It's Not Amusing Anymore

"Chicken Little" is a children's story about a chicken who had a pebble fall on his back, and was convinced the sky was falling. He ran around the barnyard yelling that the sky was falling, and got the other animals in quite a panic... until a wise squirrel uncovered the truth.

Recently though, some people on the far right of the political spectrum in America have actually become voluntary Chicken Littles. They search for a pebble to drop on themselves and then run around scaring everybody on purpose. They have been making a cottage industry out of this in recent days.

The best example to date is the "Global Currency Scare" thought up by the folks at Fox News (and one habitually off-the-wall hysterical congresswoman from Minnesota).

So what was the pebble? Most international finance is denominated in US dollars. China recently suggested that another currency might be better suited for this than the dollar. That was the pebble.

What did chicken little pretend it was? An imminent plan to do away with the American dollar and force you to use a single worldwide currency.

This wasn't a misunderstanding. This was a deliberate tactic to scare Americans, and then try to link that contrived fear to Democrats. (For another good example of this Chicken Little Ploy, check out the comments section in my Bob Basso post below.)

Is this tactic all the Republican party has left? No. They have something else too: In psychiatry, it is called Oppositional Defiant Disorder; in politics, it's called "whatever you do, I'll do the opposite... just because."

For a good example of this, look at last Sunday's (admittedly dumb) "turn off your lights to vote against global warming". The right wing folks urged everybody to go around their houses and turn on every light they owned during this simple-minded show of global conservation.

Is that really all The Right has? Petulance? It's not that they didn't make a point, or didn't have the right to counter-demonstrate; it's just that being low-brow and childish is an idiotic impression to attach to your own political party. (It didn't work with left-wing anti-war protesters either, but at least those guys had the intention of following up their idiocy with discussion, ideas, and debate.)

No discussion, no ideas, no reasoned debate with the Right Wing though: Just fear mongering, distortions and misdirection, and fingers-in-the-ears tantruming. They haven't learned, they haven't changed, they haven't improved. I'm a conservative in a lot of ways... but fuck all if I could ever be a Republican again. These people have nothing to offer anymore.