Civil Commotion

There’s usually a pastor around whenever vigilantes gather for an execution.

Timothy Egan

Ted Cruz explains his decision not to endorse The Donald.

A day after being booed off the Republican National Convention stage, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz stubbornly defended his refusal to endorse Donald Trump, insisting he is not a “servile puppy dog” who would back anyone who personally attacks his family.

The blatant sign of GOP disunity angered some GOP delegates …

Well.

The question is, Is Cruz sincere? If he is, then I find myself unexpectedly wanting to applaud him. Family should stick together, and Trump’s beyond-the-pale suggestion that Rafael Cruz was somehow involved in President Kennedy’s assassination should be the stuff of an epic, generations-long family feud that dwarfs the Hatfields and McCoys — and shame on Cruz if he ever even obliquely suggests that Trump is a decent human being who deserves to be treated with respect. He is not a decent human being, and he deserves only loathing and contempt — and those who can’t see that deserve little better.

Nor am I surprised that the delegates are annoyed with Cruz. They are mostly evangelicals and, marketing lies about ‘family values’ to the contrary, evangelical Christians affirmatively, explicitly, disapprove of family loyalty. It’s a presumption upon the absolutely sovereignty of their white-trash sewer-god, who alone is worthy of your loyalty, et cetera, et cetera. Has Cruz turned his back on the pious persona that lies at the heart of his branding?

So: Is Cruz sincere? I doubt that very much. I doubt, even, that he can correctly spell ‘sincerity’ or ‘loyalty;’ certainly he has never exhibited those traits in the past, and there is not a scintilla of evidence that either has ever informed any decision that he has ever made in his life.

My best guess is that Cruz believes Trump is going to go down in an electoral fireball that recalls the Hindenberg, and he wants to be positioned to say “I told you so” in 2020.

So … no applause yet. But we will certainly have opportunity to reconsider in the next few months.

Is the American nation really this polarized and toxic? Truthfully? Yes. The problem is that as a whole, it seems that Americans are loathe to confront their demons, especially the grand daddy of them all: religious influence. While the First Amendment grants “freedom of religion,” it also grants freedom FROM religion and the unholy marriage of the Christian right to the American body politic needs to have a divorce.

Brody Levesque

Levesque is 100% correct: The elephant in the room is religion — and today the resolute ignorance and malice of the Evangelical Right pose an actual existential threat to the country. They, and their waterboy Donald Trump, must be defeated.

… that I published this one year ago today. Frankly, it seems more timely now than it was then.

One way of illustrating how insane the Republican Party has become over the past decade is to compare it to the right-wing ‘extremists’ of a generation ago — to Barry Goldwater, say, whose 1964 defeat is regarded, still, as a sort of benchmark for an electoral thrashing. Lyndon Johnson carried 44-states, and the vote in the electoral college was 486/52.

Can anybody, anywhere, even imagine the contemporary Republican Party nominating a man who says things like this?

• Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies.

• My faith in the future rests squarely on the belief that man, if he doesn’t first destroy himself, will find new answers in the universe, new technologies, new disciplines, which will contribute to a vastly different and better world in the twenty-first century.

• I think every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass.

• On religious issues there can be little or no compromise. There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God’s name on one’s behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both.

  I’m frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in “A,” “B,” “C” and “D.” Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me?

  And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of “conservatism.”

• Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them.

• When you say “radical right” today, I think of these moneymaking ventures by fellows like Pat Robertson and others who are trying to take the Republican Party away from the Republican Party, and make a religious organization out of it. If that ever happens, kiss politics goodbye.

• The big thing is to make this country, along with every other country in the world with a few exceptions, quit discriminating against people just because they’re gay. You don’t have to agree with it, but they have a constitutional right to be gay. And that’s what brings me into it.

• Having spent 37 years of my life in the military as a reservist, and never having met a gay in all of that time, and never having even talked about it in all those years, I just thought, why the hell shouldn’t they serve? They’re American citizens. As long as they’re not doing things that are harmful to anyone else… So I came out for it.

I think it’s likely Goldwater met lots of gays but it just wasn’t discussed then, but you get the idea.

Most importantly, contrast his forward-looking views with the bizarre pastiche of anti-intellectual, often racist and usually xenophobic Protestant fundamentalism that is today’s GOP — and you realize that the man easily caricatured in the ’60s as a hawkish Strangelove would be dismissed today by the modern Republican Party as a blinking-neon liberal.