(Weekly Column)

Last week, the Texas Board of Education voted 10-5, along party lines, to replace history textbooks with right wing political propaganda. The vote followed a separate, contentious scrum over whether creationism should be taught in science courses.

Would it not have been easier to have simply jettisoned all textbooks and replaced them with episodes of Glenn Beck and Pat Robertson’ 700 Club on a continuous loop during school hours?

In defending his bid to jam creationism into the school science curriculum and rewrite history, ultra-conservative board member, Dr. Don McLeroy, said, “Somebody’s gotta stand up to experts.”

One wonders if he has the same negative view on experts when it comes to his own dental profession? Would McLeroy trust his own expertise over a guy off the street that fancied himself a dentist because he owned a pair of rusty pliers?

Of course, many fundamentalists have long disdained experts, such as historians, because they have a tendency to reveal men like McLeroy to be agenda-driven amateurs. The extremism of the Texas School Board is evident by the guidelines they voted for.

For example, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, the Eagle Forum’ Phyllis Schlafly and the National Rifle Association have replaced Thomas Jefferson. This is in a despicable effort to marginalize the man who coined the phrase, “separation of church and state”, while elevating America as a right wing “Christian Nation.” (Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein were also eliminated to make room for these conservatives)

Newt Gingrich’ flash-in-the-pan Contract with America and Rev. Jerry Falwell’ short-lived Moral Majority are elevated as historically important, while the supposed religious roots of the American Revolution will be now be studied.

“I reject the notion by the left of a constitutional separation of church and state,” David Bradley, a conservative school board member from Beaumont, told The New York Times.

Social conservatives have created an entire industry to twist our nation’ history. But, if the founders were fundamentalists who intended America to be a Christian version of Iran, than why do these folks have to work so hard to prove their point?

It seems to me that our founders were quite eloquent and certainly able to convey their desire to be a fundamentalist nation, if that is what they had intended. But, our country is not called “God Land.” Jesus’ name is not in the United States Constitution.

Case closed.

These simple facts are clearly eating up these zealots inside and driving them to distraction. They just do not want to accept that their totalitarian and exclusionary vision of America is a radical and dangerous departure from the ideas of religious freedom embraced by our Founding Fathers.

These bitter fundamentalists are left cobbling together arcane quotes — often out of context — that make a circumstantial case that some of our nation’ founders were religious.

So what?

There are millions of Americans who go to church each week, but they don’t want to live in an oppressive theocracy that brainwashes students and undermines democracy. At heart, the conservative members of the board believe they are superior and anyone who does not imbibe on their delusion can be minimized or erased from the historical record.

Furthermore, the new textbook “standards” are not about learning, but a laundry list of southern fundamentalist cultural grievances. For instance, the civil rights movement is downgraded and the peaceful Martin Luther King Jr. will now be “balanced” by lessons on the Black Panthers.

Lyndon Johnson’ Great Society will be degraded for “the unintended consequences” such as affirmative action. The Board rejected attempts to increase the number of Latino figures in history lessons and demands that Republicans get more credit for voting in favor of civil rights legislation. So, even as they demean minorities, the Board is conservatively correct enough to portray social conservatives as supporters of the Civil Rights movement. Nice touch.

There was also approval for an amendment highlighting that Italians and Germans, not just Japanese, were placed in US camps during World War II, to dispute the idea that imprisoning the Japanese was motivated by racism.

The bloc of seven fundamentalists on the Texas Board of Education doesn’t really care about public education. In fact, several members either home school their children or send them to private schools. Their real goal is to infiltrate the system to remake it in their image. There are three things that I hope will come from this controversy:

1) Enough people come forward during the 30 day comment period to reverse the vote.

2) Mainstream textbook makers will take a moral stand and refuse to print propaganda

3) If the standards remain, schools that are able should switch to computer software for lessons, so they are not saddled with Bible-based “history” books for a decade

Is there any doubt that brutally unflattering chapters about these zealous hijackers of history will be written into future social studies textbooks?

This is the funniest, campiest 700 Club clip I’ve ever seen. The melancholy music. The close-up shots of the little boy wearing high heel shoes. The credulous narrator. And that’s all in the first thirty seconds! I found it over at Rich’s FourFour blog, where he had this to say about it:

I’m of two minds regarding the ex-gay thing. Because I believe that no one is a better expert on my emotions than I am, it seems hypocritical to turn around and tell someone that what he’s saying he feels is not what he actually feels. Being “cured” of homosexuality flies in the face of what I consider to be innate and acceptable (Whoooo! I don’t need no cure! I don’t need no cure!), on top of it supporting the ludicrous “choice” argument made by the hateful and unsympathetic (homosexuality is a choice in the same way that going out to get food so that you don’t starve is a choice), but if Tony Spears wants to put on broad, five-minute theater to convince us he’s banging chicks now, well, whatever! I love the ultimate implication that you can be cured of desire, but that the gay sensibility is resistant to prayer. Reassuring!

Maybe if the way to “cure” homosexuality is through prayer, the way to cure homophobia is through laughter. I’m so sick of being depressed by shit that it’s worth a try.

I like the way he compared it to eating to fend off starvation. The only difference is that, while swearing off food is deadly, celibacy probably won’t kill you. But it won’t change the fact that your biology draws you toward a certain kind of person, a certain gender, etc.

Anyway, here’s Tony Spears talking about how he once was gay, but now he’s banging one very special lady named Felicia! Also, he only had the gayness because he didn’t know his Paw Paw. Riiiiiiight. Oh, and Pat Robertson gets so excited at the end! He’s rocking back and forth in reaction to the gayness that went away by the power of prayer!

The more I read about the Tea Party, the more it becomes vividly clear that this is nothing more than a Great Tea Purge of Republican moderates and independent thinkers. This process was already underway for years. It began when Ralph Reed was hired by Pat Robertson to form The Christian Coalition. Reed took the huge mailing list compiled from Robertson’s quixotic run for President in 1988 and transformed it into a movement.

Having placed basically every blue-nosed busybody in a database, Reed set out to hijack the Republican Party. He had a stealth strategy of taking over school boards, local GOP committees and city councils under the radar. Once this was accomplished, his largely clandestine movement came out of the closet and stole Congress. Unfortunately, Washington has never been the same, with collegiality in shambles and extremism replacing reasonable debate. In short, Reed and Robertson soiled our nation to fulfill their sinister goal of turning America into a theocracy.

The Christian Coalition ran out of steam. However, this new Tea Bag movement has picked up where they left off. Phillip Glass is using his National Precinct Alliance to hijack the GOP by signing up Tea Baggers to run the party. In the process, they are running out moderates and finishing the job that the Christian Coalition’s Reed set out to do.

So, what is the Tea Party (Purge)?

It is a brilliant coup by Big Business to co-opt the American government, by using dim-witted fundamentalists and under-educated, under-employed rural folks to carry their water. Look at the issues:

1) Climate Change: Irresponsible members of Big Business do not want to pay to stop the damage corporations have done to our planet. They want to continue polluting and exploiting our natural resources. The best way to do this is to trick people, by flooding the Internet with fake science, into believing climate change is not man made. The next step is to turn the government into a bogeyman, so “the people” will reduce its power to regulate corporate excess and corruption.

The end result will be dirtier water, filthier air, sicker families and dwindling natural resources. Of course, the powerful and wealthy CEO’s won’t notice. While your children choke on the dust and grit, they will be yachting off to the few remaining private islands that are not despoiled by greed and pollution.

2) Taxes: One of the most irresponsible parts of this “movement” is that Americans should not have to pay their fair share of taxes. This whole idea that you can get something for nothing is a mirage and the poor families who scream and act the fool at Tea Bag protests are the ones who will be left without basic services if this radical agenda becomes enacted.

Here is a dirty little secret. Developing countries are only “Third World” for the desperately poor (i.e. the majority.) The sliver of wealthy people in these nations often live like kings. They have privatized services and are pampered in every imaginable way. They frequently jet off to beautiful flats in Paris, New York and London, while “the people” suffer in anonymity back home. While living in such luxury, these elites have little incentive to make life better for the impoverished masses.

By significantly eroding or eliminating the tax base, the majority of Americans would lose government services – from clean water to garbage pick-up, to affordable education to job training, to pathogen-free meat to reliable transportation (such as train service). The CEO’s would save a fortune on taxes, while using private companies to pay for services no longer available to average Americans.

They win. You lose.

Meanwhile, when people become angry over the situation, these titans will spend millions of dollars on propaganda to blame the deterioration of America on liberal morals and government incompetence – even as they starve the government of the resources it needs to effectively do its job.

What a scam.

The hard truth is, these avaricious conservatives and their Tea Party tools are going to turn America into a Third World nation, where there is a huge gulf between rich and poor. Look around – it is already happening.

Wake up Tea Baggers. You are dupes who are forfeiting your family’s future and don’t even realize it.

3) Health Care: CEO’s and their families will always receive top-notch health care and cutting edge medicine. But, increasingly, they see little incentive for workers and average Americans to get the same benefits and level of care. By crushing labor unions and buying off politicians, thanks to our Supreme Court, they can easily replace sick workers with younger, healthier models.

The CEO’s have used this gullible Tea Bag crowd to convince a majority of people that the government is inefficient and should stay out of health-care. I guess these “real Americans” are content having potential treatments for their children rejected by faceless insurance company bureaucrats sitting in sterile cubicles with the job of protecting a corporation’s bottom line.

Do these tools realize how they have been tricked by hucksters like former Congressman Dick Armey (R-TX) – who now runs FreedomWorks, an umbrella for Tea Party groups? Armey is a corporate shill who is robbing your family of its future. However, too many people think he is on their side because he wears cowboy boots and uses quaint, folksy sayings.

Catch a clue – Armey cares nothing about your freedom. Armey is a con artist – an actor – posing as a good ole’ boy outsider, when he is the ultimate insider. Yet, countless Americans keep falling for his phony snake charmer act.

4) Illegal Immigration & Gays: The corporate titans realize that if they ran on a platform of, “We manipulate the system to steal your money and you go broke”, they would not do so well in elections. So, they have developed the cat-with-a-laser technique.

When I want to distract Critter, my cat, I shine a laser on the wall and he runs to attack it. He never actually catches the gosh-darn-red-light, but he always feels like he’s getting close. More importantly, he expends a lot of energy – and then takes a multi-hour slumber.

Tea Baggers – you are the cat and the issues of immigration and gay rights are the laser. You are being distracted, busied on a circular obstacle course and ultimately being put to sleep – even as you feel you are accomplishing something.

I have news for you.

You are never going to stop people from crossing the border, as long as there are better economic opportunities in America. You are never going to stop gay people from dating and mating. No matter how high you build that wall, or how many Proposition H8 measures you spend millions of dollars to enact. You are essentially wasting your time and money. You will eliminate gay people and immigrants, right after you accomplish winning that great war against marijuana or electing pure Christian politicians who won’t cheat on their spouses.

It ain’t going to happen, so the sooner you drop the expensive fantasy, the sooner we can all move on to real issues that will actually improve the lives of our families.

Of course, by adopting extreme anti-government, anti-regulatory economic policies, we will ruin the economy for all but the robber-barons. With few decent-paying blue-collar jobs left in America, hard-working Mexican immigrants will just stay at home. And, those loudmouths at the Tea Party rallies will have no choice but to fill their threadbare shoes – picking tomatoes and mowing laws.

Sadly, these folks will be happy performing such labor-intensive, menial tasks, because – a bad job is better than no job. And, the joke is, the radical politicians they helped elect to destroy America’s economy will make these dupes feel important by feeding them propaganda about opportunity, freedom and hard work.

“If you just scrub that toilet a little bit harder, you’ll be an entrepreneur in the opportunity-based society and one day smoke cigars on the country club golf course with Rush Limbaugh,” I can hear the hired PR guns say. (Read More)