Parliament or Pulpit?

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America has ground to a halt because of the sacred fetus and the sanctity of the sperm.  Church and State are no longer separated as our government is held hostage by ranting Red State Ayatollah’s on a jihad against Planned Parenthood in their war against women.

Nevertheless the Press and politicians continue to refer to the looming government shutdown as the Tea Party’s steadfast stand against taxes, when it is clearly the same old rearguard action in the perennial culture war waged by the right wing of the Republican Party.

How can anyone pretend that this is a movement of economic populists galvanized by outrage over Wall Street’s plunder?  It should now be abundantly clear that this is what many suspected the movement was from the outset, an Astroturf insurgency managed and guided by seasoned Republican operative like Dick Armey and Karl Rove and financed by jaundiced oligarchs like the Koch brothers.

The Tea Party is nothing more than the far right repackaged and rebranded to look less like the wingnut fringe that it is, and more like the mom-and-apple pie center it is not.  In making their stand, and going to the mat to bring the house down, they surely have exposed their true agenda.

The Tea Party caucus scuttled the budget bill over their riders on restricting abortion and eliminating enforcement of clean air standards.  Those apparently are their priorities and they happen coincide exactly with the main obsessions of the religious right and the cherished goals the Koch brothers are paying their lobbyists to achieve.

A small group of anti-abortion zealots staged a sit-in in the corridor outside Senator Reid’s office yesterday spewing out righteous anger against the “socialist baby killer Harry Reid”.  How they managed to turn a mild-mannered Mormon into a monster reveals some of their psychological state, but a deeper diagnosis would suggest these pudgy middle-aged men are on a moral free ride on their road to Damascus.  They can enjoy the rapture of the righteous as they worship someone else’s fetus, without enduring the pain of choice facing the woman who must bear the child and support it alone, whether it has two heads or not.

Since the whole issue of Planned Parenthood is a phony because the Hyde Amendment is the law of the land and no Federal money can be used for abortions, we must assume this is either moral posturing or a reflection of a deeper hostility to women’s health and a woman’s right to plan their own parenthood.  

Venturing into more amateur psychiatry, these martyrs for the unborn might also be acting out of patriarchal desperation, rooted in a fear of women.  The same righteous indignation that led to hundreds of thousands of uppity women being burned at the stake in the good old days of theocracy when we practiced that old time religion that America’s mullahs want us to go back to.

The other diagnosis is more cynical and it has to do with the politics of distraction where Americans are encouraged to take their eye off the ball and not vote in their own interest to see that their taxes are properly spent, but to vote against their own interests on spurious moral grounds for religious hucksters who steal from the poor to give to the rich.

When you consider that the debt and deficits that the Republicans now warn us about in apocalyptic visions of crushing sovereign debt and international penury was run up by them, you have to give them kudos for brazen hypocrisy.  Fully one third of the nation’s debt from day one of the Republic up to the present was run up by their hero George W Bush, and one half was run up the combined misrule of junior and senior Bush and Reagan combined.

Conversely the only president in recent memory who balanced the budget, paid down the debt, got rid of the deficit and left the country in surplus was the Republican’s nemesis who they tried to shame and shun as a sinner because of his unbiblical activities in allowing his seed to fall on fallow ground, that immoral libertine Bill Clinton.

Yes God is great and man is weak.  But where does that leave women?  Are they to be loved or feared?  Go figure.