The Race to Be the Top Nut in the Nuthouse

According to the Republicans campaigning to be their party’s nominee to be the President of the United States (not to mention many others in their party), the chief problems facing the United States include things like illegal immigration, attacks on religious liberty, Planned Parenthood, attacks on cops incited by Black Lives Matter activists, Hillary Clinton’s private emails, and of course Iran and ISIS/ISIL/Daesh. Given the excessive attention being paid to this circus – and particularly to the loud guy with the goofy hair who is currently leading the pack – by the national media in the US, at least some of the public may also be starting to believe that these are the things that matter, rather than issues like climate change, severe economic inequality, racial injustice, or the way money has come to dominate US politics. If the US president wasn’t such an influential figure, not only in the US itself but globally as well, most of the candidates’ rhetoric would simply be hilarious in its inanity, and if some of their fellow Republicans weren’t in a position to make laws and fund (or rather not fund) the government, their disconnection from reality would just be amusing.

According to Mr. Hair, the US is in grave danger of being overrun by rapists and murderers that Mexico is deliberately sending north and therefore it is imperative that a huge wall be built to keep out the riffraff. Most of his fellow candidates are only slightly less extreme in their views on immigration. Never mind that the number of people actually coming over the border illegally is at its lowest level in years, or that immigrants in fact commit crimes at far lower levels than native-born Americans, or that undocumented immigrants pay more into the system than they get in benefits. How extreme some in the Republican party have gotten on the issue of illegal immigration is shown by their response to the murder of a woman in San Francisco by a undocumented immigrant who had come back into the country despite being deported. A number of Republicans have gone so far as to propose a mandatory five year prison sentence for anyone caught coming back into the US after being deported. American prisons may be already overflowing, mandatory sentences in general may have long ago been shown to be unjust and ineffective at ending crime, and the idea of judging millions of undocumented people for the actions of one despicable individual may make about as much sense as condemning all white people for the actions of the racist Charleston mass murderer: Republicans still want to stuff prisons full of people whose “crime” is trying to join their families or just make a better life for themselves, treating them as they’ve committed an act as bad or worse than armed robbery or assault.

Then there’s the issue of “religious liberty”. Republican presidential candidates like Mike Huckabee rallied to the cause of a county clerk who went to jail rather than obeying a judge’s order to do her job, acting like she was some sort of martyr for her beliefs when she could have simply resigned if she really found letting same sex couples register their marriages at her office too much for her “conscience” – even though she seems to have no problem with divorced people (including herself) getting married. Only Lindsey Graham and Carly Fiorina offered some mild criticism of this petulant display of defiance against the rule of law. Huckabee and most of his fellow candidates also want Christians who oppose same sex marriage to be able to deny other services to gay couples, though they are silent on whether such people should also be able to deny services to people on second marriages or interracial couples. The Republicans seem to think that because conservative Christians are no longer able to freely impose their views in the public sphere, their “liberty” is at stake. On the other hand, they don’t seem so interested in protecting the religious liberty of Muslims, with Ben Carson even saying that Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to be president and the orange haired guy implying that one already is (and that there are training camps for Islamic terrorists in the US, despite there being not a shred of evidence to support that claim).

As for Planned Parenthood, the Republican candidates are almost unanimous in condemning the organizations on the basis of doctored videos that do not actually prove anything like what they have been saying, and Carly Fiorina make even more wild and blatantly false claims based on a video that doesn’t even exist. Amazingly enough, it is the Donald who has been the voice of reason on this issue (relatively speaking, of course), acknowledging that Planned Parenthood provides many useful services. But the rest seem to just foam at the mouth at the mere mention of Planned Parenthood. But despite their supposedly “pro-life” hostility to abortion, none of these candidates seems interested in supporting measures that would actually reduce abortion, such as comprehensive (not abstinence-only) sex education and ready availability of contraceptives, nor are they interested in ensuring a decent life or even sufficient food, health care and education for the children that they want to force women to bring to term. In the meantime, John Boehner’s reluctance to shut down the entire federal government over Planned Parenthood funding has cost him his position as Speaker of the House of Representatives, leaving the House Republicans, as one commenter put it without even ineffectual “adult supervision”.

We’ve also heard that people like President Barack Obama have helped create anti-police hysteria by acknowledging in mild terms that a few police officers have on a few occasions done bad stuff and that Black Lives Matter activists are helping to create a war on cops. Never mind that far fewer police have been killed in the line of duty during Obama’s term than in equivalent periods in past administrations reaching back to the 1970s, or that the number of people killed by police in the first week of September was greater than the number of police killed in the entire year to date, or that Obama said a lot of positive things about most police officers, or that there have been many – and I do mean many – cases in which police officers have literally gotten away with completely unjustifiable murder, or that Black Lives Matter activists have never called for attacks on police, just reforms to address the problems which anyone who has been paying in attention clearly exist in how the police and the justice system treat minorities, especially African Americans.

Of course few Republican national figures can go very long without attacking the current Democratic front runner Hillary Rodham Clinton for something or other. An old favorite is her supposed responsibility for “allowing” the terrorist attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya that killed four Americans, including the ambassador (though Republicans seem to have conveniently forgotten that their favorite president, Ronald Reagan, “allowed” an attack on the US embassy in Lebanon that killed a couple hundred Marines). The current favorite, though, is Hillary’s deletion of private emails that she used when doing government business as US Secretary of State. Never mind that she was doing pretty much what her predecessors had done, or that there is no indication that she violated any procedures that were in place at the time; the desperate need for the Republicans to dig up a scandal to bring her down means that we can expect them to keep dredging the issue up until the general election (unless perhaps Bernie Sanders can manage to upset her in the Democratic primaries).

ISIL of course is the current favorite foreign bogeyman of the American right wing. Lindsey Graham, and the agreement on Iran’s nuclear program is their favorite example of the supposed weakness of Obama’s foreign policy. Lindsey Graham famously warned that without military action by the US, ISIL would come to the US and “kill us all”, and most of his fellow candidates have been only a little less hyperbolic about the threat. At the same time, they seem to regard the agreement with Iran as a total capitulation. Never mind the fact that, while truly awful, ISIL has not shown any capability of striking seriously in the US (right wing terrorists have killed more people in recent years in the US than Islamic terrorists of any sort have) or that the Iran agreement is really a fairly decent deal, and much better than the alternative. Only Rand Paul acted disinclined to wade into another war in the Middle East, and John Kaisch was the only other Republican candidate to evince any reluctance to immediately throw out the Iran agreement if elected.

Of course where other issues have been mentioned, the rhetoric hasn’t been much better. Only Graham has fully acknowledged the reality of climate change, the others sticking to the same denial of reality that has dominated the Republican party on this issue. On taxes they mostly offer the same old giveaways to the rich and on the budget they are mostly eager to gut social programs and foreign aid, while dumping even more money on the one part of the government where the vast majority of the actual waste is, namely the Pentagon.

So what are we to make of this bunch? On every issue, there are at best one or two candidates who have semi-reasonable positions, but those same candidates invariable have terrible or even absurd positions on other issues. Take the Donald, the current front runner in the polls, for example. While his less completely unhinged attitude toward Planned Parenthood and his willingness to raise taxes on at least a few rich people (e.g. hedge fund managers) might seem to make him like one of the less repellent options, his xenophobia and sexism are more worthy of one of the lower types of Internet trolls than of a serious candidate for president of the US, and in any case, anyone delusional enough to doubt whether Barack Obama was born in the US should be automatically disqualified from any political office. Graham is almost reasonable on climate change but terrible on foreign policy and most other things. Paul has halfway sensible stances on issues like marijuana regulation, over-incarceration, government spying or the overreliance on military force in US foreign policy, but he would be terrible for the poor or the environment. Really, all of them would be so terrible that the race for the Republican nomination does really seem like a competition to be the top nut in the nuthouse.