Dear Conservative Americans,

The years have not been kind to you. I grew up in a profoundly Republican home so I can remember when you wore a very different face than the one we see now. You’ve lost me and you’ve lost most of America. Because I believe having responsible choices is important to democracy, I’d like to give you some advice and an invitation.

First, the invitation: Come back to us.

Now the advice. You’re going to have to come up with a platform that isn’t built on a foundation of cowardice: fear of people with colors, religions, cultures and sex lives that differ from yours; fear of reform in banking, health care, energy; fantasy fears of America being transformed into an Islamic nation, into social/commun/fasc-ism, into a disarmed populace put in internment camps; and more. But you have work to do even before you take on that task.

Your party — the GOP — and the conservative end of the American political spectrum has become irresponsible and irrational. Worse, it’s tolerating, promoting and celebrating prejudice and hatred. Let me provide some examples ? by no means an exhaustive list — of where the Right as gotten itself stuck in a swamp of hypocrisy, hyperbole, historical inaccuracy and hatred.

Hypocrisy

•   You can’t flip out — and threaten impeachment — when Dems use a parliamentary procedure (deem and pass) that you used repeatedly (more than 35 times in just one session and more than 100 timesin all!), that’s centuries old and which the courts have supported. Especially when your leaders admit it all.

•   You can’t vote and scream against the stimulus package and then take credit for the good it’s done in your own district (happily handing out enormous checks representing money that you voted against is especially ugly) — 114 of you (at last count) did just that — and it’s even worse when you secretly beg for more.

•   You can’t fight against your own ideas just because the Dem president endorses your proposal.

•   You can’t call for a pay-as-you-go policy, and then vote against your own ideas.

•   Are they “unlawful enemy combatants” or are they “prisoners of war” at Gitmo? You can’t have it both ways.

•   You can’t carry on about the evils of government spending when your family has accepted more than a quarter-million dollars in government handouts.

•   You can’t refuse to go to a scheduled meeting, to which you were invited, and then blame the Dems because they didn’t meet with you.

•   You can’t rail against using teleprompters while usingteleprompters. Repeatedly.

•   You can’t rail against the bank bailouts when you supported them as they were happening.

•   You can’t be for immigration reform, then against it .

•   You can’t enjoy socialized medicine while condemning it.

•   You can’t flip out when the black president puts his feet on the presidential desk when you were silent when the white presidents did the same. Bush. Ford.

•   You can’t complain that the president hasn’t closed Gitmo yet when you’ve campaigned to keep Gitmo open.

•   You can’t flip out when the black president bows to foreign dignitaries, as appropriate for their culture, when you were silent when the white presidents did the same.

   Bush Bowing Down To King Abdullah

   Nixon.

   President Dwight D. Eisenhower bowing to Charles Degualle in 1956.

You didn’t even make a peep when Bush held hands and kissed leaders of a country that’s not on “kissing terms” with the US.

•   You can’t complain that the undies bomber was read his Miranda rights under Obama when the shoe bomber was read his Miranda rights under Bush and you remained silent. (And, no, Newt — the shoe bomber was not a US citizen either, so there is no difference.)

•   You can’t attack the Dem president for not personally* publicly condemning a terrorist event for 72 hours when you said nothing about the Rep president waiting 6 days in an eerily similar incident (and, even then, he didn’t issue any condemnation). *The Obama administration did the day of the event.

•   You can’t throw a hissy fit, sound alarms and cry that Obama freed Gitmo prisoners who later helped plan the Christmas Day undie bombing, when — in fact — only one former Gitmo detainee, released by Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, helped to plan the failed attack.

•   You can’t condemn blaming the Republican president for an attempted terror attack on his watch, then blame the Dem president for an attempted terror attack on his.

•   You can’t mount a boycott against singers who say they’re ashamed of the president for starting a war, but remain silent when another singer says he’s ashamed of the president and falsely calls him a Maoist who makes him want to throw up and says he ought to be in jail.

•   You can’t cry that the health care bill is too long, then cry that it’s too short.

•   You can’t support the individual mandate for health insurance, then call it unconstitutional when Dems propose it and campaign against your own ideas.

•   You can’t demand television coverage, then whine about it when you get it. Repeatedly.

•   You can’t praise criminal trials in US courts for terror suspects under a Rep president, then call it “treasonous” under a Dem president.

•   You can’t propose ideas to create jobs, and then work against them when the Dems put your ideasin a bill.

•   You can’t be both pro-choice and anti-choice.

•   You can’t damn someone for failing to pay $900 in taxes when you’ve paid nearly $20,000 inIRS fines.

•   You can’t condemn criticizing the president when US troops are in harm’s way, then attack the president when US troops are in harm’s way , the only difference being the president’s party affiliation (and, by the way, armed conflict does NOT remove our right and our duty as Americans to speak up).

•   You can’t be both for cap-and-trade policy and against it.

•   You can’t vote to block debate on a bill, then bemoan the lack of ?open debate’.

If you push anti-gay legislation and make anti-gay speeches, you should probably take a pass on having gay sex, regardless of whether it’s 2004 or 2010. This is true, too, if you’re taking GOP money and giving anti-gay rants on CNN. Taking right-wing money and GOP favors to write anti-gay stories for news sites while working as a gay prostitute, doubles down on both the hypocrisy and the prostitution. This is especially true if you claim your anti-gay stand is God’s stand, too.

When you chair the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, you can’t send sexy emails to 16-year-old boys (illegal anyway, but you made it hypocritical as well).

•   You can’t criticize Dems for not doing something you didn’t do while you held power over the past 16 years, especially when the Dems have done more in one year than you did in 16.

•   You can’t decry “name calling” when you’ve been the most consistent and outrageous at it. And themost vile.

•   You can’t spend more than 40 years hating, cutting and trying to kill Medicare, and then pretend to be the defenders of Medicare

•   You can’t praise the Congressional Budget Office when its analysis produces numbers that fit your political agenda, then claim it’s unreliable when it comes up with numbers that don’t.

•   You can’t vote for X under a Republican president, then vote against X under a Democratic president. Either you support X or you don’t. And it makes it worse when you change your position merely for the sake obstructionism.

•   You can’t call a reconciliation out of bounds when you used it repeatedly.

•   You can’t spend tax-payer money on ads against spending tax-payer money.

•   You can’t condemn individual health insurance mandates in a Dem bill, when the mandates were your idea.

•   You can’t demand everyone listen to the generals when they say what fits your agenda, and then ignore them when they don’t.

•   You can’t whine that it’s unfair when people accuse you of exploiting racism for political gain, when your party’s former leader admits you’ve been doing it for decades.

•   You can’t portray yourself as fighting terrorists when you openly and passionately support terrorists.

•   You can’t complain about a lack of bipartisanship when you’ve routinely obstructed for the sake of political gain — threatening to filibuster at least 100 pieces of legislation in one session, far more than any other since the procedural tactic was invented — and admitted it. Some admissions are unintentional, others are madeproudly. This is especially true when the bill is the result of decades of compromise between the two parties and is filled with your own ideas.

•   You can’t question the loyalty of Department of Justice lawyers when you didn’t object when your own Republican president appointed them.

•   You can’t preach and try to legislate “Family Values” when you: take nude hot tub dips with teenagers (and pay them hush money); cheat on your wife with a secret lover and lie about it to the world;

•   cheat with a staffer’s wife (and pay them off with a new job); pay hookers for sex while wearing a diaper and cheating on your wife; or just enjoying an old fashioned non-kinky cheating on your wife; try to have gay sex in a public toilet; authorizethe rape of children in Iraqi prisons to coerce their parents into providing information; seek, look at or havesex with children; replacea guy who cheats on his wife with a guy who cheats on his pregnant wife with his wife’s mother;

Hyperbole

You really need to disassociate with those among you who:

•   assert that people making a quarter-million dollars a year can barely make ends meet or that $1 million “isn’t a lot of money”;

•   say that “Comrade” Obama is a “Bolshevik” who is “taking cues from Lenin”;

•    ignore the many times your buddies use a term that offends you and complain only when a Dem says it;

•   liken political opponents to murderers, rapists, and “this Muslim guy” that “offed his wife’s head”;

•   say Obama “wants his plan to fail…so that he can make the case for bank nationalization and vindicate his dream of a socialist economy”;

•   equate putting the good of the people ahead of your personal fortunes with terrorism;

•   smear an entire major religion with the actions of a few fanatics;

•   say that the president wants to “annihilate us”;

•   compare health care reform with the bombing of Pearl Harbor, a Bolshevik plot, the attack on 9/11, or reviving the ghosts of communist dictators;

•   equate our disease-fighting stem cell research with “what the Nazis did”;

•   call a bill passed by the majority of both houses of Congress, by members of Congress each elected by a majority in their districts, as “the end of representative government”;

•   shout “baby killer” at a member of Congress on the floor of the House, especially one who so fought against abortion rights that he nearly killed health care reform (in fact, a little decorum, a little respect for our national institutions and the people and the values they represent, would be refreshing — cut out the shouting, theswearing and the obscenities);

•   prove your machismo by claiming your going to “crash a party” to which you’re officially invited;

•   claim that Obama is pushing America’s “submission to Shariah”;

•   question the patriotism of people upholding cherished American values and the rule of law;

•   claim the president is making us less safe without a hint of evidence;

•   call a majority vote the “tyranny of the minority,” even if you meant to call it tyranny of the majority — it’s democracy, not tyranny;

•   call the president’s support of a criminal trial for a terror suspect“treasonous” (especially when supported the same thing when the president shared your party);

•   call the Pope the anti-Christ;

•   assert that the constitutionally mandated census isan attempt to enslave us;

•   accuse opponents of being backed byArab slave-drivers or being drunk and suicidal;

•   equate family planing with eugenics or Nazism;

•   accuse the president of changing the missile defense program’s logo to match his campaign logo and reflect what you say is his secret Muslim identity;

•   accuse political opponents of being totalitarians, socialists, communists, fascists, Marxists; terrorist sympathizers, McCarthy-like, Nazis or drug pushers; and

•   advocate a traitorous act like secession, violent revolution , military coup or civil war (just so we’re clear: sedition is a bad thing).

History

If you’re going to use words likesocialism, communism and fascism, you must have at least a basic understanding of what those words mean (hint: they’re NOT synonymous!)

•   You can’t cut a leading Founding Father out the history books because you’ve decided you don’t like his ideas.

•   You cant repeatedly assert that the president refuses to say the word “terrorism” or say we’re at war with terror when we have an awful lot of videotape showing him repeatedly assailing terrorism and using those exact words.

If you’re going to invoke the names of historical figures, it does not serve you well to whitewash them. Especially this one.

•   You can’t just pretend historical events didn’t happen in an effort to make a political opponent look dishonest or to make your side look better. Especially these events. (And, no, repeating it doesn’t make it less of a lie.)

•   You can’t say things that are simply and demonstrably false: health care reform will not push people out of their private insurance and into a government-run program; health care reform (which contains a good many of your ideas and very few from the Left) is a long way from “socialist utopia”; is not “reparations”; and does not create “death panels”.

Hatred

You have to condemn those among you who:

•    call members of Congress n*gger and f*ggot when they disagree with them on policy;

•   elected leaders who say “I’m a proud racist”;

•   state that America has been built by white people;

•   say that poor people are poor because they’re rotten people, call them “parasitic garbage” or say they shouldn’t be allowed to vote;

•   call women bitches and prostitutes just because you don’t like their politics ( re – pea -ted – ly );

•   assert that the women who are serving our nation in uniform are hookers;

•   mock and celebrate the death of a grandmother because you disagree with her son’s politics;

•   declare that those who disagree with them are shown by that disagreement to be not just “Marxist radicals” but also monsters and a deadly disease killing the nation (this would fit in the hyperbole and history categories, too);

•   joke about blindness;

•   advocate euthanizing the wives of your political opponents;

•   taunt people with incurable, life-threatening diseases — especially if you do it on a syndicated broadcast;

•   equate gay love with bestiality — involving horses or dogs or turtles or ducks — or polygamy, child molestation, pedophilia;

•   casually assume that only white males look “like a real American”;

•   assert presidential power totorture a child by having his testicles crushed in front of his parents to get them to talk, order the massacre of a civilian village and launch a nuclear attack without the consent of Congress;

•   attack children whose mothers have died;

•   call people racists without producing a shred of evidence that they said or done something that would even smell like racism — same for invoking racially charged “dog whistle” words (repeatedly);

•   condemn the one thing that every major religion agrees on;

•   complain that we no longer employ the tactics we once used to disenfranchise millions of Americans because of their race;

•   blame the victims of natural disasters and terrorist attacks for their suffering and losses;

•   celebrate violence, joke about violence, prepare for violence or use violent imagery, “fun” political violence, hints of violence, threats of violence (this one is rather explicit), suggestions of violence or actual violence (and,
really, suggesting anal rape with a hot piece of metal is beyond the pale); and

•   incite insurrection telling people toget their guns ready for a “bloody battle” with the president of the United States.

Oh, and I’m not alone: One of your most respected and decorated leaders agrees with me.

So, dear conservatives, get to work. Drain the swamp of the conspiracy nuts, the bald-faced liars undeterred by demonstrable facts, the overt hypocrisy and the hatred. Then offer us a calm, responsible, grownup agenda based on your values and your vision for America. We may or may not agree with your values and vision, but we’ll certainly welcome you back to the American mainstream with open arms. We need you.

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   Sam Vaknin, Ph.D.
By Sam Vaknin — Author of “Malignant Self Love – Narcissism Revisited“

Even mega-states are typically founded by a small nucleus of pioneers, visionaries, and activists. The United States is a relatively recent example. The character of the collective of Founding Fathers has a profound effect on the nature of the polity that they create: nations spawned by warriors tend to be belligerent and to nurture and cherish military might throughout their history (e.g., Rome); When traders and businessman establish a country, it is likely to cultivate capitalistic values and thrive on commerce and shipping (e.g., Netherlands); The denizens of countries formed by lawyers are likely to be litigious.The influence of the Founding Fathers does not wane with time. On the very contrary: the mold that they have forged for their successors tends to rigidify and be sanctified. It is buttressed by an appropriate ethos, code of conduct, and set of values. Subsequent and massive waves of immigrants conform with these norms and adapt themselves to local traditions, lores, and mores.

Back to the United States:

Thinkers and scholars as diverse as Christopher Lasch in "The Cultural Narcissist" and Theodore Millon in "Personality Disorders of Everyday Life" have singled out the United States as the quintessential narcissistic society.

The "American Dream" in itself is benign. It involves materialistic self-realization, the belief in the ideal of equal opportunities and equal access to the system, and in just rewards for hard work, merit, and natural gifts. But the Dream has been rendered nightmarish by the confluence with America’s narcissistic traits.

America’s internal ethos is universally-accepted by all Americans. It incorporates the American Dream and the conviction that America stands for everything that is good and right. Consequently, as the reification of goodness, the United States is in constant battle with evil and its ever-changing demonic emissaries – from Hitler to Saddam Hussein.

There is no national consensus about America’s external ethos. Some Americans are isolationists, others interventionists. Both groups are hypervigilant, paranoid, and self-righteous – but isolationists are introverted and schizoid. Theirs is  siege mentality. Interventionists are missionary. They feel omnipotent and invincible. They are extroverted and psychopathic.

This pathology can be traced back and attributed to a confluence of historical events and processes, the equivalents of trauma and abuse in an individual’s early childhood.

The United States of America started out as a series of loosely connected, remote, savage, and negligible colonial outposts. The denizens of these settlements were former victims of religious persecution, indentured servants, lapsed nobility, and other refugees. Their Declaration of Independence reads like a maudlin list of grievances coupled with desperate protestations of love and loyalty to their abuser, the King of Britain.

The inhabitants of the colonies defended against their perceived helplessness and very real inferiority with compensatory, imagined, and feigned superiority and fantasies of omnipotence. Victims frequently internalize their abusers and themselves become bullies. Hence the rough, immutable kernel of American narcissism.

The United States was (until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s) and still is, in some important respects, a pre-Enlightenment, white supremacist society. It is rife with superstition, prejudice, conspicuous religiosity, intolerance, philistinism, and lack of social solidarity. Its religiosity is overt, aggressive, virulent and ubiquitous. It is replete with an eschatology, which involves a changing cast of demonized "enemies", both political and cultural.

The Civil War was fought between 2 America’s: the South, a perverted rendition of Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, and the North, a harbinger of modern, multicultural immigrant societies. The North and the American Dream prevailed, the slaves were freed, and the Southern way of life, that of "gentlemen with leisure", was replaced by a workaholic society where everyone is a slave to money and leisure is an ever rarer commodity.

Americans’ religion is a manifestation of their "Chosen People Syndrome". They are missionary, messianic, zealous, fanatical, and nauseatingly self-righteous, bigoted, and hypocritical. This is especially discernible in the double-speak and double-standard that underlies American foreign policy.

American altruism is misanthropic and compulsive. They often give merely in order to control, manipulate, and sadistically humiliate the recipients.

Narcissism is frequently comorbid with paranoia. Americans cultivate and nurture a siege mentality which leads to violent acting out and unbridled jingoism. Their persecutory delusions sit well with their adherence to social Darwinism (natural selection of the fittest, let the weaker fall by the wayside, might is right, etc.).

Consequently, the United States always finds itself in company with the least palatable regimes in the world: together with Nazi Germany it had a working eugenics program (the 1935 anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws and the Nazi sterilization law were modeled after American anti-miscegenation and sterilization statutes), together with the likes of Saudi Arabia it executes its prisoners, it was the last developed nation to abolish slavery, alone with South Africa it had instituted official apartheid in a vast swathe of its territory.

Add to this volatile mix an ethos of malignant individualism, racism both latent and overt, a trampling, "no holds barred" ambitiousness, competitiveness, frontier violence-based morality, and proud simple-mindedness – and an ominous portrait of the United States as a deeply disturbed polity emerges.

Also Read

•    Islam and Liberalism

•    Narcissistic Collectives

•    The Cultural Narcissist

•    The Roots of anti-Americanism

•    And Then There Were Too Many

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By Kap Kirwok

Sometime in June, the ever controversial Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi said the then Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama had an ‘inferiority complex‘ because he is black and if elected might ‘behave worse than whites‘.

Now that Obama will be President, it is time to examine this ‘inferiority‘ accusation more closely.

   By Newbreen.com

When a black person projects confidence, he is accused of putting on airs; he is overconfident, too cocky; or they will simply say he is imitating the white man — ‘acting white‘, as they say in the US.

When a black person projects humility, it is said he is acting true to character — subservient, inferior, slavish and lacking in confidence. In short, he is accused of suffering from an inferiority complex.

Will the ascension of a black man to the most powerful office on earth restore some respectability to the black man’s battered image?

I doubt it. The black man has a millennium old image problem. Racial prejudice against black people runs deep, with antecedents that span centuries. The historical and psychological roots of racial prejudice against blacks are many and complex, but you could reduce them to four words: military conquest and enslavement. Throughout history, any people that have been conquered and ruled or enslaved are always treated by the conquerors as inferior.

It is why the British imperialist poet, Rudyard Kipling, in his poem, The White Man’s Burden, uses words such as ‘half-devil and half-child‘ to refer to the conquered people of the Philippine Islands, while exhorting the white empire to act as the almighty lord to all ‘inferior’ races.

Prejudice

While blatant displays of prejudice against black people are less overt today compared to Kipling’s time, they are no less frequent and virulent in their subterranean form. In a recent article in the New York Times, columnist Nicholas D Kristof reports on studies by several scholars, which showed rampant unconscious bias and racism towards black people.

Prejudice against black people is so deeply ingrained and embedded in the psyche that racially discriminatory and prejudicial behaviour often operates subliminally. It is sad and tragic. But the greater tragedy is this: even black people themselves are caught up in unconscious discrimination towards people of their own race.

There is a popular and free test on the Internet that you can take to test the level of your unconscious bias. It is called the Implicit Association Test and is run by a team of psychologists led by Prof Tony Greenwald of the University of Washington.

Choosing the whites

The test is designed to probe unconscious biases in people. It is one thing to lie about one’s true thoughts and feelings; it is entirely another to not even know what is truly in your mind. For example, well-meaning people who say they have no racial prejudices might be surprised to discover they are in fact unconsciously racist.

When such people are faced with a decision that requires making a choice between a black and a white with similar qualifications and experience — such as in a job interview setting — they will always choose the white person.

If you think you know your mind well, you might want to withhold that judgment until you have taken the Implicit Association Test. It has the potential to shock you.

The implication of all these is the black man’s burden is double in weight. On top of the weight of conscious and unconscious white racial prejudice, there is the extra baggage of conscious and unconscious black inferiority complex.

It raises a disturbing question. Will the black race ever rid itself of this double load? Conquering and enslaving another race is out of the question, at least not in this millennium. Becoming the president of the most powerful country on earth will not do it either. For every good an Obama-type does to the black man’s image, there are a million negative images competing to nullify the effect.

Inferiority complex

There is one way to do it and it is not by decolonising the mind through the promotion of native languages, as Ngugi wa Thiong’o suggests in his book Decolonising The Mind. It is not by merely urging Africans to ‘drop the inferiority complex’, as Gambian President Yahya Jammeh recently said.

It is only through a combination of strategic humility and strategic pursuit of self-interest in a determined effort to raise black people’s development — individually and collectively — that our millennium-old image problem will be addressed. It means recognising that we are in a hole (literally and perceptually) and then using any means necessary to climb out.

Olbermann: Divisive politics is anti-American. GOP ticket’s willingness to say anything to win ultimately damages America.

In a Special Comment, Keith Olbermann lists examples of hateful, divisive politics from the right that actually do more to undermine America than the bogus accusations of anti-Americanism being leveled against Barack Obama.

By AngryToast.com

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