According to a columnist for New Zealand’s top newspaper, America is facing a threat worse than it has ever known. Is it Ebola? No — that was cured the day after the 2014 election. Obama? Nope. ISIS? Absolutely not — but one could easily refer to our main issue as the “American Taliban.”
NZ Herald columnist Paul Thomas told it like it is in a Friday column titled The Greatest Threat to America? Republicans. Thomas’ first “victim” in what will undoubtedly be called a “liberal socialist smear campaign” by the subjects of the New Zealand columnist’s ire was Ted Cruz:
Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz called it “the darkest 24 hours in our nation’s history.” Was he referring to:
• The outbreak of the Civil War.
• The assassination of Abraham Lincoln or John Kennedy or Martin Luther King.
• The 1929 Wall St crash.
• Pearl Harbour.
• 9/11.
• The realisation that the immensely costly and destructive Iraq War was launched on the basis of a lie.
As Americans know, and as Thomas pointed out, the Supreme Court’s decision that marriage between two consenting adults is legal everywhere, and its upholding of the Affordable Care Act, are Cruz’s favorite boogeymen. According to the Texas Senator, “the extension of health insurance, previously the preserve of the rich, and marriage, previously the preserve of the straight, is worse than war, depression, assassination and mass murder.”
Thomas laid into Republicans’ opposition to the recently penned and painstakingly negotiated nuclear deal with Iran. He pointed out that Mike Huckabee, friend of noted and adored child molester Josh Duggar, said that one thing alone will bring “death to America” — but it’s not climate change, ISIS, North Korea nukes, the country’s growing obesity problem, or even “psychopathic gunmen wrapped in the Confederate flag” — it’s the Iran deal, which greatly cripples the country’s nuclear aspirations in exchange for allowing them to compete in global markets.
“It appears all 17 Republican presidential hopefuls believe the treaty painstakingly negotiated by the US, Russia, China, Britain and France is not merely not worth the paper it’s written on, it’s positively catastrophic,” Thomas writes. In response to Huckabee’s claim that the Iran deal will “wipe Israel off the map,” the columnist pointed out that Israel, much-celebrated by the American Right, is “often accused of being a terrorist state, has a nuclear arsenal whereas Iran doesn’t, and, by virtue of this treaty, won’t have for at least a decade.”
But Republicans have a plan to deal with Iran, Thomas points out — more war in the Middle East — “or, as the 2008 Republican presidential candidate John McCain put it, singing along to the tune of the Beach Boys’ Barbara Ann, ‘Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran’.”
Leaving aside the fact that war in the Middle East is the current and normal state of affairs, this assertion begs the question of how the critics would deal with Iran and its nuclear programme. Well, by making war in the Middle East even more widespread or, as the 2008 Republican presidential candidate John McCain put it, singing along to the tune of the Beach Boys’ Barbara Ann, “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran”.
Fittingly, given that the Republicans are now essentially a party of religious fundamentalism, their candidates are partly taking their lead from Zionist Israel and Wahhabist Saudi Arabia who are terrified – hopefully with good reason – that the Iran deal foreshadows a seismic realignment which reduces their malign influence on US Middle East policy.
“Fittingly, given that the Republicans are now essentially a party of religious fundamentalism,” he writes, “their candidates are partly taking their lead from Zionist Israel and Wahhabist Saudi Arabia who are terrified – hopefully with good reason – that the Iran deal foreshadows a seismic realignment which reduces their malign influence on US Middle East policy.” He points out that this TEA-hadist approach to politics is quite, quite frightening:
The takeover of American conservatism by evangelical Christianity, Fox News and a handful of shadowy billionaires has transformed the Republicans into the party of wilful ignorance: doctrinal purity is more valued than intelligence; tolerance has been supplanted by persecutory moralising; paranoia has replaced realism.
“This process may be reaching its logical conclusion with the emergence of property billionaire Donald Trump as the front-runner for the party’s presidential nomination,” Thomas writes, adding that Trump “personifies everything the world despises” about the United States: “casual racism, crass materialism, relentless self-aggrandisement, vulgarity on an epic scale. He is the Ugly American in excelsis.”
Thomas summed up the insanity that is Trump’s popularity with American conservatives, calling it an example of “how warped the party has become”:
You might expect a tycoon/buffoon cross to be a political player in some Latin American failed state or backward former Soviet republic, places with no democratic tradition or public institutions that have stood the test of time and no such thing as “the people” in the sense of an educated, civic-minded citizenry.
The fact that so many Republicans are comfortable with the thought of this monumentally unqualified individual in the Oval Office shows how warped the party has become. To borrow the rhetoric of their candidates, the party is now an existential threat to America’s leadership of the global community.
Thomas’ scathing condemnation of the American conservative is excellent — but nothing is more telling than the comments under it, where everyday New Zealanders shared their thoughts on what America has become since its acceptance of their brand of insanity as something that should be entertained.
“Even Reagan had more sense.”
If Trump gets elected, “the inescapable conclusion will be that Americans are incredibly stupid.”
Republicans are just as bad as ISIS.
Nuclear war won’t destroy America — Conservatives will decimate it from the inside.
America has fallen behind since “Reaganomics.”
Republicans are “a little too much like ISIS…”
“Either you are with us, or you are the terrorists.”
“If the USA were broken up” would the violence be as catastrophic as in the Middle East?
Jade Helm. ‘Nuff Said.
Unfortunately, this is what the world thinks of us thanks to our right-wing political superstars — and Thomas (and these everyday people, for that matter) is right. All you have to do to become popular with conservatives is scream loudly about how ‘the gays’ are a threat to the children you want to molest. Or cry about “gun rights” — because you need to protect the 17-year-old girl you adopted so you could have sex with her. Or support making it difficult for black people to vote — because you’re “not-racist.” You just think that taking steps to protect others from racism is itself racist. Or suggest that an entire nation of people is comprised of rapists. The list goes on.
It’s time that we stop taking conservatives seriously. It’s time that we stop bothering to debate whether or not Satan is taking over America because “the gays” can get married, or whether health care for all will lead to “The Mark of the Beast.”
The world is right to be concerned about the impact a heavily conservative president would have on the world. After all, we are.
Featured image — screenshot from NZ article
