Citizens United

Recently, a friend of mine, quite conservative, argued that the Citizens United case decided by the United States Supreme Court has not distorted the political process, but was a reaction to the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law, which was the first serious attempt in ages to restore some sanity to the overwrought process of electing officials of our government.  He argued that full disclosure of the source of financing would be the cure-all for the unlimited right of corporations to spend as much money as they wished to ensure the election of candidates that would be less threatening to their bottom line.  He also unconvincingly argued that labor unions have the same rights as Exxon, for example and the same amount of monies to spend on their candidates.

Perhaps in an earlier time he would be correct in his assumptions.  He referred to a political cartoonist, Thomas Nast, of the 19^th century who exposed the Standard Oil trust with his acid pen. These days, however, the scene is quite different.  There are so many talking heads on the networks that any position is overwhelmed by the breadth and penetration of varied points of view, but especially subject to advertising saturation ads, both negative and positive.  The candidates who win are the ones who can raise the most money and feed it into the overwhelming media exposure they can buy.  

The  McCain Feingold Act was designed to address two issues:  The increased role of soft money in campaign financing, by prohibiting national political party committees from raising or spending any funds not subject to federal limits, even for state and local races or issue discussion;

 The proliferation of issue advocacy ads, by defining as “electioneering communications” broadcast ads that name a federal candidate within 30 days of a primary or caucus or 60 days of a general election, and prohibiting any such ad paid for by a corporation (including non-profit issue organizations such as Right to Life or the Environmental Defense Fund) or paid for by an unincorporated entity using any corporate or union general treasury funds. The decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission overturns this provision, but not the ban on foreign corporations or foreign nationals in decisions regarding political spending.

In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Citizens United, ruled that corporations and unions are entitled to the same political speech rights as individuals under the First Amendment. It found no compelling government interest for prohibiting corporations and unions from using their general treasury funds to make election-related independent expenditures. Thus, it struck down a federal law banning this practice and also overruled two of its prior decisions. Additionally, in an 8-1 decision, the Court ruled that the disclaimer and disclosure requirements associated with electioneering communications are constitutional.

These were horrible rulings and serve to do nothing more than further distort our political processes.

                        

Now, “Super Pacs,” ostensibly not connected or coordinating with the candidates are spending untold millions on media commercials to sell the candidates, or even worse, fill the airwaves with negative information, much of it out of context and misleading.            

My friend’s full disclosure caveat holds no water, I am afraid.  

But from a conservative, the 19^th century perspective is not surprising.

We live in an increasingly polarized atmosphere, burdened by the disappearance of moderate Republicans who used to be able to work with moderate democrats to accomplish  useful legislation.

Now we cannot even have that.  The Republican party has been hijacked by evangelical and social conservatives, backed by millions of dollars, to convince the electorate to vote against their own interests by using their checkbooks to take stands on gay marriage, abortion, contraception, religion in public places and  creationism  instead of trying to reach an accommodation on education, infrastructure investment, job creation, and expanding the middle class.  

The United States in Afghanistan 2012

"A nation that forgets its past is doomed to repeat it."  Winston Churchill

Among the follies of our foreign policy is the belief that the United States is serving its national interests by continuing its failing attempts to guarantee a democratic solution in a culture so primitive, so alien to our Western mores that it defies the boundaries of our collective imagination.

Cultures take centuries to change.  Cultures imbued by theocracy take even longer.   Afghanistan is such a place.

One only need compare the history of our own country to realize that the political and cultural forces militating against change are so embedded in the Afghan people that we are faced with a Sisyphean task so overwhelming, so impossible, that our efforts, no matter how noble, are doomed to ignominious failure.

As an historical analogy, the American Civil War ran roughly four years from Ft. Sumter to Appomattox, but actually continued for another 150 years thereafter. Vestiges linger even yet. Those states that seceded from the Union did so not only because they wanted to keep their slaves, but also because they were culturally different from their Northern brethren.  Southern agrarian, slave-holding society bore a religious ethos, based upon inequality of the races, not only upon economic disparity between it and their northern countrymen.  Southerners believed that white men had the God-given right to hold slaves.  The morality of holding slaves was never really open to debate among Southerners.  Holding slaves was the droit de seigneur. The South would fight to the death, and did, to uphold its principles.   Northern culture was an anathema to it, a base, industrial, immoral society inhabited by crude, irreligious, and yes, heathen Yankees devoid of any pretense or genuineness of refinement, a threat to southern paradigms, virtues and ways of life.  Margaret Mitchell wrote about it; we all viewed it in the 1939 classic film of her novel, the name of which does not here need repeating.

Evidence of those deeply held beliefs could not and did not change overnight, despite the posting of Federal troops in Charleston, Atlanta, and New Orleans after open hostilities had ended and after Lee surrendered.  Nor was the imposition by the radical US Congress of black legislatures in the south which lasted only as long as Federal troops remained stationed there to override the deeply held beliefs of the populace.  The sad history of reconstruction, of Jim Crow laws, of lynching, of black post-bellum economic servitude and segregation bears wretched testimony to the excruciatingly slow pace of cultural change.  Yes, the south is different now, but it was not so different in 1960, a hundred years after the Civil War had ended. And this in a country with a Constitution founded on democratic principles authored by the founding fathers of all of America, many of whom were southerners.

Cultural differences in Europe now, for a further example, threaten to destroy the Euro, pitting hard working Germanic culture against profligate Greek culture.  Germans do not wish to pay for Greek irresponsibility, but are forced to do so because the Greeks are their customers.  This problem is almost intractable and Greece may very well be printing Drachmas again, rather than surrender to Germanic austerity.  And this is a problem between culturally different democracies, a minor problem compared to the problems we face with Islamists and the Taliban, religious zealots all.

Space here does not allow a full history lesson, but the British were among the many nations interfering unsuccessfully in Afghan politics, the Brits using a divide and rule strategy between Afghani Pashtuns and Baloch territories.  Later, Afghanistan experimented with reform in the 1920s including the banishing of the burqa and establishing co-educational schools, alienating religious leaders.  All reforms were abandoned in 1929 when a new leader Mohammed Zahir Shah became king in 1933, ruling until 1973.  After that, the United States financed the Mujahadeen religious warriors against the Soviets, who had invaded in 1979.  After the Soviet  defeat, (after killing 1 million Afghans), the Taliban assumed control of the country, ultimately creating an Islamofascist nightmare, women subjugated, religious police, and a culture that precluded the development of any modernity.

Now we delusionally expect that this primitive, Islamist, women-stoning society that executes women for adultery, is to grasp liberty and equality for all?  A society that throws acid on the faces of women who dare to go to school to seek an education?  A society that has a caste of theocrats that superstitiously believes in practices such as honor killings is going to find its Thomas Jefferson in an abbreviated epiphany under beneficent American auspices?

The politicians in Washington are dithering over a decision to abandon that place, a decision that should have been made long ago.

Religion and Politics in America 2012

"Verily, men gave themselves all their good and evil. Verily, they did not take it, they did not find it, nor did it come to them as a voice from heaven. Only man placed values in things to preserve himself--he alone created a meaning for things, a human meaning. Therefore, he calls himself 'man,' which means: the esteemer." 

F. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Bk.1

Some liberal souls, I understand, have named Rick Santorum as an ideal 13^th century president.  The particulars of this appellation are well known to those who have been following the interminable Republican debates, some of which have actually revealed the vacuousness of a few of the candidates, including Rick Perry, the governor of Texas whose gaffe of not remembering which governmental agency he wished to guillotine or how many death row inmates in his state have actually met a similar fate, albeit with a needle instead.  

Then there was Michelle Bachman whose IRS credentials, foster children, and bible-thumping husband presumably rendered her capable of running the world’s most powerful country.

After that we had Ron Paul, a libertarian, who plainly feels that the underclass should have their healthcare needs met by their local churches and charities, and that the US should disengage from the rest of the world.  In some respects he is correct in alluding to the misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.  However, hegemons do not voluntarily surrender their place in the world and most moderates do not think we should isolate ourselves from a world increasingly globalized based upon a 19^th century interpretation of a constitution arguably in need of serious revision.

And then that inimitable paradigm of hypocrisy, Newt Gingrich, a miserable human being, powered by his somewhat hard to ignore intellectual credentials and his use of the words “profoundly,” and “fundamentally,” as well as his colossal arrogance.  He seems to have learned, moreover, very little, from his ethics violations in Congress and his, to use his words, “profound” fall from grace. His conversion to Catholicism and his abandonment of his cancer-ridden wife for Calista, a helmet-headed blond with whom he prays often and who would, no doubt, be a loathsome first lady.  His billionaire supporter Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate, single handedly has prevented Newt’s campaign from plunging over a cliff the size of Mount Rushmore, a place, fortunately, he will never inhabit, although Newt probably believes he should replace George Washington on the prominence. Mr. Adelson apparently has now hedged his bets and is rumored to be giving  money to Mitt Romney, a man who cannot seal the deal even with moderate Republicans, let alone evangelicals who think that Mormonism is a devilish and heretical cult.

Mr. Romney bases his qualifications for the presidency because he was a successful venture capitalist and therefore understands how to run a profitable government (as though the government were a for profit corporation.)  and that he is now a conservative who unsuccessfully denies his fostering a successful (egads! socialist)  health care plan for Massachusetts.  He is sinking fast, however.   We are not sure he will not survive, however, since the Republicans usually pick the next in line.

That brings us back to the possibility of a Santorum nomination, a thought  I suspect, not without some logical basis, that the American Union may be further infused with theocratic ideals, since Santorum has made pronouncements like President Obama is conducting a war against religion.  The White House would be clearly gleeful if that happened, since Mr. Santorum was given the unceremonious boot by blue collar Pennsylvania after his undistinguished time in the United States Senate. Mr. Santorum also denies global warming and believes that he can single handedly cure the economy, but really does not say how.  Dinosaurs really do walk the earth with people---Santorum being living proof discrediting the observations of Charles Darwin.

How the American public can swallow these arguments is stupefying.  Are we back in the 1920s? Why are we even discussing issues like abortion? Birth control? Contraception? Who prays more?  Which church is not inhabited by heretics?  Are we about to have another Scopes monkey trial?  No country in the western world has not left these issues far behind.   But of course, the threat these intellectually challenged candidates envision is that the United States will become more like Europe.   And Europe has uncivilized and heathen institutions like high speed rail, good roads, health care for all its citizens, and a more enlightened populace that does not tolerate such pandering infantilism in its political discourse.

Malefactors of Great Wealth

" Too much cannot be said against the men of wealth who
sacrifice everything to getting wealth. There is not in
the world a more ignoble character than the mere
money-getting American, insensible to every duty,
regardless of every principle, bent only on amassing a
fortune, and putting his fortune only to the basest
uses —whether these uses be to speculate in stocks and
wreck railroads himself, or to allow his son to lead a
life of foolish and expensive idleness and gross
debauchery, or to purchase some scoundrel of high
social position, foreign or native, for his daughter. Such
a man is only the more dangerous if he occasionally
does some deed like founding a college or endowing a
church, which makes those good people who are also
foolish forget his real iniquity. These men are equally
careless of the working men, whom they oppress, and
of the State, whose existence they imperil. There are
not very many of them, but there is a very great number
of men who approach more or less closely to the type,
and, just in so far as they do so approach, they are
curses to the country.”

Theodore Roosevelt. February, 1895

I have been having a continuing dialogue with some Republican friends of mine, ardent defenders of our capitalist system.  And so they should be.  It is a system that has provided, all throughout the 20^th century, a nation with probably the grandest middle class and the greatest lifestyle the world has ever known.  But that lifestyle was not easily won, and is now again under threat by individuals and corporations not unlike the description voiced above by, can you imagine, a Republican President of the United States, who must now, by even the narrowest stretch of any imagination, be spinning in his proverbial grave.

These Republican gentlemen, having achieved considerable wealth on their own or by whatever device, now strain mightily to justify their unimaginable insensitivity to the problematic society in which we now live.  One of them said that he wished he had an airplane, four homes instead of two, and other needless accoutrements of decadence.  I have no problem with that, because he did not achieve it at the expense of the poor.  However, such a mentality enables a “scorched earth” policy and a sanctioning of Congressional refuseniks who have been purchased by lobbyists to protect governmental subsidies of banking, corn, oil, and other interests too numerous to catalog in this meager column.

We now live in a country that no longer has a growing middle class. The American dream has, through a darkly lit tunnel, departed the station. We live in a country that is increasingly plutocratic, where those inhabiting the strata of the upper one percent control more of the wealth than ever before.  The figures, staggering and depressing,  advanced by a party that has lost its moral compass, looms as a guillotine over the heads of working people who have lost their homes, been evicted in the street, cannot afford health care, and can no longer buy food. Forty six million Americans are now living in poverty.  People are taking to the streets.

Nightly news shows a litany of neighborhoods, such as in Cleveland, where Cuyuhoga county has decided that abandoned homes should be demolished, rather than bring lower the homes of those people who, either conscientiously or stupidly, make mortgage payments to banks that will not readjust their financing, even though they are “under water.”  These souls, representing the essential staunch character of the American middle class, choose to stay in homes valued at $50,000 carrying $100,000 mortgages.  They are faced with banks, which would choose to foreclose, evict and leave the home vacant, subject to scavengers and vandals thereby depreciating the entire neighborhood rather than adjust the financing based upon their diminished value since the housing bubble burst.  

Of course, banks are in the business of making a profit.  But in times like these, does it not make more sense for a bank to collect a lower payment rather than no payment at all? And with no one to whom the house may be sold?  These are the same banks, bailed out by taxpayer dollars, too big to fail, that are sitting on hoards of cash and are refusing to lend any money.  These are the same banks (Bank of America/Countrywide) that faces Justice Department fines that it charged African-Americans a higher interest rate than whites, purely based on race.  

The Bank of America's Countrywide Mortgage was required today to pay $335 million in fines for discriminating against Black and Latinos who were steered to higher interest rates than white borrowers.   Anthony Monzillo, the CEO of Countrywide earned $531 million during 2003-2008 based upon his misdeeds. This criminal has, to date, escaped prosecution. Countrywide did about 49% of all adjustable rate mortgages in the U.S. in 2008 and engaged in systemic fraud.

Republican politicians should fear the next election.  People are now aware that they have been hoodwinked by a congress that is not responsive to the needs of its people and are dedicated solely to obstruct the present inhabitant of the White House, who, despite all his faults, including timidity, some pandering, some absence of courage to confront obstructionists, and who, may in this election year, find some way to bring a message to the people that their cause will not remain hijacked.  Hijacked by the Malefactors of great wealth.

Miscellanea, November 2011 and the Religion of College Football

Miscellanea, November, 2011

I had written earlier about the Presidential debate format being changed to tête-a tête between the candidates.  I was wrong.

The Republican debates have served a useful purpose, by showcasing the empty suits of most of the candidates, and by highlighting Mitt Romney’s stronger appeal to the general electorate.  In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.

Rick Perry’s gaffe about abolishing government departments and then not remembering which one he was going to axe, is not really the important point.  It was his lack of a policy understanding and a failure to prepare and be acquainted with policy positions rather than memorizing positions coming from his handlers’ talking point memos.   His authenticity quotient swan dove into a media hurricane.  Memories often fail when there is only rote memory of the thoughts behind the statement.  That is why he could not remember.

"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."
Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

Comments on the Religion of college football.

I cannot remember reading anything as loathsome as the Penn State football coach scandal except the ongoing priestly scandals plaguing Catholicism. The idea that men entrusted with the welfare and the education of children could be so callous and even depraved is unimaginable. The idea that football is a more important enterprise than the educational establishment to which it is wedded is evocative of the Catholic Church’s placing its hierarchical power structure before the interests of children, and the shuffling about of pedophilic priests to avoid responsibility for repulsive grotesqueries that would make even the most perverse Hollywood directors blush.  You could not make a horror film on this subject.  There is no film rating for this.  It is just another life destroying mechanism that people will remember, like 9/11 or Pearl Harbor, without the bombs and explosions.

That is what the coaching staff including the legendary (now, in my opinion, disgraced) Joe Paterno as well as the sacked president of the University did, placing the University’s $76 million revenue machine ahead of the children whose lives have now been scarred  by a monster.

The siege mentality of the Penn State football staff—them against us, the lack of transparency, the para-military discipline  that robs young men of their dignity, sublimating their individuality to the team and that subjects their bodies to indentured battering in the name of an academic institution, has escorted our society to a new low of moral and intellectual bankruptcy.  The fact that college football players are encouraged to take courses that do not demand much study, so they can devote their time to playing football is another indication of why our country is falling behind nations that prefer educating their studentry instead of head bashing them.  Most of these misguided souls will not play professionally, and then when they graduate, if at all, they will not be trained in the skills necessary to succeed in an exponentially growing meritocracy.  The origins of college football have been distorted and corrupted beyond all recognition. A game that began as an amateur pastime has lost its compass and the Penn State scandal is just another example of the decay, the rotting corpse of American big college football academia.

How much Coach Paterno knew, as well as his staff and the higher ups knew, will now be subject to the harsh scrutiny of the courts, both criminal and later, civil.  Those who decry the legal system will now see it seek justice once again for those who could not protect themselves.

May the wheels of justice grind exceedingly fine.

Our Floundering Ship of State

O Ship of State

Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State! Sail on, O Union, strong and great! Humanity with all its fears, With all the hopes of future years, Is hanging breathless on thy fate! We know what Master laid thy keel, What Workmen wrought thy ribs of steel, Who made each mast, and sail, and rope, What anvils rang, what hammers beat, In what a forge and what a heat Were shaped the anchors of thy hope! Fear not each sudden sound and shock, 'Tis of the wave and not the rock; 'Tis but the flapping of the sail, And not a rent made by the gale! In spite of rock and tempest's roar, In spite of false lights on the shore, Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea! Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee. Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears, Our faith triumphant o'er our fears, Are all with thee, -are all with thee! Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

         It is inconceivable that the President Obama has, during the last three months, raised about $70 million for his current reelection campaign.  The election is more than a year away!  The Republicans will be obliged to raise similar amounts of money for their campaigns.  We are talking about estimates as high as a billion dollars between the two parties that could be better utilized for more constructive purposes than advertising, negative campaign ads, denigrating other candidates, and waterboarding the hapless television viewer.

          There is something inherently wrong, something improvident about this cumbersome, agonizing process.  It is destructive to our polity.  It should not take so long, be so divisive, or be so expensive to run for office.  It was not always so.   There are more efficient ways to elect a leader and many more useful ways to spend money.  Perhaps the old way of political parties picking the candidates in nominating conventions was better.        

          Less democratic, perhaps, but more efficient, and perhaps more productive of good candidates like Roosevelt, Truman, Lincoln, Jefferson, Washington, to name a few. 

          A year ago I wrote that I was grateful that the 2010 congressional and senatorial campaign was over. But wait! Now we are obliged to listen for another year to candidates for the Presidency in an essentially perpetual campaign.   We cannot afford a perpetual campaign, diverting resources from the actual governance of the nation.  A process that is devoted for years on end to divisiveness is a self fulfilling enterprise, a destructive song without end.  The very length of the campaign is productive of even more divisiveness, not the cohesiveness we now so sorely need as a national goal to get us through the great economic global crisis in which we now lie, almost like a tortoise on its proverbial back, helplessly unable to right itself, ready to be devoured by predators.

          Candidates, questioned by journalists about all manner of irrelevancies, including whether that candidate is a true follower of Jesus, Brigham Young, Mohammad, or is a true Christian. Who really cares if Mormons believed golden plates of Jesus were in New York and they moved to Missouri?  Who cares if Jesus ascended to heaven on a cloud?  What difference does it make that fundamentalist Christians pronounce fitness for office on how “Christian” a candidate is? These are not questions that should be asked of candidates. How deep and abiding faith guides a candidate is not the issue.  Religion and government do not mix.  Any candidate, who wishes to force upon the public social issues such as abortion, should be asked whether they also believe that putting people to death is contradictory to that premise.  Why is our dialog so rudimentary, so infantile, and so juvenile in its exercise?  What is it in the American vernacular that has happened to stunt our intellectual growth as an electorate?

          The inanity of it all is a stupefying indictment of either the lack of intelligence of the voter or of the politicians or more likely, both.

          Why do we need Wolf Blitzer and Chris Wallace to moderate debates? Why do we need any moderators at all?  The idea of Michelle Bachman giving a straight answer to anything other than how much she is guided by her faith is so fantastical as to strain the imagination of J.K. Rowling. Mitt Romney, a homogenized, blow-dried, fabric softened mannequin, is now vying with the pizza man for front runnership.    The “debates” are farcical, nincompoop enterprises, offering only a modicum of insight into who these people really are.

          And the President, although disappointing, will probably get another term after all is said and done, given his less than courageous posture in standing up to a Republican party that has been taken over by social ideologues, who deny science, climate change, evolution, stem-cell research, instead harping on piety, religiosity and “values.”

          Our political and electoral system is a broken, rusty, creaking locomotive, chugging up a hill that steepens every year, hampered by global competition, economic challenges, and countries which select their Prime ministers in 6 week campaigns from start to finish.

          The Electoral College is an anachronism. Its origins, based upon state’s rights, disenfranchised women, slaves, and rural communities is in need of serious reform. We need direct popular election of the President, a dramatically shortened campaign, and a congress that remains in Washington, seeing to the business of governance, not partisanship driven by vote getting.

          Billions spent to elect candidates and a rational discussion of the issues confronting the country, do not need years of campaigning.  

         

          Debates should be discussions among the candidates themselves, not howling, applauding audience extravaganzas on Fox and CNN.  The discussions should include follow up questions, follow ups to the follow ups and not be a continuum of handler-generated sound bites.

          People should understand that there should be a depth of knowledge generated by the discussion and a revelation (forgive the expression) of what these people are actually thinking and, more importantly, what they actually know.

Another Depressing Presidential Campaign is Underway

“Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.”

“The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.”

Eric Hoffer (1902-1983)

Recently, some thoughtful friends of mine have been writing about how the personalities of Presidential candidates and their individual world view are not really crucial to the process of how they manage the economy.  These friends equate the economy with all the reasons to elect a candidate.  I suppose this is a rationalization of how to support a Texas top gun like Rick Perry or a crazy woman like Michelle Bachmann whose primitive social instincts are fantastically out of touch with the 21^st century. The economy is important, of course, but there are other issues that trouble people, including  a woman’s right to choose, birth control, education, a safety net for our citizens, and the government’s ability to create infrastructure and an environment in which people can live in safety.

Of course, economic policy is an adjunct to this, but it is not the sole thing. 

I guess my perspective is different: I believe that the socio-religious-anti-science zealotry of some of the candidates, especially on the Republican side of the aisle that unctuously panders to the religious right is a disingenuous manifestation of  a hypocritical vote solicitation-at-any-cost mantra. And when President Obama also does the same thing, “may God bless the United States of America,” at the end of every speech, he is no less obsequious.   Earlier presidents did not need to wear flag pins or make ubiquitous and gratuitous religious references in order to please the voting public.  Abraham Lincoln’s references to God were not done as a matter of course at the end of every speech. And certainly Thomas Jefferson did not do so.

I understand the perhaps human genetic need to believe in a supernatural force to provide social cohesion and an ability to war against other tribes, but why must it be a prerequisite to garner votes?  Why must every speech be an appeal to piety?  Are not Muslim fundamentalists the same as Jewish fundamentalists or the Catholic Church in their a priori discounting of other faiths, claiming their faith is the exclusive path to salvation?

At least the Catholic Church is somewhat consistent: no birth control, no capital punishment, and no abortion.  But its hypocritical and certainly not biblical 16^th century calls to celibacy among priests so that the church could perpetuate its property and estates are no indication of godliness.  And there is a cogent argument that the celibacy requirement attracts sexually abusive individuals to its ranks.   The Catholic religious hierarchy continues to mystify me.

Why is the American public so ostensibly pious?  Europeans have already moved away from state religions, but in the United States, there is an almost secular state religion, an unintended consequence stemming from the tolerance set forth in the Constitution.  The entire fringe religious fundamentalism in this country has a cult-like tenor to it, an irrationality that is almost indecipherable yet understandable at the same time.  I think the candidates should be extensively questioned about whether they expect to govern by divine revelation.  Michelle Bachmann has been particularly adept at dodging that question.   George W. Bush, born again, took us into two wars costing trillions of dollars, which history has borne out to be unnecessary, given recent events in the Middle East. 

I still remember the Republican debate in 2008 when the candidates were asked if they believe in the theory of evolution and all raised their hands in the negative. That question should be put to the candidates again.

At the same time, the ideological, proto-religious aspect of the economic arguments presented today is undeniable.  On the right are the zealots who want to remove government from the economic process, yet wish to include it in the social agenda.   Do not abort the child, but once it is born unwanted, abandoned, and neglected, let it inhabit the lower depths of a Dickensian untervelt of deprivation, ignorance and poverty. 

America must find a rational alternative to this mind numbing debate:  Moving beyond piety in its political dialogue, whether it be a religious or dogmatic view of economic solutions or its misappropriated social creed of imposing religious education and its anti science dogma in the public schools.

Focusing on the solutions to our social problems through ideology is neither productive nor encouraging of solutions.