No, We Aren’t Better Than This & The Top Idiot Award
Just when you thought you had seen Marjorie Taylor Greene’s* most despicable demonstration of degeneracy, she somehow went even lower. In a House hearing she declared that only biological moms are real moms. To hell with you do-gooders who open your hearts and adopt or foster kids. You’re not real moms, according to Greene. Neither are the grandmas who raise their kids’ kids.
We’re officially on notice yet again that there is no bottom, no low below which the MAGA/Freedom Caucus/Trump cult won’t go. Their hatred knows no bounds.
John Lewis implored his fellow House members to a higher standard, saying, “We’re better than this.” I didn’t agree with Lewis then and I don’t agree with Randi Weingarten saying that same thing on Nicolle Wallace’s program last Friday. Note that Weingarten was present for Greene’s cruel “real moms” condemnation.
Lewis and Weingarten are wrong because if we were better than this nobody would be saying the dreadful things that Greene, Matt Gaetz, Ted Cruz, Jim Jordan and the rest say. They wouldn’t be denying safety to school children if we were better than this. Over 140 of them wouldn’t have tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power on January 6. They wouldn’t be playing Russian Roulette with our debt ceiling and our economy. Republican state legislators wouldn’t be perverting our states with anti-pandemic lies and allowing over a million people to die. They wouldn’t be stealing education from our children or stealing healthcare from women and demoting them to second class citizenship.
No, we’re not better than this. We are exactly this. We made our choice to be ruled by the heartless minority doing these wicked things. Some of us chose this affirmatively, some did it passively by not voting and some did it unwillingly as victims of voter suppression.
The old saying advises that if we always do what we’ve always done, we’ll always get what we always got. The cousin to that is Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing and expecting different results.
So, if we continue along our present “We aren’t better than this” trajectory, we will continue to fail to be better than this. But if we do something different, we will change everything.
We aren’t better than this now. But we could be.
The Top Idiot of Last Month Award
Tennessee’s savage practice of capital punishment is on hold due to the cruelty they’ve done via lethal injections. A brain-free solution for moving forward was offered in a committee session and was detailed on March 2 by WPLN News, 90.3FM, Nashville:
The Criminal Justice Committee, earlier this week, passed a measure to add alternative procedures for carrying out executions.
During the hearing, Republican Rep. Paul Sherrell, R-Sparta, suggested another option.
“Can I put an amendment on that that would include hanging by a tree also?” asked Sherrell.
What could be more American than bringing back lynching in the state where the Ku Klux Klan originated?
Consider that madness side-by-side with this hypothetical.
Imagine the convening of a council of the Native American tribes originally from the southeast of this nation, but forcibly moved west on Andrew Jackson’s** brutal Trail of Tears. Picture a council meeting, convened because they are out of patience with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and it is now clear to all that something dramatic must be done.
Imagine further that in an effort to find a path forward one of the council members were to propose a method tor motivating the BIA to do the right things. He would argue that they bring back the practice of some tribes of scalping White soldiers.
What do you suppose lynching proponent Rep. Paul Sherrell and the other Nashville Criminal Justice Committee legislators would say to that?
Rep. Paul Sherrell of Tennessee lynching fame gets our
Top Idiot of Last Month Award
.
That fits him perfectly, as last month he also voted to expel two legislators from the Tennessee House for the grievous offense of protesting for gun safety while Black.
Quote of the Week
- “Antisemitism has skyrocketed on the @GOP‘s watch because they have tolerated, embraced, echoed & normalized dangerous extremists.”
- – Halie Soifer
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Quote From the Way-Back Machine
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”- – Carl Sagan The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
- Treat yourself to this interview of Sagan, as well as his presentation in a Senate hearing in 1985 on climate warming.
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* Even duct tape can’t fix stupid – but it sure does muffle the sound. (Thanks to MZ for that)
** That’s the same Andrew Jackson whose portrait Donald Trump hung on the wall near the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. It replaced a painting of the arm and torch of the Statue of Liberty. Compare and contrast the meanings.
Today is a good day to be the light.
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- Our governance and electoral corruption and dysfunction and our ongoing mass murders are all of a piece, all the same problem with the same solution:
- Fire the bastards!
- The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.
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JA
Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
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