Strength, some of us have it, some of us want it, and some of us can only admire it in others. It comes in varieties and involves diverse attributes, but is generally understood as a quality associated with power and durability. Generally.
It seems in the Bizarro World inhabited by wingnuts, strength is characterized by deep social injustice, weakness by income security for the elderly and adherence to democratic values, and history only a bundle of opinions held by elitists who don't know how to think with their gut. Or, at least, that's how it seems from where I'm standing.
In recent months, goopers of all stripes have held forth on their own ideas about strength, and especially how America no longer has it. Marco Rubio, Florida's living Sugar Daddy Ken, recently redacted actual US history to delete the circumstances of elderly Americans prior to the passage of Social Security in 1935. According to Senator Rubio, America was stronger when 58 percent of men who lived to retirement age...didn't retire because they couldn't. These were times when a full 30 percent of the elderly were forced into economic dependency if they outlived their productive years, and 50 percent of them died in poverty. This is Marco Rubio's America, and it is strong.
But he's hardly the only mouthbreather to issue a declaration. Here are a few more asswipes bound for the dustheap of history:
Sad alcoholic clown, John Boehner, got into the act of claiming his agenda would strengthen America by claiming that the Bush tax cuts couldn't expire because you "can't have a strong economy when you raise taxes on the very people you expect to invest in the economy and start hiring again." He further castigated the president for excessive spending, perhaps forgetting that he was part of the cadre of Republicans who went on exactly the spending spree that created the debt he's now pinning on Obama.
Rat-faced rat bastard, Eric Cantor, claimed in an op-ed in the pages of the Washington Post last week that the possibility existed for a "compromise on the way to strengthen entitlements...." This sounds promising, and as anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of the situation knows, that only minimal changes to both Social Security and Medicare are needed to make them solvent into the furthest reaches of the foreseeable future. However, despite using the words "strengthen" and "compromise," Cantor pivoted in the same exact sentence to supply-side orthodoxy rejecting any action that could strengthen these programs, which seems like an uncompromising stance to me. Issuing a blatant falsehood in the form of implying the job creator mythos, Cantore said, "...raising taxes in this economy is another. Doing so would exacerbate the jobs crisis for the 14 million Americans out of work. It would negatively affect the businesses across America that we are counting on to get our economy going. " Let me be the very first person in the world to tell you, Mr. Cantor, businesses and rich people don't create jobs; consumers do. Not one single instance in our 235 year history has ever demonstrated a correllation between taxes on upper incomes and the economy. Never. Douchebag.
So what we're left with, since the only way to actually "strengthen" Social Security and Medicare is increase taxes, is a shit sandwich in which assholes like Cantor rebrand cutting benefits for people who actually need these programs to survive, while selling the idea that they're really only making sure that they don't go bankrupt. Lying asshole.
Not to be outdone, Grandpa Crazypants, Ron Paul, said that not only do communities ravaged by natural disasters not need the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, but that "we should be like 1900." Paul went on to say that people don't understand the power of free markets, prompting me to wish that Paul could have the experience of holding hands with his idiot hero von Mises and tra-la-la their dumb asses into the teeth of a raging hurricane, for freedumb.
Guy version of Sarah Palin, Rick Perry gave an interesting sermon to televangelist Glenn Beck on what makes America strong. Apparently, it's a patchwork of state-run programs for everything from environmental regulations to the national defense. Nothing the Federal government does, apparently, passes Constitutional muster in Rick Perry's world. Considering his reputation for being stupid, the only thing I can says to his abhorrent understanding of our founding document is, big stuff like air pollution and poverty don't respect state lines, dumbshit.
The point of pointing out this rhetoric is, well, to say that it really is this transparent and bizarre. When arguing with wingnuts, or when unpacking statements made by high profile wingnuts, it is almost as dependable as sunrise that whatever thing was said, the opposite -- the exact opposite -- is the true thing. The word projection gets tossed at wingnuts a lot, and rightly so, but it's a term of art in the world of psychology, and I'm not really sure that it's apt. It seems to me that when a person says the opposite thing from the true thing, and it's readily apparent that they know what they're saying is as such, that the proper term we should apply to their antics is the same one we would use in any similar situation. Just call these assholes what they are, liars, and leave their pathological aversion to the truth alone.