Bumper Stickers and the Raising of Rabid Dogs

A conservative friend of mine sent me an email full of typical anti-Obama bumper stickers today each more offensive than the last.  Ostensibly, these were supposed to make me laugh or serve to prod me as a 'silly liberal' in that condescending tone that conservatives find so amusing.  I don't know what the intention of sending them was.  Likely fun, and an innocent attempt at humor.

What's strange is the reaction these bumper stickers elicited in me and how viewing them made me appreciate how offensive Republicans must have found all the anti-Bush bumper stickers over the last decade.  I certainly am no Bush fan, but I never understood the compulsion to stick ‘Somewhere in Texas a village is missing its idiot’ on your bumper. I generally assume most people have heard the joke already if they are the types to find it funny and if they're not, the sticker is just going to be annoying at best and hurtful at worst.   These little nasty slights we sling at each other contribute the general growing level of mistrust and fractiousness that is shattering our ability to reach group consensus on anything.


Though I often disagree with the policy positions, I actually quite appreciate the work done by serious senators and congress people from the other side of the aisle.  They are hard to find these days, though I very much appreciate the efforts of Senators like Lindsey Graham and Orin Hatch to work in good faith towards accomplishing group goals.

While its always been obvious that an easy way to grab headlines and rile up base is to throw a little hissy fit, in my idealized view of the past politicians or elites at least knew these theatrics were for show.   At some point they would have to get down to business and iron out at least basic issues such as the solvency of the nation through shared sacrifice, compromise, and reason.  Now it appears that Republicans have joined their own lynch mob, searching for the failure in each new policy challenge that arises. 

Mind you, though I often disagree with the them, I have no problem with sincere conservative ideas of government founded in internally consistent logic.   Pressure to  impose fiscal restraint and contain the size of government force those proposing new initiatives to think through their ideas.  A healthy and intellectually honest two-party system necessarily and by definition  inhibits the grandest dreams of each side from ever being enacted.  While this sometimes results in painful half-measures, for example our current proposed health reform instead of Medicare for all, it also prevents societal abominations like China's cultural revolution.

However, I do have a problem with the people who are leading the so-called conservative movement now.  Folks like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner.   These individuals seem simply not interested in governing in any meaningful way.  Their only goal is to obstruct and inflame, and then ride a wave of agitated discontent back to power.  Their actions are fostering a dangerous climate which elevates and promotes the most selfish and ignorant complaints of the most unreasonable people in our society.

If the Democratic Party suddenly became dominated by 9-11 conspiracy theorists, black-box voting nuts, and anti-vaccination zealots, the right would be alarmed and rightfully so.  While there would be some complaints from the left that 'centrists' were trying to silence them, there would be a good deal of effort to contain and isolate these elements of the party.

What's troubling is that in today's environment, otherwise good people like my friend who sent me the bumper-stickers, are complicity allowing dangerous right wing extremists to take over the Republican party.   These are people who question the citizenship of the President of the United States, openly espouse violent revolution, publicly embrace the dissolution of the union, the dismantling of the Federal Reserve System, and a return to the gold standard.  In short, they are not in possession of their faculties and any serious thinker from the Mitt Romney wing of the party would know that. 

I think mainstream Republicans are playing a quite dangerous game with the Tea Party Movement.  They are fomenting hatred, allowing known falsehoods to be propagated, and allowing treasonous and antidemocratic positions to be debated in the mainstream.  When confronted with this fact they will deny they are behind the movement although even a cursory investigation reveals that the Tea party is funded by the deepest of pockets and most connected agents of the Republican Party. 

The behavior of the right is similar to an owner who feeds a rapid dog, and the bumper stickers and exhortations from Fox, talk radio, and mainstream political leaders is the meat.   The Republican Party seems proud to show off just how angry and dangerous the dog is as though that gives the party, its supposed owner, some type of legitimacy or power.

History sadly teaches us that dogs can often bite the hands that feed them with particularly unhappy consequences.