Ann Davidow

How tortured our belief systems have become. Things that seemed immutable in the past have been warped into unrecognizable forms whether the topic is religion, the economy, or our political environment. Agencies we always thought would protect us are often fronts that don’t speak to the interests of regular folks. And by the time they’ve been proselytized and pulled in a dozen different directions the American people end up clueless about who’s telling the truth and who’s just jerking them around.

How is it that Christianity is the fallback position for many of our politicians and pundits when all else, and most especially logic, fails? Who knew that Jesus was a free-marketer or that God would always bless America no matter what course our leaders undertook? And how did “The Family” on C Street come to be regarded as a religious, tax-free institution where prayer meetings and bible readings by right-wing lodgers could hide ethical and moral lapses from view?

What’s to be done about the descent into the world of non-sequiturs in which so many on the right and some on the left engage? The amount of time dissecting every issue great and small only diminishes the ability of most people to make sense of their world and the politics that surround it.

One of the more outrageously eye-popping discussions occurred between Bill O’Reilly and Brit Hume of Fox News during which they skewered the NY Times for being biased.

In what bizarre universe does Dancing with the Stars qualify as “reality TV” or any other definition of reality? And how did a disgraced former congressman end up cavorting in outlandish outfits as a participant in such a travesty? Indicted for illegal campaign-finance dealings, Tom DeLay apparently couldn’t stand being out of the limelight despite having dishonored his time in office.

But the antics of dubious stars are something way far apart from the reality average folks face in lives fraught with anxiety about health care, jobs, and fears about our foreign engagements. The president is being pressured now to make decisions about Afghanistan by the very people who were so deadly wrong in the past.

What began as anger and outrage at the excesses of radicals in government and right-wing media has become something more deeply distressing. It isn’t just that mean-spirited, low-minded rubbish is so widely disseminated. More disturbing is the ignorance that infuses so much of the rhetoric and the degree of public acceptance that attaches to it.

Despite real issues, real problems and their impact on real people, the noise from the opposition crowds out rational discourse. It’s like trying to listen for discernible speech in a windstorm. If it’s health care, abortion is wedged into the debate and “abstinence only” programs in school are promoted by conservatives who want something to write home about.

As congressional fulminations rage on and Republicans, sensing a window of opportunity, throw every conceivable roadblock in the path of palliative health-care legislation and beat the drum of the party’s agenda the public is left in a state of confusion anger and a weariness with the workings of government in general.

Sadly our political process often confounds efforts to get to the crux of what ails us. Most ordinary Americans aren’t clear about who’s really pulling the strings or how to influence whoever it is. They just know something isn’t quite right. Time after time narrow causes and small-minded politicians influence decisions that affect great swaths of the country.

At some point during the trickle-down years portions of the electorate, preoccupied with abortion and gay marriage, seemingly failed to grasp the fact of stagnant wages and the huge transfer of wealth and control of capital that had become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. People who often benefit least under a corporate umbrella that provides enormous advantages to some at their expense are the loudest proponents of a system that often shuts them out. Duped into believing that "Socialism" is the devil’s work, they are oblivious to the devil on their doorstep.

There is a level of delusion that is hard to fathom and a shamelessness on the part of the politicians who represent the deluded that is even harder to understand. Who can forget George Bush declaring, at the beginning of his second term, that he had garnered political capital and intended to spend it. Perhaps just not losing the popular vote was, for him, a sign of electoral significance, his political capital a myth in the making.

Still, many Republicans point with pride to the prescription-drug benefit, passed during his presidency without any financing and accompanied by giveaways to big pharma to induce their participation. Conservative grousing now about health-care reform is an egregious example of hypocrisy-hampering efforts to upgrade programs and foster less virulent behavior on the part of insurers. It probably shouldn’t surprise anyone that formularies in Part D plans didn’t always survive, so that people who signed up because a specific medication was covered found in short order that, too bad, it no longer qualified.

It has become increasingly obvious that our country is intellectually adrift. Debates about health care, national security and a myriad of social issues suggest that instead of seeking enlightenment people often embrace instead crackpot notions of patriotism and irrational fears about an over-intrusive government.

The Senate’s health-care deliberations are a gut-wrenching display of that chamber’s “collegial” atmosphere. Remarks that begin with “my good friend” are tributes those outside the beltway find hard to swallow without gagging. It’s as if something resembling a beauty pageant were in effect with senators vying for the congeniality award -- a testament to the superficial nature of our political dialogue that may help to explain Sarah Palin’s success in some quarters.

When debates about everything from health care to the economy are short on logic and driven in the main by ideological passion, public opinion is persuaded not just by real concerns but by less admirable, more narrowly conceived agendas.

Conservatives like to say that progressives always cry racism when anyone disagrees with the president, a manufactured talking point that is most certainly not the case. But when conservative mouthpiece Rush Limbaugh says that a white kid getting beaten up by blacks on a school bus is a product of “Obama’s America” and fails to mention that a black student intervened to restrain the attackers, his racist slant derives a kind of legitimacy among his listeners and beyond. Outrage over the incident was immediate as media coverage and You Tube converged with Limbaugh to inflame the passions of people just waiting to vent their latent racial angst over a convenient cause.

However, other aspects of the conservative mindset contort an already convoluted socio-political environment for which simple black-white explanations are insufficient. Star Parker, founder and president of the “Coalition on Urban Renewal and Education,” appeared on Saturday’s Washington Journal defined as much by her conservative, “values voters” credentials as her African-American heritage.

Hers are boilerplate conservative views - - for example, that markets correct themselves, and “market-based not government-based solutions” are best for the country. She’d be on the same page as former Fed Chairman Greenspan if he hadn’t recently revisited his thinking about free-wheeling markets. She made all the familiar Republican arguments about government getting between you and your doctor, defended Joe Wilson for addressing the issue of illegals and health care and characterized the current administration as “hard left.” She claims 30% of the black community are evangelical conservatives and decried the country’s “secular” rather than “biblical world” rejecting “homosexual marriage” and abortion as do most evangelicals of whatever color. And she suggested that attempts to equalize in some measure the distribution of wealth were tantamount to disobeying the tenth commandment not to covet what others have.

What is most disturbing about all this is the notion that religion should inform government, a contention that challenges the principles of our Constitution. But religion is very much at the heart of conservative principles, whether black or white, - - an abstraction that disrupts productive debate about education, the economy and health care. But if religious values are to infuse our daily lives it should be recalled that Christian doctrine includes caring for ‘the least of them’ as one of its most basic canons. Setting aside the habit of digging up a particular biblical passage that supports some arcane pre-conceived belief, if health-care and reasonable economic protections are not available to everyone, the term ‘values’ becomes all but meaningless.

On the one hand providing medical coverage for the uninsured may be a worthy pursuit; however, the under-insured suffer many of the same disadvantages as people who have no insurance at all. High deductibles and exclusions make for a troubled health-care landscape. Clearly, just adding a raft of new clients to the rolls of insurance companies would represent a bonanza for them without provisions that would limit the cost of premiums and co-pays and meaningful options to encourage competition. As Bob Herbert, The NY Times, 9/18/09, pointed out about the recently released Baucus plan, “The insurance industry of course, loves the Baucus plan. Need we say more?”

There are valid political differences among the president’s supporters and critics, but when race, religion and ideology intermingle, a tangle of recriminations keeps everyone confused and off-point. On Sunday The Wall Street Journal’s Steven Moore looked into the camera on Washington Journal and said he’d never seen a gun or a swastika sign at any event he attended, hmm. He also said the president should ‘stop polarizing the country and govern from the middle.’ Apparently for him, partisan rancor is really Obama’s fault. But the fact is Conservatives want to keep the president from realizing any of his goals and to pull the country back to yesterday. If polarizing the electorate and massaging the truth is what it takes to achieve that end their approach is full steam ahead.

It’s time to make the case for common sense, and work to derail the seduction of the electorate by talk-show crazies and pundits who make a mockery of free speech.

It wasn’t like Woodstock. There was no mud, everyone was fully clothed and there were no drugs except possibly an occasional dose of Viagra or Geritol. And it wasn’t like the anti-war protests or civil rights marches with their clear ideological messages.

No the FreedomWorks, Teabag crowd in Washington on Saturday was nothing like those other gatherings. It was a display of discontent by people who had complaints about anything and everything, who ranted about imaginary socialistic programs not to be confused with the real ones from which they derive special benefits. It was an event for malcontents who took their over-heated, Glenn-Beck-induced rhetoric to the national stage where its incoherent message could reach the zenith of unfocused, scatter-shot rage.

Perhaps in its quivering excitement, the crowd missed FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe’s observation that something would have to be done about entitlements like Social Security and Medicare. He wasn’t specific so his words just hung out there without attracting a lot of attention as attendees reveled in their shining moment. There were no cries of “hands off my Medicare” when he spoke, and probably not much thought given to what he actually meant. These were not folks given to serious reflection about the meaning of words that aren’t wrapped in a slogan.

Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, was introduced as “a special treat” and greeted with cheers when he said “welcome to Waterloo,” his goal of defeating both health-care reform and the president clearly in mind. Republicans Eric Cantor of Virginia and Mike Pence of Indiana also spoke - - Pence especially beguiled by the rally’s theme, ‘fighting for freedom,’ as if we had suddenly become enslaved when President Obama took office.  No-one it seems took a moment to consider that without the freedom to dissent, these insufferably dull-witted politicians wouldn’t have been able to appear and speak such drivel. They should have been ashamed, but lest we forget - - they have no shame.

One of the more curious speakers was from  “The Ayn Rand Association” who told attendees emphatically that it's “your life, you’re not your brother’s keeper”, that neighbor who didn’t save and got himself into financial trouble. But if most of the audience had even a clue about Rand's writings they might have recoiled at the terrorist act of her hero in The Fountainhead who blew up buildings that didn’t conform to his original design. Oh well, Rand was just making some kind of point, sort of like Ann Coulter who said she regretted that Timothy McVeigh didn’t target the NY Times building in NYC instead of the one in Oklahoma. Fiddle de Dee.

The weekend’s message was less focused than we had been led to believe. But it wasn’t just about health-care reform and government spending. More disturbing, subterranean currents were in play. With respect to diversity, one would have had to comb the outermost reaches of the assembled throng to find a person of color. The most visible black faces were a woman who shouted from the podium “Charlie Rangel, pay your taxes” and an entertainer who intoned a bastardized version of “New York, New York” where Frank Sinatra’s rendition is played when the NY Yankees win at home.

Scary people like a woman saying “the Muslims are taking over” and others holding a giant homemade cross emblazoned with a religious message of some sort provided insight into the personal fears and biases characterized by a crowd of overwhelmingly white demonstrators, eerily reminiscent of angry white crowds from the past. For some the only things that seemed to be missing were pointy hoods and long white robes.

Tea-baggers and Republicans in general are unlikely to support health-care-reform of any sort. Newly minted hero Joe Wilson, for example, insists that undocumented workers could receive taxpayer-financed health care unless enforcement measures are included in proposed legislation, procedures that would undoubtedly target brown people - - an image that stirs up memories of Justice Rehnquist’s forays into Arizona polling places where he harassed black voters, ostensibly to make sure they were properly registered.

Such are the troubling perceptions that linger in the wake of last weekend’s event. Oddly, Republicans are ‘astonished’ that charges of racism have surfaced in response to some of the behaviors in Congress and on the part of protesters. But members of a party that long embraced a “southern strategy” as a major component of its political modus operandi, shouldn’t be all that surprised that supporters carry on the tradition.

Correction: Remarks by the speaker from the Ayn Rand Association were incorrectly attributed to Andrew Langer of the Institute for Liberty previously. The reference to Mr. Langer has been removed with apologies. 

There are big lies, small lies and false premises that take on a life of their own. There are inanities, stupidities and gross misrepresentations propagated by a host of single-minded activists hiding behind what they claim are well-intentioned principles. No doubt there is much snickering on the sidelines at the ability of supporters to capture headlines and foster the pretense of a rational thought process. They have all come together in recent days to create a disruptive flying wedge into whatever is left of the country’s problem-solving apparatus, many of them marching on Washington under the auspices of  “Freedom Works” and various offshoots of the “Tea-Bag” movement.

President Matt Kibbe of “Freedom Works” claims the organization has always been active promoting fiscal responsibility and monitoring government spending, but it was only when it began attacking President Obama that it received significant attention. After less than a year in office, the new administration has been targeted by the group for incessant criticism and tumultuous demonstrations. One can only wonder why that is so. An amalgam of disparate but similarly motivated factions insists theirs is a spontaneous grass-roots operation enabling rank-and-file citizens to articulate their anxiety about the economy and other issues. The notion that great swaths of the public would, on their own, suddenly grow a concern about the national debt, question the president’s place of birth or accuse him of socialist tendencies is absurd. Obviously they had to be encouraged, some might even say incited, to ‘grab a pitchfork’ and take to the streets. Ironically, at a time when there are so many good sources of information available to so many people we are in danger of entering an age of dis-enlightenment.

A formidable group of right-wing attack dogs has assembled to advocate and spread their vitriolic wares. “Freedom Works” chairman, Dick Armey, always a ready right-wing voice helps the organization behind the scenes most of the time while Glenn Beck weeps and cajoles his audience into imbibing his political brew no matter how screwy it is. Sean Hannity and Michelle Malkin enjoy convivial chats during which Malkin hawks her book that mysteriously rose to number one on the NY Times best-seller list as soon as it became available. Nightly TV plugs for one’s book must help along with perhaps a boost from buyers-in-bulk on the right.

What is most alarming and distressing about these folks, however, is the amount of false information they can transmit in a short period of time. As Keith Olbermann showed so pointedly with videos, Sean Hannity got the president’s remarks in his health-care address completely backwards. If Hannity actually watched the speech he either misheard or deliberately misstated the president’s words. What Obama said was that insurance executives weren’t bad people, they were simply trying to run profitable businesses. But a choleric Hannity claimed that the president had said insurance executives were bad people. Fox may be reliably unreliable, but Hannity was even more outrageously wrong than usual that night.

And no matter how many times it is emphasized in print and verbally that illegals will not receive medical benefits, and that government will not make decisions about doctors and procedures if health-reform legislation is enacted, Republicans keep repeating that the opposite is true. So when the president made the point about illegals in his speech South Carolina representative Joe Wilson felt comfortable shouting “you lie”, and another ill-informed, factually-impoverished, right-wing hero was born. Will a third Joe appear to form a triumvirate with the congressman and the plumber? The world awaits.

It was sad to see the president treated so disrespectfully and to have it proven once again that there are people in this country content to make heroes out of jerks, and attempt any diversion to achieve political dominance. The only good thing about the incident is that perhaps ordinary, decent Americans will reject the blatant, mean-spirited partisanship that has been dominating the national debate.

Matt Kibbe threatens that members of Congress will be held accountable for the way they vote on health care and environmental issues. It may also be the case that voters will not take kindly to those who would club them into submission with rancorous distortions that do nothing to change their lives and for whom disruption has become an end in itself.