Month: March 2015

Ted Cruz’s religious horror: Why he’s really running for High Priest of America

JarretR 10 Comments
Read Cruz's words and watch his stagecraft -- and you see this is the deeply fundamentalist vision he's propagating.

Read Cruz’s words and watch his stagecraft — and you see this is the deeply fundamentalist vision he’s propagating.

My latest piece is an article for Salon that explains why Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s presidential ambitions are driven, in part, by a strangely fundamentalist  interpretation of American civil religion.

In many ways, America deserves Ted Cruz. After all, it’s been nearly eight years since voters (and the Supreme Court) elected a cocksure, right-wing adopted Texan, long on discredited ideology but short on wits, who plunged the United States into a sinkhole of economic and foreign policy chaos from which it has yet to fully emerge. The American political attention span is notoriously short.

Read the whole thing over at Salon.

America and Homosexuality: An Unfortunate Hate Story

JarretR 40 Comments
A motley collective of passionate Californians, fresh from re-reading the Sermononthe Mount, practice loving thy neighbor.

A motley collective of passionate Californians, fresh from re-reading the Sermon on the Mount, practice loving thy neighbor.

America. It’s the land of the free. The home of the brave. The country that invented the bacon milkshake. If that isn’t freedom, then “freedom” has no meaning. But in the twenty-first century, this great nation faces many threats to its cherished notions of freedom: wage stagnation, income inequality, unequal pay, infrastructure collapse, money in politics, endless overseas wars, environmental degradation, poorly guarded nuclear arsenals, TED CRUZ!!! But, according to some conservative Americans, no threat is more threatening than the threat of two dudes making out (lesbians don’t count, because they’re what conservatives download at night after a hard day of protesting gay marriage at any given state capital).

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47 Vallandighams: The GOP’s Iran Letter and the Shadow of Civil War Treason

JarretR 49 Comments
Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton (R-Confederacy) and his GOP collegues don't take kindly to Obama being president of 'Murica.

Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton (R-Confederacy) and his GOP colleagues don’t take kindly to Obama being president of ‘Murica.

What exactly is treason? Well that’s an easy one, innit? Treason is when a scheming, disloyal jerk betrays a sacred oath they took to their country, usually in the service of an enemy power or for shallow, partisan, political gains. It’s one of those concepts that everyone intuitively understands, but it gets really thorny when brought under the parsing nuance of the law.

Thus, when 47 members of the Republican-dominated Senate sent “An Open Letter to the Leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran” (seriously, they used a generic salutation more akin to an editorial in a local newspaper) for the express purpose of undermining the Obama Administration’s ongoing diplomatic nuclear talks with Iran, they probably weren’t concerned about committing treason against the United States (besides, Obama’s from Kenya anyhoo, right?). And while their boneheaded attempt to score political points with their war-happy, right-wing base by giving said knuckle draggers yet another collective, foreign-conflict buzz may or may not constitute treason in a constitutional sense, there’s another conception of treason — the popular conception — that’s played a major role in U.S. history, and 47 GOP senators have skirted this line closer than Cubans in a missile crisis.  Continue Reading →

Bibles, Bubbas, and Hucksters: Mike Huckabee’s “Real” America

JarretR 14 Comments
The cover to Mike Huckabee's book. "God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy," a concise history of alliteration for rubes.

The cover to Mike Huckabee’s book. “God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy,” a concise history of alliteration for rubes.

Much like the distant European Pleistocene past, when modern Homo Sapiens co-existed with their brow-ier Neanderthal cousins, there are currently two species of humans in twenty-first century America: “Real” and “Fake” Americans. While many noted anthropologists, such as Dr. Sarah Palin of the University of Boonedocksville – Alaska have devoted their studies to understanding how and why these two species of Americans exist, few scholar-scientists have understood the phenomenon of bifurcated modern American humanity better than that foremost expert on U.S. political alignment: former Arkansas governor (and last-remaining Ted Nugent fan), Professor Mike Huckabee.

Dr. Huckabee holds the distinguished title of William Jennings Bryan Professor of Rubeology and Bumpkin Studies at the University of Arkansas’ Barney M. Fife School of Political Science and Aw-Shucks Gol-Darnnit-isms, where he has twice received the Jed Clampett Award for excellence in provincial numbskullery and right-wing boilerplate.

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