Right Wing Uses Kooky Cultural Issues Distract From BushCo's Failures
by Allen Snyder
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Neo-con super-creep Karl Rove has the GOP/FOX hate machine all revved up and ready to go for the 2004 Presidential election. His boss, King George, has royally botched practically everything he's touched, his re-election hopes dim daily, and his numbers are steadily declining, Rove's hoping to turn this contest into a you're-either-with-us-or-against-us social statement mostly about gays and marriage, but to a lesser extent, abstinence 'education', obscenity, abortion, and capital punishment.
Kooky conservative alarmism about the numerous moral diseases afflicting Western civilization is nothing new. For this election, it's particularly important BushCo keeps voters looking everywhere but at the results of their categorically failed domestic and foreign policies.
They're desperately busy manipulating ordinary GOPers into ignoring what a bumbling moron Dubya is (that Meet The Press interview? Ouch!) and directing their attention to other more pressing matters, like whether the FCC should investigate 'wardrobe malfunctions' by breast-baring has-beens and talent-less hacks trying to increase their stock or revive their sagging careers (apparently not the only thing sagging).
Instead of accepting BushCo's policies as cynical, anti-American, democracy-hating enterprises, the neo-con think tanks and spin-rooms want moderate Republicans to vote for Dubya because of his faux conservative stance on contentious cultural issues they've been told are disproportionately more meaningful than perpetual illegal war or national bankruptcy.
As long as these Republicans remain uninformed, poorly informed, or misinformed about scandals like the lies invented for Iraq, the total absence of WMDs, the retaliatory outing of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame, Bush's National Guard non-service, the unconscionable and continuous obstruction of the 9/11 investigation, vicious Orwellian environmental initiatives, the atrocious and jobless economy, humungous ballooning deficits, and the walking conflicts of interest named Dick Cheney and Antonin Scalia, they can vote for Dubya as committed moral leader, resolutely maintaining America's lofty moral standing.
What's there for a clueless cultural conservative not to love? Dubya wants to deny gays the basic rights of family and marriage (that sacred institution where half end in divorce), expect teens to keep their pants on (what a joke!), wants to force virtually all pregnancies to term (mothers be damned!), and thoroughly enjoys executing criminals (he set a record in Texas ). Still looking? He also wants to abandon affirmative action altogether (don't want them darkies gettin' too uppity), and spend so much money on defense and corporate welfare that there'll soon be no alternative but to turn devilishly liberal hand-out programs like Social(ist) Security over to his rich cronies for a heady dose of good old American privatization.
For many Republican voters, then, Dubya still looks pretty good. Despite the growing mountain of serious scandals (no blowjobs for this guy), he's still all for abstinence and all against gay marriage, effectively reducing his myriad illegal and immoral domestic and international activities to ambiguous or vague, but politically useful, wedges designed to cast a big, thick, stinky NASCAR exhaust cloud over his supporters' better judgment.
This divisive strategy has already met with immense success. Their racial/civil rights/black/white wedge is largely responsible for the white South's transition from solid Democrat to irreversible Republican. Yet another example of how right-wingers get people to vote contrary to their own best interests, then turn around and ask the crooks for more. These conned marks then parade before the rest of us as the morally pure, oblivious to the scam that has the rest of us pitying them.
The grossly oversimplified and dangerously unrealistic worldview the GOP offers these voters pits the perceived moral uprightness, correctness, certainty, and absolutism of the righteous right against the more tolerant and inclusive, but significantly less certain, heathen 'anything-goes' party-time relativism of the left. Among those unwilling or incapable of making more sophisticated philosophical distinctions and who wrongly see this ultra-complex world as a modern Manichean good/evil one, this intellectual short-cut is very appealing; it involves little thinking.
Sadly, for those same Republicans, mostly less-affluent middle and lower-class blue-collar workers, their loyalty will be repaid only with more economic and social injustices. For just as BushCo placates these hapless voters merely by ratcheting up the rhetoric about a Constitutional Amendment defining marriage as heterosexual union, repealing Roe v. Wade, or at least legislatively banning rarely used, but medically necessary abortions, and pumping money into abstinence education (a folly no reputable study supports), they're robbing these voters blind.
With this ill-gotten cash, they fill their sponsors' coffers, lobby to make their skewed tax cuts permanent, pass even more cuts, and gut or eliminate important social services millions rely on. By the time the rank-and-file moralists realize what's happening, Dubya will have bolted and the neo-con spin machine will have returned to blaming the sorry state of the union on Bill and Hillary Clinton.
The only things poor blue-collar white Republican guy and his progeny will be left with are empty pockets and a trillion dollar tab.
