Right Wing Values; In a consumer based, material society, the end always justifies the means. It's O.K. to lie, cheat, steal and kill because material accumulation and possession become indistinguishable from virtue.
by Jon Faulkner
The Republican Right has laid claim to morality as if only they possess moral standards when in fact the right-wing has never been about anything more than material possession and the pursuit of power for personal gain. In a consumer based, material society, the end always justifies the means. It's O.K. to lie, cheat, steal and kill because material accumulation and possession become indistinguishable from virtue. Corporate excess - "irrational exuberance" - gives name to the abandonment of principle for personal wealth.
In 1906, Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" exposed the robber barons and the rampant public corruption their money bought. Horrified Americans identified the right- wing with opulent greed at the expense of common decency. Voters threw the bums out. Fifty years later Newt Gingrich hit upon a solution to soften the public's perception. The right wing would sell themselves as moralists! Newt wrote a list of "code words". Henceforth, right wing politicians would use "care, courage, protect, family, crusade, truth" etc. to describe themselves and their policies. Their political opponents would be tarred with a different list of "code words", among them, "Anti-child, destroy, waste, anti-family, liberal, decay, sick, traitors" and so on. Newt and the right wing were so successful in marketing their newfound virtue that today they control all three branches of government.
Dishonest right-wing moralists fill the public's airwaves with their message of hate and intolerance. Ollie North, of Iran-Contra, was indicted on 16 felony counts and convicted of three. He isn't capable of the truth. That makes him a favored guest of Fox News. Rush "Oxycontin" Limbaugh, Michael "Racist" Savage, Bill "Shut up!" O'Reilly and the shrew, Ann Coulter, tirelessly reinforce phony right-wing virtue while setting up an impenetrable wall of racket. Bill Bennett, Reagan's old Secretary of Education was so taken by the notion of virtue that he was moved to give us "The Book of Virtue". This lofty work, written by an egomaniac, (there are no humble, modest or intelligent people who believe they are authorities on virtue) predictably libels anyone who doesn't agree with the author's idea of God and Country. Mr. Virtue lost the proceeds from his virtue book when he parked his morals in Las Vegas and lost over a million dollars on the gambling tables. Bennett is typical of right-wingers. Virtue is good, and even better if it can be converted into cash! These right-wing howlers all have at least two things in common. They are consummate liars and they have huge bank accounts. The moral business is a regular cash cow!
The unfortunate irony is that Bush & Co. is the logical result of his electorate's academic and moral ignorance. It's ironic because Bush wouldn't recognize a moral value if it came free in a bag of pretzels. Appropriately, his largest constituency are right-wing, Christian evangelicals. Loud and boisterous, they are a significant audience of hate radio. They are pathologically delusional in their self pro-claimed vision of moral superiority. Bush also finds many supporters among the middle class and rural working poor, especially in the South. These people have no reason to vote for a party that will literally steal the shirts off their backs so the right-wing media flatters them, ad nasuem. They are victims of the old adage, "flattery is the highest form of insincerity". They shoot themselves in the foot while holding out their pants to be taken along with their shirts! Now their sons and daughters are being taken from them for an unprovoked and illegal war. Hitler would be proud. He ran the same scam with his blond, blue eyed, super-race nonsense. PT Barnum summed it up best, "There's a sucker born every minute".
Only very rich people have a logical reason to vote Republican. De-regulation, privatization, outsourcing American jobs to other countries, are just a few right-wing strategies designed to transfer Americas natural wealth into a comparatively few pockets. When the neocon, right-wing seized power through a partisan Supreme Court the first thing they did was sack the U.S. Treasury. They divided the Nations wealth and like bank robbers, the politically connected got their pile. They called it tax cuts and now the poorer, but not wiser, "Ditto Heads" roar their approval.
Imagine a world of corporate bottom liners. They have finally managed to suck all the life and natural resources from the planet. Naturally, they will turn on each other when there is nothing left and no one else to use. The last right-winger, surrounded by his useless wealth, will thank his cash register God for letting him get everything. Alone, with the cold wind blowing across a barren, deserted wasteland he still won't know right from wrong but off he will go, as greedy and foolish as ever, to check the coin returns on public payphones. Virtue indeed.
Jon Faulkner: Stockholm, ME, I think my political opinions took root when I was 12 years old. I had gone from my home in Massachusetts to visit my relatives in Birmingham, Alabama. I watched my relatives cheer the police as they attacked blacks with water cannon and dogs. I should have suspected something was up because shortly before arriving in Birmingham we had stopped for gas. I walked over to a Coke machine that had 2 drinking fountains, one on each side. One said "colored" and the other didn't say anything. I asked the attendant what color the water was. He walked over to my Dad and jerked his thumb at me, and my Dad told me to get in the car. I live in Maine now and I've always wondered what color that water was.
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