in our thinking that we have "faith-based initiatives" instead of programs that actually help people with real problems. Prayer can never replace governmental action and responsibility: rebuilding levees and cities destroyed by natural disasters; caring for our sick, our weak and our poor; creating jobs; rebuilding infrastructure; planning for the future of our planet; and on and on.

These feelings are one reason why I am so gung-ho on Al Gore, who wrote a book dealing with this subject. I would like a President who believes in science and facts, not prayer, as solutions to real-world problems.

Would that be so much to ask?

I just had to post some good news today. Hooray, Governor Spitzer!

The state has turned down millions of dollars in federal funding for abstinence-only sex-education programs.

State Health Commissioner Richard Daines calls the Bush administration's abstinence-only Program a failed health care policy that's based on ideology and not science.

And thank you, Commissioner Daines, for that clear statement.

Let me take his statement one step further: The Bush Administration and its Fascist enablers and true believers don't want public policy, because really, they don't believe in the public. They believe in cartoon representations of the public, all of them unflattering.

Let me give an example of what I'm talking about. Bill O'Reilly, one of the most reliable Bush apologists on the planet, made the following incredible statement on the O'Reilly Factor:

Discussing his recent dinner with Rev. Al Sharpton at the Harlem restaurant Sylvia's, Bill O'Reilly reported that he "couldn't get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia's restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it's run by blacks, primarily black patronship."

I would love to hear Bill O'Really explain what he thought was going to happen at Sylvia's. Body-armor-clad waiters? Scantily-dressed women offering to, um, soap up his loofah? An OTB parlor in the back?

Sadly, ol' Bill knows his audience. They have no interest in educating themselves about other aspects of American life. All you have to do is go on one of the right-wing websites like FreeRepublic.com and look at the comments. You'll see nothing but stereotypes masquerading as cultural understanding. "Welfare queens," "Islamofascists," "illegal immigrants" (used to cover all brown people, legal or not), "faggots," "bitches," etc. etc. etc. A cartoon is so much easier to demonize than a real person, isn't it?

Well, Governor Spitzer has decided that real people need real sex education. Instead of punishing children and teenagers for their lack of knowledge about health issues, he's going to inform and educate them instead.

What a difference a Democrat makes...

I'm beginning to think that in order to be on the teevee these days, you have to have your brain surgically removed and a video of "The Teletubbies" put in its place.

What kind of a person doesn't know that the world is round these days? Well, that would be Sherri Shepherd, guesting on the controversial gabfest The View.

First, the Divine Miss Shepherd stated she did not believe in evolution (as pregnant conservabot Elizabeth Hasselbeck, sure to give birth to a monkey if there's any justice, looked on approvingly.) When Whoopi Goldberg sardonically asked her if the world was flat, here was her response:

"I don't know. I never thought about it Whoopi. Is the world flat? I never thought about ...I...I...No....But I'll tell you what I have thought about. How I'm going to feed my child, take care of my family. 'Is the world flat' has not been an important thing to me."

The worst thing about this, to me, is the arrogance and smugness of her response. Why, she's too busy putting food on her family to know whether the world is flat! When you're cooking barefoot and pumping out the Jeebus-followers, there's no damn time to think!

That preening, jiggling, moronic specimen is proud of her ignorance. My question to La Shepherd is this:

What's the point of having children if all you teach them...is how to be stupid, like Mommy?

In our society, we seem to have a serious problem with blame.

Modern conservatives have a worldview that posits a cruel, Social Darwinist society, in which all people, no matter their circumstances, should somehow "know better" than to let bad things happen to them. Sick people shouldn't get sick if they have no health insurance. Poor children shouldn't get hungry if they have no food. Uneducated people shouldn't fall for credit scams. Black people shouldn't let themselves be purged from the voter rolls by Jeb Bush. Michael J. Fox shouldn't allow himself to shake from Parkinson's while promoting stem cell research.

Conservatives tend to smugly blame the victims in the cases above. But conservatives are in the minority, right? We all know that in most cases, sick people cannot prevent themselves from being sick; poor children can do nothing about their poverty; uneducated people are uneducated because of system failures; and the disenfranchised cannot prevent political leaders from disenfranchising them. Those people who really can help themselves, but become victims anyway, are the exception, rather than the rule. As enlightened liberals, we get that.

Or do we?

I fear that blaming the victim has infiltrated our political discourse, left, right and in between, to an alarming degree. For six years, prior to my current incarnation as zzzzzzzzzzzlist bloggista, I yelled at my friends and family for blaming the Democrats for the Bushian takeover of our government. "Why don't you blame the Republicans? They're the ones who are doing everything! They have control of the committees! They change signed bills in the middle of the night! They don't even let the Democrats into the room when they create legislation! Hastert doesn't even bring a bill forward unless it has 'majority of the majority' approval, which means it has no chance of being filibustered!" (Yes, I'm a pain in the butt. Are you surprised?)

No, no, it was the Democrats who were at fault here. Never mind that demonizing the victims is a conservative meme that liberals should be ashamed to promote - bloggers such as Bartcop hammered the Democrats daily for being out of power and unable to prevent the strong-arm tactics of the Republic majority.

Well, now the Democrats are in power, but BARELY. The Senate majority is razor-thin. It counts, of course, because actual humans are now in charge of the committees. (Substituting Patrick Leahy for Arlen Specter as Chair of the Judiciary Committee has had some excellent consequences, for example.) But in terms of getting 67 votes - enough to stop the Deciderer's newly-discovered veto pen - well, let's just say it's a wee bit challenging to get 16 Republics to vote with Democrats on the color of the sky, much less something controversial, such as cutting funding for the Iraq war, or impeaching Bush, Cheney and/or Gonzales. And of course, Bush has had six oversight-free years to completely infiltrate every area of government with his political hacks and flunkies, not to mention the almost-fatal damage his regime has done to our country's laws and institutions.

Yet after barely six months of power, liberals are screaming even louder about how worthless the Democrats are. Why haven't they fixed everything Bush has done by now? Why haven't they ended the war, impeached Bush/Cheney/Gonzales, restored the Constitution, etc. etc. etc.? NEVER do we blame the Republics for blocking Democratic efforts at every turn. No, we take the actions of the minority of Democrats (such as the ones who voted for the FISA bill) and sweepingly apply blame for their actions to the leadership. Well, isn't it possible that the leadership was misled by those Democrats? If so, why can't we blame those Democrats?

Even worse, to me, is how many liberals refuse to give the Democrats credit for anything they are actually accomplishing. So often in the blogosphere (comments on Huffington Post and Eschaton, for example), I hear that the Pat Tillman hearings, the Justice Department hearings, and the NSA wiretapping hearings are so much political theatre. Oh really? Then why have these hearings led to so many resignations? The mighty are falling. The DOJ is in a total shambles, with Gonzales barely holding on. (Another Gonzales protégé resigned today, by the way.) DeLay, Libby, Abramoff, Hastert, Rove, Rumsfeld - all gone or going, long before the President stumbles out of office.

I'm tired of hearing conservative memes falling from liberal lips. It really sickens me that people cannot tell the difference between the criminals and the victims of their crimes. Am I saying that all Democrats are perfect and all Republics are evil? No - although at this point, Republics who hold any political office at all should not be trusted in any way, shape or form. But can we at least blame the right people when something goes wrong? Can we stop repeating Rove's lies as gospel? And can we finally, FINALLY get some nuance back into our political discourse?