These are the sensible, repected voices of the right?

You know those recurring dreams where vaguely disturbing things happen to you and it always turns out the same; you fall off a cliff but never hit the ground or you suddenly remember that you signed up for Philosophy 200 back in September and it’s now December and you haven’t been to any of the classes because you forgot all about it?  I thought about this over the weekend after reading a couple of republican hack syndicated columnists jabbering on about how we’re all going to die because of the awful, terrible negro, Obama.   

Charles Krauthammer and Victor Davis Hanson share an aura of credibility and respectability because they are rumored to have some kind of academic credentials, thus rendering their otherwise inane and repetitious Obama-badgering to be the voice of the loyal opposition.   I, however, have drilled deeply into their Cave of Half-Remembered Treachery and am here to tell you the truth.   Both of these guys are making a tidy living being professional Obama-haters and undiscerning shills for every right-wing interest group from the NRA to Chevron to the Daughters of the American Revolution to the Elks club down on the corner.  So as a public service I am once again going to take my trusty lance to their army of straw men and try to get the smell of red herring out of the house before the company comes over. 

Krauthammer’s latest thinly disguised propaganda piece uses the pretense of dissecting the choice of Chuck Hagel for Defense Secretary to flog Obama for not hewing to the neo-con vision of American exceptionalism, a grand-sounding euphemism for global imperialism and genuflection to Israel specifically.   He cites three areas where Obama is reverting to his true Obama-ness; military spending, Israel and Iran – sort of a holy trinity of the sacrosanct to the Bill Krystol  / Richard Perle church of world domination.   Citing the 600 billion in automatic, across-the-board defense cuts to be implemented by the sequester, he fails to recognize John Boner being hoisted on his own petard and makes it sound as if that’s Obama’s number, a number which, if implemented, would leave our military tragically neutered and wandering the world stage like a 20 year old hump-back gelding.   His basic criticism – boiled down – is that Obama wants a smaller military, a grim and ominous development for USO bars from Okinawa to Dusseldorf.  But really Chuck – virtually everyone not obsessed with some kind of weird Julius Caesar complex understands that after winding down two wars, the military should be smaller.

Our problem with our belligerent little brother Israel is a vexing one politically.  There are so many Israeli constituencies, from hallucinating evangelicals to the George Patton-wannabe chicken hawks who lay in bed at night with erections thinking about the 7^th Armored Division charging across Kordestan hell-bent for Tehran and the obstinate 17^th century monks huddled in the Grand Mosque plotting our demise.  This is just stupid, as has been American policy towards Israel and Iran for the last 25 years.   Unless you want to sanction bombing them back to the Bronze Age, they aren’t going anywhere.  You’d think we might come to understand that putting a gun to their head isn’t going to accomplish anything but every time an American president whispers the word “negotiate” these guys start foaming at the mouth.  They apparently never got over their personal Peacock, the Shah, being ignominiously kicked out and are determined to make up for it, turning what under other circumstances might just be another Middle Eastern country suspicious of us for our knee-jerk support for Israel into a scary nuclear monster trying to destroy us.  I know lots of Iranian people and generally find them to be friendly but tough negotiators who like “things” just like we do and like the Chinese do and like most people do.  Turning them into cartoonish and mysterious haters of the Great Satan is counter- productive.

I’m personally ambivalent about Israel – I can sympathize with 60 years of jittery nerves, bus-bombings, and widespread hatred from their neighbors.  But I also know that if every time my neighbor’s kid lost a ball in my yard I took a high-powered rifle and shot out their windows I probably wouldn’t get much sleep at night either.   And they need to stop building god damned apartment buildings.

But for my money Krauthammer’s most damning position is his exaltation of the little war criminal, Henry Kissinger, to some kind of semi-deity and Middle Eastern savant.  Never mind that the little bastard sits in his New York City brownstone with security armed to the teeth and is afraid to venture much past Massachusetts for fear of being Pinochet’d into his own damp jail cell.  The little prick probably dreams of extraordinary rendition at night – rotting in some stinking prison in Outer Nowhere is too good for him.   But he’s Krauthammer’s idea of a statesman.

In his latest column for the San Jose Mercury, Victor Davis Hanson – and by the way; it’s a sure sign that someone is a blowhard if they use three names when surely two will do – regurgitates his usual litany of republican talking points, augmented nicely by a veneer of doom and foreboding.  I wanted to punch him but I’ll just hit these one by one instead.

The central premise is that the idea of some kind of gun control is creating panic akin to that which would occur is one of those big-ass spaceships were hovering over New York or Los Angeles, so just-plain-folks are flocking to gun stores, arming themselves to the teeth and checking their supply of Twinkies in the basement for fear the faceless bureaucrats of the ATF will soon be going door-to-door to seize Grandpa’s 12 gauge.  As paranoid fantasies go, this is a good one – some addled gun owners seem to have this as their recurring dream.   He then goes on the blame violent video games and the depraved glitterati of Hollywood for making Adam Lanza go nuts and kill 26 people.  He neglects to mention that Lanza’s mother was the source of the weapon in question and misses the irony of her buying it for self defense purposes.  Vic, if she did have Grandpa’s 12 gauge for protection, young Adam would likely never perpetrated his nightmarish crime and we might not be having this conversation.  Some simple safety measures, eh?  Like maybe a trigger lock or a gun safe and Adam is still in his room playing World of Warcraft and listening to German death metal.

He segues into a rant about health insurance and higher taxes on income over 400k, bemoaning the fact that these valiant embodiments of American bootstrap success are being punished – made hapless victims – and the government is, by implication, going to give their hard earned money to the shiftless among us.  In a particularly obvious falsehood, he sympathizes with those who have been playing fair and buying insurance and who now must subsidize, “many who could, but chose not to buy health insurance”, somehow obfuscating the fact that making those people pay for their insurance or health care one way or another is the very essence of Obama-care.

He ends on this cheery note; “No wonder the fear that a growing government will infringe on such traditional freedoms is stampeding millions of panicky Americans in all directions.”  Of course this is insulting in several ways, the most egregious being the implication that Americans are as stupid as cockroaches, something that – I’m afraid – he and the rest of the right wing intelligencia truly believe down to their souls…or whatever it is that occupies the space where there should be a soul.

My recurring dream is the clamor and screeching of these relentless voices spewing misinformation and outright lies to advance their agenda, cloaked in faux patriotism, racism and contempt for those whose striving hasn’t resulted in “success”.   It’s one thing to want a smaller government – I certainly do.  It’s something else to take that very traditional American ideal and twist it into hatred and fear and treason.  Listening to some of the over-heated rhetoric coming from the sputtering and bug-eyed republican members of the House of Representatives, I am frankly surprised that they haven’t been hauled off by the secret service for a sweaty conversation in some dusty warehouse in Maryland.  To have these ostensibly respected members of the conservative media fomenting this kind of hyperventilating nonsense is regrettable.  I think tonight I’ll take an Ambien and see what happens…