Why is the right acting like they have lost their collective minds ? For one thing the decision of giving corporations person hood and the ability to buy any politico they choose, as Sam Smith points out here.

That said, there is a moment when confusion turns into chaos or assault turns into murder. For the American political system that moment was the Supreme Court decision on corporations a year ago. Historians - if such people are permitted to exist in the future - will probably see this as one of the great tipping points in the collapse of America.

Further, what has happened in the last year - including the Tea Party surge in the 2010 election - is not so much the result of an intrinsic mental breakdown in the GOP as it is the conscious selection of candidates who would once have been considered absurd, but now can be safely used to carry out corporatist goals because the public no longer has the power to defeat the money.

A Scott Walker or Paul LePage can say and do anything that their campaign contributors want because it is assumed by the latter that money now inevitably trumps public will.

Yes, Scott Walker may be a sadist and Paule LePage a dumb bully, but they are merely tools of those who fund them. All they have to do is be pluto pimps for the corporate agenda.

This is scheme wouldn't work so well if their funders mainly wanted something, but what they really want is the absence of something -namely a government that might stand in their way. So long as Walker and LePage are destroying things, their backers are quite content.

These Republicans are wrecking trucks for the big businesses that want to tear down the neighborhood we call America.

It's working for them right now. Whether it will continue to do so remains to be seen. For example, for the working class to even think about supporting Republicans is an idea only about three decades old.

A short list of constituencies that Republicans have recently offended include supporters of 9/11 responders, the AARP, Americorps, black men, cchildren with pre-existing health conditions, college students, cops, disabled people, aarthquake warnings, employed women, EPA, ethnically mixed couples, gays, ill people who need medical marijuana, immigrants and their children, jobless people, journalists, latinos, Medicaid recipients, Methodists, minimum wage workers, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, NPR & PBS, the Postal Service, public school students, public workers, scientists, supporters of separation of church and state, Social Security recipients, state workers, and women generally.

This may well all be true and I do not dispute it. This comment though pretty much says it all.

StopTheInsanity said...

    would that it were true that the real-Right were somehow more mentally ill than the fake-Left.

    but this simply is not remotely true.

    i'm a repentant, recovering liberal-progressive-democrat (there are no substantive differences among these labels) and i have long realized the fake-Left is as bat-shit-crazy as the real-Right.

    you will find, to name but three examples, significant numbers on the fake-Left that believe:

    1) nine-eleven was an inside job,

    2) vaccines are a hoax for profit, and

    3) condensation trails from jet planes are really "chem trails" deployed to kill, sicken and control.

    but the serious and crippling mental illness the real-Right and fake-Left share is their brain dead fealty to our unsustainable-by-definition, criminally unconscionable, and unforgivable Empire of Growth.

    Chris Hedges recently exposed his inability to let go of this Empire in his essay, The Collapse of Globalization.

    In which he boxed himself into an untenable contradiction by expressing this truth:

    "We must embrace, and embrace rapidly, a radical new ethic of simplicity and rigorous protection of our ecosystem—especially the climate—or we will all be holding on to life by our fingertips."

    only to immediately contradict it with:

    "It does not matter that the middle class—the beating heart of any democracy—is disappearing and that the rights and wages of the working class have fallen into precipitous decline as labor regulations, protection of our manufacturing base and labor unions have been demolished."

    this is a glaringly counterproductive disconnect.

    which is to say, you cannot have a thriving amerikan middle class and "a radical new ethic of simplicity and rigorous protection of our ecosystem".

    for they are, by definition, diametric:

    "Humanity would need five Earths to produce the resources needed if everyone lived as profligately as Americans..."
    - tinyurl.com/yl8q3fz
    (regardless of techno-fix religion)

    this is the nightmare of the amerikan dream.

    and trying to save the impossible dream will only prolong the real nightmare.

    it amounts to trying to get out of a bottomless pit by relentlessly digging with imaginary shovels.

    we would, as a culture, have to do something which no previous globe-eating Empire-of-Growth has ever done.

    we would have to collectively and voluntarily turn our backs on our brutal, predatory, exploitive, profligate, military, criminal, sociopathic way-of-life to instead embrace "a radical new ethic of simplicity and rigorous protection of our ecosystem".

    but there is not one shred of proof--not the tiniest speck--which points to our ability to recognize our cognitive- and behavioral-dissonances, let alone the ability to transcend them.

    pretending there is significant difference between the real-Right's desperate hail Mary attempts to save the impossible dream and the fake-Left's hail Mary attempts is a fool's folly.

    it's a Quixotic quest which--most likely intentionally, on a subconscious level--misses the point by light years.

    and it only serves to cause more harm.

    because fake-Left, real-Right or non-existent-Middle, the overwhelming majority believe the self-serving myths and lies of our collapsing Empire of Growth.

    myths like infinite growth on a finite planet and everyone on Earth can and should live as we do (impossible by definition since our way of life is criminally parasitic by design).

    and lies like money is real and money can breed more money (which is like believing dragons are real and dragons can breed more dragons).

    these cultural myths and lies are legion and our faith in them is as self-destructively unwavering on the fake-Left (technology will save us) as on the real-Right (god will save us).

    neither will save us.

    only we can save us.

    but we clearly do not have the stomach for it.

    for it would mean facing a kind of personal- and collective-responsibility foreign to us all.

In other words there is enough collective insanity on both sides to go around.