Kennedy 202-224-4543
Biden 202-224-5042
Kohl 202-224-5653
Feinstein 202-224-3841
Schumer 202-224-6542
Durbin 202-224-2152

The phrase you used about needing to be political surgeons is the one that I would like to take off on, because, in my own study of the phenomenon of ‘right’ vs ‘left’, I have come to analyse it in terms of ‘whole body health’.

I think about America as ‘one body’ with different parts such as organs [institutions], muscles [money/energy exchange], bones [structure], circulatory system [ideas, communications, values], hormones [new concepts] and tissue cells [citizens], whereby all these parts absolutely have a role in whole body health.

When the body parts are fighting each other, the whole body suffers and declines. When you wrote of “the right’s patiently orchestrated takeover of the mental, emotional and therefore political landscape’……., I thought of a cancer spreading inside a body. A cancerous growth cares not that it eventually kills its host. A cancer cell cleverly mimics healthy cells in order to steal space and nutrients from those cells. A cancer has no loyalty to the body it depends upon, only to its own malignant growth..

While I would make the case that many huge corporations are in fact now acting as cancers on the whole of America [being given status as ‘individuals’, but having no loyalty except to their own bottom line], I would not portray individual ‘righties’ as intentionally cancerous, but rather as cancer enabling.
What I see so dangerous among the righties whom you so intelligently analysed, is that their fear and cowardice, coupled with the usual right-wing worship of corporate power, creates a critical lack of THINKING about the whole of the entity named America. In short, righties are so busy wrapping themselves protectively in ‘a need to be right’ [particularly narrowly focusing upon hot-button issues to feel righteous], that they cannot even fathom that their latest ‘authority’ Bush is trashing our Constitution, or that the hugely powerful amoral corporations are now writing our laws while simultaneously putting their corporate monies outside of America [the unleashing of corporate cancer is directly related to Reagan-era de-regulation, important regulation functioning like T-cells that fight cancerous growths]

It is beyond bizarre to me that lefties, who distinguish themselves by thinking in terms of ‘the big picture’, taking the whole of America into account [focusing on the poor’s lack of resources, thinking ahead to grandchildren’s needs for national parks, in short considering the needs of all the parts of the ‘body’ ] are labeled ‘unpatriotic’ by the righties!! This bizarre situation comes precisely from the inability of most righties to maturely realize that disease and decline can come from within. Without that adult understanding, the scared righties project all ‘evil’ onto ‘others’.

In short, I believe that the left thinks broadly and wholistically in ways that take the right into the equation, while the right thinks in ways which willfully [for reasons you list] ignore broad views of American issues and lead to the right crazily wanting to hate and destroy half of the country–the Democrats.

What I find so appalling about the right is their lack of commitment to the truth, wherever it may lead them. This commitment takes moral courage, because truth may take you to some pretty fearful or unpopular places, and moral cowards will have none of that. Turning away from the truth, leads to willful ignorance. After years of this behavior, these people become so willfully dumb that you don’t know where to begin with them.

The right believes in might-makes-right. They cling to the security they believe comes from believing in the all powerful Borg, instead of taking a sometimes lonely or painful stance for what is true. They never were able to succesfully challenge Father, whoever he was, when they were growing up. And so, lLike children, they still believe that Father - or whoever the current authority figure or belief system is - is always right.

Do this for a whole lifetime, and one’s truth detector never really developed as it never learned to figure things out on its own. Their moral courage subsequently never had a chance to develop by taking the risk of standing up for their own beliefs. As such, the truths they do connect with are small, safe ones, and so their lives and arguments revolve around pettiness and nitpicking detail, while they completely miss the bigger picture, which does them - and us - in. One of the things I’ve learned from dealing with the right is to steer clear of such pettiness as it’s like the brush underfoot that trips you up and is completely irrelevant and a waste of time.

I’ve seen otherwise intelligent people on the right twist their minds around the most outrageous fictions and add their mental energy to them, by not only believing in these fables but also militantly and maliciously promoting them. These are the dopes who believe whatever demagogues like Limbaugh tell them, no matter how absurd. All because they lacked courage and the willingness to question what they were being told, and they have an ingrained fear habit of doing so.

These people are moral infants, incapable of standing on their own without some powerful big daddy comforting them and telling them what to think. Such children should never have been given a national soapbox, but hey, this is America. Could any of us have believed, thirty or more years ago that the quality of public discourse would degenerate down to the level of food-fights?

We on the left have to do everything we can to fearlessly hew to the truth, and challenge these dangerous, misguided children on their cowardice and consequent blindness. We also have to do everything we can to discredit, disable, and displace their big daddy - their might-makes-right ideology and those who personify it - which is the kingpin of their emotional existence. The Borg then fall apart, leaderless.

Often when I write a rant like this about the right, I go back and reread it, trying to see if it also applies to the left. It’s surprising to me how often it does, whereupon I usually hit Delete, fuhgeddaboutit, into the bit bucket, and it never goes public.

There are people on the left who also blindly cling to certain comforting ideologies, but at this time in America, the danger from this is miniscule compared to the right’s patiently orchestrated takeover of the mental, emotional and therefore political landscape. I find that lefties have much more refined and operating bullshit detectors, especially after the dozens of screaming wakeup calls from the last five or twenty years.

After years of being flummoxed by the right’s linguistic, journalistic, and intimidation tricks, we’re becoming much less afraid to speak out. We’re onto their game, and we’re building our moral courage, our moral muscles, by risking speaking out and calling them on their blatant dishonesty. We need to go the further step and focus on their cowardice and their fears, which are at the root of their chronic dishonesty. We need to talk openly about their lack of commitment to the truth, wherever it may lead them. This will take us into the terrain of becoming skilled and courageous moral giants, political surgeons, cultural technicians. Our country badly needs us.

DeBose is now DeNose with his lying affecting the length to which he would alter facts to project a ‘perception’ that ignored ‘reality’. The righties who echo DeNose better watch out when championing falsities….Maha will smack ‘em in the nose.