Do you have to hate everything in order to be a new Republican?
You've got to hate women: the Republicans in Congress refused to accept any budget that funds the health and social services that millions of American women need just to eke out an existence. These are the kind of people who came up with "barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen."
You've got to hate animals: my Republican congressman wants to kill all the wolves in the southwest and other Republicans want to gut wildlife protections and endangered species laws. These are the kind of people who would shoot Bambi between the eyes, feed poison to Lassie, put Flicka in hobbles and filet Flipper.
You've got to really hate poor people. In a land where the richest one per cent of the are getting richer still by leaps and bounds, while the rest of fall further and further behind, the Republicans want to cut funding for programs to help the poor. When Barry Goldwater, the godfather of neoconservatism, was running for President, Bill Mauldin drew a cartoon depicting an impoverished woman in tattered clothes on a church step, with B.G. towering over her saying, "Quit whining. Go out and inherit a department store."
You've got to really hate the planet we inhabit. Let the filthy rich mining companies turn Grand Canyon and Arches National Parks into slag-filled swamps of bile and rot. Drill, baby, drill! Put the tree-huggers in concentration camps and make them drink from the streams befouled by mountain-top removal. These people never met a landscape they didn't want to defile.
You've got to really hate good health. The Republicans want to destroy the Environmental Protection Agency. Never mind that it prevents the polluters from causing cancer, diabetes, asthma and emphysema in millions of Americans. It's a damned nuisance for industries with billion dollar profits that don't pay a nickel of income tax. These are the kind of people who would make matchsticks out of Tiny Tim's crutch.
You've got to really hate the old and the sick. Republicans want to end Medicare and Medicaid as we know it. They detest what they call Obamacare. They think primitive tribes had it right: when you're old, infirm or sick, you should just crawl off into the wilderness and die. Except that if the Republicans had their way, there'd be no wilderness to crawl off into.
You've got to hate real people and love corporations. (See Supreme Court decision in Citizens United.) No wonder women are beginning to incorporate their uteruses: "It's a person, not a choice."
You've got to really hate liberals. Liberals, by definition, are open to new opinions and progress; they favor individual liberty in political and social affairs. Next thing you know they'll be wanting to inflict stuff like habeas corpus on us.
You've got to really hate working people. Republicans have already put 27 million Americans out of work, and now they're zeroing in on the unions that protect workers' rights. A variation on the idea in the Mauldin cartoon. These are the kind of people who would strangle the canary in the coal mine because it costs too much for birdseed.
But Republicans still love motherhood and apple pie. Unless, of course, mother is a liberal. Then, well, send her out into the wilderness!
"Don't tell Momma I'm a journalist; say I play the piano in a whorehouse."
What are we humans to do with ourselves after hearing how half of us, give or take, are "the kind of people who would make matchsticks out of Tiny Tim's crutch"? You'd think that half would run and hide their heads in shame, but only if you'd never before sought to engage them in real argument. But why argue if you can simply condemn whatever you wish to destroy? Why debate when you've got balls-out denunciation in your kit-bag and it gets the job done? And should they ask if the Pianist doesn't rely on condemnation as much as you say we do, tell them no. No, because while he states the facts more felicitously but every bit as harshly, they remain facts. In other words, gang, the man is just telling us the truth.
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