David A. Schwinghammer, click here
to update your web pages on AuthorsDen.
Blogs by David A. Schwinghammer
Conservative psyche (continued) 5/14/2010 7:41:56 AM
Blame the other guy seems to be a mindset.
When the Bush administration ran the economy on the rocks I was wondering how the leaders of the Republican aparatus would spin it so it looked like the democrats were to blame. Sure enough, it was Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac who had been bullied into making all those bad loans to people who couldn't afford it by the democratic congress. Not hardly. Deregulation is your culprit. Did you know there's such a thing as a bucket shop, where people can place bets on stocks they don't own? You can jack up the price of commodities that way and starve the people in Haiti. When conservatives criticize Wall Street it's like John Gacy denouncing Ted Bundy as a maniac.
Okay, let's continue our somewhat hyperbolic conservative psychoanalysis. God knows they need it.
1. Feelings of inadequacy (to use a polite term). How else do you explain the gun nuts who showed up at that national park fifty miles from Washington DC, claiming they were exercising their Second Amendment rights. No, it's a macho thing. These are little people who need guns to make them feel more like men. Owning a gun is just a bad idea. You might wake up in a bad mood some day and take it out on the wife and kids. It happens every day. These people aren't the criminals conservatives like to portray. Most of them don't even have a record; yet, they're responsible for most of the gun homicides in the United States. The bobbies had the right idea in England. For most of the 19th and 20th centuries the English police officers didn't carry a gun.
Crime was way down. They only recently started carrying them because of drug trafficking. If you get a gun, the other guy is going to get a bigger one. Criminals are now using machine pistols and wearing Kelvar vests to stick up banks. Little kids know how to use 911 and it's a lot more effective than shooting it out with a burglar who will shoot you with your own gun.
2. Delusional. Not all conservatives are fundamentalist Christians but if you're going to hang with these people you've responsible when they try to blow the world up. Take a look at a little number called "Jesus Camp," run by a crazy woman named Becky Fisher out of Devil's Lake, North Dakota (Yes, that's the name of the place). There's a big poster of George W. Bush. The kids sing rap songs and dance to them. Aren't these the same people who thought Rock and Roll was devil's music? Becky talks about what a wicked world this place is and how she can't wait to leave the place. And she's liable to try to make it happen. Some of these right, right, right of right Christians believe the Earth is only six thousand years old and that the cavemen and the dinosaurs were co-existent. The Texas School Board would like to teach this stuff. We're already behind the Far East in Science and Math; they must want to be last.
Some of these people actually get elected to Congress. Michelle Bachmann, congresswoman from the 6th District in Minnesota (That's you, St. Cloud) and one of the leaders of the Tea Bagger movement, is a theocrat who has access to thousands of Flat Earth Society members who accompany her on her many protest trips to Washington DC. The problem is the only legislation she's sponsored in four years as a congresswoman is something about foster families. She just happens to be a foster mother. She says it's because she belongs to the minority, but the real reason is that she spends most of her time as a commentator for Fox News, the fair and balanced network. Minnesota also has a born again Christian governor who appointed a born again as education commissioner. Thankfully, she was not confirmed. Governor Pawlenty is notoriously difficult to negotiate with. Must be that faith thing going on; facts never get in the way.
Pawlenty also didn't have a problem with holding a revival on the state capital grounds. As Barney Frank famously said about the woman with the Obama poster portraying him as Hitler, "You might as well be talking talking to the dining room table."
