Dorothy is Wrong – We ARE in Kansas – And it Sucks

Forcing Austerity Down Their Throats in Kansas
Kansas Governor Sam Brownback, Kansas Secretary of Revenue Nick Jordan, Arthur Laffer, and the ghost of Ronald Reagan hog tie Kansas and force austerity down their throats.

I was reading about how Kansas Republicans have made themselves slaves to a monster – Gov. Sam Brownback – of their own making, a guy a lot scarier than the Wizard of Oz and the flying monkeys. And my first thought was, of course, that this is true of the entire conservative movement in the United States. Worse, thanks to the House of Representatives, we are all of us, in a sense, in Kansas. And it sucks.

Let’s set rampant and debilitating Boehnerism aside for now. You have only to look at Red States in general to see where Republicanism is leading the nation. If you require more proof than Kansas, look at Michigan and especially Detroit . Look at Wisconsin, where Scott Walker is mortgaging our futures. Look at Texas and Oklahoma. The much-maligned Roman Empire granted more autonomy to cities than does Oklahoma. The list goes on.

Rick Perry, like Kansas’ Brownback, ran his state into the ground. Fresh from that experience, he wants to do the same to the country as a whole. He claims to have more executive experience than Obama. He claims to be the answer to ISIL.

I think that’s the reason ISIS has gone forward, I think that’s the reason Putin is standing there basically laughing at us as we have one lack of impact after another in the global world that we’re living in.

Putin doesn’t know what laughter is yet, buddy.

Perhaps Perry is the answer, if ISIL laughs themselves to death. Drunkards shooting pistols in the air will no doubt be cheered by a certain segment of our population, but neither Perry nor the overweight, middle-aged white beer guzzlers doing the cheering will have to fight in any war Perry starts.

Rick Perry at least is actually funny, he is so completely clueless, and he is more likely to end up in a prison cell than in the Oval Office anyway. But Perry, like so many other elected Republican officials today, is a symptom, not a cause.

Once upon a time, he would no more have been taken seriously than bumbling George W. Bush. Another Texan, six-foot-four Lyndon B. Johnson, could have whupped them both – and you can throw Ted Cruz and Louie Gohmert in there for good measure – with one arm tied behind his back. But not because of his size; because he was not an imbecile.

The GOP long ago sold its soul to the Religious Right and became corrupted by that contact. Which is exactly what the Founding Fathers warned was the result of such intermixing of government and religion. They said, “Don’t go there.” The Republicans went there, with predicted results.

The American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer isn’t worried about America losing jobs because of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). He just doesn’t want to see “sexual deviancy” exported to the rest of the world, as though we’ve invented sins here the rest of the world has never heard of.

Should we be offended more by his stupidity or his arrogance?

At the same time, if he is talking about the Duggars, I’m with him. Especially if the means of export is a sealed cargo container.

Republicans have also sold their souls – and this goes way past the more recent Religious Right – to corporations and especially to the fossil fuel industry. The more recent deals with ALEC, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the Kochs, are almost anti-climactic in a sense, just formalizing a slavery out of the old times.

And after all, what do Republicans have left to sell?

Other than America itself, of course. And they are already doing that as well. They want to sell our National Parks. Or let Red State governors run amok on federal lands that belong to all of us:

John Boehner – and we can say this as we eye the rising sea levels – will soon have some swampland in Florida to send your way. Snorkeling to his new retirement home will become tiring, you can be certain.

Speaking of global warming, how does California Republican Assemblywoman Shannon Grove figure liberals are to blame for California’s drought? This isn’t 10,000 BCE. We know where droughts come from and it isn’t God.

The Biblical practice of scapegoating won’t work. But if it means driving Shannon Grove into the desert, I’m willing to try it.

Speaking of Biblical, it’s hard to know what to say to a labor plan that involves workers putting off retirement until, like Noah, they are 600 years old.

I do, however, want to meet Billionaire Greg Gianforte’s friends so I can learn their anti-aging secrets.

And then I’m going to go dig up my dad and ask him why we buried him when he could be working. He was nowhere near 600.

I mean, seriously. Our graveyards are full of slackers.

I just wish I could be as stupid as Greg Gianforte. Then none of this BS would upset me.

As corruption goes, Republicans are taking America the way of Russia, but who needs the Russian mafia when you have the GOP?

A couple of things have become very clear: America needs to lose the Republican Party – at least as it exists now – while there is still time. Not only to save our real estate – including our National Parks and Native American sacred sites, but everything we have worked so hard to build since 1789.

This is what America has come to under the influence of Republicanism. It is time for an intervention, America. It is time to “Just say no” to Republicanism. We cannot let this nonsense go on any longer.

They are selling everything that isn’t nailed down, America, and it doesn’t belong to them. It belongs to us. Yet not only have the wheels started to come off democracy everywhere Republicanism reaches, but they have sold the damn wheels.

Ann Coulter says Americans may flee to Canada, which will apparently remain safely white while America becomes “Latinized” by immigration. It’s a win-win: Ted Cruz gets to go home to Canada and we get to go back to being the smart country.

I say we take her up on it. We keep the wheels, however.

Image by DonkeyHotey under Creative Commons License.

Edit: This post has been corrected to reflect that the flying monkeys were in fact the Wicked Witch of the West’s minions and not the Wizard of Oz.

Hrafnkell Haraldsson

Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen's Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.

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