IS Ron Johnson the Next Toe to Fall Off?
Democrats have wanted to invest in climate control for twenty years and, at the least, take the issue seriously. After weeks of turning their backs on soldiers exposed to human, chemical, and toxic waste from burn pits, GOP politicians finished their ruthlessness by voting, by a majority, to deny children, moms, and dads affordable insulin. In all fairness, they did not oppose a thirty-five-dollar fee—for a drug that can be had elsewhere in the rest of the world for eight dollars—for Medicare recipients—the elderly and disabled. In 2007, former Vice President under Bill Clinton, Al Gore, won an Academy Award for his brilliant and prescient movie Inconvenient Truth. The right-wing roundly skewered Gore despite 97 percent of climate scientists agreeing with him from one extent to another.
Mocking tricks like bringing a snowball onto the floor of Congress to disprove global warming were used. Biblical prophecy was exploited more than once to paint Gore as a heretic. In March 2009, during an Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing, former Republican Illinois Rep. John Shimkus quoted Noah, saying God decides when the “earth will end.” A good quote for his religious base but an abdication of responsibility for a government leader. Couple that with snowball-toting Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), who delivered a sermon-like response to the question of climate change.
“Well actually the Genesis 8:22 that I use in there is that ‘as long as the earth remains there will be seed time and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night,’ my point is, God’s still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous,” said Inhofe.
Now that the thinly veiled cloak of racism and white supremacy is seeking validation under the pseudonym [White] Christian Nationalism, the GOP is really stretching its “superior” legs. To prove the point, at the recent gathering of Trumpites at CPAC (Conservative Political Action Committee), one of the big gets was Hungary’s President Viktor Orbán. In a speech days before his appearance in Texas, Orbán told a Romanian audience, “This is why we have always fought: We are willing to mix with one another, but we do not want to become peoples of mixed-race,” said Orbán, he went on to say, Hungary will not join in with Western Europe’s “mixed-race world.”
What does the GOP want to be?
The party, seemingly wanting to embrace a form of representative libertarianism mixed with our democratic/republic, is now embracing unforgiving authoritarianism. Talk of pulling away the social safety net built on the foundation of FDR’s New Deal is on their hit list of deliberate cruelty. Even debates about forcing a raped ten-year-old to carry her rapist’s fetus to term are not too far for their zeal to control. Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson flew a sacrificial trial balloon suggesting that Social Security and Medicare be subject to annual review and refunding. “As long as things are on automatic pilot, we just continue to pile up debt,” said Johnson. I do not claim to speak for America, but a plane piloted by Republicans could find us all eating one another on a mountain in the Andes. A warm toe, anyone?
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