1994 all over again

Congressional midterm elections are just around the corner, and there's a lot of dissatisfaction with the Democrats right now. That's understandable considering what little of their 'progressive' agenda they've gotten accomplished so far, not to mention their incessant pandering on the platform of 'the least worst,' but that doesn't mean things will be any better with the Republicans back in power.

Of course, getting anything useful done in Congress is like pulling teeth regardless of the party in charge, but seriously, these people are more dangerous to personal freedom than they've ever been. They might say they want to reduce the size of our government because it's such a drain on national resources and inhibits economic growth, and are totally against government intrusion, but then they turn around and try to use the very same bloated government to force their conservative/religious values on the entire country.

If the Republicans get back into power again, they'll pull all the same old tricks like trying to prevent gay people from having equal rights; telling women what to do with their bodies; go back to pushing abstinence-only sex-ed; limiting or eliminating federally-funded stem-cell research; extending tax cuts that will only add to the growing deficit; increasing an already bloated military budget at the cost of everything else they can dismantle (e.g., public education, Medicare, Social Security, etc.); you get the idea. Heck, they'll probably even start another war just for the hell of it.

While the majority of Democrats in Congress are almost as bad, I think things will be far, far worse if the Republicans manage to sweet-talk their way back into power with their Pledge to America. It'll be 1994 all over again with Newt and his Contract with America, only worse because they'll have the Tea Party Express behind them, condemning masturbation, Muslims and the evil socialists on the left who want all Americans to actually have access to healthcare like they do in every other wealthy, industrialized nation on Earth.

In fact, conservatives are already bemoaning the threat of 'big government,' and promising to repeal the recent insurance reforms passed by Congress and signed by the president, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010. The question is, What would Republicans do to improve healthcare if they were in charge?

Well, at one end of the spectrum, there's Mike Huckabee. According to him, people with preexisting conditions are like houses that've already burned down, so I think his plan would be to essentially allow insurance companies to tell people with preexisting conditions to go fuck themselves since they'll just eat into their ridiculously large profit margins.

At the other end, there's Mitt Romney, who actually signed into law an insurance reform program when he was governor of Massachusetts that's similar to the reforms Obama signed into law this year, so he'd repeal 'Obamacare' and replace it with 'Romneycare,' which would basically be the same thing, but since he's a Republican, his individual mandate would somehow be more constitutional.

As for the rest, they'll probably fall somewhere in between these two positions, which means their ideas for improving healthcare in the U.S. will lie somewhere between cutting corporate taxes and letting insurance companies do whatever the hell they want, and instituting some half-assed reforms like Obama and the Democrats did, but just calling it something different like 'Common-sense Healthcare Reforms Our Nation Can Afford.' Then Fox News will hail them as the saviours of democracy and the free market. Oh, and abortion will be illegal.

Unfortunately, these things are cyclical, and each party's half-ass attempts to implement their agendas almost always seems to make things worse. It's sad and it makes me sick that the most we can do it pick the 'lesser of two evils' at any given election instead of having some real choices and the power to immediately recall our elected officials when they're not getting the job done. But I'd like it even more if I didn't have to worry about right-wing fundamentalists gaining popular support with their puritanical, anti-gay, anti-Muslim rhetoric. That stuff's poison, pure and simply.

I truly wish that the Republicans were what they purport to be—fiscal conservatives who want limited government involvement in public and private affairs. At least I can respect and tolerate that, even if I disagree with their positions ideologically. But since the GOP has allowed itself to be captured by the religious right, or at least panders to them to the point of adopting many of their stances on social issues, I'm honestly afraid of the damage they'll do if we, as a nation, allow ourselves to be duped into voting them back into power again.

ethno-religious race baiting needs to stop

I'm sick to death of all this manufactured hullabaloo about Obama secretly being a Muslim and Islam being more violent and less tolerant than Christianity. The right in America has been searching for a new boogieman since the end of the Cold War to replace the evils of communism — which, in the words of the late Sen. Absalom Robertson, "seek simultaneously to destroy our democratic way of life and the faith in an Almighty God on which it is based" — and they've found one in Islam. But I say, "Enough already!"

A recent survey shows that a growing number of Americans think that Obama is a Muslim. To begin with, a person's religious affiliation shouldn't matter, it's their actions that count. Moreover, it's completely irrelevant to public office considering that the First Amendment creates, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, a "wall of separation between church and state."

What truly bothers me, however, is that not only do people care what religion Obama professes to practice, but they can't even get it right! Either the majority of these people are so easily misled by right-wing hack-jobs that they're willing to accept he's a closet Muslim who was born in Kenya (despite the fact that he has a Hawaiian birth certificate) or they're unwilling to say that they don't know and guess (making themselves look even dumber when they get the answer wrong).

If there are 'educated' people who think Obama is Muslim, I'd seriously question their so-called education, and I'd think it's more likely they're using the label pejoratively in order to attack Obama and sway public opinion away from him, which is a disgusting and ultimately racist political maneuver if you ask me. Has the right so quickly forgotten their last contrived controversy surrounding Rev. Wright and the charge that Obama was a racist Christian attending a 'radical black church'?

As if that weren't bad enough, we have washed-up Jim Jones wannabes like Terry Jones going around threatening to burn Korans and claiming that Islam is a more violent and less tolerant religion than Christianity. Never mind that, historically speaking, Christianity hasn't been very tolerant of other faiths, either, e.g., the various Crusades, which we against fellow Christians, Jews and Muslims; medieval pogroms against the Jews, etc.; and then there are things like Uganda's anti-homosexual bill that was inspired in part by an American, evangelical conference, held a month before, whose theme was "the gay agenda — that whole hidden and dark agenda."

And if you think that the holy books of Judaism and Christianity are any warmer and fuzzier than the Koran (which, by the way, forbids persecution of "people of the Book," i.e., Jews and Christians), just read things like Deut 20:16-18, Deut 22:13-21 and Deut 22:23-24. Then there's this heart-warming utterance of Jesus: "But these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slay them in my presence." (Luke 19:27). As Jesus said, "He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone" (John 8:7).

If Jews and Christians took their holy books more seriously (i.e., literally), they'd be stoning people to death as well. The real difference, I think, isn't in the substance of the three Abrahamic religions themselves, but in the cultures that are influenced by these religious traditions. Islamic society was, during the Middle Ages, arguably more tolerant and prolific than their Christian contemporaries. It was mainly Muslims that helped to preserve the works of Aristotle, for example; and the Muslims were far more tolerant of Jews in places like Spain than their Christian counterparts (for more on this, see Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy, 323 & 419-31).

I think it's fair to say that certain people and cultures are more intolerant and prone to use religious teachings to justify violence, but I don't think it's fair to single out Muslims or Islam as being less tolerant/more violent than Christians or Christianity. People should be judged by their actions, not by what they chose to call themselves. Yes, the Constitution guarantees religious freedom, but singling out a particular religion like this only shows the world how intolerant we, as a country, can be.