Friday, January 8, 2016

The Politics of Total Depravity Here And Now

The shame of Maine, that locus of viral hate, Paul LePage has done it again, he's exposed what a vile example of human being my state has made governor, not once but twice.   It's blatantly racist this time, blatantly disgusting, blatantly appealing to the lowest of the low, his natural constituency.

“These are guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty – these types of guys – they come from Connecticut and New York, they come up here, they sell their heroin, they go back home,” LePage told a large crowd. “Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young white girl before they leave, which is a real sad thing because then we have another issue we have to deal with down the road.”

Other than being blatantly and provocatively racist, it's also a distortion of the problem with opiate addiction in Maine which, as in so many other places, was a product of over distribution of prescription artificial opiates.  There are doctors in Maine, the ones I'm aware of quite as pink as LePage, who run a buisness in writing prescriptions for them for people they certainly know are addicts.   There's a doctor in the town next to mine who has probably gotten more people addicted to Fentanyl and the Oxy- family of artificial opiates than your typical inner city neighborhood dope dealer.

But, tempting as it is to go into the relationship of our pharmaceutical and medical industries to the addiction crisis, with the illegal branch of Big Pharma also reaping the rewards, this is about how to prevent the LePages that our corrupt politics puts up for election gaining office.

LePage almost certainly could have been kept from being the governor if the election laws prevented anyone who didn't get over 50% of the vote from taking office.  Having an instant run-off election between the two candidates with the highest vote would probably have done it in his case.  Though I think it is as important to prevent millionaire vanity candidates, such as the one who enabled LePage's election, twice, from appearing on the ballot is also necessary.   I am confident that it is far less likely for a candidate of the gutter scrapings like Paul LePage to be able to get more than 50% of an election, at least in my state and the worst of the worst would probably be avoided through that reform.  Something is needed to fix the pudding-headed, earlier ballot reform that has led to this result.   "Reforms" largely at the behest of never-will-win 3rd party candidates having the names of their losing candidates appear on the ballot.  Maybe we didn't know the results of that then, we do now and it favors right-wing Republicans and their close political allies, it doesn't favor even the moderate left of the Democratic Party.

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I am ashamed and totally disgusted that my state could have a governor as bad as Paul LePage and I am disgusted that the political establishment, especially that of the Republican Party has allowed him to do so much damage to peoples' lives.   And beyond doubt, he is a creation of hate-talk media in Maine and of the right-wing cabloid world of FOX, CNN and, as it is obvious the direction it's reportedly taking, MSNBC.  Oh, yes, our "public radio" has had a hand in it too,  The morning news reader might as well be considered Paul LePage's unofficial press secretary.  The idea that "more speech" was going to be a boon for progressive politics in the United States when that "more speech" was certain to largely be the opportune lies of corporate media is a total and complete sham.   The politics we've got are a result of the "free speech" "free press" rulings of the Warren, Burger, Rehnquist and, now, Roberts courts and the legal theorists who promoted those insanely irresponsible lines.  It originated in the relativistic morality in which the ability to discern the true from the false was denied.  That denial was not only an opportunity for liars to win through lying, it was an opportunity for those with responsibility to pretend that discerning the truth from lies wasn't the job description of judges, politicians, government officials, and the news media.

That program of sciency modernism has, as I think it's becoming obvious even within science, made anything like a democratic civilization impossible.  Democracy rests, absolutely and inescapably on the morality that values the truth above lies, equality over inequality, honesty over greed and the moral responsibility to make the right choices in such things.   The concept of morality, itself, was jettisoned by that intellectual regime as being old fashioned and inconvenient and not sciency.  Well, the real life results of that are in and the results are, unsurprisingly, amoral and awful, promoting politics through prejudice and hate, promoting conditions in which people are hooked on Oxycontin by doctors before the illegal drug pushers are given their crack at the remnants.   It can definitely get worse, wait to see what happens in November.

3 comments:

  1. There's a Twitter post making the rounds, showing three very white people arrested for heroin trafficking in Maine. The question is: which one is "D Money"?

    Our Governor, trying to out Tea Party Rick Perry, has called for a Constitutional Convention to invoke the "Texas solution" to our government problems (basically, he wants to reinstate the Articles of Confederation). Of course, that can only happen if the Texas Lege meets and votes to call for such a convention, to get the ball rolling. The Gov. has the power to call them into special session for this important vote, but he isn't going to do that. So apparently it isn't so important it can't wait until 2017, when the Lege reconvenes for regular business.

    OTOH, he's still not as blatantly racist as LePage.

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    1. I doubt he's as supremely a dedicated vulgarian as Paul LePage.

      We haven't had a decent governor since Kenneth Curtis left office in 1975. I used to think that Mr. Olympia Snowe, aka Jock McKernan was the worst in our history but LePage is worse by a quarter of a mile. LePage was the protogee of Olympia's first husband Peter Snowe, who could obviously pick 'em. He's got a lot of skeletons in the closet, reportedly, and the Maine media is too delicate and too Republican to be interested in exposing it. They're a very genteel bunch, our ruling class, much of it from away.

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    2. So genteel that LePage insists he didn't say "black," so his remark wasn't racist.

      It's his critics who are racists.

      Yeah, that's the ticket!

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