CALLING ALL PSYCHIATRISTS!

My sincere thanks to mud_rake over at Man With the Muckrake for providing me with the initial inspiration and encouragement for this post. Keep up the great work over there, Muddy!


Today's ultra-conservative, reactionary Republican Party confounds logic. It is so unstable, volatile, and irrational that I am seriously beginning to worry about its adherents. It has become so dishonest and so contradictory that I am amazed it can hang onto any followers at all! Consider this:

It acts for the benefit of huge corporations and the wealthy elite who comprise a tiny minority of our citizens, and who have little in common with the vast majority of our population, yet it proclaims itself to be the majority party.

It preaches law and order, but opposes governmental involvement or regulation.

It professes to be strongly pro-life, yet it supports aggressive, pre-emptive warfare and the military/industrial complex, as well as the torture of prisoners and the death penalty. On the subject of abortion, it screams that it is totally against it, yet between roughly 2003-2007, with a conservative Republican President, a strong conservative Republican majority in Congress, and a de facto conservative Supreme Court, it never even tried to overturn Roe v. Wade. Instead, it simply used the issue as a political tool to pull Catholic and religious right voters away from Democratic candidates.

It has become racist and anti-intellectual, actively pushing to eradicate affirmative action programs and questioning and ridiculing those in academia who are not professors of finance or business.

It loudly proclaims itself to be the party of "family values" but opposes direct government aid to poor families, as well as sex education in public schools which would prevent unwanted teen pregnancies.

It claims to be the party of patriots, even as it encourages and incites open rebellion and revolution against the government.

It portrays itself as the party of Judeo-Christian values. But neither the Jewish nor the Christian faiths preach that the rich should get richer, the poor should be neglected or villified as being lazy, or that we should wage aggressive war against our enemies, all stances the party endorses and puts into practice when in power. Indeed, it even attacks those in government who work for the poor and the common good!

It ignores the lessons of history, as it has done by repeatedly adopting and promoting various forms of the same old, tired, "free market" laissez-faire failed 1920s economics which caused the Great Depression and Great Recession, and as it did by engaging in a long, drawn-out and expensive Vietnam-like war in Iraq.


It ignores and ridicules the scientific community on questions of environmentalism and climate change, refusing to take wise and preventative steps for the future and instead choosing to protect the shortsighted business interests of the present.

It proudly bills itself as the party of fiscal discipline and responsibility, yet historical data over the past 30 years does not bear this out. It is every bit as guilty of pork-barrel spending as are the Democrats.

It loves to paint the Democrats as being weak on national defense and itself as the party best suited to provide national security. But its President and Vice President were asleep at the wheel during the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., and over Pennsylvania on 9/11, even though they had received a briefing that an Al Qeda attack was imminent FIVE WEEKS EARLIER!


I know what I would call today's Republican Party: insanely delusional and anti-social. But I would love to have a team of psychologists and psychoanalysts do a behavioral study and psychiatric evaluation on the party. Perhaps then, after this analysis, I ill finally be able to understand the seeming irrationality of what it has become and is today.

CALLING ALL PSYCHIATRISTS: Are there any of you out there who can oblige me on this request?