AM Drive w/Dr. Woody 7/17/11): Tea-Baggage

From time to time I worry that my pessimistic, skeptical (albeit, I believe, informed and realistic) views of the conditions of things may be exaggerated; or that I may portray things as worse than they are; may predict a bleaker future than is warranted by the facts.

Then I read something like the recent (Friday, AM) piece on PoliticusUSA, and my conscience is assuaged. I am NOT guilty of hyping the danger. It is real, and durable. In that article, the author (Hrafnkell Haraldsson. Really.) has gathered together a compendium of the assorted pieces of legislative mischief, misogyny and misanthropy which the nascent Tea-Bagger "revolutionaries" have introduced, and in far too many cases, ALREADY shoved through the legislative processes in their own States and locales.

It is truly staggering, and quite chilling. The article presents the list of abuses by categories (which it--wrongly, imho--classifies as "Wars"), starting with a "war" on women: The renewed, metastasizing, vitriolic and vicious assaults on womens' personal sovereignty, their reproductive freedoms, including right to choose to be or to continue to be pregnant or not. Despite the Roe v. Wade decision, many (crackkker) States have been active introducing and passing legislation to restrict, or impose invidious conditions upon, the right of women seeking abortions, in Arkansasa, Georgia, Texas, South Dakota, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Kansas and Arizona to have them.

The assault on women has included legislation to defund Planned Parenthood, both nationally (Mike Pence, of IN, is the guilty party) and in individual States (Indiana, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Texas,and Kansas, so far). It has also included measures to expand the definition of "personhood" and the the beginning of life to the mere fertilization of the egg: Iowa, Nebraska, Idaho, Oklahoma, North Dakota, and Louisiana are egregious examples.

Though women are at the top of the list of the objects on whom the Tea-baggers want to exert--and have already exerted--their power, many other sectors are under attack:

• Special Supplemental Nutritional Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC)
• National Public Radio (NPR)
• Desegregation
• High-Speed Rail/Social Energy Efficiency
• Marriage Equality and the Anti-Gay Agenda
• Net Neutrality
• Obama: Birthers and Anti-Obama Legislation
• Unions and Collective Bargaining/War on Middle Class
• Immigration
• Child Labor Laws
• The Right to Vote
• Islam/Islamophobia
• The Federal Government (Tentherism)
• Gun Control
• Education/Historical Revisionism

The list is long and, I should think, terrifying to anyone who values civilized values of equity, fairness, and personal liberty. Because: This shit won't just go away, even if the authors are rejected by subsequent electorates (NOT something I'd be inclined to bet on, frankly: As their raw, numerical power wanes, White people are going to becopme even MORE ferocious in their desperation to hold on to their (spurious) privileges and advantages.

So, the thing most to be concerned with is that fact of the difficulty--perhaps the impossibility--of truning any (much less ALL) these attacks around and re-establishing sanity in the legal codes, even AFTER the worst of these feculent fuckers is dispatched back to Pea-Patch, Looseyanna and their sister-wives.

It took the Bircher/Rightards at LEAST 50 years, countless BILLIONS of dollars, from DOZEN pet bazillionaires--Scaife, Olin, Coors, Kochs, Waltons, Schramm/Kaufman, Bradley, et al--and the full propaganda resources of the entire USer corpoRat infrastructure, including network/cable television, and ALONG WITH the leg work of some countless thousands of 'rightardaceous' ministries, churches, and bible-hells, who mainly volunteered to spread the manure for Owners, to arrive at the positions they occupy today: standing proudly and defiantly athwart the common good.

Even if their growth were arrested right now (which it won't be), and they were ALL thrown out--and you KNOW that's not going to happen--it would take a decade to undo what they've done to this point, presuming a veto-proof "Prog" majority in the drivers' seat. It's not gonna be enough to replace the Labor mural in Maine or the multi-cultural celebratory art in the Wisconsin Gov. manse.

Every day they're in charge, every alteration they effect, every regulation they weaken, will take exponentially longer--weeks, months, YEARS!--to rebuild.

And then you have to realize: Nothing EVER goes back like it was. Once they have fucked with something, it stays fucked with. Luckily, John Ashcroft only covered the naked breasts of Justice. If he'd have chiseled them babies off, there'd be no WAY to ever recover em--nobody'd ever PAY to re-sculpt the same figure again. Too controversial; wouldn't be prudent. For the same reason, the "Fairness doctrine" is also eternally dead and buried, never to be resuscitated. There is NO "going back."