These people are the official representatives of one of America's great parties

Before we begin, an historical footnote: the Republican Party was founded in 1864 and soon joined by Abraham Lincoln to unite the disparate anti-Confederate, anti-Slavery forces in American politics.

Today, delegates to the Republican Party's National Convention behave like this:

An attendee to the US Republican party convention was removed from the conference after allegedly throwing nuts at a black camerawoman from CNN, saying "this is how we feed animals".

and like this - towards members of their own party, apparently for being, well, Latina:



Not to worry you, but the gap between the candidates is currently 1%. I'm not that bothered that Mitt Romney wears special religious underpants and believes that Jesus visited America. I am bothered that his party hates women, believes weird things about their biology, promotes the most vicious forms of capitalism, thinks it's OK that a Presidential candidate keeps his millions in the Cayman Islands, Switzerland etc - he wants to run the government, not contribute to its maintenance - and believes that electing representatives whose faces contort with racial hatred is apparently fine.

(Puerto Rico was seized by the US at the end of the Spanish-American war. It's a dependent territory, essentially an offshore possession in which citizens can't vote for the Presidency but do have an elected governor).

The wisdom of Mitt

This pretty much sums up the Republican Party:

"If the federal government were run more like the government here in Mississippi," he told the inhabitants of America's poorest state where infant mortality is on a par with Botswana, "the whole country would be a lot better off".

From this article by Gary Younge in today's Guardian.

Relative radio silence from me today: English department meeting in seven minutes, and an intense session on Proletkult in Welsh literature with my darling third-years. Which reminds me - I need to catch up with the project students.

Drinking the Kool-Aid

I don't know if you've been following the American Presidential nomination campaigns, but it's a fascinating example of why we are doomed to a future of environmental misery, scientific ignorance and social decay.

The primary system pitches potential party candidates against each other in a bitter, gladiatorial contest. Any voter registered as a supporter (not member) of the party can vote in their statewide poll. In some ways, it's quite useful: the flaws of the candidate can be highlighted before the actual national election. On the other hand, those flaws are exposed for the nation to see even years before the candidate faces the official vote. Additionally, the public can become bored with the candidate very early on.

Apart from the obscene amounts of money soaked up by essentially 3 years of campaigning during a 4-year election cycle, the major problem for the American 2-party system is extremism. This year's Republican candidates are Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain (until yesterday), Mitt Romney, Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich. All of them are hugely rich, privileged people - and all of them are running as political 'outsiders': even Newt Gingrich, who led the Republican Congress against Bill Clinton. He's up to his neck in lobbying corruption and accusations of hypocrisy: while pursuing Clinton for the Lewinsky affair, he was conducting several of his own…

The problem with the primary system is this: to win the nomination, you have to appeal to the minority of voters who turn out. This is the hardcore: those who want a candidate exactly like them, which means loudly proclaiming your fundamentalist Christianity, attacking science, denying that there's anything wrong with the environment at all, wielding heavy artillery at every opportunity, and promising to deport anyone who's ever looked longingly at a taco.

Which is all very well: but it pays no attention to the rest of the country. The Republicans are facing a liked but not massively popular incumbent in Obama. There's a percentage of the country which will switch to the Republicans without too much guilt if their candidate is reasonably centrist (by American standards: horrendously conservative by our's). But this is exactly what won't happen. The most reasonable Republican candidate is Mitt Romney, the billionaire Mormon: but even he's had to abandon all common sense and drink the extremist Kool-Aid. So the Republicans will get a candidate in their image - and lose heavily. It's a problem common to political parties everywhere: true believers are often a bit odd, whereas the plausible candidates can't always be trusted (looking at you, Blair), but it seems to be magnified in the US, where the Republicans are becoming a narrow, bitter faith-based sect, and the Democrats are simply technocratic avatars of the status quo with very little in the way of actual, y'know, beliefs. 

It's the old conundrum: electable or true believer? I'm pretty certain that there's a big chunk of potential ordinary decent Republicans out there who espouse small-town conservative values who are essentially disenfranchised by the activists' extremism.

And while we're at it, yesterday's Doonesbury is a magnificent attack on Rick Perry and election funding.

Cancer… or votes?

Presumably those of my readers who aren't American aren't quite as transfixed by the Republican race for the Presidential nomination as I am. Feel free to skip this post. Ditto those who don't like to confront The Stupid.

You may have noticed that this year's contenders range from the unpleasant to the unbelievable. The dumber the candidate, the more chance they have to win. In the old patrician days, the Republican Party could talk down to the rednecks and take their votes for granted, meaning that an intellectual or a moderate stood a chance: Eisenhower stands out as a particularly respectable candidate.

But this lot are so dumb - or worse, cynical - that they've made a point of disavowing the basic things that most electorates want in a political leader: reason, discrimination, decent pragmatism, negotiating skills and above all, faith in government as a social structure which serves the people well.

There are two American models of government, and they both have their roots in the 18th century. One holds that government is the highest expression of collective human desires: altruism, pooled authority for the good of all, and so on. The other holds that community, and especially formal expressions of community such as laws, healthcare and so on, are automatically oppressive and injurious to individual human enterprise. From the first conception springs the Democratic Party and the old moderate wing of the Republicans. From the second springs the whack jobs currently running for office.

The most disgusting example of this total hatred for government was the candidates' exchange of fire over the Human Papilloma Virus vaccination, now given to adolescent girls in the UK, and available to them in the US. Texan governor Rick Perry bowed to the federal courts and allowed the vaccinations to go ahead in his state, against his political judgement - and he even allowed parents to opt out. In the most recent debate, we had the sickening sight of watching the other candidates, especially the know-nothing rabble-rouser Michele Bachmann, sententiously express their view that they'd rather the girls get cervical cancer than allow a democratically-elected government insist that they be vaccinated. Bachmann now claims that the vaccine causes mental retardation… which makes me wonder how many shots of it she took.

Of course the American political funding situation is a revolting other matter and they're all guilty: it's no coincidence that over 80% of American legislators are millionaires. Similarly, there's a debate about which particular vaccine should be used.

Unfortunately, I can't find an embeddable clip, but you really need to watch it.

So now you know. The Republicans would rather your daughter got cancer than accept government help. And they might win.

The Big (t)Issue

Well done to America's Republican Party. In the midst of global recession, climate havoc, mass unemployment (15% in the US), they've been electing their candidates for Senate.

So who've they gone for?

Christine O'Donnell beat a long-term congressman for the Republican candidacy. The woman whose main interests are guns, opposing abortion and - the pressing issue of our times - the fight against masturbation.

The then leader of Christian lobby group Savior's Alliance for Lifting the Truth, O'Donnell took part in an MTV series, Sex in the 90s. "The Bible says that lust in your heart is committing adultery. So you can't masturbate without lust," she told the programme. "The reason that you don't tell [people] that masturbation is the answer to Aids and all these other problems that come with sex outside of marriage is because, again, it is not addressing the issue. You're just gonna create somebody who is toying with his sexuality. Pardon the pun."

O'Donnell, meanwhile, has questioned the focus on apparent untruths on her CV, such as claims she had a masters degree when she was in fact still awaiting the award of the bachelor's equivalent, due to unpaid university fees. 

Ah, what a delightful whiff of the 1950s. When life was simple and the greatest threat facing the US was communists with boxes of Kleenex weakening the moral fibre of the nation.

People in the States seem terrified of the Tea Party and their house-trained Republican counterparts, partly because they decided that Obama's election was the signal to be as disruptive and undemocratic as possible. I'm more relaxed. I think that most Americans are pretty mainstream. The more Tea Party candidates take over the Republicans, the more people will vote Democrat: the Republicans are making themselves unelectable by being captured by their mad fringe.

The O'Donnell case is the perfect example. The US is swinging Republican at the moment, and her mainstream Republican rival could have won the currently Democratic Senatorial seat - but she can't. The Dems must be jubilant every time one of these loons gets the candidacy. Interestingly, the American primary system lets all citizens vote in party elections, so hopefully Dems are voting for these weirdos to make the real elections even easier for them.

Problem solved. Or it would be if other candidates were sane: only one of the 48 Republican candidates accepts that climate change is happening - and he's the guy who just lost the primary to O'Donnell.

Who's been a naughty politician?

While Obama and most of the Democrats were trying to drag the USA into the civilized world by instituting at least basic healthcare for most citizens, the Republicans were elsewhere.

In breaks between describing Obama as a Communist and a Fascist (no, me neither), they were spending party money on… bondage clubs. It's like the Tories!

I do remember reading some report which demonstrated a correlation between the levels and type of pornography downloaded and states' churchgoing (more religious states downloaded more porn), but this is ridiculous!

The report is titled 'Republican red faces'. Red bottoms too, from the sound of it. This from the party of God and family values…

It emerged today that the Republicans spent almost $2,000 last month on a visit to the club where topless women hang from nets on the ceiling and simulate sex in a glass case.

The Los Angeles Times, in a review of the club soon after its opening in October last year, described it as being modelled on sex scenes in the Stanley Kubrick film Eyes Wide Shut.

"There is also a heavy net suspended above the club's lounge area where performers writhe above the heads of clubgoers. Even more provocative scenes are played out in an enclosed glass booth area adjacent to the club's dancefloor area," the paper said.

A reviewer for the Yelp website wrote: "At one point I walked to the bathroom and pretty much just stopped dead in my tracks to watch two girls simulating oral sex in a glass case."

Bush redux

Over at The Huffington Post, those good liberals are enjoying the implosion of the Republican Party. The front-runners for the 2012 nomination are Palin, Jindal and Jeb Bush. The mark of the true mess those bastards are in is encapsulated by this:

How screwed are the Republicans right now? Put it this way: the sanest contender in the above list is named "Bush".