I’m embarrassed for the “religious right”…

… or “values voters” or the “moral majority” or whatever they call themselves nowadays.

First, all the most outspoken gay-bashing Republicans and pastors turn out to be gay themselves. For an ongoing chronicle of pastors’ betrayals, see Mojoey’s blog. On family values, Republicans are no better than Democrats, but the hypocrisy makes them worse.

A while ago I learned that the whole global warming denial thing is a Republican strategy by people like Frederick Seitz, S. Fred Singer and organizations such as the George C. Marshall Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, whose “About CEI” page says

The Competitive Enterprise Institute is a non-profit public policy organization dedicated to advancing the principles of free enterprise and limited government.

Doesn’t sound very scientific, does it? Sounds more like the Republican mantra that John McCain has been parroting since his involvement in the Savings & Loan crisis of the late 1980s, until this year’s subprime meltdown, “deregulate, deregulate, deregulate”. The whole goal of global warming denial was to sow doubt about the science and delay regulation. They were such fierce believers in “free enterprise” that they created false, misleading “evidence” and succeeded in delaying meaningful action by 30 years, causing our current environmental situation to be much worse than it would have been if Reagan had acted.

I read that people in 34 countries were polled about their belief in evolution and only Turkey had a higher percentage of people who reject evolution. Maybe you’re even one of them, and you think you have all this brilliant “evidence”, but trust me, you’re wrong. 100% wrong. You’ve been deliberately kept ignorant by your church and the Republican Party. It’s part of their war on science and “elitism”. Or call it the assault on reason.

Why do you think Bill O’Reilly hates Daily Kos so much? He doesn’t want you to read it, because you might begin to comprehend the magnitude of the lie that’s been perpetrated on you.

Then, I find out that the Republicons were just using racist white voters, and that the Republican Party

promotes not the general welfare but the commercial interests of corporate enterprise.

How many times did you hear John McCain talk about the middle class? He just talks about tax cuts for business, it’s Reaganomics, you take care of big business and hopefully wealth will “trickle down”. We all know how well that’s worked – the gap between rich and poor has never been as big as it is now.

Then I learned that the whole idea of repealing Roe v. Wade is just red meat (a much more powerful analogy than a carrot) dangled in front of evangelicals to keep them on issue. For over 35 years since Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court has been dominated by Republicans – they could have overturned it at any time, but they never have and never will because then they’d lose their precious carrot.

Lee Atwater, Karl Rove and their type turned negative campaigning into an art form, hitting new lows this year. They knowingly use your racism, intolerance and ignorance to instill fear in you. They’ve succeeded so well this time that I’m afraid it will be hard to get the hatred back under control. Seriously, so what if his middle name is “Hussein”? It’s a name, he was named well before Saddam became a household name. And do you not remember the stuff about his pastor, how can he be a Muslim at the same time? They hit a new low with their smear against Rashid Khalidi. But you don’t care – he has a Muslim name, he must be a terrorist. People, your ignorance is appalling. Here’s even an article by Bill Ayers, who’s not an enemy of America as he was portrayed.

After McCain picked Palin, most reasonable Republicans were severely disappointed. But not “the base”, you guys love her, and already want her to run in 2012. In fact, many of you were secretly hoping that McCain would die so she would become President. McCain chose her in a cynical move calculated to appease “the base”, hoping it might attract some Hillary supporters, but Palin’s whacked-out ideas just drove them away.

I learned about American eliminationism, which helped me decode the veiled racism in statements such as

“You know, people are poor in America, Steve, not because they lack money; they’re poor because they lack values, morals, and ethics.” (Same guy also said they’re “fat and flatulent.”)

or

Equality, which is the primary value of the left, is a European value, not an American value. Let me tell you that right now. I know this sounds offensive to half of my fellow Americans, because they have been Europeanized in their values. The French Revolution is not the American Revolution. The French Revolution said Liberty, Fraternity, Equality. The American Revolution said Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. We have lost touch with what our distinctive American values are. We have distinctive American values. … We have a better value system, and this is being protected by one of the two parties: the Republican party.

Except that the Declaration of Independence starts with the words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” And Abraham Lincoln made it clear in the Gettysburg Address that the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness doesn’t apply just to whites.

And of course there’s the obsession with being “tough on crime”, which is code for “put the blacks in jail where they belong” because you’d rather just lock ‘em all up than create programs to help them help themselves. “If you work hard in America, you can succeed” just means that you think blacks are lazy and don’t deserve any help.

When McCain said that famous day, “The fundamentals of the economy are strong”, the deregulation theme he’d been repeating for so long was shown to only benefit the rich.

And of course he couldn’t separate himself from his good friend, George W. Bush, the most-disliked president in history. But many of you still support him because your pastors have been telling you to for eight years.

So between Bush, Palin, the economy and negative campaigning without any viable ideas of his own, he lost the election, and the Republican Party became a “white, rural, regional party”, who mostly voted for Palin not for McCain.

Now, the party has been taken over by the base, and Palin is your first choice for 2012. Problem is, the guys in charge know Palin will never attract the independents and democrats needed to win an election so now they’re throwing her under the bus.

Too bad, so sad.