G.O.P. War On U.S.

G.O.P. War On U.S.

by Paul Covell

Copyright 2012 Paul Covell

Smashwords Edition

Other Books by Paul Covell

The Hail Mary available as a pocketbook at createspace.com/3989582. G.O.P. War On U.S. also available as a pocketbook at createspace.com/3955908.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1-First Amendment Freedom, For Whom?

Chapter 2-Republican Party Primary Centrifuge 2012

Chapter 3-Self-Inflicted Blunt Force Trauma

Chapter 4-The Dysfunctional Congress

Chapter 5-Republican Party Has No Valid Reason to Exist.

Chapter 6-Compassionate Conservatism

Chapter 7-Civil Rights & the South

Chapter 8-Triangulation

Chapter 9-Propaganda War

Chapter 10-Armageddon

Chapter 11-Republican Brain, Marketing, Propaganda & Disinformation Trust

Chapter 12-Politics of Fear & Smear

Chapter 13-Secret Government

Chapter 14-You Can Fool All of the People Some of the Time

Chapter 15-The Cheney Presidency

Chapter 16-Romney’s Dilemma

Chapter 17-The Elephant in the Room

Chapter 18-How Did the Republican Party Become Anti-Everything?

Chapter 19-The Big Lie

Chapter 20-The House of Reprehensibles

"The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One’s right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no election".

Justice Robert H. Jackson, W. VA. Bd. of Ed. v. Barnette, 319 U. S. at 638 (1943).

Preface

Republicans are not just Waging War on Women’s Rights, with legislation limiting access to contraceptives, and mandating trans-vaginal ultrasound scans to humiliate women seeking abortion. Republicans are Waging War on America and undermining the very foundation of Democracy in an attempt to hold power through Vote Suppression and Voter Intimidation.

Aside from supporting unlimited accumulation of wealth, low taxation for the upper one percent, and the procurement of every weapons system advanced by the Military-Industrial Complex—the G.O.P. is anti-everything else. Anti-abortion, anti-contraceptive, anti-feminist, anti-woman, anti-women’s health care rights, anti-gay, anti-foreign, anti-immigrant, anti-Hollywood (except for fundraisers), anti-liberal, anti-labor, anti-organized labor, anti-minority, anti-government, anti-Affordable Care Act and hysterically anti-everything-President Obama supports. On July 11, 2012, Republicans in the House of Reprehensibles repealed the Affordable Care Act for the 31st time, while refusing to pass jobs bills.

Republicans took over the U. S. House and a gaggle more of state legislatures in the swing to the right by voters in 2010. This enabled Republicans to accelerate the War on Women’s Health Care and the campaign of Vote Suppression and Voter Intimidation. Right Wing states require women seeking abortion to undergo ultrasound scans before having an abortion. The author of the Alabama ultrasound bill offered women a Hobson’s choice of which ultrasound method they preferred for their humiliation. As will be seen, the G.O.P. no longer has a valid reason to exist. The unholy alliance of Republicans and the Christian Coalition is coming apart at the seams.

The election of November 6, 2012, could be a watershed event, a tsunami, sweeping Right Wing Republicans out to sea, likely surpassed in importance only by the New Deal election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. Voters will reject religious fanaticism and social wedge issues. Voters will see through G.O.P. propaganda in all its overt and subtle forms. G.O.P. Chair Reince Priebus encapsulated the social barb that is latent in all G.O.P. "Talking Points". When Barack Obama came to America, according to Priebus, he took advantage of many of the opportunities here.

For the more innocent among us, Priebus implied that Barack Obama likely emigrated from his mythical homeland in Africa along the lines of Eddie Murphy’s character in "Coming to America". Perhaps this explains why the Right Wing and snake oil salesmen, such as Donald Trump, demand to see the President’s long-form birth certificate, as if the announcement of the birth of Barack Hussein Obama II on August 4, 1961, published contemporaneously in the Honolulu newspaper, were part of a conspiracy to foist an extra-terrestrial on our Nation.

The election of 2012 likely will slow down G.O.P sponsored legislation to impose government-mandated ultrasound scans as a humiliation of women, and expose Vote Suppression and Voter Intimidation as unlawful tools that Republicans use to subdue minorities, students, naturalized citizens, Hispanics, city dwellers and other democratic citizen groups. Unless the electorate reigns in Right Wing state and federal legislators, the War on Women’s Health Care and minority groups will continue unabated.

Republicans face a losing demographic because the G.O.P. has alienated most other groups. Republicans painted themselves into their own minority corner—where they cannot win a fair election because the Republicans offended and alienated all of the other minority groups.

Even though women fought and won the battle for sexual equality during the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, the Right Wing wants to go back 60 years or more to a time when politicians and bishops thought they could tell women how many children to bear. From this day forward, no politician will dare mention the word trans-vaginal ultrasound and choice in the same sentence—except to condemn any attempt to humiliate women who seek birth control.

Roy Blunt (R-MO) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) proposed an Amendment to the Transportation Bill (voted down 51-48) that would allow employers and health care providers to deny healthcare to anyone for moral or religious reasons. The target obviously was contraceptives and birth control for women, but the Blunt-Rubio Amendment made all health care subject to the whim of employers and health care providers. The G.O.P. is in a medieval time warp that threatens the freedom of everyone.

The Blunt-Rubio Amendment and the trans-vaginal ultrasound humiliation proposed in Alabama, Virginia, and other states have led to a firestorm of protest against Right Wing Neanderthals. All Republican Senators present (except Olympia Snowe) voted against Women’s Rights and for the Blunt Amendment. Incredibly, three Democrats, Bob Casey (PA), Ben Nelson (NE) and Joe Manchin (W VA) voted with the Republicans for the Blunt-Rubio Amendment.

Republicans have used propaganda to hold power for sixty years. In the 1950s, then Congressman Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy scared us with the threat of communism. Republicans worked the Cold War for forty years. Racism gradually infected Republican strategy. Republican strategist Lee Atwater knew if he could make Willie Horton a household name, he could win the election for George H. Bush in 1988.

George W. Bush won in 2000 behind the mask of a compassionate conservative. In 2012, the Republicans want to take the country back on the slur that our President somehow is not one of us. Mitt Romney can win the Presidency only by adopting the Big Lie, the colossal untruth. Romney praised Romney Care in 2007 as a model for the national health care. Romney now says deceitfully that Obama Care, which copied Romney Care, is not the same, on most major points, as the health care bill Romney signed into law in 2006 as Governor of Massachusetts.

On May 29, 2012, Mitt Romney made a joint appearance with Donald Trump in Las Vegas to raise campaign funds. The same day Trump made his weekly call to CNBC’s Squawk Box, and raised the issue of President Obama’s birth once again. On the same day, the Romney Campaign posted Romney’s U. S. birth certificate on their website, to underscore Trump’s propaganda campaign against Barack Obama.

The Big Lie is constant repetition of a lie that is so colossal that the people cannot imagine it could be false. Romney ratified Trump’s Big Lie on the birther nonsense.

Romney trumpets his own Big Lies, including claims that:

the federal Stimulus Funds did not produce any jobs

Romney should have credit for saving the auto industry

Obama should take military action on Syria and Iran

Presidents must have 3 years of business experience

Romney's business experience qualified him to be Governor

Romney produced jobs as Massachusetts Governor

Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital produced 100,000 U. S. jobs

Obama will take away your guns

Operation Fast & Furious was a plot to ban U.S. gun sales

the rate of federal spending went up under Obama

Romney is severely conservative

Corporations are people, my friend

Obama is responsible for high gasoline prices

When gasoline prices fall, it is not because of Obama

Obama does not understand capitalism

Obama is overregulating banks and businesses

Business is not hiring because of government regulation

Obama does not believe in American exceptionalism

Criticism of Romney’s record is character assassination

Romney's business experience qualifies him to be President

The Affordable Care Act is the largest U.S. tax hike ever

***

"Conservatives trust families and the ordinary Americans formed by them.

Liberals do not. They border on disdain for the common man."

Former U. S. Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA), It Takes a Family.

Chapter -1-

First Amendment Freedom, For Whom?

As noted by Walter Shapiro in The Ticket on 2/17/12, Senator Santorum’s attempt to wrap himself and conservatives in the cloak of family values—and Santorum’s suggestion, in the above quotation from It Takes A Family, that liberals disdain the common man—is indefensible,…inflammatory and untrue.

While there are apologists for the meaning of liberal and liberalism, these concepts do not have the fervent apostles of extremism that conservatism boasts. The progressive-bashing books of Right Wing acolytes reveal a concerted attack on liberal ideas portrayed as evil personified.

Ann Coulter: Demonic, How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America; Godless: The Church of Liberalism; Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism; Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right

Sean Hannity: Deliver Us From Evil; Let Freedom Ring: Winning the War of Liberty over Liberalism

Michael Savage: Liberalism is a Mental Disorder; The Enemy Within: Saving America from the Liberal Assault on our Churches, Schools and Military

David Limbaugh: Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity.

The above are only the tip of the iceberg of fundamentalist polemics, which depict conservatives as patriots and liberals as atheists and traitors.

Liberals must define liberalism continually in all forms of media, or suffer the consequences of the continuous loop of hostile conservative propaganda. The uneven battle in the war of words has left liberals as if members of a colony of lepers who (in the opinion of conservatives) deserve the consequences of their freely chosen malady.

The situation for liberals is so precarious in the lexicon of ideas and in the marketplace—as a result of conservative propaganda presenting liberalism as unpatriotic and atheistic—that there is an underclass of the real (more or less) silent majority who hesitate to admit being liberals in public.

It is ironic that the root meaning of "liberal, i., e., free", is a concept espoused by every true conservative. Free from government regulation, free from bureaucracy, free from burdensome taxation, free from federal meddling with local schools, free from interference with or deviation from the conservatives’ concept of Christian family values. The liberal might add, free from bigotry, free from shibboleths, free from ignorance, free from prejudice, free from beliefs disproven by science and free from the straitjacket of unenlightened thinking. The other great irony in the conservative versus liberal debate is the shift of purpose of the Republican Party from protector of the little people to champion of corporations and the upper one percent of income earners and property owners.

Today’s Republican Party would set our nation back to a distant time when only white, male property owners had the right to vote. This retrograde conservative movement fails to admit its true objectives and the targeted beneficiaries of its policy. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) believes that conservatives are setting us back at least to the 1950s with their increasing attacks on contraception and women’s health care. All of the women Democrats in the U. S. Senate took the unusual step of writing a letter to House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) to urge that the House not take up a bill sponsored in the Senate by Roy Blunt (R-MO) and Marco Rubio (R-FL). The Blunt Amendment would allow employers or health insurers to deny employees healthcare based on moral or religious beliefs—an impossible standard to apply objectively.

The Republican Party was founded on vastly different principles in 1854 to protect small farms, small businesses and workers, and to end the scourge of slavery. As will be seen, the Republicans of today have vastly different goals. The G.O.P. is waging a War on America and American ideals. The unholy alliance between Republicans and the Christian Coalition resulted in a G.O.P. with no valid secular reason to exist, other than to promote the welfare of millionaires and corporations and the procurement of every weapons system advanced by lobbyists for the Military-Industrial Complex. Republicans have alienated every other minority group and must hold power, if at all, through Vote Suppression and Voter Intimidation of members of democratic voting blocs.

Vote Suppression and Voter Intimidation, tactics adopted by Republicans across the nation, are un-American, illegal and the most obvious threat to the Constitution’s promise of one citizen, one vote, under the Fourteenth Amendment, which the Republicans want to revise.

Contraception, a Crisis Contrived by the G.O.P. in 2012

In the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, women fought a grass roots battle over the right to family planning and contraceptives as the chief method of family planning. Women pioneers started using the Pill in limited numbers in 1957. With approval of oral contraceptives by the U. S. Food & Drug Administration in 1960, women as a group made extensive use of oral contraceptives. There were roadblocks, however. Various States, spurred by social conservatives, claimed the right to prevent women from using oral contraceptives. Some States decreed that contraceptives were permissible only for married women. States’ Rights legislation against Women’s Rights espoused the rights of religious organizations to enforce conformance to religious beliefs, without any recognition of the religious liberty rights of the individual women the anti-contraceptive laws coerced.

The social conservatives of the 1960s (who wanted to impose their values on every family) asked, Why should any woman (married or not) be allowed to use contraceptives? Married women triumphed over chauvinistic States’ Rights in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) 381 U.S. 479. Justice William O. Douglas found the right of privacy (including freedom to make intimate personal decisions) embedded in the Constitution, even if not expressly mentioned. Unmarried women overcame state interference with use of oral contraceptives in Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972) 405 U.S. 438, which struck down a Massachusetts law (General Laws, chapter 272, § 21A.) on Crimes Against Chastity. In Roe v Wade (1973) 410 U.S. 113, the U. S. Supreme Court overturned State laws banning first trimester abortion, citing a constitutional right of privacy. States with Republican legislatures are trying to repeal Roe v. Wade by enacting laws and regulations calculated to make the licensing and operation of abortion clinics commercially impractical.

The danger faced by the nation in 2012 is that Republicans deny they are waging a War on America or a War on Women. On April 27, 2012, John Boehner pounded the Speaker’s podium as he rallied his caucus and shouted. "And now we are going to have a fight over women’s health. Give me a break. This is the latest plank in the so-called War on Women, [which is] entirely created, entirely created, by my colleagues across the aisle for political gain."

President Barack Obama championed the Affordable Care Act in 2010. On the two-year anniversary, House Speaker John Boehner bragged that, The House has now taken 26 votes to fully repeal, defund, or dismantle parts of this law. How many times do the overwrought conservatives in the House have to kill the Affordable Care Act before their rage is assuaged? The Senate simply ignores the House of Reprehensibles, health care, kill-bills, as histrionics.

Also in 2012, the Obama Administration announced rules that required health plans of religiously affiliated organizations, such as schools and hospitals, to provide women employees (other than ecclesiastics) access to contraceptives with no co-pay. With the U.S. economy slowly pulling away from the brink of collapse during the past three years and with an election looming on November 6, 2012, the Republicans temporarily abandoned the argument of the bad economy and fell all over themselves in a cri de coeur over religious freedom of Catholic Bishops not to pay for women’s contraceptives. The Right Wing does not even pay lip service to the religious freedom of the women that the G.O.P. seeks to intimidate. Rick Santorum and other social conservatives seek to burden all women with the family values of the Christian Coalition.

Republicans argue that Catholic Bishops need protection in their exercise of religious scruples on behalf of the Church against providing contraceptives as part of health care plans of women employees of Catholic schools, hospitals and charities. No one on the conservative side showed concern for the religious and personal freedom of the women who are at risk from involuntary childbearing.

The First Amendment Protects Rights of Individuals Not Just Church Leaders

Republican Party leaders cite the First Amendment in criticizing the Obama Administration’s mandate for schools and hospitals to include contraceptives for their ordinary employees as an integral part of women’s health care, over the objections of the Catholic Bishops. The First Amendment, however, does not allow churches to use the law to coerce their members, or allow the federal government to enforce religious teaching, or make healthcare subject to religious dogma.

The dispute on contraceptives is distilling to the fine essence that Catholic Bishops do not want to pay for the birth control pills that the Church does not want women to use. The Bishops claim that they have a First Amendment Right not to pay. The Obama Administration tried to compromise by offering to have the health insurance companies pay for the contraceptives. The Bishops countered that many Church institutions self-insure. The matter is now before the Courts. No one on the Right seems concerned about women’s First Amendment Rights.

U. S. Constitution, First Amendment

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting

the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press,

or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the

government for a redress of grievances.

Adopted December 15, 1791.

One thing is clear. The First Amendment does not protect enforcement rights of the overseers of any organized religion to use an argument for religious freedom for clerics to suppress heretical thinking or to restrain proscribed acts of church members. The Framers of the First Amendment were concerned with the civil rights of persons, rather than with the rights of a religious organization to cause conformity to dogma dictated from on high. The Ten Commandments correctly condemn murder, adultery, theft, slander, envy and greed, and properly suggest honoring of God and parents.

What was written in stone tablets 3,500 years ago, however, constitutionally cannot be used by religious or secular authority in the U. S. to compel or ban attendance at religious ceremonies or to promote or prohibit thoughts or acts not sanctioned by the overseers of any religious organization. While Bishops agonize over the fine point of who should pay, women are using contraceptives for family planning and other health issues.

Freedom of Belief

There was a time when the separation of Church and State did not exist, and the State punished expressions of thought offensive to the established religion. Denying the immortality of the soul drew punishment under a 1646 Massachusetts law. In Virginia in 1612, a predecessor of Governor Bob McDonnell set the death penalty for any person who denied the Trinity as defined in the Commonwealth’s Laws, Devine, Moral and Martial. Where there is less separation of church and state today, for example, in some Muslim countries, a Pakistan Court reportedly sentenced a woman to death in 2012 for blasphemy for defaming the prophet.

The government may not protect a particular religious doctrine. Joseph Burstyn, Inc., v. Wilson. 343 U.S. 495, 505 (1952), invalidating a New York law allowing censorship of sacrilegious movies. Law cannot restrict freedom of conscience and freedom to adhere to such religious organization or form of worship as the individual may choose. Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U. S. 296, 303 (1940), reversed conviction of Jehovah’s Witnesses for seeking converts in a Catholic neighborhood. In 1636, Roger Williams fled the theocracy in Massachusetts and founded what ultimately became Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations based upon the right of individuals to be free from the dictates of the predominate religion.

The Church asserted in 2012 that the federal government has dealt a heavy blow to the Catholic population by mandating women’s contraceptives as part of health care. The G.O.P. quickly invoked the First Amendment to support the outcry against contraceptives. Republicans turned the issue of religious freedom upside down, however, by stressing the First Amendment rights of organized religion over the civil liberties of the individual. At one time or another in their lives, the majority of Catholic women use oral contraceptives as part of their health care for family planning and for other health issues.

Church leaders cannot invoke the First Amendment as a lever to use national health care law to make it more difficult for women employees of Catholic schools, hospitals and charities to obtain contraceptives or family planning services. Timothy Cardinal Dolan, Chairman of the Conference of Catholic Bishops explained the Church’s position on May 22, 2012, on CBS Morning with Charlie Rose and Erica Hill. Catholic Bishops object that the federal government is intruding into the religious arena and defining religious beliefs. Catholic institutions filed suit against the federal government for an injunction.

Moreover, many Catholic hospitals and schools self-insure. It does not help, therefore, for the federal government to compromise by having contraceptives available at no cost through health care insurers. It appears that the only solution acceptable to the Church is for the government to exempt employees of religiously affiliated schools and hospitals from the rules mandating automatic availability of free contraceptives through health care plans. The Church-State dispute is