A Partisan's Journal

A Partisan's Journal

Photo by Lucas Sankey on Unsplash

Saturday 10 March 2012

     I awoke one morning, simultaneously bored and irritated with the Republican Party's pandering to right-wing nut jobs. With each election cycle, the right dumbs down it message, offering ever more simplistic solutions to increasingly complex issues. I've come to see the anti-science, anti-intellectual disregard for reasoned thinking in a discussion cannot be countered with intelligent and rational debate. Partisan extremists understand only the shout-down and the Big Lie.
     My concern with right-wing political posturing lies in the use of the Big Lie and its heavy-handed use in the propaganda machine. Pseudo-historian David Barton represents the use of propaganda devices that would have won for him the admiration of the rulers of wartime Germany and cold war Russia. His outrageous claims--designed for the consumption of the gullible--about the motivations of the Founding Fathers reveal themselves on inspection as nothing more than fabricated and self-serving "facts." As a result, he has achieved stardom among the True Believers and those crippled by an inability to think critically or perceive the immorality of the use of made-up facts as a rhetorical tool.

Tuesday 13 March 2012

    Our ancestors and Founding Fathers have placed on us a sacred trust: to give an honest and fair appraisal of their lives and times. Any attempt to distort those lives in order to promote an ideology amounts to deception--a lie. It invalidates the lives of those who lived during the times the pseudo-historian alters for his benefit. If, at times, egalitarianism or authoritarianism, mass hysteria or noble pursuits ruled the zeitgeist, then let us see it for what it was, rather than what we wish it.
     People who would kill our history and those who came before us by replacing them with imaginary figures are too often the same people who tell us the lives of the unborn are sacred. They would have us believe that a zygote has a greater right to life than our ancestors. Their concern for life does not extend to those who have passed.

Thursday 15 March 2012
     A group of intellectually impaired Democratic Party members in Florida have decided it would be a good idea to fly an American flag emblazoned with the likeness of President Obama over their party headquarters. Did these geniuses not see that their action as playing into the right-wing propaganda machine? Could they not see that Americans, in general, worship symbols--graven images -- that they substitute for reality?
     The dufus who approved of the use of the flag in such manner is guilty of the crime of supreme stupidity. While all of us possess the right to do what we will with an object, as long as it does not harm others or endanger public safety, we might also regret the lack of rational thought in the people behind the action. If the Florida Democrats paid for the altered flag with their own money, it is their property to dispose of at their will and whim. We can forgive the method by which a group of partisans chooses to exercise their freedom of speech, but we can loathe their self-destructive intellect.