I don't really know where to start.
America has been led down the garden path by power hungry people riding moral high horses for years now - we're famous for it around the world.
They do it with God, fear and our own sense of being better than anyone else around...."American exceptionalism"
GOPers have done it for the past 30 years, railing against other people's totalitarianism and with the fear of the Bomb.
In the past decade, people who wanted to loot this country did it using a combination of fear and a spasm of nativism brought on by 9/11 to distract our attention and make us lose perspective.
Obedience to a Christian God and being holier than thou are underlying themes as well. They work well to foster GOP goals.
But we on the Left do it too....we lose perspective and equate things that are vastly unequal in importance, and get deluded as a consequence too..........
Witness how we allowed the progressive criminalization and "deviancing" of sexual behavior in this society over the past 30 years in the name of both God and feminism, working hand in hand. The imposition of Vonnegut's "ethical birth control pills" (the ones that make you numb from the waist down) would be approved by many Christians and feminists today (for different reasons, of course). Now irresponsible (but legal) gratification of horniness has become a defect on a par with active complicity in the systematic looting of America. We moved from 1970 to 1692 almost without noticing because we collectively forgot that civil liberties matter MORE than personal (legal) sex habits.
It's happening again.
I say to those who are fulminating with righteous outrage about JRE's adultery:
Why should we get in such a pother about this?
We don't know all the details, and even if we did, why should we care?
Not only is it not our business.......it DOESN'T MATTER to us.
Georgia being invaded matters.
The murders committed in our names matter.
Our Constitution matters.
Getting the looting thugs that are the Bush Admin out matters.
The banal adultery of a guy who knows the score about the Bushies, but tripped over his cock does NOT matter. He's not even our nominee.
It makes me want to scream.
We're getting suckered again into abandoning liberalism and taking up the banner of prurient selfrightous panty-sniffing because we're disappointed in JRE's personal weaknesses. When we do this, we become like the Americans who think that 30 years in Gitmo is a commensurate and appropriate response to driving Osama's limo in Afghanistan.
Prefrontal cortex 0, Limbic system 1
Again.
Dammit, the French (and H. L. Mencken) are right, and Americans of goodwill look ridiculous again.
Sorry, just had to vent............