The Law of One Third

Why the GOP is going down, and why it will come back

©Bryan Zepp Jamieson
http://www.mytown.ca/zepp
09/15/07

I didn’t bother to watch the Putsch speech on Iraq, and I’m willing to bet the large majority of my readers not only didn’t either, but don’t blame me a bit.

I mean, let’s face it: the son of a bitch was just going to lie to us. And they would be clumsy, self-serving, obvious lies that insult the intelligence of any person of normal intelligence.

I can guess at a couple of them. He talked about how Anbar province was a miracle, proof that the surge worked. Hours later his only ally in the region got greased. And he doubtlessly babbled about how the government in Bagdad was steady, full of resolve, and in there for the count.

The next day, al-Sadr walked out, taking the Sunnis with him, and the government is on the verge of collapse.

This won’t matter to the one third of Americans who still support Putsch, of course. Nothing matter to them except their endless dumb adoration of The Leader.

It’s the most disgraceful thing you can say about America, that at this late stage in the game, one in three Americans still supports the son of a bitch. It’s the same question people used to ask about Nazi Germany: how could this possibly happen in a country that has universal education and a culture?

All it takes is stupidity, ignorance, and a will to follow authority. All the education and culture in the world cannot raise some people above that level.

It’s interesting to watch some of the groups that supported Putsch in the beginning break away, and cope with the remaining True Believers in their midst. Contrary to popular belief, a lot of the groups that originally supported the aims of this administration did not have stupidity and greed as prerequisites for membership. Indeed, only the Republicans have that bar, along with a taste for cubicle sex or child rape if you want to be a county commissioner. (Right wingers gleefully produced a democratic county commissioner the other day who was supposedly accused of serial child rape, but the story kind of fell apart when the “Democrat commissioner’s” name was given as Yo Wan Fuk. Honest. You can’t make this stuff up.)

A lot of evangelical Christians have left the Putsch camp. Various groups under that umbrella give differing reasons for this, but there are four in general.

First is the contempt that the Bushies secretly held for Christians, which came to light the day that Putsch’s first Faith-Based Initiative director resigned and wrote a book. Calling people who you want to make a major element in your voting bloc “idiots” isn’t a really good idea, and that goes double if it so happens that they are idiots. If you happen to be an idiot too, like Putsch is, then it is political suicide.

A lot of evangelicals left because they found they couldn’t tolerate the morals of the GOP, far worse than a Bill Clinton wet dream. Diapers, molesting teenage pages, and cubisexuality aren’t a part of those family values that the religious right thought the GOP had in mind when they talked about such. Lesson: sneering at Bill Clinton does not make you moral.

Third, a lot of Christians realized that they were the targets, rather than the beneficiaries, of Putsch’s economic policies, which are best described as “rape the hell out of the people and give all their wealth to major corporations.” Most Christians, like most Americans, are part of that 99% of the population minority who are not obscenely rich.

Fourth, and perhaps most heartening of all, is that a lot of evangelicals broke with the GOP over the issue of the environment. The evidence for global warming is absolute, the suspicion that humanity is causing it at the level of certainty, and a lot of Christians understand that their beliefs don’t support blindly despoiling the planet so someone else can get rich.

There are other reasons given. I know Christians who are disturbed, not only about the war and the sabre-rattling GOP supporters make against Iran and “Muzzies” in general, but think that Israel has far too much influence on this administration. One Christian friend refers to the neo-cons as “Christian Zionists,” and wonders if the administration really is dominated by the strange death cult of “Left Behind” believers who need an alliance between Israel and the US to bring about the end of days, with rapture and nuclear war and the moral sniggering at everyone else and all that. I’ve often wondered the same thing. If so, those crazy bastards, the American equivalent of al Qaida, have nukes.

I read today that industry is starting to break with the administration. One of the nastiest secrets is that in reality, Republican values are bad for business. A glance at economic growth in America, dating back to 1924, shows that it ALWAYS does better under Democratic administrations. Always. Without exception. That’s pretty much the entire modern era of business.

It’s a mystery how the GOP got so many people to vote against their own best interests, but the business community, supposedly smarter than most interest groups, can lay out the evidence that the GOP is bad for them right on their spreadsheets. It’s the language they speak, and the one they understand above all. The GOP is bad for the bottom line, but endless GOP propaganda has managed to convince all these crafty wealthy types that the very opposite is true.

Today, Alan Greenspan attacked the administration, saying that Putsch let politics supercede sound economic policy. True, it only took Greenspan six years to figure this out, but the man is both a libertarian AND an economist. Tying his own shoes (and not together) could take him three weeks. He expresses regret for supporting the tax cuts that have done so much damage to the American economy, but as befits his class, refuses to apologize. His half-hearted mea culpa complete, he can shuffle off into a well deserved obscurity now.

And finally, I read today that industry is demanding more government regulation. That sounds as odd as Ann Coulter announcing she’ll vote for John Edwards, but it’s true. Part of it is an effort to stem the flow of cheap, toxic, dangerous items from overseas, particularly China, which has been selling America toys with lead paint, toothpaste with antifreeze, and other items. Part of it is the widespread expectation that the next administration will be Democratic, and they hope to lighten the impact of regulation by working with them. And part of it is the grim realization that the “free market” is neither. It is not free and doesn’t have any interest in anyone else being free, and the ultimate aim of any large business is to eliminate the competition, making the “market” wholly captive.

Not for the first time, business is calling for Democrats to bail them out from problems caused, in large part, by their own excesses. It happened in 1932, after all.

And if history repeats, by about 2011, a Democratic president will be grinning and pointing with pride to a huge jump in economic activity fueled by increased worker wages, and a market at 20,000 or above. And the business community will be screaming that Democrats are destroying the “free market”!

Of course, by then the fundies will have forgotten all about Vitter and Craig and Foley, and will be howling because some Democrat has an eye for the ladies.

You really can’t expect much from that bottom one third.