Idaho Is Not Fooled: Keep Your Sharia Money, Tyrannical Federal Government

[phantom power]

There are a number of people I would like to congratulate for their hard work in injecting this primeval American idiocy back generally into the political culture of the nation. (In the middle of the last century, it was mainly focused on resistance to the Civil Rights Movement.) First among them are the Tenthers, whose most visible champions are Ted Cruz, who is running for president, and Mike Lee, the konztitooshunal skolar from Utah who's out there peddling a Tenther book about how the Constitution was "lost," and how he found it again. The conservative echo chamber that has been drifting increasingly to the right as a result of having been driven mad by a black president. However, there were other hands put to the job as well: the people who secretly negotiate international trade deals that cost American jobs under the veil of a system of "globalism" that looks to the paranoid mind very much like one-world government, and our increasingly militarized local police forces. It is a very good time to be a paranoid nutball in America these days, and you can really turn a fine buck on exploiting that situation, too.

So now, in Idaho, we have state legislators who look at $46 million in federal aid that will help track down deadbeat dads and see the first stirrings of an American caliphate. And why shouldn't they believe that? They hear it every day from their favorite radio and electric teevee news-stars. They read it in widely circulated e-mails all over the country. Government is not the solution. Government is the problem, and the national government is the worst problem of all. And they go to the polls and elect the likes of Sheryl Nuxoll, an accountant who sees the fine hand of Islamic radicalism in the Department of Health and Human Services, and who herself is no stranger to the strange.

And the paranoia inevitably comes cloaked in what is perceived by these people to be the noble constitutional heritage of "states rights." This ignores the fact that we've tried that system at least twice in our history -- first, under the Articles of Confederation, and second, in the Confederate States of America -- and it failed miserably both times. It is founded in the fundamental American political heresy that holds the Constitution to be a pact between states and not an agreement undertaken by all the American people, as the Constitution says in its first three words. One entire political party is now dominated by this heresy. I am not aware of a single Republican presidential candidate, real or potential, who is not a Tenther in some way. Out of the national spotlight, they are succeeding wildly in many states. If the Supreme Court rules in favor of marriage equality, for example, you're going to see an explosion of this heresy all over the country. They are trying to recreate in fact the Confederacy that they hold dear in their hearts. My god, there are better theories from which a country can die.

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a34330/idaho-cannot-be-fooled/