Every day that passes I become more and more incredulous over the things right wingers do and say. They are completely irrational regarding a growing number of subjects ranging from global warming to our President’s place of birth. Oh, and let’s not forget the callous wars against women and the poor. But there was something lacking in my over-all analysis and it was bugging me. Then I read this blog post on HuffPo, which filled in my blank. Yep, these folks are just plain mean!
Here is a taste, but you really should read the whole thing:
The problem is that on the right, irrationality and opposition to moral values are not merely personal flaws. They are policy.
The ways in which this is true are discouragingly familiar and numerous. On the one hand, rightist politicians question the science of evolution and climate change, endorse wacky economics, and insist that Obama is a muslim who was born in Africa. On the other, they promote rage politics, tell fibs and destroy jobs and wages and families in order to enrich a tiny group of bankers and businessmen. To evade the central moral ideals of kindness, mercy, and forgiveness, the right dismisses those who defend them as weak, effeminate, whining, bleeding hearts. Then it enacts laws that make the United States the prison and death penalty capital of the world. In fact, the right promotes vengeance and heartlessness throughout the law and, against all reason and in defiance of obvious fact, denies both that waterboarding and other horrors are torture and that law and morality forbid us to torture prisoners. These policies reflect failures of conscience -- a lack of empathy or a habit of overruling empathy when it is inconvenient or conflicts with self-interest or self-approval, and a surrender to sadism and vengefulness.
