Moral Responsibility

The witless hominids on the right have broken their chains and launched an all-American, red-white-and-blue trailer trash version of Kristallnacht. This is all because they regard a law that requires people to buy insurance from private, for-profit companies to be an apocalyptic act of socialism, socialism! Good god. It’s a marvel these primates can eat with a knife and fork. On an evolutionary spectrum, I’d place them somewhere between Homo habilis, one for our most primitive ancestors, and the more advanced Neanderthals, who could manipulate objects to bludgeon their prey but lacked the fire to cook it.

I suppose it’s fitting that one of their intellectual leaders, the great ‘idea’ guy of the Republican party, Newt Gingrich, originally wanted to be a zookeeper. So what’s Gingrich’s response to the escalating violence of a mob that he himself inspires? It’s time for political leaders to take moral responsibility for what’s happening in our country, he says. Not Republican political leaders, mind you, but Democratic leaders:

I think the Democratic leadership has to take some moral responsibility for having behaved with such arrogance, in such a hostile way, that the American people are deeply upset. So let’s be honest with this. This is a game that they’re playing. People should not engage in personal threats. I’m happy to condemn any effort to engage in personal threats. But I think the Democratic leadership has to take some real responsibility for having run a machine that used corrupt tactics, that bought votes, that bullied people, and as a result has enraged much of the American people. And I think it’d be nice for President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and Majority Leader Reid to take some responsibility over what their actions have done to this country.

This is good news for every wife beater in the country. The victim has to take moral responsibility for having provoked him!

I wonder who’s going to take moral responsibility when this carnivorous rabble starts turning against people in their own movement who they deem to be ideologically impure. Ask Dick Armey, whose position on immigration has made him a deviationist among some tea party “patriots.”

[…] And in recent weeks, Dick Armey has found himself targeted by a quiet, but concerted campaign from fellow conservatives challenging — and seeking to undermine — his status as a leader of the tea party movement.

Critics ranging from prominent conservatives to bloggers to grass-roots tea party activists have called into question whether Armey’s stances on illegal immigration and social issues, his candidate endorsements and his past lobbying work are fundamentally inconsistent with the tea party movement. They also have suggested he raised the white flag too early in the fight over the Democratic health care overhaul and is beholden to corporate benefactors, and have accused him of trying to hijack the tea parties to serve those benefactors or his own personal political ambitions.

“We’re seeing lots of traffic that shows a lot of anger at (Armey). I would think that he’s endangering his entire standing among the patriots,” reports a tea party leader from a rival faction, and another one says, “…right now, I think we should tar-and-feather Dick Armey.”

Republicans have stimulated the basal ganglia of the most violent, racist, and fascistic elements in our society for cheap political gain, and now it’s getting out of control. Rather than forthrightly condemning these thugs, they play politics by rationalizing their behavior which just emboldens them. Sooner or later, someone’s going to get hurt, and it’s possible it will even be a conservative. Family quarrels are always ugly, and civil wars are always the bloodiest. I wouldn’t expect nitwits like John Boehner or Eric Cantor to understand this, but the historian Gingrich surely knows better, he just doesn’t seem to care — a morally responsible act if I ever saw one.