For Whom The Bells Toll

It seems that Michele Bachman just couldn’t see herself ever getting anywhere with only a meager 6 percent total vote in Iowa last night. And without any question she has officially called it quits. Despite her win in the Ames Straw Poll last year, her scorching anti-liberal rhetoric calling President Obama a socialist who’s trying to turn the country into the next European Union overpowered her strong socially conservative standing. Of course, she has promised not to stop fighting Obama’s continuing reign of socialism, calling his every legislation a form of socialist propaganda dozens of times in her concession speech this morning. But as a woman whose set of religiously anti-social beliefs supports a more subservient view of women in society, she had no chance of getting enough support from the people who believe in the same thing.

Although Bachman’s loss was not a surprise (although her concession speech this morning was a bit surprising), Rick Santorum’s loss to Mitt Romney by only 8 votes was quite a surprise, as scary as it was. In his speech last night he was strangely restrained from his usual balls-to-the-wall public appearances. He did compare his grandfather’s suffering under Mussolini’s 1920’s fascist Italy to Obama’s first term in office, which by all standards is one of the worst sociopolitical comparisons of his campaign.

The reality of Rick Santorum’s presidential aspiration is that his near win in the closest caucus vote ever means nothing at all. He doesn’t stand much of a chance of eventually winning the Republican nomination because his diehard socially conservative stance is polluted by his overzealous views. Yes, he almost won in Iowa because of his continued no-retreat stances on gay marriage and abortion, but with that stance comes his inability to realize when to stop. His belief that abortions should be constitutionally banned even in the cases of rape and incest defies social ethics, while his promise to invalidate already legal gay marriages lacks any sense of humanity. Why should legally bound couples who love each other be forced to suffer because a hardline religious belief says it’s wrong? That is in direct defiance of one of the basic founding principles of the country that he continues to mention in his speeches, and that is the right of the people to be happy.

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Compared to Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney is almost a saint. But he as well doesn’t realize that many of the promises he has made cannot be kept. He can’t repeal Obama’s healthcare initiative on his first or second day in office because there is a process that must be followed before he can ever touch it. His claim during his speech last night that Obama has created more deficit than his predecessors is an outright lie, because before Bush was in office we had an actual surplus. By the time Obama came to office, the country was in a financial sinkhole that could only be gotten out of with bipartisan handholding which, as we all know, the Republicans are incapable of doing even with the country’s economy on the line.

Both candidates have called Obama’s economic strategies “entitlement programs.” Santorum has claimed that income inequality is something that should be embraced with open arms, while Romney has proudly stated that he will run the country like a multimillion-dollar corporation. And the fact is that compared to the European countries these candidates so despise, our economy just plain sucks. One big difference is that none of these countries have an entitlement-based economy. They all have exactly what the Republicans love: merit-based opportunities.

Unemployment numbers in some European countries, including Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden, are at least 2 percentage points below our average. This is in part from a combination of government intervention and a worker/management cooperation not seen in American corporations. With the help of the government to retrain workers and help relocate then in the job market, Scandinavia helps workers create new innovative enterprises. And in Germany, many CEO’s salaries average only 11 times that of their workers, allowing many unions to agree to hold their wages flat (which are still much more than their US equivalent). Compared to the American CEO’s average salary, which is between 200-300 times that of their workers, we can clearly see why our economy has taken a dive.

Whether Santorum, Romney, or even Newt Gingrich become president, they don’t realize that only finding ways to create jobs will not bring the economy out of the tank. Without some government intervention, like the help of food stamps, Medicare and other entitlement programs, hundreds of thousands of people might end up without food on their table or any way to treat a medical condition. These are necessary to support a healthy economy when those who work hard to make enough money just to feed and cloth their family are seen as lazy, compared to those who sit in an office and make millions with the twitch of a wrist.

If the Republican candidates want to create a fully merit-based society, they need to do their homework and look at the European countries they so despise. The European countries that have merit-based societies also have more entitlements and higher taxes than we do, which combine to help keep their economy balanced and push their workers to be competitive. The Republican Party has strayed far away from the party of Regan in whose footsteps they all claim to follow. They need to realize than some government involvement in the economy and in society along with a steady decline in the excessive income inequality that exists today, will help bring the economy back to a fighting stance.

Will The (Impracticable) 44th President Please Stand Up

Today the new American crusade officially began in the form of a supposedly all-important first vote made by only 100,000 people in a state whose population is almost purely Caucasian. This minute percentage of the population is voting for a Republican candidate for president who will turn the country around and roll back the clock in our centuries-long attempt to truly idolize the most important aspect of our country’s world-renowned stance as the land of opportunity and freedom. And that is the freedom we give to all of our citizens no matter what race, gender or religion; the freedom to a life of liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

But this freedom is being strangled by the highly conservative rhetoric of these candidates and their promises to pursue their paths of social injustice that they believe they should impose upon every citizen. They believe that everyone should follow their system of beliefs no matter what the consequence. Women will not allowed to have control over their own bodies, even if they are raped and impregnated by either a complete stranger or a family member; they would be legally bound to bring children to term because the law will state that the fertilized egg in a woman’s own uterus is a person starting at the moment of its conception. People will be incapable of marrying the one they love because that person is of the same sex. All of this because these Republican presidential hopefuls feel that it is their divine right as the potential future leader of the world’s strongest country to turn us into the Christian equivalent of Saudi Arabia.

The social views of the candidates have ranged from moderately conservative (Jon Huntsman) to religiously dogmatic (Rick Santorum and Michele Bachman). But in the bid for the vote of only 3 percent of the total population of the state of Iowa, the candidates with more moderate views on the most heated topics of abortion and same-sex marriage have moved farther to the right just so they can get votes. They are willing to vow that they will constitutionally deny same-sex couples the right to marry, ban abortion no matter what the circumstance, including rape and incest, and create a supposed constitutional “personhood amendment.”

Mitt Romney recently claimed that President Obama was keeping the nation "from being one nation under God." Newt Gingrich has been quoted comparing being gay to choosing to be celibate. Rick Santorum has not shied away from his strong religious-conservative stance on everything anti-gay and anti-abortion, recently claiming that Obama should be pro-life because he is black and stating that in addition to a federal ban on same-sex marriage, he would invalidate any now-legal same-sex marriages under another constitutional ban. He even went so far as to blame the Obama administration of refusing to end what he calls "sexual promiscuity" while setting aside “Christian values” to promote the idea that all beliefs are equal. If I didn’t know the First Amendment, I might just consider Santorum a religious bigot.

The fact that all of the Republican presidential candidates would purposefully ignore the First Amendment by constitutionally instilling their religious beliefs onto every citizen of the country has become everyday news. What continues to amaze me though is the candidates’ persistence in stating ambitions that they are either legally incapable of pursuing or are outright stupid.

Last month Gingrich continued to state that, if elected, he would abolish the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which has been labeled by almost all of the candidates as a “liberal” court and by some, including Gingrich, as an “anti-American” court. The 9^th Circuit Court covers the west coast states and also includes Montana, Idaho, Nevada, Arizona, Alaska, Hawaii, The Northern Mariana Islands and Guam. The candidates’ various attacks against the 9^th Circuit Court stem from the fact that the majority of the court’s rulings tend to lean to the left of the political spectrum. Gingrich has called the judges who believe that the phrase "One nation, under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance violates the separation of church and state are "radically Anti-American"

Despite how irate conservatives may become when the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals is mentioned in conversation, there is no legal way to abolish the court without reengineering the entire judicial system. You can’t just say, “You judges are too liberal and ‘anti-American,’ so we’re just going to remove you from your seat as a federal judge and your court will now have no power whatsoever.” Not to mention that the 9^th Circuit is so large that it includes four separate courts in three different states.

For a bit of history, the pledge we say today is not the original one that was written in 1892 by the Christian Socialist Francis Bellamy and formally adopted by Congress in 1924. The words “under God” were not even in the Pledge until it was rewritten for the fourth time in 1954. Previous rewrites include the addition of the words “of the United States,” in reference to the flag, in 1923, and the words “of America” after the previously stated addition.

And when it comes to plain stupid ambitions, Rick Santorum has taken the prize for worst foreign policy. While most of the candidates have stated that Obama has been too lax on his foreign policy, with Romney and Gingrich claiming Obama has been following a policy of appeasement, Rick Santorum recently stated that if elected he would bomb Iranian nuclear facilities if they were not opened to international arms inspectors. Even Israel, one of Iran’s most hated enemies, has refrained from attacking Iran, believing that any preemptive attacks would be catastrophic to any potential rapprochement between Iran and the rest of the world.

Tonight’s vote in Iowa is the first stepping stone on a path to a conceivable collapse of a growing social transformation that this country hasn’t seen since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950’s. The past few years have seen unprecedented changes in the minds of everyday people, despite differences in race, religion and sociopolitical views, to name a few. With the election of the first African-American president, the growing list of states legally granting same-sex couples the right to marry, and the continuing fight for a woman’s right to have an abortion if so desired, the American people are pushing the country into a new age of freedom, ambition and the ability for every citizen to live a life of liberty and happiness.

The Republican Party continues to drift farther to the right and farther from the mainstream social belief system that they all claim to be fighting for. While national polls have shown that more than half of the country supports legalizing same-sex marriage, the candidates still claim that the country does not want to legalize same-sex marriage. The Republican Party needs to take into account that all of their false opinions and open lies can be fought with irrefutable facts.