Shame On You!

A new month beckons and with it another opportunity to shine the light of day into the squalor lives of individuals who so richly deserve the accolades accorded them. Certainly seems like a long way to travel to heap a ton of hurt onto the narrow shoulders of the despicable, but never let it be said I haven’t been guilty of occasionally laying it on a bit thick.

As in past months, the honorees went above and beyond to earn our collective wrath, but seldom as a Shame on You monthly awards segment highlighted such loathsome behavior. It was difficult picking a winner, so I’ll just let the chips fall where they may and allow God to sort it out later.

Bunning On Empty.

First up, Republican Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky, aka Pinhead. Like his fellow conservative colleague Richard Shelby, one of last month’s winners by the way who put a blanket hold on Obama Administration nominees, Bunning seems determined to let ideology rule out over common sense. He single-handedly held up a 30-day extension of unemployment and health benefits to millions of Americans, and for reasons only Bunning seems to have gotten.

Bunning says he held up the extension because the cost of it, approximately $10 billion, was not offset by cuts to other programs. In a nutshell – no pun intended – if the Senate is going to pride itself on passing "pay-as-you-go" legislation then Bunning has taken it upon himself to expose any approved unfunded spending, no matter who it hurts. Ironically, it was Bunning who opposed the very same “pay-as-you-go” legislation he now claims to be championing.

When confronted by Senate Democrats on the floor, Bunning had the nerve to complain that he was being made a victim for his stance and that he was missing a college basketball game; a game by the way he could’ve TiVo’d. Later he responded to one last plea for those affected by saying, “Tough shit. I’m trying to make a point to the people of the United States.”

Point taken, I guess.

While we have seen many examples of broken politics in Washington, this latest stunt beats them all. Bunning’s insensitivity underscores just how depraved some can get in their pursuit of partisan politics. While Bunning isn’t alone in his sentiment – Arizona Senator Jon Kyl went so far as to call it a “disincentive” to be on unemployment – he has unfortunately become the poster boy for the GOP as it attempts to obstruct just about any Democratic legislation coming down the pike. But this wasn’t some political nomination that was being held up for its own sake; this was a vital piece of legislation aimed at helping people caught in the worst recession in decades. Apparently the Party of No is now the Party of No Empathy and Bunning is its mascot.

It wasn’t until Senate Democrats called his bluff and were actually going to require him to personally filibuster the legislation, that Bunning backed down and withdrew his objection; but not before getting them to agree that one of his amendments get an up and down vote in the Senate. In what can only be described as poetic justice the amendment was defeated.

Congratulations pinhead, you’ve earned your stripes.

Fear and Loathing in America.
Next up we have “The Insane Right.” When Andrew Joseph Stack decided to do his own imitation of a kamikaze pilot and fly his plane into the I.R.S. building in Austin, Texas on February 18, he wasn’t just your typical lunatic out on a murder spree, he had a specific mission in mind: to take his wrath out on as many government officials as possible. His deep-seated hatred and contempt for anything connected to the government had been stewing for months and finally, like a volcano, could no longer be contained.

But Stack himself is not the principal cause for concern here. That there exists in this world people with severe emotional problems is a simple fact of life. The real alarm lies behind the impetus that is driving such people.

There is no polite and delicate way to put this. Stack and others of his ilk belong to a group, which is growing in numbers and fervor like a rash spreading throughout the body. For months now I have been writing about the lunatic right-wing fanatics, who are being co-opted by the Republican Party for the sake of cheap politics, and are acting like their own version of the Nazi Storm Troopers in Germany. I have warned about this malignancy spreading throughout the country. In Andrew Stack they finally have their martyr. I fear he will not be the last.

Frank Rich in a New York Times op-ed piece titled, “The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged,” has correctly and appropriately drawn a comparison between the current Tea Party movement and the domestic terrorism of Timothy McVeigh.

“Anyone who was cognizant during the McVeigh firestorm would recognize the old warning signs re-emerging from the mists of history. The Patriot movement. "The New World Order," with its shadowy conspiracies hatched by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. Sandpoint, Idaho. White supremacists. Militias.”

The pattern is repeating itself, only now it is far more intense and toxic. What had been born out of Dick Armey’s Freedom Works as an organized campaign against Obama and Congressional Democrats over healthcare reform, has morphed into yet another full-blown firestorm that is completely contemptuous of establishment politics and has set its sites on all of Washington. Like Frankenstein’s monster turning on its creator, the Tea Party movement has taken on a life of its own and is beholden to no one except its own insular interests and agenda. Its ideology is one in which paranoia and delusion are given priority over even a modicum of reason. As Rich adroitly pointed out, “That ideology plays to the lock-and-load nutcases out there, not just to the peaceable (if riled up) populist conservatives also attracted to Tea Partyism. This ideology is far more troubling than the boilerplate corporate conservatism and knee-jerk obstructionism of the anti-Obama G.O.P. Congressional minority.”

Gone is the intellectualism of William F. Buckley, replaced by the anti-elitism of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin: the new heroes of the new counter-conservatism. Their followers run the gamut from conspiracy theorists to anti-government zealots to Oath Keepers to John Birch Society Brown Shirts, sprinkled with just a tad of the usual disillusioned bystanders who are still suspicious of Washington, but who haven’t gone completely off the deep end yet.

Last August I wrote in a blog about Fascism, “Pathological dissent often reads like freedom of expression until it is turned up a few notches and it is given voice in the form of riotous hatred. In such instances, the ignorant and frightened are often manipulated and mobilized to act in manners they normally would not be prone to do.” In the Tea Party movement we have the perfect example of freedom run amuck. America’s version of the Nazi Storm Troopers: racist, myopic, and contemptuous of law and order. It is the reincarnation of the mob that turned on Brutus in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” only in this case it is the United States that is at peril from such mindless individuals.

Rational people often have a blind side when it comes to such groups. They see erratic and unbalanced behavior and dismiss it as being largely innocuous. The analogy they draw is that of a spoiled brat or an undisciplined child acting up and looking to draw attention to itself. It is best not to acknowledge the behavior lest you condone it. They see the Tea Partiers as a fleeting movement that will die of its own weight eventually. The problem with that thinking is that this movement is hardly shrinking; in deed it is growing by leaps and bounds. They are well organized, and many of them are equally well armed. The fervency of these people is unmatched by any other in recent memory and they are as unyielding as they are zealous. Far from your typical unruly child, this movement shows no signs of tiring out and grabbing a nap for itself. It is, if anything, loaded for bear. If the August Town Halls were any indication, we are in for one hell of a ride.