By Mike Weland
Dorothy Moon, chair of the Idaho Republican Party and stalwart of the party’s radical right MAGA wing, certainly knows the tropes that drizzle down from Mar-a-Lago like excrement into the pits beneath a National Park Service outhouse. What’s astonishing is how she and so many of her ilk in high GOP office can employ such tripe with straight face and nary a trace of shame, and how so many stand, faces to the light and arms outstretched, in supplication for their share of the odious benediction to splatter upon their countenance.
As with others of the party “conservatives” who send me letters to publish, I publish except when the lies are too egregious. Not because I believe what they say or that I’m trying to be fair and balanced — I am, but you can’t be fair and balanced with a group that has for nearly a decade now treated those of my noble profession, protected as essential by the U.S. Constitution, as enemies of the state, a group who who classify a large part of their constituency as “vermin,” who have overtly declared it their goal to overthrow the constitution in favor of a fascist regime headed by one of the weakest national leaders to have ever existed.
They don’t play fair, but have the temerity to cry “foul” when the tables are turned … to seek solace in the courts like bullies running to tell mama when their attempts at intimidation fall flat, or worse, results in an unexpected shiner.
That they so seldom win is sure proof, as if any were needed, in the sheer wrong-headedness to which they seem to aspire.
No, I publish their letters that people of reason can see what the MAGA gang is thinking and doing at the moment, see that they remain a dire threat to the ideals upon which this nation was founded.
Today’s letter from Dorothy, “Conservative Idahoans embrace message of faith, family and freedom,” is a good example.
Her headline holds two words subverted by the radical right, “conservative” and “freedom,” to conjure a warm and fuzzy, happy and wholesome image belied by the text of her message, also couched in happy sounding verbiage to hide its darkness.
Her happy world sounds nice at first glance, but it’s a very exclusive club, and no one’s place in it is secure.
“Contrary to what you might have heard on the news, the Idaho Republican Party is growing,” she writes, her first dig at an enemy of state. “Idahoans, whether they have lived here for five generations or recently escaped a blue state like California, believe in our message of faith, family and freedom. Old and young alike understand how close we are coming to losing the freedoms that our ancestors fought and died for, and they are looking for people to stand up for those freedoms.”
And there we go. Those “freedoms” she and the Make America Great Again confederacy of dunces so loudly proclaim, while not actual freedoms in any sense of the word, belong solely to those who believe as do they, who are guided by their hate and sense of superiority such that only they are worthy of the blessings of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That theirs is the only God, that any freedom granted the “vermin” must come out of their slice of the pie.
That we, the oppressed, must stand up, put the vermin back in their rightful place of servitude, showing the respect and deference they owe we who are their betters.
Like the good old days, when the vermin would look down and step aside without being told when approaching on a sidewalk. Sit at the back of the bus.
So how do they go about seeing that freedom reigns? By pushing the overwhelmingly Republican Idaho legislature to make it harder for citizens to bring a citizen’s initiative forward, such as the open primaries initiative that would do away with the very successful effort of years to stack Idaho elections to favor and empower the radical faction of a once proud political party.
They want to see porn filters turned on by default when kids get devices …you know, to protect the children, even as they again bring up measures to make criminals of hard-working librarians who allow the innocent children to see or read anything that might violate their standard of decency, lest the delicate little flowers grow into the vermin we’re working to eradicate from our midst.
The GOP conservatives want to give landlords the ability to refuse renting to tenants receiving federal section eight benefits designed to help the very poor, the elderly and the disabled afford safe and decent housing, I can only assume for the protection of those slum lords whose great wealth relied upon their ability to fleece and coerce the poor downtrodden.
They now officially condemn the use of “dark money,” such as the trove of loot poured into Idaho Freedom Foundation poster boy Senator Scott Herndon’s campaign to unseat an accomplished, reasonable and sensible Idaho legislator with glitzy fliers filled with lies and false aspersion, stuffed in mailboxes county-wide to the point of their bursting.
“Freedom” can be defined, “the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint,” and they are relying on the average Joe conjuring that very image when hearing their high-sounding rhetoric for the first time, knowing from Propaganda 101 at the Joseph Goebbels Institute of Perfidious Press that if the sap will come back to hear a lie repeated, he’ll soon believe the lie to be truth, and stand firm to defend it.
We can’t afford to be fooled.