Tuesday - October 06, 2009

Hard Work

Work was just awful today.

I did the windows for another one of these condos here. The lady was watching Charlie Rose on TV, and his guest was author, and fanatic leftist, Max Blumenthal. Horry Clap. The guy was on for 15 uninterrupted minutes and almost every word out of his mouth was a lie. What a total crock. Al Gore won the 2000 election. Bush was selected not elected. The Christian Right wants to execute doctors and eliminate old folks. The GOP has no ideas. McCain is a moderate Republican. Republicans overwhelmingly rejected Sarah Palin. And on and on and on. 10 years worth of tired old Push Button talking points dragged out and repeated for the 83rd millionth time. Plus how wonderful Obama is, and how he’s going to save us all, and take the country in the right direction finally. GAK.

Maxxy baby has a new book out, called “Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party”, in which he “exposes” the Christian Right as intolerant haters who want to rule everyone and violently stamp out all forms of dissent or contrary opinion. It turns out that extremely large portions of Max’s book are just retellings of Frank Shaeffer’s book “Crazy For God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back”. So much for originality and actual research.

As Mr. Shaeffer himself explains, for 18 paragraphs, in the review section at Amazon for Blumenthal’s book,

For me reading Max Blumenthal’s Republican Gomorrah is a look into a mirror. That might be because Blumenthal extensively interviewed me and drew rather heavily on my book “Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back” as a reference for his in-depth exposé of what has gone so very wrong with the Republican Party. He’s on my turf so I happen to know he’s telling the truth as its not been told before. But there’s more.

Republican Gomorrah is the first book that actually “gets” what’s happened to the Republican Party and in turn what the Republicans have done to our country. The usual Democratic Party and/or progressive “take” on the Republican Party is that it’s been taken over by a far right lunatic fringe of hate and hypocrisy, combining as it does, sexual and other scandals with moralistic finger wagging. But Blumenthal explains a far deeper pathology: it isn’t so much religion as the psychosis and sadomasochism of the losers now called “Republicans” that drives the party. And the “Christianity” that shapes so much “conservative” thinking now is anything but Christian. It’s a series of deranged personality cults.

Th e Religious Right/Republicans have perfected the method of capturing people in personal crisis and turning them into far right evangelical/far right foot soldiers. This explains a great deal that otherwise, to outsiders, seems almost inexplicable--the why and wherefore of “Deathers” “Birthers” et al. Blumanthal brilliantly sums up this pathology as:

“...a culture of personal crisis lurking behind the histrionics and expressions of social resentment. This culture is the mortar that bonds leaders and followers together.”

So we have one lefty encouraging another. Big whup. Give each other a hand. And a reach around.

Max Blumenthal is a jerk. Want more proof? Here’s a couple excerpts of his book, from over at the “fair and balanced” NPR site. Max is writing about his almost dangerous, amazingly bold foray into the lion’s den, about when he attended the 2008 GOP Convention:

From the Idaho delegation, I pushed through a gaggle of reporters and cameramen surrounding the Alaska delegation to meet some of Palin’s constituents. When I approached a young man, the only delegate from the state who appeared to be under the age of fifty, he snapped, “You’re not going to ask about Bristol, are you?” referring to Palin’s pregnant sixteen-year-old daughter, who sat nearby with her fiance, eighteen-year-old self-proclaimed “fuckin’ redneck” Levi Johnston. I asked about Palin’s support for laws banning abortion even in cases of rape, incest, or when the mother’s life is in danger. “There’s no reason to kill a baby, whether you consider him unborn or born,” the delegate replied. Another delegate, a middle-aged woman, explained to me how her husband took their two daughters on “dates” to “talk about keeping themselves pure until marriage.” (Two days later, the same woman, dressed in a construction worker’s outfit like one of the Village People, bellowed on the convention floor in favor of offshore drilling: “Drill, baby, drill!")

This was a portrait of the Republican Party fully in the grip of its right wing: almost exclusively white, overwhelmingly evangelical, fixated on abortion, homosexuality, and abstinence education; resentful and angry; and unable to discuss how and why it had become this way. Noticeably absent from the convention were moderate Republicans. Senator Lincoln Chafee, legatee of the moderate Republican tradition in Rhode Island, was defeated in the 2006 midterms, and he was endorsing Obama.

Born in 1900 in Germany, Fromm descended from a long line of rabbis. After studying to be a rabbi himself, he switched to the law, sociology, and the new field of psychoanalysis. He joined the famed Frankfurt School for Social Research [ You watched Peiper’s video yesterday? Then you know that this means that FROMM WAS A COMMUNIST!! ] but fled the country after Hitler’s assumption of power, eventually making his way to New York. In 1941, Fromm published Escape from Freedom, a book illuminating the danger of rising authoritarian movements with penetrating psychoanalytical insight.

Writing after the Nazis had overrun Europe but before the entrance of the United States into World War II, Fromm warned, “there is no greater mistake and no graver danger than not to see that in our own society we are faced with the same phenomenon that is fertile soil for the rise of Fascism anywhere: the insignificance and powerlessness of the individual.” Those who could not endure the vertiginous new social, political, and personal freedoms of the modern age, those who craved “security and a feeling of belonging and of being rooted somewhere” might be susceptible to the siren song of fascism. For the fascist, the struggle for a utopian future was more than politics and even warit was an effort to attain salvation through selfmedication. [ and yet Blumenthal doesn’t see the slightest thing wrong with Obama and Obamabots. Hmm, willful disconnect perhaps?? ]

When radical extremists sought to cleanse society of sin and evil, what they really desired was the cleansing of their souls. Fromm’s understanding of the psychological character of authoritarianism was not only penetrating but also prophetic. He described how submission to the authority of a higher power to escape the complexities of personal freedom would lead not to order and harmony but ultimately to destructiveness. [ this sounds EXACTLY like the Left’s desire for the NANNY STATE. Max must be asleep at the wheel not to see this one! ] Movements that evangelized among the crisis-stricken and desperate, promising redemption through a holy crusade, ultimately assumed the dysfunctional characteristics of their followers. After sowing destruction all around it, Fromm predicted that such a movement would turn on itself. Dramatic self-immolation was the inevitable fate of movements composed of conflicted individuals who sought above all the destruction of their blemished selves.

“The function of an authoritarian ideology and practice can be compared to the function of neurotic symptoms,” Fromm wrote.

“Such symptoms result from unbearable psychological conditions and at the same time offer a solution that makes life possible. Yet they are not a solution that leads to happiness or growth of personality. They leave unchanged the conditions that necessitate the neurotic solution.”

I thought he was never going to shut up. I was hoping, really hoping, for a commercial break. Ha, not on Channel 13!  But I had work to do, so I kept my mouth shut and got done as quickly as I could.  It was awfully hard to do so.

Posted by Drew458     on 10/06/2009 at 02:10 PM   
Filed Under: • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat Leftists • work and the workplace •  
• Comments (5) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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