Tag: Marjorie Taylor Greene

Categories
At Large Opinion

The Devil to Pay

Photo: Adrienne Wallace | Dreamstime.com

We’re hearing a lot about God in politics lately. Maybe not your god, especially if you’re Muslim or Buddhist or Jewish or, I don’t know, Episcopalian. No, the god that’s being shoved into our faces by the United MAGA Church is the American fundamentalist Christian god, the one who doesn’t approve of unmarried sex, homosexuals, abortion, interracial marriage, or even contraception. This god is a real hard-ass, and the MAGAs have attached themselves to him like a barnacle on a tugboat. (We’ll assume His pronoun is Him.)

This god was invented in backwoods American churches, where fast-talking evangelists did their best to guilt their flocks into obeisance and into donating money to “the church” before seducing the prettiest 15-year-old in the congregation and running off to dupe the next group of suckers.

As is often the case with successful small businesses in America, that model got leveraged and eventually morphed into the big mega-churches whose preachers fly private jets, live on palatial estates, and have television shows. The payoff is bigger but the game is the same — guilt and grift: “You poor schmucks are going to fry in eternal hellfire FOREVER if you don’t stop sinning. Here’s a list of stuff that’s bad. Don’t do any of it, even if most of it feels good. Like sex. Sex is really bad unless you’re heterosexually married and only doing it to have babies. Did I mention you need to send me money so we can stop all these other schmucks from sinning? In the name of JAYSUS, amen!” Millions of idiots buy into this.

All of this hustle is theoretically based on Christianity, which, applied properly, is a respectable religion, based on the life and example of one Jesus Christ of Nazareth, a poor man who lived in the Middle East a couple thousand years ago, and who, as far as I’m aware, never asked for money or said a word about abortion, guns, contraception, interracial marriage, or white supremacy (which is a good thing, since Jesus wasn’t white).

Mainly, as I recall from my Methodist raising, Jesus was against materialism (money-changers), for forgiveness — and for treating our fellow humans as we ourselves would like to be treated. If we did this, I was taught, we’d go to Heaven, where we’d see all the people in our lives again and hang out with them forever (which was a concept I spent many a night in my youth trying to get my head around).

But any religion is subject to perversion of its core beliefs, whether in the pursuit of money, power, or both. And make no mistake, nationalistic Evangelicalism is a perversion of Christianity. It has literally nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus. It’s a bizarre cult that believes a 10-year-old should be forced to carry a rapist’s baby to term, that everyone should carry guns, and whose political representatives are now passing laws prohibiting women from crossing a state line to get a medical procedure they disapprove of.

This Christian Taliban thinking led all but eight Republicans in Congress to vote last week against a bill guaranteeing the right to contraception. Think about it: Ninety percent of Congressional Republicans literally voted against guaranteeing people the right to buy condoms.

Also, last week: Georgia Congress-beast Marjorie Taylor Greene said on television: “We need to be the party of nationalism. I say it proudly. I’m a Christian Nationalist!” So were the Nazis, Marge.

Colorado Congress-gun Lauren Boebert said, “We need to get over this idea of the separation of church and state, because we’re a Christian nation.” The Founding Fathers would be surprised to learn that, LB.

And there was Florida Congress-putz Matt Gaetz, who offered the novel theory that women demanding abortion rights shouldn’t worry “because they’re all 5’2” and 300 pounds and no one’s going to want to impregnate them.” So, only hot chicks get abortion rights?

How deep does this crazy go? And more important, how far do we let these dangerous freaks go before we stand up and vote-shame them back into the guano-glutted bat-caves from whence they came? If we don’t take these people seriously — right now — we will regret it for the rest of our lives. They’ve gotten a taste of power (and money) and now they’re coming for our freedoms.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Take the Gloves Off

Marjorie Taylor Greene (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Many of you have no doubt watched a video of Michigan state Senator Mallory McMorrow’s forthright response to a far-right colleague’s attempt to paint her as a “groomer” for the LGBTQ community and a supporter of pedophilia.

The larger import of McMorrow’s courageous pushback should not be lost: Democrats need to respond, with controlled anger and potent language, to the deliberate lies and bullying the far right is using these days to win power.

Democrats seem to think facts speak for themselves. Any intelligent person can surely see through the baseless far-right charges. But polls suggest that most conservatives want to believe them, must believe them if their candidate is to succeed.

In this new era of social media-generated “alternative facts,” where the loudest voices are instantly magnified and often win out, we can make no assumptions about the intelligent voter.

Liberals and progressives need to go beyond polite dismissals of the big lies. The liberal media need to stop making it appear that there are two legitimate sides to every debate.

And the president of the United States needs to stop ignoring the far right’s hateful attacks.

It is time to take the gloves off — to call things for what they are. Donald Trump is a traitor; he is responsible for an attempted coup on January 6, 2021. (His financial chicanery also makes him a common white-collar criminal.)

The far-right House team of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Mike Lee, et al. are treasonous co-conspirators who should be barred from office. The Trump inner circle of Michael Flynn, John Eastman, Roger Stone, Mark Meadows, and the rest are cowards and seditionists. Kevin McCarthy is an ambitious liar. Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott are bullies and bigots. Sean Hannity and the rest of the Fox “news” team are repulsive serial liars.

Get the picture? We no longer treat these people as being sadly wrong or merely narrow-minded. They are, as a group, anti-American — determined to remake our country into an authoritarian state founded on white Christian nationalism. They should be either voted out of office or jailed for criminal behavior.

We cannot continue to be merely “shocked and saddened” by every deceit, every racist act, every homophobic comment the far right comes up with. As Mallory McMorrow said, “Hate wins when people like me stand by and let it happen.”

We, people like her, need to fight back, with a passionate defense of human rights, social equity, and environmental justice — “liberty and justice for all,” remember?

And we should mount a vigorous campaign to pressure the justice department to start bringing federal charges against all these outliers.

Mel Gurtov, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is professor emeritus of political science at Portland State University and blogs at In the Human Interest.

Categories
At Large Opinion

The Memory Hole

Marjorie Taylor Greene (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Memories are ephemeral things. They get stacked like dishes in a cabinet, most never brought out until evoked by happenstance — a story told by a friend, an unexpected phone call, an old family photo. We more easily recall the high moments, the weddings, births, holidays, deaths. The events of an ordinary day from, say, seven years ago, are mostly forgotten.

Unless, that is, you have a device like the Portal that’s in our kitchen. It’s a screen on a stand that will play music or perform other web duties as needed, but we mostly use it for long-distance calls with family, so everyone can see each other at once.

You can also link the Portal to photos from your camera or computer. Portal then cycles through your pictures at random, posting them for 10 seconds at a time, before sliding into the next one. Since we have made hundreds of photos available to Portal, this can be both delightful and disconcerting.

Walk into the kitchen and you might see a photo of a gorgeous sunset from a long-ago boat ride, followed by a shot from that horrible February when your roof had to be replaced, followed by a picture of your beloved old mutt, Trotsky, who died in 2015. Every 10 seconds, it’s a new memory to think about, a new reminder of how much past has really passed and how many of life’s transitory moments we forget.

Yesterday, a picture I took of then-President Donald Trump’s infamous 2017 “covfefe” tweet appeared. It was once a big deal. Was the president delivering a secret message? What did it mean? I hadn’t thought about “covfefe” and the temporary nuttiness that ensued for a long time. I bet you haven’t either. Once, it was the story of the week. Now it’s just another “WTF?” moment from the Donald years.

The photo reminded me of last week’s kerfuffle involving Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who, in a rambling tirade, accused “Nancy Pelosi’s gazpacho police” of spying on her and other members of Congress. The pundits had a field day making sport of MTG. Pelosi was a “soup nazi.” She’s connected to “anti-pho.” Ha ha, etc. Afterward came a tepid debate about whether Taylor Greene was really that stupid (I vote yes) or whether she was playing a clever four-dimensional chess game to get people talking about her.

Who knows? Nobody but Marjorie Taylor Greene. But as the “covfefe” incident demonstrates, none of it will matter in a couple of weeks. Today’s distraction will be yesterday’s soup.

But the distractions can present a real danger, not just fodder for foolishness. While everyone is yukking it up about MTG’s gaffe, GOP-controlled states around the country are continuing to pass laws that restrict voting rights, a woman’s right to choose, and the rights of LGBTQ people. They are redistricting their party into permanent majority status. It’s happening here in Tennessee as we speak. In addition, Governor Bill Lee is proceeding apace with his audacious plan to pay a Michigan-based Christian school to create up to 500 private charter schools in Tennessee, using tax dollars meant to go to public schools. It’s a huge grift and a deep dive into unconstitutional waters. But that won’t stop “Bible Bill” from pushing like hell to make it happen.

All the national talking heads are making dire forecasts about the 2022 midterms for Democrats, saying the GOP is likely to take back the House and Senate. This isn’t a drill, anymore. It’s no longer politics as usual. One of the two major American parties has skied down the slippery slope, has gone all in for establishing a one-party Christian autocracy as our new system of government.

You have but to listen to the tweet-rants of senators Marsha Blackburn, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and others. They don’t speak of policy or lawmaking. It’s all about spreading fear and disinformation. That’s it. That’s the play. You and I can stand up and fight like hell, or we can sit back and enjoy the shit gazpacho we’re all about to be served.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

The Tabloid Party

Remember “supermarket tabloids”? They were called that because when you stood in the checkout line at the grocery store, you were invariably confronted with a rack of newspapers featuring headlines such as: “HILLARY CLINTON ADOPTS ALIEN BABY!” Or, “BIGFOOT KEPT LUMBERJACK AS SEX SLAVE!” Or, “DICK CHENEY IS A ROBOT!” (All actual headlines, by the way.)

There was the Star, the Weekly World News, The Sun, and, of course, the still extant National Enquirer, most recently famous for burying stories about former President Trump’s extramarital liaisons.

I like to think most people who saw these tabloids in the checkout line back then were like me — they chuckled, rolled their eyes, maybe even bought a copy of a particularly outrageous issue ironically, thinking “Who the hell would believe this?”

But the tabloids sold millions of copies a week in their prime, and they weren’t all being purchased ironically. Some people bought tabloids because they wanted to know exactly how a “174-MPH Sneeze Blows Off Woman’s Hair,” or details about the “FBI Captur[ing] Bat Child,” or the woman who claimed “I Had Bigfoot’s Baby.”

We used to think the kind of people who believed tabloid stories were unsophisticated rubes who didn’t know any better. It wasn’t a big problem. If some goober in Horn Lake believed that Hillary Clinton adopted an alien baby, what was the harm, really? Morons gonna moron. We’ve come a long way from that sort of lunacy.

Oh wait, no we haven’t. Countless numbers of QAnon faithful believe Hillary Clinton and Anderson Cooper (and many others) are involved in a cannibalistic pedophilic sex-slavery ring. I guess for Hillary it probably all started with that alien baby.

It would be funny, except that most Republicans are now basically members of the “Tabloid Party,” because what is the QAnon conspiracy if not a gory tabloid fantasy writ large? Let’s review: A cabal of cannibalistic satan-worshipping pedophiles (cool band name) — including Democratic politicians, media moguls, and bankers (short-hand for Jews), journalists, and other powerful government figures — control the “deep state” and thereby rule the country. And remember, they eat babies. Let that sink in. Thousands of people believe this shit. Which is terrifying.

The QAnon conspiracy further alleges that a battle between good and evil is raging and that Donald Trump was sent to turn the tide for good. “Q” himself is deep within the deep state, giving cryptic clues to the faithful and orchestrating two great upcoming events: The Storm (mass arrests of the deep state evil-doers) and The Great Awakening, in which all will be revealed and made obvious to non-believers — and Donald Trump will return to his rightful place as president of our great and noble land. (Trump, by the way, is supposed to be sworn in on March 4th. Trump’s hotel in Washington, D.C., has tripled its rates for that night. Look it up. Used to be that morons just bought tabloids. Now they book $1,000 hotel rooms.)

This is all insane, right? Surely, most sentient beings can agree on this.

I mean, except for most Republicans in Congress, who gave freshman Congressperson Marjorie Taylor Greene a standing ovation after she slightly backed off a couple of her more controversial QAnon-related remarks. Among her many outrages, Greene has denied 9/11 happened, called several mass shootings “false flag operations” and berated one of the students at Parkland High School as a “coward,” claimed Bill and Hillary Clinton were involved in numerous murders, including that of John F. Kennedy Jr., and alleged that Jews in the banking business used lasers from space satellites to start last summer’s California forest fires. I could go on, but I’d run out of space. Greene is a walking, talking issue of Weekly World News, only more dangerous. She’s racist and vile, and frankly, nuts.

And yet, only 11 Republicans in Congress had the courage to vote for removing Greene from her committee positions last week. Only Liz Cheney had the guts to forcefully speak out against this madness.

And her father’s a robot.