Neanderthinking

You may have noticed I stopped writing about politics awhile ago. It had gotten boring. W was finally out of the White House and Obama was really, really slow getting out of the gate. I was tired of bagging on the GOP and my side wasn’t giving me very much to crow about.

Well, finally politics is finally getting interesting again.

Just caught former mavericky Senator John McCain on CNN, defending Sarah Palin’s most recent outrageous act—writing on her Facebook page that now that they’ve lost on health care, it’s time for her mouth-breathing fan base to “re-load.” This at a time when Black and gay members of Congress are having derogatory epithets hurled at them, and being spat upon in public. When even GOP stalwarts who voted “correctly” are having their office windows shot out in the dead of night. The political cauldron is boiling over, there’s violence in the streets, and Palin is using the language of hunting to describe the next step her admirers should take.

Naturally, a principled independent like John McCain isn’t going to see anything wrong with that. Especially when he’s in a tough re-election fight and Palin is stumping for him this weekend, even headlining a fundraiser. She could put out an open contract on Obama’s life, advertise it on billboards in the DC metropolitan area and post an animation of the imagined assassination on her website and McCain would find some ethical wiggle-room to defend her right to incite violence. I can hear it now... “Let the free market determine if the money she has offered for Obama’s death is reasonable. Or are you a Socialist…?!”

My other Conservative friend (besides The Last Boy Scout), The Boyhood Pal, wrote me this morning, promising to read my thoughts on the passage of the health care bill a couple posts down, then get back to me with his “Neanderthoughts.” He’s a funny guy. I wrote back and told him: Neanderthoughts. That’s great. I should start a blog by that name and post crazy right-wing ravings there, except with Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck leading the forces of conservatism, you guys have become awfully hard to parody.

And it’s true, but he’s just that good. He actually did a pitch-perfect job of comically but accurately defining how wrongheaded the Right’s thinking is these days. Neanderthoughts. I’ll bet Neanderthals spat on their enemies in public and called them dirty names to their faces, too. I suppose Nancy Pelosi and John Lewis are lucky they didn’t have tea-partier’s poo thrown at them as well. Yet.

And when threatened, violence would certainly be the Neanderthal’s first thought of response.

On Palin’s Facebook page, they’ve moved beyond the rhetoric of “targeting” opponents for defeat in their reelection efforts to placing actual hunter’s targets over points on a map of America (above). It looks like something you’d see taped to the wall of bin Laden’s cave, not the calling card of an American citizen hoping to become President one day.

Even the things that piss them off are logically inconsistent. I find it downright farcical that the same bunch of Neanderthinkers who didn’t blink an eye at dropping a trillion dollars on W’s Excellent Middle-East Adventure are today crying doom and apocalypse over the same amount being allocated for domestic health care guarantees.

Obviously, I’m painting all Conservatives with a pretty broad brush here. For example, I’m sure neither of the two conservative pals I’m mentioned in this post would participate in the extreme activity I’ve described above. But it’s always the people doing the most outlandish stuff who are going to define your movement in the public arena. If you don’t repudiate the ugliest words and actions of those who carry your banner, Senator McCain, you are at least complicit in whatever bad behavior follows.

I believe when history remembers the birth pangs of universal health care, it will be the same way it remembers suffrage and civil rights: That Conservatives fought tooth and nail to block implementation of what has since come to be seen as a fundamental American right.



Only two classes of people ultimately prevail in bringing about political change of any consequence: Progressives, through the strength of their ideas, or Fascists, through the strength of their arms. Everybody else is just a footnote.

And the Neanderthinkers seem determined, now more than ever, not to allow themselves to become a footnote.