After watching Rachel and Lawrence yesterday, then waking up this morning to see two Rec'd diaries side by side, one about Republicans discarding voter registrations in Virginia, the other about Lawrence daring Tagg Romney to hit him, I had what we charter subscribers to MS Magazine used to call a Click! moment (in the days when a mouse was a small rodent exploited by Walt Disney for financial gain). Because there really is no limit to Republican hypocrisy: it's wired into the Republican mind.
Nobody would scream louder than those R thugs currently dumpstering D registrations in hopes of swinging an election, if they caught Democrats dumpstering Republican registrations. And as Lawrence said, nobody would be quicker to applaud another war than those Romney men, who for the past four generations and counting have never served in the military, though they've supported every war the US has engaged in, and (as Ann pointed out on The View) nothing in the Mormon faith prevents military service.
And what got Tagg so riled up that he wanted to punch President Obama? The President's implication that Tagg's daddy is a liar! Meanwhile Ann Romney goes on national television and inadvertently admits that Mitt lies: he is "pro life personally" but he campaigned as pro choice and then as governor decided to fuck the hopes of everyone whose life depends on stem cell research. (I'm paraphrasing here.)
My father was an officer in the John Birch Society. At every level, personally and politically, his views and reasoning were typical of today's Tea Party. As I noted recently in a comment to a diary on conservative craziness,
He campaigned for Eisenhower, then decided Eisenhower was a communist. Reagan was a turncoat and a communist. We should return to the gold standard. Abortionists deserve the death penalty. Vietnam was treason because Congress never declared war. Get rid of all the "pointy-headed professors" and we'd all be better off (Dad having refused the college education his parents intended for him, and having been rejected for the priesthood because even in his teens, his bishop could see his Paul Ryanoid rigidity). Etc etc etc.
Unlike George Romney, my father served bravely and honorably during World War II. As a reconnaissance (spy) photographer in the India-Burma-China theater he "flew the hump" over the Himalayas on numerous highly dangerous missions, returning to develop film of such critical importance to Allied strategy that he sometimes "had a general standing there in the tent breathing down my neck."
But here's the far right Republican thing: Having volunteered for service in hopes of procuring a safer slot than those poor fools in the infantry, my father discovered one night, while cleaning a military command office (and setting down his broom long enough to find his placement card in the file), that he was in position to wind up as a grunt after all. So what did he do? He traded his card with someone else's. Now, up to this point I see this act as human, albeit cowardly and unfair: not particularly Democratic or Republican. The difference between my father and a cheating Democrat is that Dad repeatedly bragged about how brilliant he was to do this, how smart to riffle through personnel files and find his own, etc etc. It was totally lost on him that he had condemned someone else, who probably enlisted before he did, to serve as cannon fodder.
Even though I grew up with it, the Republican way of thinking never ceases to amaze me.