The right-wing war on women: Why have an economic meltdown if you can't use it as cover for a return to biblical patriarchy?

UPDATE: For handy reference, MoveOn.org has posted a list of "Top 10 Shocking Attacks from the GOP's War on Women"

[Don't forget to click to enlarge.]

by Ken

With Wisconsin, Ohio, and Florida only the lead battlegrounds for a return to a political stone age, we do well to remember how the forces of the Far Right are using the economic meltdown -- the very meltdown they worked so hard, by either monumental blunder or underlying intent, to create -- as cover for a massive return to a primitive political netherworld that has nothing to do with the dark netherworld of their wet dreams.

So when the new thug-governor of Wisconsin insists, for example, that he has to strip away the hard-won rights of state workers to collective bargaining, it really has nothing to do with what the state can or can't afford, especially when he's rammed through tax cuts that exceed the size of the "crisis" budget gap he claims to be trying to close. Just this morning I heard Governor Walker explaining again why he can't even consider any sort of compromise in his anti-worker crusade: "We don't have any money." I notice he doesn't mention that he himself made sure that that would be the case.

At the moment the Right is basking in the glory of its message success at demonizing public workers, trusting that it won't occur to the "middle" voters they're playing for suckers that those workers are doing a whole lot more for them than the economic elites who are pulling the strings behind the scenes of the right-wing regression.

The other day Ian Welsh wrote in a post:

A friend just emailed me about Wisconsin. I’m happy people are protesting, but the governor said, long before he was elected, that he intended to break public sector unions. He’s just doing what he said he would do. If you didn’t want it, why did you vote for it?

The Governor has a mandate. Wisconsin voters gave it to him.

Voters in the grip of economic panic -- a state, it's only fair to say, in which the Obama administration left them feeling abandoned -- may have thought they were voting that panic, but as the dust settles, are they beginning to understand what they actually voted for?

So it really shouldn't come as such a surprise that the war on women's rights has emerged from the right-wing muck. For some on the Far Right it's the answer to prayers long muttered under cover of ideological darkness, for a return to the "happy" days of biblical patriarchy, where uppity people who don't know their place are forcibly shown their place. For others on the Far Right, notably the economic royalists led by the Koch brothers and their zillionaire cohorts, it's a useful strategy for reinforcing the loyalty of those militant warriors for their authoritarian agenda. Just how far this holy alliance can succeed under cover of the economic meltdown remains to be seen.

I wouldn't bet heavily against it, though.

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