Dumb Like a Foxx

Except for a year and a half spent in Houston when I was a kid, I've lived my whole life in Union states: Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey. I've tried not to fall prey to stereotyping the people of the South, even if they did once commit mass treason because they wanted to enslave a race of people.

About ten years ago I visited a friend I'd made through my job at Penthouse who lived in western North Carolina. I met some of her friends and was overjoyed that they were all progressive-thinking people. But there are yahoos everywhere, apparently, because a congressional district in the same state (not the same one I visited) have elected someone who just may be the most despicable person in that august body (always a lively competition).

Virginia Foxx is the congresswoman, and she's made one lunatic statement after another. First she stated, on the House floor, that the killing of Matthew Shepard was not a hate crime, and that it was a "hoax" that he was killed because of his sexual orientation. She has also stated that tobacco is no worse than Mountain Dew. And now she's joined the chorus of the lunatic fringe that the health care plan now being debated has a provision that will euthanize senior citizens. Here's what she said, again on the House floor: "Our plan is pro-life because it will not put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government."

Oy vey. Here's the truth--a portion of the bill includes a benefit, non-mandatory, for counseling for terminal patients or for those interested in living wills. It is not, as some like Foxx contend, going to fund a squad of government agents hopping off of black helicopters and sneaking in at midnight to administer overdoses of morphine to octogenarians.

What's especially disturbing about this is that I doubt Foxx actually believes this. It would be nice to just think of her like the disoriented woman at the McCain rally who called Obama an Arab, but I think there's more to it than that. It's just another way for Republicans to utilize fear instead of rational thought. We need health-care reform in this country, it's a national emergency, but the right is more interested in playing politics and seeking to torpedo Obama, no matter what the issue. They are acting like a cornered animal, lashing out with whatever low tactics they can think of.

Years ago Nixon came up with the "Southern Strategy," which targeted white males and sought to make them afraid that they were losing their dominion. And they've done pretty well with that strategy, but demographic changes are catching up with them. In a generation or two white males won't the majority any more, and if the Republicans keep alienating other groups, especially Hispanics, they will doom themselves to the periphery.

I'm not sure whether Foxx believes that Mr. Obama was born in the United States or not, another head-scratching issue the lunatic right is harping on. This is bizarre for many reasons--the Supreme Court has already denied the suit by one "birther," so it's not clear what these people expect to accomplish, and even if they did they'd get a President Biden, and what is with the officials, some of them Congressmen, who make circumspect statements about there being "questions" about his birth? A birth certificate exists, and it comes from the state of Hawaii, not from the hands of Bill Ayers. When they go in front of a camera and say that if only there was a birth certificate, they seem to be speaking a script written by Lewis Carroll. Not only that, but there are birth announcements in the papers of Honolulu right after Obama's birth. If there exists a conspiracy to make the son of an inter-racial marriage to a teenage girl from Kansas and a Kenyan grad student the President of the United States, it would seem to involve time travel.

Abraham Lincoln must be rolling in his grave.