Mentally Ill Republicans

It?s not difficult to make the case that conservative republicans
suffer from a form of mental illness. Americans have watched them
embrace family values and discover ethics, while stealing an election
and contriving the circumstances for starting wars. They have worked
tirelessly to undermine the American Constitution while frantically
waving the flag. They firmly believe in the privatization of
government and consistently ignore the inconvenient history of the
American taxpayer bailout of one failed/scandalized corporation after
the next. These things, by and of themselves, don?t make republicans
soft in their heads, but as Einstein said of insanity, it?s ?doing the
same thing over and over again and expecting different results.?

There are no practical reasons that Americans, unless they are
independently wealthy, or industrial capitalists, should belong to the
republican party. In a healthy, freedom loving democracy,
republicanism would not be tolerated, and its inherents would be
shunned like the plague. One has only to ask, ?Just what is it that
conservative republicans have ever done for the collective good of the
nation?? If a rejoinder is slow in coming it?s understandable, because
the answer is, not much, if anything. Republican mental illness
manifests itself in the duality that conservatives want to turn the
clock back to mom, apple pie, and that good, ol? time religion, while
unmercifully exploiting every natural resource until the ravaged earth
will no longer support life. Turning yet another profit takes
precedence over their own survival. This is not a healthy, mental
state.

To attain public office, conservative republicans must lie. The truth
must be disguised because their motives for leadership rest solely on
their ambition to material gain. Sharing the nation?s vast wealth
among its people is anathema to republicans. The idea so repulses them
that their willing to practice any deception that will tilt the
playing field in their direction. FDR personifies their hatred of
government acting in the interests of all Americans. Conservative
republicans despised FDR because of all presidents, it was FDR who
first showed Americans that government is a tool that properly used,
can and will improve the lives of all citizens. A rock ribbed
republican will always argue that FDR was a socialist, or worse, a
communist. The many successful government programs that were initiated
under FDR are dismissed as ?touchy feely, warm and fuzzy? examples of
wasteful, liberal spending.

Even while FDR pulled the nation out of its economic morass,
republicans never tired of criticizing him, thundering to anyone who
would listen that FDR was destroying the business incentive to
compete. They cried copious tears when FDR made them pay employee?s a
livable, minimum wage. We can?t, they howled! FDR, acting against the
day?s anti-trust laws, allowed business to stabilize prices under the
condition that as their profits rose so would their employee?s wages.
The National Recovery Administration brought business, labor and
government together, and for the first time in the nation?s history,
these elements found mutual ground on which to cooperate with each
other. The NRA imposed sweeping regulations on business, forcing
production standards on goods and services. Child labor laws were
enacted bringing more howls of protestation from the badly frightened
republicans. Somehow, they got over it as children reported to school
instead of work. They learned to read and write, add and subtract,
thereby guaranteeing a future work force of educated employees. Of
course republicans, to this day, fail to see the point.

Upon winning office by a landslide, FDR immediately closed the
nation?s banks until the U.S. Treasury could move in and supervise
them. The Great Depression was in full swing and Roosevelt, quite
rightly, had reservations about trusting the nation?s bankers whose
arrogance was only exceeded by their incompetence. Roosevelt also
began the Security & Exchange Commission, the SEC, to keep fat cat,
republican capitalists honest. His New Deal would redistribute wealth
downward, and attempt to put the nation back on sound, financial
footing. FDR?s regulations on corporate behavior kept such things as
today?s outrageous fuel costs from happening.

Persistent poverty in the south was met with Roosevelt?s Resettlement
Administration, Farm Security Administration, Rural Electrification
Administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority. Southern farmers
could bring their products to market, and enhance their lives and
their work with electricity. The school lunch program, new roads into
rural areas, and reforestation began having significant, positive
effects on poverty. The democrats lost the south when LBJ signed the
Civil Rights Act into law. Johnson put down his pen and said, "We have
lost the South for a generation." It seems the south should have been
ashamed to inspire such a comment, but no, racism thrives when it?s
seen as virtue.

Roosevelt demonstrated to Americans that government is a tool that?s
best employed for improving the lives of citizens. Republicans like to
call the New Deal socialism and FDR a socialist. They pretend
ignorance that corporations are always the first in line, screaming
for taxpayer handouts, when corporate CEO?s run their companies into
the ground and then walk away with their employee?s pensions. Greed on
a scale this vast can no longer be considered merely greed - the
terrible need to take and keep taking, no matter at who?s expense, is
a sure indication of an aberrant, disordered mind.

Roosevelt brought Social Security into existence, largely eliminating
older Americans crushing poverty when they could no longer work.
Republicans were apoplectic with fury. Why should we pay one cent in
taxes to help a bunch of old geezers who are better off dead, they
asked. Elected in 1932, Roosevelt, by 1933 had steered the nation into
a sharp, upward economic recovery. Republicans, mentally ill and
maddened by his success still, to this day, hold a deep abiding hatred
for FDR. They can?t abide the thought that wealth could be distributed
to benefit all citizens. Selfishness doesn?t begin to explain the
conservative republican?s fixation on material gain. Mental aberrance
does.

George Bush has been the crowning achievement of conservative
republicanism. A dullard, who can?t string a coherent sentence
together, he gleefully follows the lead of every traitorous republican
who has his ear. Karl Rove, a fat, marshmallow, donut of a man, looks
and acts exactly like someone who would like to get even for all the
slights he had to have suffered when young. A mental case in his own
right, Rove thinks nothing of tearing down a nation to satisfying his
grotesque egoism. Cheney?s character is displayed plainly across his
face. His snarling countenance illuminates his mental instability and
his vast capacity for greed is unequaled. These mentally abhorrent
spectacles are anti-American and have fundamentally betrayed the U.S.
Constitution and every other trust they have been given. The Bush
Administration has long been a national embarrassment to the American
people. Much worse, they have shamed a great nation that was once a
model for humanity to emulate. Appointed by a rogue Supreme Court,
these jokers began sacking the U.S. Treasury from their first days in
office. Their neocon cohorts and partners in crime should invoke
nothing but disgust in the minds of all Americans.

At some point in the future Conservative Republicanism will be a
distant memory whose only remaining function will be horrifying
historians. Republicans embrace the political philosophy that wealth
should be concentrated to a few, at the expense of many. This mindset
is breathtakingly arrogant, or more accurately, is a symptom of
corrupted minds. At the top of the republican food chain exist such
despicable creatures as Richard Mellon Scaife, Rupert Murdock, The
Reverend Sun Moon and Adolph Coors, among others. Beneath them are the
politicians that lick their boots for elected office. Then come the
jokers, the fools and knaves. Limbaugh, Coulter and Bill O?Reilly are
a few such republican lapdogs who trumpet right wing propaganda into
the ears of the most gullible, the most ignorant Americans. Rupert
Murdoch, in a just world, would have his U.S. citizenship revoked, as
would the Rev. Sun Moon. Coors, Scaife and their ilk have far more
money than brains, and should be heavily fined every time they open
their mouths.

Scaife and Murdoch became self appointed extensions of the U.S. Dept.
of Justice when they financed endless fishing expeditions into
President Bill Clinton?s business dealings and sex life. The
republican congress jumped in behind them spending millions of
taxpayer dollars. They couldn?t find the dirt they longed to bury
Clinton under and they finally gave up, sputtering and growling -
mumbling curses and striking their heads - just as any nutcase might.
The Rev. Sun Moon has referred to his adopted land as ?Satan?s
Harvest.? This clown is allowed to own a Washington newspaper with
which he spreads lies and propaganda. He and Murdoch, both naturalized
Americans, should be booted out of the country. Moon, a Korean, was
given ?lawful permanent resident? status during the Nixon
Administration. Moon bought his residency with the billions he has
given away to republican, wingnut causes. Republican causes make an
interesting study. They are never about improving the lives of
Americans. They are always about forcing their whacky, misguided
beliefs on anyone stupid enough to believe them, and on getting, and
holding onto power.

The worst manifestation of republican mental illness has been the war
in Iraq. Local WalMarts across the nation reserve a wall on which they
display the pictures of young American men and women. These children
are offered in Iraq as George Bush cannon fodder. Their 18 and 19 year
old faces gaze back from their portraits. Their dress caps always seem
too big for them. All wear stern, unsmiling, expressions, to let the
photographer know they are going to kill other human beings, for God
and Country, the viewer supposes. They joined the army to escape small
town America - to serve their country and be rewarded with the promise
of free college.

They are babies. They are naïve and don?t have any way to understand
the horror of war. They?ve watched Hollywood?s less than realistic
cinematic efforts to capture the terror, the waste, the incredible
devastation that war visits on all who are touched by it. Innocent
children have no hope of equating burnt, ripped flesh, sudden death, a
dying friend crying for his mother, with Bush and his wholly contrived
war. Republicans promise more war, endless war, even a new front -
this time in Iran. This is insanity at its worst. Republicans, and
sadly many democrats, support the wars and endorse the incidental
madness that spins off from them. Torture, the suspension of Habeas
Corpus, government eavesdropping on private phone calls and emails,
above all the suspicion that is deliberately encouraged by the
nation?s so called leaders who seek to divide, weaken, and in so doing
realize complete control over Americans who never seem to learn that
war is the result of a complete failure of political leadership.

Insanity has its own way of proliferating. While Americans continue to
sleep through the right wing?s hysteria, Condoleezza Rice imagines
mushroom clouds sprouting over Brooklyn. Cheney?s old man delusions,
while conveniently making him fantastically wealthy, nonetheless mark
him as paranoiac. When Cheney moved into the Vice President?s
residence at the Naval Observatory, local and national news reported
that strange noises could be heard coming from inside the observatory.
The noises, that according to witnesses sounded like digging, issued
from the observatory night and day for many weeks. Cheney, like
Saddam, was preparing a deep hole in which he could hide and feel
safe. Freud would no doubt have some interesting comments on Cheney?s
tunneling compulsions.

As for Bush, he?s not crazy at all. He?s not smart enough, and lacks
the imagination to be crazy. He?s a comical figure. He offers his
half-witted observations, sincerely believing he?s the big man. He
hasn?t understood that the U.S. Presidency is not an office for his
macho fantasies to gain substance. The poor *** is so stupid he
can?t feel remorse, or even connect his egoism with the dead, and
those who grieve them. After his 9-11 scare, when he flew all over the
country evading imaginary enemies, he found a persona that has always
suited him. That is -"He?s a cool dude in a smooth mood."

Those Supreme Court Justices who voted to install Junior in office
should be unceremoniously run off when Obama gets elected. Roberts,
Alito, Thomas and Scalia are a disgrace. All are openly partisan and
their interpretations of the constitution may be politely described as
radical. If Americans expect to reclaim their nation they have a very
long, steep road ahead of them. The Corporate Oligarchy that replaced
representative government has a death grip on the levers of power and
it has no intention of giving it up.

John Faulkner
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