GOP: "a mixture of 16th Century voodoo, repressed sexuality and Ted Nugent songs"

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Looking Back at the GOP Convention: Forced Birth & Birthers
By Cliff Schecter, August 31, 2012

This past week, the once great Republican Party, whose belief-system can now pretty much be described as a mixture of 16th Century voodoo, repressed sexuality and Ted Nugent songs, arrived in Tampa Bay for its big shindig—to nominate Mitt Romney as President of the United States. The excitement in the thick Florida air was palpable, even as a passing hurricane en route to New Orleans served as a reminder of the last time we gave Republicans the keys to the kingdom.

But the story, of course, was not outside the convention center, but inside, where a collection of oft-angry and very white (89 percent of the party, according to Gallup) Republicans got together for one last Council of Conservative Citizens hurrah, to yuk it up about welfare cheats (wink, wink) and slutty women on birth control who are destroying America.

Emmy-Award-winning broadcast journalist David Shuster first reported on an incident, which was later confirmed by many sources, where a couple of delegates threw peanuts at an African-American camera woman with CNN, telling her that “this is how we feed the animals.

Meanwhile, the first night saw a number of women speak, all presumably to tell other women watching, “who cares if Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan approved a platform that would force women who are raped (or at least those legitimately raped) to carry their rapist’s child to term, because they’re just a couple of wild and crazy guys!”

Yet, most of these female officeholders—as women’s politics expert Nancy L. Cohen, author of “Delirium: The Politics of Sex in America,” pointed out to me—were “as extreme on this issue as the now-infamous Todd Akin—the logical culmination of the sexual counterrevolution, a forty-year long political campaign to roll back women’s rights.” Whether it was Governor Mary Fallin of Oklahoma or Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington, they all think that women earning 70 percent of what men do is rockin’ good news and birth control is yucky.

If only women could tap into that fallopian force field that prevents rape-induced pregnancy all the time!
Of course the figurative birtherism was the real star at this convention. Truth giving way to blatant dishonesty so obvious, that it was shocking even by previous campaign standards.

Former Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice [sic]—who seemingly arrived late because she finally got around to reading warnings that Al Qaeda’s would be a threat in September 2001—spoke about how she became Secretary of State after growing up in Jim Crow Alabama. No acknowledgment that Civil Rights started as a Democratic plank with President Truman in 1948, and became a reality because of John Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Meanwhile, Paul Ryan’s speech was a masterpiece of mendacity. He blamed President Obama for a GM plant that closed in Ryan’s hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin, even though it closed December 23rd, 2008, when some guy named Bush was still president. Ryan attacked President Obama for the downgrading of our credit rating, which really occurred because House Republicans (like Paul Ryan) refused to raise the debt ceiling.

But perhaps Paul Ryan’s most brazen metaphorical birtherism arrived when he denigrated government as what his idol Ayn Rand called “central planning.” Ryan himself didn’t need the help of big government to succeed, as long as you don’t count the millions his family pocketed via government contracts to build roads. And the government jobs he’s had his entire adult life.

There’s even the sad and untimely death of his father. Ryan talked a lot about it in his speech in a very moving way, but somehow forgot to mention those Social Security survivor’s benefits he received to go to college. He remembered that his mom, upon the death of his dad, took a bus to her business classes so she could start her own small business. But apparently it skipped his mind that she did it by riding a publicly funded bus to a publicly-funded state school.

Mitt Romney’s speech continued this trend, lacking any specifics (we’ll replace Obamacare…with what, we’re not telling you!). He even mocked President Obama for trying to deal with global warming and brought us back from metaphorical to literal birtherism, implying Obama was not American.

In other words, the most honest gesture of the convention might have been when Clint Eastwood conversed with an empty chair from which an imaginary Obama was swearing at him.
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