GAZETTE COLUMN: T-Party – a Toxic Brew for the Americas by John P. Flannery

The T-party in action, not the idea or the more carefully (politically) stated phrases, is an angry, intolerant, atomistic impulse that has proven itself to be selfish, heartless, incoherent, and insulting to the revolutionary patriots that it makes the pretense to imitate.

Don’t we all agree, with that great Roman Senator, Seneca, that “anger, drunkenness, fear, and the like, are base and fleeting excitements and do not give arms to virtue, which never needs the help of vice?”

Yet pundits and politicians celebrate the “anger” of the T-party movement, say it’s understandable, and thus tolerate in adults what would prompt a parent to discipline a child.

We have seen these self-proclaimed saviors disrupt public meetings, insult public officials, slander opponents, and shout down those who disagree, all in defiance of that bed rock democratic principle, that we all enjoy freedom of speech, and not just the self-appointed righteous.

The supposed justification for their anger and misconduct is that the government has done us wrong. 

Well the original T-party actors, when dumping Tea in the harbor, had no redress. 

Merry Old England treated the colonials to subservient misery without a right of representation in their parliamentary councils. 

But we in the modern Americas have representation and we’ve lately come to the awakening that it has fallen way short of curbing the excesses of Wall Street and the money lenders who broke this nation’s economy and, according to some experts, marginalized every other economy in the world. 

It is because our elected representatives are mostly bought and paid for by malefactors of wealth who care only about their bottom line and not a bit about our welfare.

The T-party answer is no better.

They argue that the wealthy need do less, and need not pay their fair share in taxes.

It’s an open secret that the T-party’s most visible and televised confabs have been financed by the wealthy who want “limited” government, fewer regulations, so they can increase their profits while freely spewing poison into the air and water, and concocting the next great financial hoodwink that will top Enron and the mortgage loan scandals.

The T-Party shamelessly invokes Christ in its cause but surely Christ would curse them as hypocrites for disregarding his sermon on the mount, given that the T-party decries any role for government in the “welfare” of citizens struggling to recover from natural disaster, needing to be tided over when unemployed, joining working hands to bargain for fair wages and working conditions, staving off illness and hunger, or making more secure the fragile aged in their years of retirement.

At the core of the T party’s political “thought” is the wrong-headed notion that this nation was founded on “limited” government. 

In fact, our founders rejected limited government as ineffective – when they discarded the “Articles of Confederation.”

It was a deliberate and conscious action that many believe was prompted by revolutionary solder Daniel Shays’ rebellion in Massachusetts attacking banks and the courts of law for confiscating their homes when their mortgages went unpaid. 

George Washington wrote, “Let us have a government by which our lives, liberties and properties will be secured, or let us know the worst at once.”

The resulting constitution in 1787 created that strong central government to unite the country as one, to promote the “common” defense but also the “general” welfare of “we,” that is, all “the people of the United States.”

The T-party objects to what is “common,” to what is meant by “welfare,” even that there is a “we,” who need to spend, tax or borrow to advance the constitution’s stated purposes.

The T-party seemingly favors anarchy over any government - and that’s a toxic brew.

GAZETTE COLUMN: The T-Party Demolition Derby – there she goes again! by John P. Flannery

T-Party Fave, Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, founder of the House T-party caucus, presents a clear and present danger to the nation – as she says foolish things and appears to mean that they should be taken seriously as public policy. 

George Orwell wrote a marvelous comment in 1947, titled, “Politics and the English Language,” concerned with the fact that “the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

Orwell thought that, if we only thought clearly, we would take a significant step toward “political regeneration.”

Bachmann’s latest gaffe - hope you’ve been keeping count of her unclear thoughts - was that young girls in Texas and indeed across the nation should be protected from any mandatory vaccination of Gardasil that protects them against strains of a virus (HPV)(human papilloma virus) that causes cervical cancer; by the way, cervical cancer is the 2^nd leading cancer killer of women with 10,000 women diagnosed each year; Gardasil can stop the resulting deaths and should be given to all girls, in order to be effective, before they become sexually active and can contract the virus.

On NBC’s Today Show last week, Ms. Bachmann nevertheless told Host Matt Lauer, “I had a mother last night come up to me here in Tampa, Florida after the [Republican primary presidential] debate” and “she told me that her little daughter took that vaccine [Gardasil], that injection, and she suffered from mental retardation thereafter.  It can have very dangerous side effects … This is the very real concern, and people have to draw their own conclusions.”

Okay, so let’s look at what the Center for Disease Control reports. 

They say that 35 million doses of Gardasil have been distributed as of June 22, 2011 and they have reported no vaccination resulting in “mental retardation.”

Two bioethics professors, Univ. of Minnesota Prof. Steven Miles and Univ. of Pennsylvania Center of Bioethics Prof. Art Caplan, immediately challenged Ms. Bachmann to produce any evidence that Gardasil produces mental retardation, and even offered her cash money if the mother could be identified and demonstrate the alleged link between Gardasil and “mental retardation.”  Ms. Bachmann hasn’t taken up the offer.

Ed Rollins, who recently jumped the Bachmann bandwagon as her campaign manager, tried to tell MSNBC that Ms. Bachmann just made a “mistake.”

Ms. Bachman then told Sean Hannity that she was just “reporting what this woman told me…”

But what about the remark Ms. Bachmann made independently, that the vaccine “can have very dangerous side effects” and that “this is the very real concern.”

Perhaps Ms. Bachmann is reviving the arguments of the Anti-Vaccination Society of America, founded in 1879, that opposed vaccines because they caused “corruption of the blood.”

Ms. Bachmann has joined a long line of medical know-nothings who have opposed vaccination for small pox, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, measles, mumps, rubella, polio, you name it; the Pediatric Academic Society estimates that childhood vaccinations prevent about 10.5 million cases of infectious illness and 33,000 deaths every year.

Ms. Bachmann’s fear mongering demagoguery parallels those who thought autism was brought on by vaccinations but the British Doctor who said so was later charged with “an elaborate fraud.” Closer to home, in August 2010, the federal appeals court upheld a lower court finding that there was no link between vaccination and autism.

Does Ms. Bachmann object to the fact that every state requires vaccinations for children entering public schools?  Perhaps!

Orwell cautioned that political language “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Let us pass over the Bachmann breeze and turn to a candidate and dialogue that will instead regenerate the nation.