Arliss Bunny's Blog

You have heard the jokes. Most of them are pretty much the same. They all include one of the fly-over states in the Midwest, one or more idiot rednecks and a cow. The premise is that the aforementioned idiots sneak up on a cow while it is standing, asleep, and tip it over. Which is even more stupid than it sounds because it isn’t true. It isn’t that it can’t be done. It’s not against the laws of physics after all, it’s just that it is highly unlikely in no small part because cows sleep lying down. Oh, and wide awake cows don’t take lightly to the idea of being tipped over. They are, in fact, pretty dead set against it…and they weigh in the neighborhood of a thousand pounds and have hooves. Your opposable thumbs and big brain aren’t all that useful when you are way out in a pasture somewhere with a truly pissed off cow. Just as a side note, rabbits consider watching cow tipping attempts to be the highlight of local entertainment. Tickets are sold. Popcorn is consumed.

Which brings me to the subject of my thoughts for the day. Will there ever come a tipping point for the hard swing to the right taken by the modern Republican Party? There has been a lot of talk and, conservatively, a bizillion blog posts (the highlight of which was mine, of course) on the subject of the inexhaustible efforts by various GOP candidates and holders of office to promote lies. I’m not talking about areas in which the GOP and the Democrats disagree. That is expected, necessary, even important. I would worry if we were all Kum-by-yah all the time. My concern is with actual lies. Lies which exist in direct opposition to facts which are not only proven but which have direct observable verification available for all to see. Is there a point at which the GOP will finally admit that the emperor has no clothes?

I am not worried about the lies as they have impacted the 2012 election. Frankly, I think that ship has already sailed. That cow has been tipped for approximately 48% of Americans. What worries me is all the ways these lies are seeping into so many other aspects of society. Teachers in many states are being required to teach both evolution and creationism. On one hand candidates speak about their love for teachers and the importance of seeing to it that the US return to leadership in math and science so that we will remain competitive and at the same time those teachers are being required to teach actual lies to students. Teachers are required to dishonor the name of science as a matter of curriculum. This isn’t the policy of a nation of leaders. It is an example of Republicans tipping cows at the cost of our student’s education.

Did you notice that during the recent Presidential debates, the subject of climate change never came up? This isn’t because it isn’t one of the most critical threats facing our planet today. It is because moderators (and President Obama) didn’t want to get into yet another round of fact vs. absolute denial of fact. It would have been a waste of precious network time and the short attention span of most Americans. So this threat, which may well be the very end of our society, remains a game of cow tipping for anyone who wants to hold office from the GOP. No amount of showing them facts or photos or the results from scientific missions sponsored by everyone from NASA to the Chinese will satisfy the GOP. The emperor has clothes no matter how much of his junk is just hanging out there for all to see. It would be funny except that it’s not. It’s really not.

It even applies to simple things. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Bill Maher as mad as he was this past week when he was directly quoting President Obama’s speech made the day following the attack in Libya. The GOP spinner just sat right there and kept denying that the word terror meant terror. This takes me right back to the audacity of President Clinton when he was trying to assert that it all depended upon the definition of the word “is.” NO IT DOESN’T. It didn’t then and it doesn’t now. President Obama stood in the rose garden of the White House on the day after four Americans were killed and spoke in grave and dark tones about the events of the previous day. No one on the planet without a political agenda doubted that Obama was considering all his options. God only knows what he was actually ordering behind closed doors. This is the President who has steadfastly maintained a terrorist kill list, approved drone strikes and, essentially, authorized an invasion of Pakistan in order to chase down those who pose a direct threat to the United States. Messing around with Barak Obama’s country has proven to be a terminal condition to more terrorists than we will ever know. But guess what, I was wrong before. More than God knows what President Obama has decided to do about Libya. I suspect that as I dictate this there are Deltas and SEALS training to do the will of this President. Which brings me back to the Bill Maher show. This Romney apologist was arguing that the President of the United States was implying in some way that the attack in Libya was not serious. I would argue that the day after an attack is not the time to be parsing the sentence construction of the President unless, of course, he is reading a children’s book to a class of kids and he wants to finish up before bothering to get involved.

Basing policy and action on lies is not just dangerous, it is catastrophic. Lies are why we invaded Iraq. It’s why the southern leg of a pipeline which will carry tar sands bitumen from Canada to US refineries and then on to ships in the Gulf, where the oil will set sail for China, is currently eating its way through expropriated ranch and farm land in Texas and Oklahoma. It’s why people who have been legitimately registered to vote for years will be denied their Constitutionally-given right to vote this November. And it is perhaps most notably one of the biggest conributors to why our economy crashed.

Because facts are facts.

• Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction and our intelligence services knew that.
• The Keystone XL Pipeline will not appreciably increase the energy independence of the United States.
• Voter fraud accounts for less than .00007% of votes cast.
• The regulation of the banking industry which was put in place after the Great Depression, known as Glass-Steagall, did prevent another depression in the intervening years and removing it did not account for ground-true economic growth.

And it’s getting worse. Just 35% of self-identified conservatives report that they have a “great deal of trust in science” according to a study done in 2010 and a paper reporting on it in the April 2012 issue of the American Sociological Review. These are the people who have made The Creation Museum one of the largest tourist draws in the state of Kentucky which, as I may have mentioned before, features dioramas of humans riding dinosaurs. In other words, these are the people who view The Flintstones as a documentary.

So at what point does too far become so far that even those who wanted to go There start to notice that There isn’t all it’s cracked up be? Democrats live in hope that just by presenting facts over and over and by those facts being proven again and again in the real world that eventually Republicans will join the reality parade. But that’s wrong because fear doesn’t work that way, greed doesn’t work that way and the lust for power doesn’t work that way. The GOP has too much invested in its mythos – and by invested I mean billions of dollars. Driving emotion over reason has proven to be an insanely successful tactic even though it is, well, umm…insane.

Which has started me wondering, at the beginning of all this I think that GOP puppet masters knew they were pitching a fable but lately they have really started to sound like even they believe their own crazy. It’s one thing for Karl Rove or the Koch brothers to convince the masses that cows sleep standing up but when I see them confidently striding out across the pasture toward a cow, it gives me more than pause, it gives me a cold chill. The thing about reality is that at some point she will make them her bitch and when she does a pissed off cow will be the least of our worries.