Written by John Turner   

The question of the day is how crazy Republicans have to get for the public to begin seeing them as immature fools. Your answer will depend on how sensible you think the public is. I confess, though it’s heretical to say so in a country where nation worship is the only genuine religion, that I am not in the habit of regarding the American people as a bin of bright bulbs. Lincoln’s admonition that you can’t fool all the people all the time may be technically true. But if you can fool 75 % of them all the time that’s good enough for practical purposes.

Today we have a report from Minnesota, by Representative Mike Beard -- guess what party he represents? -- that we don’t have to take any measures against using up natural resources because God will supply them endlessly, no matter what we do. I would be more encouraged by the assurance if I didn’t recall similar confidence in God that didn’t work out. Remember, for example, Stuart Shepard, a filmmaker for Focus on the Family, who fervently asked God to send torrential rains to wash out Obama’s acceptance speech in Denver in August 2008. God’s nonperformance has been so spectacular in so many instances that I can’t be sure he’s going to keep the oil flowing.

Another Republican, Rick Scott, governor of Florida, whom Steve Benen calls a ridiculous criminal -- I have no reason to disagree with Mr. Benen about that -- is turning down several billion dollars that could be used to build a high-speed rail link between Tampa and Orlando. If you have driven along Interstate 4 between those two cities, you know that something needs to be done to move people along that corridor more easily. Furthermore, Florida, which has a very high unemployment rate, would get tens of thousands of new jobs from the project. Even some of Scott’s fellow party members are saying he’s nuts to reject the money. Scott has no actual reason to do what he’s doing. But that’s okay, you see, because he’s a Republican. The privilege to do utterly bizarre things to the public welfare is a possession Republicans hold onto as though it were the only lifeboat in the ocean.

Speaking of oceans, a new study by scientists from the University of Arizona, using data supplied by the U.S. Geological Survey, concludes that rising sea water will damage 180 American cities in the next ninety years. And these are all fairly big cities, with populations of more than 50,000. Goodness knows how many smaller towns will be hurt. But Senator James Inhofe doesn’t care. He doesn’t have to believe science, and you know why not? Because he’s a Republican. Republicans don’t have to pay any attention to science if they don’t want to.

In Wisconsin, a crowd of more than thirty thousand people has gathered in Madison, to protest the action of Governor Scott Walker, another Republican, who has vowed to push a bill through the legislature that would virtually destroy public employee unions. The Democratic legislators are so alarmed by the bill’s radical nature they are running away from Madison so the governor can’t get a quorum. There are reports the State police have been ordered to apprehend the runaway legislators and drag them back into the capitol building. But many are said to have already escaped from the state. I don’t know if Wisconsin has an extradition treaty with other states pertaining to delinquent legislators. Are we about to see them delivered to the state line and packed into paddy wagons? My advice to them is to burrow deep into the south side of Chicago. Nobody can find you there.

Then, of course, we have Michelle Bachmann with her looneytoon of the day. She’s now down on Mrs. Obama again because the president’s wife wants to make it easier for mothers to breast-feed their children. That’s okay. Michelle’s a Republican.

I was sitting in airports yesterday, traveling from Chicago to Vermont, trying to figure some of this out, when it suddenly came to me that the ambient noise, which is ubiquitous during air travel, was virtually all made up of lies. Whether it was from the TVs stuck everywhere, or the droopy dead voices of TSA people announcing yet one more indignity, the essential quality of the message was falseness.

And suddenly I saw: it has to be that way.

At the heart of all we observe going on around us is a notion of capitalism which is the unchallengeable creed. And the rhetorical mode of this form of capitalism is the lie. Without the lie capitalism wouldn’t work. People wouldn’t do the dopey things they do to themselves in order to generate money, most of which ends up in the pockets of people who already have far more than they need and far more than they can spend wisely.

If you look back at any of the examples I’ve mentioned above, at the core of each of them is some tenet of capitalism, which is based not on reason and not on fact but on the desire of those, who think they control the capitalist machine, to get ever richer. It’s a sickness and it flows on a tide of lies.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against enterprise. I’m certainly not against someone with a useful service or a new product presenting it to the public and making a decent profit off of it. But, you see, that’s not what our current version of capitalism is. Rather, it’s the practice of using the lie to siphon vast floods of money into a few pockets. And in order for it to work, the lie has to be pervasive. People have to be so removed from hearing the truth they can’t imagine it anymore.

Why is Rick Scott the governor of Florida? Because he stole billions of dollars of taxpayer money that was supposed to be used to help people get well. None of his insurance machinations cured anybody. Curing people was not the point. Making money was the point. Do you think those billions would have gone to Rick if everything had been open, and above board, and truthful?

Nobody can make that kind of money unless he -- in effect -- owns a political party to do his bidding and help him deceive the population. That’s the only reason the Republican Party exists. So it’s no wonder the Republicans are in competition among themselves to tell the biggest, most audacious, most beyond this world lie that anyone has ever thought of. The truth is just some petty thing in their way, an instrument of pathetic idealists.

You may think the headlines are reaching a crescendo of absurdity and that a deflation of nonsense is bound to be on the way. But I wouldn’t count on it. There’s some schemer out there, scheming his scheme, planning to buy his Republicans, who will make Rick Scott look like a model of deportment.