Friday, October 3, 2014

The Republican Sickness


There's a sickness in this country that's not biological but rather pathological.  Jon Stewart on the despicable Republican politicization of Ebola and ISIS:



Charles Pierce also has some choice words:
... What we are seeing now, promulgated by a conservative bubble machine that has built a self-sustaining universe around itself, is political opportunism married to an active campaign of disinformation. This is a terrible thing. The people making a profit out of it are people who are too lazy to mug old ladies or swindle the blind. The people making a profit out of it are people without consciences, people who are as free of patriotism as they are free of the inconveniences of having a soul. These are dangerous people, and it's far past time for the honorable people in my profession to stop treating them like the worthless hacks they are. They are no longer cute. They are no longer funny. They are no longer the respectable "other side" of some fanciful imaginary political debate. They are dangerous propagandists. They are peddling poisonous lies and putting people's lives at risk. Every journalist who treats them as anything else, and every politician who treats them as anything else, are actively abetting evil.  [snip]
The country simply cannot go on this way, with one of our two political parties completely insane, and with a counter-cultural universe that claims the right to promulgate its own science as equal to the science produced by actual scientists, and with this dangerous lunacy treated as legitimate by powerful people who ought to know better. As I once wrote, it doesn't matter how many people vote for the anti-gravity party, you still can't flap your arms and fly to the moon. A dangerous disease is not a matter of debate. Your profitable fantasy and the reality of the disease do not deserve an equal place in the discussion of what we as a society will do about the disease. The response is going to have to be precise and empirical. It is going to have to be impatient with cant, and immune to the delusions on which demented ideology feeds.
Yet, here we are a month before an election that could easily switch the Senate of the United States to this party of hypocrites, cynics, morons, diseased minds and soulless hacks.  Now that's something to be feared.