Monday, August 29, 2005

Is "Conservatism" a New Kind Of Mental Illness?

By Manifesto Joe

When I heard the title of Michael Savage's latest screed -- Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder: Savage Solutions -- the irony wasn't lost on me. This is from a man who:

  • Was fired from MSNBC for telling a caller to "get AIDS and die" among other things.
  • Has referred to Iraqi prisoners as "subhumans" and called for them to be summarily executed by the thousands.
  • Said the tsunami that struck East Asian countries was not a tragedy but rather a message from God.
  • Says women should be denied the vote because they are too emotional -- their hormones rage.

But Savage isn't the only "conservative" who's been waxing psychopathic lately. The vilification of anti-war protester Cindy Sheehan has shown a zany viciousness once heard only from the most demented elements of the right. The typically milder-mannered Fred Barnes called her a "crackpot." Rush Limbaugh said Sheehan's story is "nothing more than forged documents." (Two days later Limbaugh denied saying anything like this, whatever it was that he meant.) One-time Trotskyite turned right-wing straitjacket candidate David Horowitz described Sheehan's protest as "hateful" and said she is dishonoring the memory of her fallen son. A political consultant and blogger named Erick Erickson said Sheehan is "a whore in the form of a grieving mother."

Savage is right about one thing: There is a strain of mental illness spreading in America. Problem is, he's pointing in the wrong direction, as usual. Many of those who call themselves "conservatives" are not merely dangerous radicals. They could use a dose of anti-psychotic drugs.

I've been wondering about the sanity of "conservatives" since the days of Lee Atwater, when it became apparent that these self-styled paragons of virtue would say and do just about anything to win an election. Atwater later died, reportedly of a brain tumor; but I'm convinced that the tumor was benign. It's the brain that was malignant.

It's gotten worse since then. Consider a political landscape in which:

  • A Republican congressman, Tom Tancredo of Colorado, suggests that if terrorists attack the United States with a nuke, we could "take out their holy sites." (Presumably he would hold all Muslims responsible.)
  • The Rev. Pat Robertson, one of our best-known "Christian" broadcasters, suggests that we assassinate a legally elected foreign head of state because we don't like his policies or the company he keeps. (But hey, keep that oil coming.)
  • Bestselling commentator Ann Coulter says, quite seriously, about Islamic nations that we should "invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." (Millions buy this shrill woman's books. I suppose these are the readers who cut class the day the professor lectured on The Crusades.)


Barry Goldwater, after leaving politics, lamented that the Republican Party had been taken over by "a bunch of kooks." This was ironic when one recalls LBJ supporters in 1964 saying about rival candidate Goldwater, "In your guts you know he's nuts." If Goldwater scared people back then, what does that say about some of the loonies who hold high office now?

I suggest something further: That pretty much describes the whole contemporary "conservative" movement. It's not just some of the top politicos, pundits and preachers who are spouting rubber-room rhetoric. It's become like a bizarre cult of millions. The only positive aspect about how many of these fanatical weirdos there are is that they could never have all fit into the compound at Mount Carmel.

The Texas Republican Party, in its delusional 2004 platform, for example, urges that the IRS be eliminated, along with "income tax, inheritance tax, gift tax, capital gains, corporate income tax, payroll tax and property tax." The state GOP would also kill "the Bureau of Tobacco and Firearms, the position of Surgeon General, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Departments of Energy, Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services, Education, Commerce and Labor." (I guess when you believe that The Rapture is coming soon, who needs a government?)

The comparably deranged 2000 platform calls for America to return to the gold standard and supports "individual teachers' right to teach creation science in Texas public schools." It also calls for the United States to quit the United Nations and re-establish control of the Panama Canal. (It stops short of unleashing Chiang Kai-shek's skeletal remains on mainland China.)

Consider that this is the political party that is governing Texas, virtually unchallenged.

Then there are the assorted lunatics who blog, argue in chat rooms, etc. A "Christian conservative" who identified himself (herself?) as "frogribs" posted a reply to an earlier article of mine on this blog in which he wrote:

"Yes, it is better `to have the London subway system be a battleground than to have al Qaeda blowing up folks over here.' The duty of the president is to place the lives and well being of Americans above all others." (I'm glad Bush was thinking that when he misled the country into a needless war in Iraq. And I'm certain the British will be thrilled to know we're willing to use them, and other allied civilians, as human shields.)

"Iraqi civilian casualties have occurred, but at a rate lower than anyone expected." (Was this person here, on this planet, in March 2003? We were hearing that this would be a cakewalk, and that Iraqis would be tossing rose petals at our soldiers' feet. Since then, dozens of suicide bombings later, the cake's been decorated with entrails, and the petals look curiously like toenails.)

"The U.S. still faces an insurgency, but they must remain to complete the mission in order to avoid the disastrous result learned in Vietnam. Napoleon said it best, 'If you decide to take Paris, take Paris.' Finish the job. ..." (This person evidently never heard about Waterloo. Or Nixon's hapless "Vietnamization" policy. What should we call this now -- "Iraqification"?)

"Does anyone remember how we got this country? We got it by force. We decimated the Indians ... We invaded the Spanish and the Mexicans and we took the spoils. We exploited slaves until the error was purged with the blood of 500,000 of our countrymen ... Manifest Destiny still runs in my veins and the veins of the free and the brave ..."

(Gosh, so America really was largely built on genocide, slavery and military aggression? Since it worked so well in the past, why don't we do all that stuff again? And when they bring back the slave auctions, I wonder -- how much would Jesus bid?)

If this person is a sincere, believing, born-again Christian, then someone must have slipped a couple of books by Nietzsche and Machiavelli into his Bible. I can envision The Prince, and Beyond Good and Evil, bound in there somewhere between Galatians and Revelation, no doubt by Godless nihilistic conspirators.

But seriously, crazy people don't perceive even such basic ideological contradictions. I've seen this firsthand in paranoid schizophrenics. They feel quite free to just make it up as they go along.

I think we've identified a unique personality disorder. It isn't hard to diagnose, because most of the patients call themselves "conservatives."

Charge nurse, call the orderlies, and break out the Thorazine. This is no problem that a little heavy sedation won't fix.

MANIFESTO JOE IS AN UNDERGROUND WRITER LIVING IN TEXAS.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Michael Savage's real name is Michael Weiner. No wonder he has to use a fake name, his real name makes him sound like the wuss that he is.

Anonymous said...

O...K.....and how much of those drugs have you sneeked for yourself? Most of this country is a partof "this christian movemnet" as you call it. Wake up and smell the coffee!

Anonymous said...

No, it's the same mentally ill Nazi people who brought you World War II that are creating WWIII.

http://www.threeworldwars.com
http://www.rense.com/general39/commz.htm
http://www.radioliberty.com/nlmar05.html
http://www.radioliberty.com/nlmay05.html

They have nothing to do with Christianity except pandering it to steal elections like Hitler. Tell people what they want to hear, get votes.

You should pay more attention to the occult than to the majority religion in the great but hijacked country of the USA.

>>>
>>>

http://www.ghosttroop.net
http://www.joelskousen.com/hotissues_news.html

The establishment has also secretly funded or taken over most conservative talk radio stations. Rush Limbaugh was "turned" early on....I knew when it happened. He suddenly switched from open discussion of conspiracy issues to deriding...

There are even a few on the right that receive leaks from sources...claiming to be patriotic...[but] only... confirming and supporting the Bush justifications for war and intervention.

http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2005/05/318379.shtml

In his shocking investigative report "The Left Gatekeepers", journalist Bob Feldman researched purportedly "Left" activist and media organizations that receive substantial funding from large establishment foundations with known ties to the CIA, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and even the much-maligned Carlyle Group...



http://www.almartinraw.com
http://www.almartinraw.com/subscription/column191.html

(Jan 31) And now the GOP is the Gay Old Party. The new chairman of the Republican Party Ken Mehlman is gay. In the past, the highest ranking members of the Nazi party were gay and now the high-ranking GOP members are all gay. It's interesting that no one in the Republican National Committee will answer questions or, interestingly enough, make denials, about this issue.

http://PirateNews.org/bushgaygate.html
http://www.rense.com/general64/laurabushconfesions.htm
http://www.rense.com/Datapages/ganndat.htm
http://www.abidingtruth.com/pfrc/books/pinkswastika/index.php





Homosexuals control USA military
Desperate wives video

http://www.hugequestions.com
http://www.arcticbeacon.com/articles/article/1518131/29982.htm
http://www.rutherford.org/oldspeak/articles/interview/Rutz.html
http://www.antiwar.com/deliso/?articleid=6934
http://www.kaygriggstalks.com

Kay Griggs, former Marine Colonel's wife talks again about military assassin squads, drug running, illegal weapon deals and sexual perversion deep within the highest levels of U.S. military and government.





http://www.bohemiangroveexposed.com
http://www.infowars.com/bg1.html
http://www.covenantnews.com/baldwin020423.htm
http://dutyisours.com/50+a.htm
http://www.bushrevealed.com
http://www.yourchristianpresident.com
http://www.savethemales.ca/000166.html
http://sf.indymedia.org/uploads/conspiracyofsilence2.wmv
http://www.geocities.com/bohemian_grove_dirt/

One may presume that catching President Bush and Company secretly partaking of homicidal pagan rites, while alleging to be America's most-Christian Conservatives, would be treated with the reverence it deserves.




http://www.kmf.org/williams/bushbook.html

Because of Bush's obsession with birth control for the lower orders, Mills gave Bush the nickname "Rubbers," which stuck with him during his years in Congress.

...

Like his father before him, Bush supported Planned Parenthood at every opportunity. Time after time, he rose on the floor of the House to praise Planned Parenthood's work. In 1967, Bush called for "having the government agencies work even more closely with going private agencies such as Planned Parenthood." A year later, he urged those interested in "advancing the cause of family planning," to "call your local Planned Parenthood Center" to offer "help and support."

The Bush-Schneebeli amendments were aimed at reducing the number of children born to blacks and poor whites.

...

George Bush was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 1972, when with prodding from Bush and his friends, the United States Agency for International Development first made an official contract with the old Sterilization League of America. The league had changed its name twice again, and was now called the "Association for Voluntary Surgical Contraception." The U.S. government began paying the old fascist group to sterilize non-whites in foreign countries.

...

Bush's open public advocacy of government measures tending towards zero population growth was a radical departure from the policies built into the federal bureaucracy up until that time. The climate of opinion just a few years earlier, in December 1959, is illustrated by the comments of President Eisenhower, who had said, "birth control is not our business. I cannot imagine anything more emphatically a subject that is not a proper political or governmental activity ... or responsibility."

As a congressman, Bush played an absolutely pivotal role in this shift. Shortly after arriving in Washington, he teamed up with fellow Republican Herman Schneebeli to offer a series of amendments to the Social Security Act to place priority emphasis on what was euphemistically called "family planning services." The avowed goal was to reduce the number of children born to women on welfare.

Bush's and Schneebeli's amendments reflected the Malthusian-genocidalist views of Dr. Alan Guttmacher, then president of Planned Parenthood, and a protege of its founder, Margaret Sanger. In the years before the grisly outcome of the Nazi cult of race science and eugenics had inhibited public calls for defense of the "gene pool," Sanger had demanded the weeding out of the "unfit" and the "inferior races," and had campaigned vigorously for sterilization, infanticide and abortion, in the name of "race betterment."

Although Planned Parenthood was forced, during the fascist era and immediately thereafter, to tone down Sanger's racist rhetoric from "race betterment" to "family planning" for the benefit of the poor and blacks, the organization's basic goal of curbing the population growth rate among "undesirables" never really changed. Bush publicly asserted that he agreed "1,000 percent" with Planned Parenthood.

...

It also is widely acknowledged that the commission Bush fought so long and so hard to create broke down the last barriers to legalized abortion on demand. Indeed, just one year after the commission's final report was issued, the Supreme Court delivered the Roe v. Wade decision which did just that.

Aware that many blacks and other minorities had noticed that the population control movement was a genocide program aimed at reducing their numbers, the commission went out of its way to cover its real intent by stipulating that all races should cut back on their birth rates. But the racist animus of their conclusions could not be hidden. Commission Executive Director Westoff, who owed his job and his funding to Bush, gave a hint of this in a book he had written in 1966, before joining the commission staff, which was entitled "From Now to Zero", and in which he bemoaned the fact that the black fertility rate was so much higher than the white.

The population control or zero population growth movement, which grew rapidly in the late 1960s thanks to free media exposure and foundation grants for a stream of pseudoscientific propaganda about the alleged "population bomb" and the "limits to growth," was a continuation of the old prewar, protofascist eugenics movement, which had been forced to go into temporary eclipse when the world recoiled in horror at the atrocities committed by the Nazis in the name of eugenics. By the mid-1960s, the same old crackpot eugenicists had resurrected themselves as the population-control and environmentalist movement. Planned Parenthood was a perfect example of the transmogrification. Now, instead of demanding the sterilization of the inferior races, the newly-packaged eugenicists talked about the population bomb, giving the poor "equal access" to birth contol, and "freedom of choice."

But nothing had substantively changed -- including the use of coercion. While Bush and other advocates of government "family planning" programs insisted these were strictly voluntary, the reality was far different. By the mid-1970s, the number of involuntary sterilizations carried out by programs which Bush helped bring into being, had reached huge proportions. Within the black and minority communities, where most of the sterilizations were being done, protests arose

which culminated in litigation at the federal level.

In his 1974 ruling on this suit, Federal District Judge Gerhard Gesell found that, "Over the last few years, an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 low-income persons have been sterilized annually under federally funded programs. Although Congress has been insistent that all family planning programs function on a purely voluntary basis," Judge Gesell wrote, "there is uncontroverted evidence ... that an indefinite number of poor people have been improperly coerced into accepting a sterilization operation under the threat that various federally supported welfare benefits would be withdrawn unless they submitted to irreversible sterilization." Gesell concluded from the evidence that the "dividing line between family planning and eugenics is murky."

As we have seen, George Bush inherited his obsession with population control and racial "down-breeding" from his father, Prescott, who staunchly supported Planned Parenthood dating back at least to the 1940s. In fact, Prescott's affiliation with Margaret Sanger's organization cost him the Senate race in 1950, as we have seen, a defeat his son has always blamed on the Catholic Church, and which is at the root of George's lifelong vendetta against the Papacy.

On abortion he commented: "I realize this is a politically sensitive area. But I believe in a woman's right to choose. It should be an individual matter. I think ultimately it will be a constitutional question. I don't favor a federal abortion law as such." After 1980, for those who choose to believe him, this changed to strong opposition to abortion.

Anonymous said...

http://www.arcticbeacon.com/articles/article/1518131/35814.htm

Savage on his promotional web site claims to be the top “independent show” in the country with over 8 million listeners on 370 channels. However, what Savage fails to mention is that he really is a government hack, bought and paid off by the corporate media/government, having his show sponsored and underwritten by the deep pockets of CNN.

Shows like Savage, claiming to be independent but actually filtering the truth as controlled media gatekeepers for the neo-cons, are popping up all over the country in an attempt to cover the real stories by posing as truth-tellers but actually being liars hiding behind a phony microphones built on corruption and deceit.

Anonymous said...

What an incredible cross-section of lunatics there are here! Sort of supports the writer's point, n'est-ce pas?

Anonymous said...

Not really. I read them, those are cool links. Thanks. America is a one party state, Republicrat. Bushes and Clintons play golf together. I have college buddies who ran for student body prez and still can't talk. It's all show biz, folks.

Anonymous said...

Liberal media? If that isn't the biggest red herring ever...

Take a look at a little film called, "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism", and see Fox employees talk about exactly how much conservative bias is mandated from the highest eschelons of the network on down.

Or, if movies aren't your thing, pick up any book by Noam Chomsky.