Rubio the Phoney

Marco Rubio, the new Senator from Florida, has emerged as one of the New Darlings of the right wing. Many Gopers even refer to him as "Our Obama," the thinking being "Let's find a youngish guy with an ethnic immigrant background and promote the hell out of him." Some are even making him a potential Veep candidate. I don't find Rubio that impressive. With his plastered down hair, shifty eyes, and shrill tone he looks like one of the guys you see promoting dubious get rich quick schemes on infomercials.

It turns out that Rubio has been lying about his family history. Rubio has been making a big deal about his parents being political refugees from the Castro Regime. But in turns out that his parents actually came to the US in 1956, i.e. before Castro came to power. Unbelievable that someone could think they could get away with a lie like that.

Realms of Nonsense Absolute

The recent flap over Michele Bachmann's claim that the HPV vaccine causes mental retardation shows the mendacity of Bachmann and much of the GOP as well. Bachmann first made the claim then she backed off of it, saying she wasn't "attesting" to it's being true or not. Now we have to believe that someone who has gone through law school and gotten a degree can't be stupid. So then that means that Bachmann doesn't care about the truth about a statement, she'll just throw something out there to make it appear that she has won the argument. That can only be a case of wilfull deceptiveness.

It's not simply Bachmann. Notice Rick Perry saying that he doesn't "believe" in evolution or global warming. Does Rick Perry believe in Gravity? Does he believe the Earth is flat?

Here is the problem. This country's economic survival is dependent upon science and technology. But how can we have scientific and technological development with leadership that is not only ignorant of but hostile to science?

Army of Psychopaths

More horrors from the latest GOP candidate debate, this one sponsored by the so-called Tea Party. Wolf Blitzer, the moderator, asked Ron Paul to clarify his position that the government has no responsibility toward people without health insurance. When Blitzer asked Paul if people without insurance should be allowed to die, some members of the audience apparently cheered at the statement.

It's clear by now that most Tea Partiers hate everybody but to cheer somebody else's death rises to what might be called depraved indifference. I'm reminded of the clinical definition of a psychopath: lack of empathy, shallow emotions, poor behavior control, remorselessness, and grandiosity. These qualities seem to be common amongst many Tea Partiers as well. Remeber the line from the Pogo comic strip, "The Enemy is Us?" I hate to think that the enemy is us, but many of our neighbors maybe be psychopaths, since psychos have the ability to pass themselves off as "normal" people. Until they pick up a gun and go on a shooting spree at a school or a shopping mall.

There They Go Again

The recent furor over the performance of Reggie Brown at the Repub Leaderhip Conference is only interesting for what it shows about the Repub mindset. Brown's inept and unfunny attempts to impesonate President Obama, was apparently a big hit with the delegates but not with the organizers, who cut Brown's performance short.

First of all I want to say that I'm not a fan of "political correctness" but I'm not a fan of what has come to be known as "political incorrectness" i.e. that there is something brave about being gratuitously offensive (Howard Stern, Don Imus etc.)
The point though is that the GOP is still trying to pull a "Willie Horton;" pandering to racial bias while trying to claim that they are not themselves racist.
How long are we going to let them get away with it?