Aww, Senator Grasshole's feelings are hurt. Those fact-hating GOP-ers always hate it when you quote back what they've said.

"When you see a bunch of people going around thinking that our president is the Antichrist, you have to draw one of two conclusions: Either these are racists, looking for any excuse to level the next accusation, or they're beyond crazy, and I think 'beyond crazy' is a better explanation, and that evangelical subculture has rotted the brain of the United States of America."

-- Frank Schaeffer, to Rachel Maddow on Wednesday's show

by Ken

We're developing a shelfful of valuable books describing and attempting to explain how the conservative movement and the Republican Party have converged in a farrago of ultra-extreme, fact-defying, junk-religious right-wing demagoguery. Howie has been regaling us with morsels from Charles Pierce's Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free,and before that Dave Neiwert's The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right.I myself found a half-price copy (sorry, Max!) of Max Blumenthal's Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party,and have it at the top of my approaching-Everest-size reading pile. We've talked about Jeff Sharlet's The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Powerand Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum's Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future,and I'm sure I'm leaving out a bunch of significant titles.

I'm just catching up with Frank Schaeffer's Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back.Somehow I missed Schaeffer's previous appearances with Rachel Maddow, but I got a jolt from Wednesday's.

Schaeffer writes from the unique perspective of someone who was in on the creation of the modern Religious Right. His father, Francis Schaeffer (1912-1984), a Presbyterian minister, was one of its shapers, and Frank himself was an eager participant until he made his break in the mid-'80s. I call attention in particular to this section, at about 1:15 in the clip:

The mainstream not just media but culture doesn't sufficiently take stock of the fact that within our culture we have a subculture which is literally a fifth column of insanity, that is bred from birth through home school, Christian school, evangelical college, whatever, to reject facts, as a matter of faith. And so this substitute for authentic historic Christianity -- and I may add as a little caveat here, I'm a churchgoing Christian -- really brings up the question, can Christianity be rescued from Christians? And that's an open question.

And when you see a bunch of people going around thinking that our president is the Antichrist, you have to draw one of two conclusions: Either these are racists, looking for any excuse to level the next accusation, or they're beyond crazy, and I think "beyond crazy" is a better explanation, and that evangelical subculture has rotted the brain of the United States of America. We have a big slice of our population waiting for Jesus to come back. They look forward to Armageddon; good news is bad news to them.

When we talk about the Left Behind series of books that I talk about in my book, Crazy for God, what we're really talking about is a group of people who are resentful 'cause they know they've been left behind -- by modernity, by science, by education, by art, by literature. The rest of us are getting on with our lives; these people are standing on a hilltop waiting for the end. This is a dangerous group of people to have as neighbors, and they're our national neighbors. And this is the source of all these insanities that we see leveled at the president. One way or another they go back to this little evangelical subculture. It is a disaster.

[Boldface emphasis added by yours truly.]

Did you get that? A subculture that rejects facts, as a matter of faith. They reject facts as a matter of faith. As Schaeffer says later, "This subculture has as its fundamentalist faith that they distrust facts per se."

Wow! Can it be said much better than that?

I bring this up because Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, best known as Montana Sen. Max Baucus's BFF (one of them is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and the other is ranking minority member, and even they never quite seem sure which is which, as long as the predatory corporatist agenda is being served), but known to our Noah as "Senator Grasshole," which I can certainly get behind, has lately been on a mission to buff up his image.

You remember that creepy post-election period when Chimpy the Then-Prez was still nominally the prez but seemed to lose most of his interest in the job and with it his always-limited focus, and concentrated instead on polishing his "legacy" -- as if the eight years he spent building that legacy could be tossed down a memory hole? Well, now Senator Grasshole seems to be searching for the opening to that memory hole. He's got a lot of crap it appears he'd like to dump down it.

I will stipulate at the outset that Chuck Grassley isn't the worst of the Republicans, or at least didn't used to be. He wasn't the best either. By Republican standards -- and I stress only by Republican standards -- he could legitimately pass himself off as a moderate. Remember that the Modern Movement Right has shifted the goalposts so that "right" is now way out in the vicinity of Uranus or Pluto, if not out of our solar system entirely, so that, relatively speaking, the "center' is, oh, out around Jupiter. By that standard our Chuck could pass as a moderate. I mean, using as our senatorial standard of comparison the likes of Arizona's John Kyl or South Carolina's Jim DeMint.

But that's only if our Chuck wanted to pass as a moderate. With the dawn of the new political alignment of 2009, he showed no inclination to buck the trend to make the GOP the Party of No. Well, perhaps he thought he was bucking it while he and his buddy Max played their joined-at-the-hip game of bipartisan health care whoring, for sale to the highest bidder.

Then Chuck had a bad August, a very bad August. Those angry mobs at his Iowa town halls seem to have unnerved him, which may not be difficult to do since he doesn't seem to have a whole lot of nerve, at least in the gumption sense. So he went with the flow and spent the month demagoguing his constituents.

Now he claims he's being attacked unfairly, because he was just answering constituents' questions. Right! Here he is, Senator Grasshole answering a constituent's question:



Senator Grasshole does say that he has nothing against "things like living wills" (here's the Young Turks' Cenk Uygur talking about it), except that they shouldn't be drawn up at the end of life but 20 years before. Try going to your lawyer and explaining, "I'd like to draw up a living will 20 years before I die." And if you miss the 20-year mark, does that mean you forfeit your right to a say in the decisions made on your behalf when you're no longer able to participate in them? And by the way, is Senator Grasshole, or Jesus Christ, his proposed solver of all end-of-life issues, doing anything to help Iowans face up to those end-of-life realities at that magic 20-years-before-death mark? Not that I've heard.

If Senator Grasshole were really answering his constituent's question, he would have pointed out, simply, clearly, and unequivocallyl, that it's pure fiction, don't worry, nobody's going to pull the plug on Grandma -- except maybe the insurance companies if they get tired of paying out on her. He could have answered her terror with fact. If he really wanted to answer the question, he could have gone further still: explaining that the "death panels" were invented by cynical politicians who spit on reality, and for that matter on people like the senator's scared-silly constituent, and seek only to scare the bejeezus out of gullible people for personal and/or political advantage.

But Senator Grasshole was too smart to be caught trying to fight hysteria with facts. He knows better than anyone that now we have a subculture that rejects facts as a matter of faith. So instead he served up bullshit. He gave his crowd: (1) Jesus Christ. "Hooray!" (2) Government interference. "Boo!" In our clip he derides the woman who tries to point out that what he's saying has nothing to do with what's being proposed.

Out of either a desire for shameless partisan political profit or else just plain gutlessness, Senator Grasshole propagandized for the loony right, acquiescing in and even amplifying its lies, when it was his job to stand up to the liars and try to ease the groundless fears of people who had been driven into a frenzy by merchants of ignorance who seek to turn the country into an autocracy, or perhaps theocracy, that would impose a reign of ignorance and terror, and turn the founding principles of America on their head.

And now Senator Grasshole's feelings are hurt! Because the president spoke less than kindly (finally! what the hell has he been waiting for?) about GOP pols collaborating with fringe loonies to legitimize the bogus "death panels" rumors, and the administration intimated that Senate Finance Committee R's may not have been "negotiating" with absolute good faith. (Ya think?)

Whatever happened to "If you can't do the time, don't do the crime"? I mean, if you make the decision to stoop to that level of behavior, and keep it up over those periods of time, I'm sorry, you have to be prepared if you' get caught. You really don't get to whine about shocking allegations or your hurt feelings. If you don't have the plain gumption to own up to it and say you're fucking sorry for having been such a fucking asshole, you at least have to come up with an excuse above the "dog ate my homework" level. Really, I'm not sure the senator's protestations even rise to the "dog ate my homework" level.

When Queen Marie Antoinette declared, "Let them eat cake," at least she was thinking happy thoughts for those breadless French peasants. Of course she gave no thought to the question of where the peasants were supposed to get that cake to eat, and in this sense I suppose you could say that Senator Grasshole has more completely considered his program for the needs of ordinary Americans. When he says, "Let them eat bullshit," he at least supplies the bullshit.

He seems to have a limitless supply.


AFTERTHOUGHT: DOES SENATOR GRASSHOLE
KNOW WHAT END-OF-LIFE COUNSELING IS?

Since writing the above, I've been thinking about Senator Grasshole's craven performance at those town halls, and it occurs to me, I'm not sure he even knows what end-of-life counseling (or planning) is. He does know enough to relate it to "things like living wills," which he declares he has no problem with. But then there's that whole "20 years before you die" business, not to mention the truly disgraceful demagoguery of invoking Jesus Christ for end-of-life planning. If there were any reason to think he believes that Jesus Christ can counsel you on how much suffering your incapacitated grandparent or parent should be forced to endure, then he should simply commit himself voluntarily to the nearest loony bin, and ideally have a staff member apologize to his constituents for treating them like brain-dead robots.

I've written before about this matter of end-of-life planning, and quoted from some of the (surely standard) language in my mother's living will, noting that she didn't have it drawn up until she was 74. As it turned out she has lived another 16 years, which means that by Senator Grasshole's standard she was too late, and I guess has to be thanked for playing our game and sent home with a consolation prize and no end-of-life plan. Well, sorry, senator, but fuck you!

I don't imagine that it came naturally to my mother to talk to her lawyer about a living will -- and as I mentioned, when she did, she not only made sure I had a copy but made it emphatically clear to me that when her time came, she didn't want her life uselessly prolonged by heroic measures, which can't have been easy for her to talk about either. My mother also planned as much as she could with regard to bank financial matters and funeral arrangements. Now that she's dying, I bless her not just for my sake and the sakes of her care providers, but for her own. Difficult as it is to watch this process, which has been going on now for more than a year and a half, we know that she doesn't want us to do anything to prolong it when there's no hope for meaningful recovery.

If Senator Grasshole and the rest of the legion of Republican rat bastards had even the tiniest shred of intelligence or honesty or decency or compassion, they would be applauding the long-overdue initiative of the government to assist all American to educate themselves about the kinds of issues that confront us at the end of life and how we can prepare for them. The people Grasshole and his kind are demagoguing on the "death panels" issue are probably the very people most desperately in need of information on the subject.

I'm hard put to think of a gentler word for such demagogues than "monsters." They better hope that this God they make such a mockery of every time they invoke Him doesn't exist, because if He does, they're in for an eternity of torment.

When a son of a bitch like Senator Grasshole invokes the name of Jesus Christ, I always wonder if he's smart enough to thank God that Jesus isn't around to speak for himself. But then, these Crap Christians, for all their hysterical fake religiosity, are shockingly ignorant of the actual teachings of Jesus, which are routinely falsified, even ridiculed, by the Religious Right.

One last point: On this matter of "just answering constituents' questions." If you're as genuinely uninformed on a subject as Senator Grasshole appears to be on end-of-life planning and what was proposed in the draft plans, then you can say, "I can understand why you're concerned, and that's something I will definitely have to look into."

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Death is too serious a subject to be demeaned by demagoguing crackpots and crooks who have only contempt for reality

Why aren't we praising the VA for distributing this guide to the fraught world of end-of-life decisions? Why has the All-Lies All-the-Time Right jumped on it? Because they're lying, hate-spewing, terror-mongering crackpots and crooks with no sense of decency or shame. Why is Arlen Specter promising hearings on the so-called "Death Book"? Because he's a cynical, demagoguing son of a bitch who will apparently stop at nothing to promote his own political interests.

"If there is no reasonable expectation of my recovery from physical or mental disability, I wish to be allowed to die and not be kept alive by artificial means or heroic measures, but wish only that drugs be mercifully administered to me for terminal suffering, even if they hasten the moment of my death."

-- from my mother's living will

by Ken

The death of Sen. Ted Kennedy has at least injected a note of reality regarding a subject that we humans as a race have always dealt with badly, most often through simple denial. What I wish to suggest just now is that death is too serious a subject to be sullied by wackos and clowns and crooks. In other words, it really ought to be off limits to Today's Republicans and Movement Conservatives.

I mentioned recently that my 90-year-old mother is dying, though she has shown herself to be in no rush to make the final departure. (She has been in hospice care since January of 2008.) I also mentioned that she made this whole horrible but unfortunately natural and inevitable process immeasurably easier for everyone involved -- herself, me, her health care providers -- by having a living will.

Some of you may never have seen one. It's a simple enough document.

TO MY FAMILY, MY PHYSICIAN, MY CLERGYMAN, MY LAWYER:

If the time comes when I can no longer take part in decisions for my own future, this statement and declaration shall stand as the expression of my wishes. I recognize that death is as much a reality as birth, growth, maturity, and old age -- it is but a phase in the cycle of life and is the only certainty. I do not fear death as much as I fear the indignity of deterioration, dependence, and hopeless pain. If there is no reasonable expectation of my recovery from physical or mental disability, I wish to be allowed to die and not be kept alive by artificial means or heroic measures, but wish only that drugs be mercifully administered to me for terminal suffering, even if they hasten the moment of my death.

I recognize that my wishes place a heavy burden of responsibility upon you, and I therefore make the following declaration with the intention of sharing this responsibility and this decision with you and of mitigating any feelings of guilt that you may have.

What follows is a DECLARATION that translates these beliefs into instructions, and the signatures of her and her witnesses.

I'm assuming that my mother didn't write this, that the language was provided by her lawyer after consultation regarding her wishes. But she made it clear to me in conversation that these are indeed her wishes. I see that she signed this on June 29, 1993, which would have been the week following her 74th birthday. Probably more to the point, it was the year in which my stepfather, her husband of 30 years, died -- mercifully -- of pneumonia after several grueling years of struggle with Alzheimer's.

I suppose she shouldn't have waited as long as she did to effect the living will, but I give her full credit for finally doing it. People of her time weren't brought up to do such things. At the same time, by age 74 she was able to assure me that she had a good life and she understood that when her time came, her time came. And we were lucky in that it would be another 14 1/2 years before her wishes would need to be honored. She even survived a cerebral hemorrhage in 1996, and had six or seven pretty good years after it.

(It should go without saying, but perhaps needs to be said given the caliber of minds now working this beat, that my mother could have made different choices about her end. The point is that they're her choices to make. The modern-day Right has gotten so used to imposing its own insanities on everyone else, more and more often accompanied by threats of violence, and those people are in any case so removed from the whole concept of rational decision-making, that they have no way of understanding what it means to assist people in making their own reasoned choices.)

Because we humans tend to deal so irrationally with the whole subject of death, it has taken a long time for us to develop the wisdom and maturity to deal with the host of complications that attend it. It should have been a source of consolation, even pride, to learn that provision to cover the cost of end-of-life counseling was included in the draft proposals for health care reform, and that the Department of Veterans Affairs was making available to its clients a serious book, or booklet, whatever it is, on the subject.

Instead, a cadre of the vilest, most contemptible, most hating and most hateful people in the history of the human race chose to demagogue the subject with their psychotic rampage of sliming, seeking to gain power over the people they terrified with the lies born of their own ignorance and irrationality.

I understand that the Right, having been trapped in a desperate political squeeze, where the contemptibility and irrationality of its political ideas have been so devastatingly exposed, feels that its only hope is to vilify reality and reason and substitute its framework of greedy fraudulence and psychosis, that only by ensuring that no word of truth ever escapes their foul mouths. Nevertheless, there ought to be -- as I suggested at the outset -- certain subjects that they have some residual shame to profane. It was vile when Sen. Bill Frist and like-minded poltiical whores chose to launch a crusade of lying obfuscation over the dying Terry Schiavo. If there are words to express the contempt that should have been heaped on them. It is, if anything, worse for the Sarah Palins of the world to cause such torment to people who weren't previously infected with her well-earned sense of utter worthlessness.

As Senator Kennedy's funeral approaches, with the likelihood that the Scumbag Right will attempt to politicize the grief of his mourners as they did after the funeral of the late Minnesota Paul Wellstone, I'm grateful to a colleague for calling attention to this wonderful Pandagon post by Amanda Marcotte:

Please politicize my death

I’m almost 32 and I’m in good health, so this might seem a little premature. But as the President pointed out that even young, healthy people should have living wills, the occasion of Ted Kennedy’s death --and Paul Wellstone’s before it -- makes it clear that anyone who is a liberal in the public eye at all should explicitly spell out their wishes about the “politicization” of their deaths, or else the wingnuts will declare that the only proper way to honor your legacy is to start by undermining it. So, in the event of my passing, I want it to be clear these are my wishes:

1) Please honor me by continuing to fight for the liberal causes I held dear.

2) Explicitly state in any obituaries, memorial services, etc. that what I would have wanted was to keep the fight going.

3) Impassioned speeches about the fight ahead for progressivism are especially welcome .
4) Indeed, the only way to honor my memory is to double down and fight for a better world .
5) Conservatives who don’t like this should shut the fuck up.

Obviously, I’m a mere blogger, so this is mostly irrelevant. But I’d like to get this out there in hopes of inspiring others. Hopefully, those who are truly influential to the point where wingnuts will try to use their death to undermine their legacy would be well-advised to spell out their wishes, so their survivors have a trump card.

Well said, Amanda! And an inspiration in the face of the sociopathic Rightists who will be dancing on Senator Kennedy's grave, not to mention the subtler wingnut hypocrites, if anything more obnoxious, people like Young Johnny McCranky and Orrin Hatch, who pay lip service to a man whose legacy they revile.

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