The view from Texas: Thomas Jefferson? That commie's as phony as a two-dollar bill

It's the only clip NBC is offering from last night's 30 Rock, but at least it's not a bad one. With Tracy (Tracy Jordan) in turmoil because of a tell-all book's shocking revelation that he's never been unfaithful to his wife, Jenna (Jane Krakowski) offers predictably dreadful advice, which he immediately tries to act on, to the dismay of Liz Lemon (Tina Fey).

"All these books, sir! I feel like I'm back in school, learnin' about the dangers of book learnin'!"

-- Kenneth the page (Jack McBrayer), excited to find

books on Jack Donaghy's desk, on Thursday's 30 Rock

by Ken

Howie and I have been kicking this around for days, what to say about the latest disgrace to storm out of Texas, where the right-wing doodyheads are determined to establish their state as the Land That Brains Forgot. A dentist who is by the most generous standard out of his friggin' mind has led a cadre of savage ignorance-worshipers similarly implanted in the Texas State Academy of Stooges (and I don't mean funny stooges -- we're talking, say, Curly Joes) that is the state Board of Education to dictate to textbook publishers how they must henceforth rewrite history if they wish to sell their books for teaching in the Lame Brain State.

Yesterday's editon of The Progress Report from ThinkProgress had an outstanding report on what happened, how it happened, why it happened, and what it means. If I didn't have a couple of thoughts of my own, I would just send you there.

I would certainly recommend that our friend Elizabeth, who commented last night on Howie's post paying tribute to Speaker Pelosi's outburst of persuasiveness on the health care bill, if she's with us again, to repair immediately to The Progress Report. Elizabeth is a "moderate" and likes to hear opinions on both sides, and is upset with us for being rude to the crooks and liars (to coin a phrase) and numbskulls and fugitive mental patients on the Right.

Now, since Elizabeth singled out Howie's calling one of those assholes a "dope," I'm guessing she would be a lot more upset by this. We're supposed to be polite, just like we try to teach our children to be. "If you don't agree with someone or something - fine! Disagree!" she says. "But do it without joining in on low-class mud-slinging; that's how animals resolve things."

No, Elizabeth, I think you mean physical violence is the way animals resolve things. You rarely hear, say, lions and wildebeests insulting each other. Physical violence, by the way, is the way the dumb animals and their crook manipulators already began moving during the last presidential campaign, inspired by the flying animal-slaughtering voodoo priestess of ignorance Sarah Palin. And the Teabaggers seem only too happy to show off their willingness, if not actual eagerness, to smash some heads. The saintly Teabaggers have in their midst no shortage of folks who show the same disposition to shoot them some sumbitches that ticks them off.

The fact is, we no longer have a situation where there are tidily diverging sets of opinion charmingly arrayed on either side of some imaginary middle. We have a cancerous Extreme Far Right that has long since jumped the bounds of sanity and reason and planted its political standard way out in the galaxy far, far beyond Pluto. The "middle" between there and reality is still somewhere way out beyond Saturn, and much as I might wish to be able to reach reasonable moderates like you, Elizabeth, I don't see how polite discourse is possible.

And, as I noted, it was interesting that she should bring up what we teach our children, because right now we've got this situation in Texas -- and we have to assume that the potential for similar ugliness is festering in other states with heavy concentrations of primitives in the populace -- where the state board of education has been hijacked by thugs who want not just their children, but all of Texas's children, and by extension most of America's children (because publishers simply can't afford to publish textbooks tailored to the bigotries and crazinesses of loons in individual states) to be morons.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. For the basic facts of the case, here is The Progress Report's lead paragraph from yesterday. Note that onsite the text is riddled with links, which you can check out there.

If America's lucky, what happens in Texas will stay in Texas -- at least when it comes to education standards. It would even better if the right wing's destructive manipulation of the state's schools wasn't happening at all. Last week, the Republican-dominated Texas Board of Education approved a social studies curriculum that extols the importance of the National Rifle Association, Phyllis Schlafly, Confederate leader Jefferson Davis, and Joseph McCarthy. Right-wing board members removed Thomas Jefferson from "a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century"; many of them bear ill will toward the third U.S. president because he coined the term "separation between church and state." They also decided to require U.S. history classes to teach the difference between legal and illegal immigration. Last week's vote was the culmination of a decades-long plot by social conservatives to gain control over the influential Board of Education and, ultimately, the power to impose a far-right ideology on the nearly 5 million schoolchildren in Texas. Unfortunately, what's happening in the Lone Star State may spread nationally: Texas is one of the largest textbook buyers in the nation, and publishers, eager to get the business, often tailor their books to the state's standards.

As TPR says, "The Texas Board of Education is trying to create an alternate universe where McCarthy's dangerously slanderous allegations were true, Ronald Reagan was the greatest president in U.S. history, the separation of church and state doesn't exist, global warming is a myth, and people of color barely exist."

Now some of the individual points aren't entirely beyond the pale. For example, the dentist wants Texas young uns to read Jefferson Davis's inaugural address alongside Abraham Lincoln's, and there's no reason why kids shouldn't learn more about the government of the Confederacy. I don't remember learning much about it.

But that doesn't mean that it's in any way, shape, or form okay to treat Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln as equivalent, any more than the Confederate States of America and the United States of America can be treated to as any way equivalent. They aren't, and they aren't, and the reasons have nothing whatsoever to do with "liberal bias"; they have to do with some of the fundamental realities of our country and our history. The people who are peddling their biases are the Texas loons.

Joe McCarthy was right? Ronald Reagan was our greatest president? These are opinions, and pretty demented ones (the historical evidence weighs overwhelmingly against both). Parents are entitled to hold even these crap-brained delusions as opinions, and I'm afraid they're even entitled to inculcate them in their unfortunate offspring. The only corrective for this is the possibility that the offspring will one day encounter reality and come to hate their parents for being crack-brained, hate-mongering idiots.

One thing parents are emphatically not entitled to do is to try to impose their delusions and bigotries on other people, including (perhaps I should say especially) other people's children. In just the way that Americans are free to practice just about any kind of delusional set of beliefs and worship practices as a religion, but are not free to attempt in any fashion to impose those beliefs on anyone else.

By strange coincidence, it is by and large the same people doing both, trying to impose both their political and historical delusions and their religious ones on others. (Does the name Bart "The Stupe" Stupak ring a bell?) The assault on history is frequently linked to a Crap Christianity that seems to take special pleasure in trashing the teachings of Jesus and dumping doody over everything he stood for, even if they have to rewrite the Bible to do so (again, check out Noah's "Why Do You Hate the Bible? Award" from his holiday Scorn Awards), to give voice to those same demonic outpourings of hatred and worthlessness and self-loathing that explode at them every time they glance in a mirror.

Of course life is hard when you look in the mirror and see doody (note to Elizabeth: I could have used a different, less polite word), at least until you make the mental adjustment that being a worthless pile of hateful doody is really a good thing. Which is where Ronald Reagan truly earned his place in history: by assuring people filled with churning demons that it's all OK -- OK to hate, OK to cheat, OK to demean anyone you don't care for. Stop beating yourself up! Celebrate your doodyfulness! It's morning in doody-filled America!

Who wouldn't like to hear that? (Besides anyone with a shred of dignity, morality, or principle, I mean.) And America embraced its doody-filled self, with a vengeance. Eventually they put that pile of worthless ignorance and puke in the White House (or allowed the Supreme Court to put him there), to pursue on the grandest scale the demolition of reason and decency, and sure enough, he and his puppet master Big Dick did everything they could to turn the country into a pile of doody.

Yes, these people are entitled, thanks to our fundamental Bill of Rights-protected freedoms (which they have spent so much energy and venom trashing) to their political and religious views. But that they are entitled to substitute them for reality for those of us trying to live in the real world is, well, just another of their poisonous delusions.

I'm sorry, Elizabeth, I try to be polite, I really do. But what do you do in the face of people who imagine they can surgically excise Thomas Jefferson from the founding of our republic, in the apparent belief that they can thereby refashion the history of the founding of our republic to suit their delusional view of it?


YOU'RE NOT GETTING THE PROGRESS REPORT?

Since we lost Rachel Maddow's old Air America radio show, The Progress Report provides the best daily digest I know of what a progressive-minded person needs to know to face the world in the morning. In addition to an admirably thorough report on the day's chosen lead subject, the team of top-notch writers provides an "Under the Radar" item (yesterday it was fallout from "Sunny John" Boehner's disgraceful pep rallly with the banksters at their annual convention Wednesday, with pushback from Larry Summers and Barney Frank) and "Think Fast," a roster of in-brief items. You'll always find the latest edition at pr.thinkprogress.org (for the weekend that will presumably remain yesterday's), with a link to sign up -- yes, it's free!


THURSDAY'S 30 ROCK: BEST EPISODE EVER?

"Best episode ever?" is just a cheap attention-getting headline-writing trick. The show has long since hit its stride, and seems to me to be cruising at an altitude not worth measuring. Nevertheless, this last one, "Don Geiss, America and Hope," written by Jack Burditt and Tracey Wigfield, was a humdinger. The pre-credit sequence, in which Jack tries to boost GE morale in the face of the looming sale to Kabletown-with-a-K, via a worldwide-teleconferenced pep talk, certainly could have been the best ever.

We had Jack, speaking at the funeral of revered departed GE chairman Don Geiss (the great Rip Torn, whose infrequent appearnces will be missed), where Geiss's "mentally challenged" daughter Kathy (Marceline Hugot) plays "Ave Maria" on the trumpet, having a sudden inspiration that could change the Kabletown we-do-nothing culture. His idea, porn for women (it turns out that 91 percent of Kabletown's profits come from porn its channels 551-600, which feature porn for men) by his onetime protege Dave Hess (Scott Bryce), now a Kabletown exec: "Women hate porn, almost as much as men hate going to outlet malls." But that was before he heard Jack's idea of porn for women.

As seen in the video clip, we had Tracy in crisis over the ruthless tell-all book that revealed shocking truths like his marital fidelity. And we had Liz continuing to run into her post-root-canal-anesthesia "future husband" Wes (Michael Sheen; they're seen in happier times at right), who turns out to be named Wesley Snipes (but please don't get him started on that!), and finding ever more evidence of how incompatible they really are, notwithstanding which Wes decided that they should declare each other their "settle soul mates," until finally she stalked him at a wine store ("I figured you wouldn't miss a tasting of 'The White Wines of Scotland'") to "tell you to your face that I know that I can do better than you, and I'm never going to be Mrs. Snipes."

By the way, the link to "Thursday's 30 Rock" at the top of this post will take you to a page where you can watch Thursday's episode complete online.


UPDATE: From Howie And Jefferson

Well, it's just Howie quoting a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to Edward Rutledge in 1796 that I remember a History teacher of mine and Ken's from James Madison High School reciting for us (Mr. Feldman or Mr. Feldstein; I remember the quote but not really the teacher.) Ken has mentioned above that the current crop of wingnuts bear ill will toward the third U.S. president because he coined the term "separation between church and state." True, true, but all conservatives from all times hate Jefferson for pointing out to Rutledge that "There is a debt of service due from every man to his country, proportioned to the bounties which nature and fortune have measured to him." This is exactly what conservatives do not want anyone thinking about. It leads to everything they hate most in the world: egalitarianism, democracy and... progressive taxation.


AND KEN ADDS . . .

Feldstein, I think it was. Wasn't it? I vaguely remember that, but I'm sorry to say that I did not remember that Jefferson quote. On the other hand, not remembering it allows me the pleasure of (re)discovering it. I think it bears repeating:

"There is a debt of service due from every man to his country, proportioned to the bounties which nature and fortune have measured to him."

That Jefferson was in so many ways -- most of them good! -- and so obviously the intellectual father of this country, and the ambassador and inspirational spokesman to the world for our best ideals, that the Texas follies stand in even starker relief. You'd think that being the idealistic heir of T.J. is one of the things Americans are most proud of.

Patriotic, freedom-loving Americans, I mean.

FURTHER THOUGHT FROM KEN:

Hmm, now I'm thinking Feldman, not Feldstein.

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