How the Cruel Love to Rule

Think of all the qualities that enable us to form a functioning and vital nation -- respect, compassion, tolerance, selflessness -- and you will see that they don't exist in the narcissistic personality (or culture).


— Dr. Jim Taylor

By Dan Hagen

Of course Little Lord Mittens’ idea of fun was to forcibly butcher a gay guy’s hair and maneuver a disabled teacher into slamming into a door. Of course Romney liked the idea of strapping his terrified dog to the roof of a speeding vehicle.

Remember how many of Romney’s campaign “gaffs” revealed his apparent inability to understand or consider the feelings of others? When your empathy is scripted and fake, you’re going to trip up.

Connect all the dots, and they spell “The GOP presidential candidate is a sadistic creep.”

Unless they happen to be giggling about the idea of hurting someone, American right wingers are often humor-challenged. That fact underlines their bizarre lack of emotional balance.

Remember when Fox News Business Host Eric Bolling asked his viewers to list people they'd like to see tortured? They targeted Joy Behar, President Obama and Senate Democrats, among others.

Note that this wasn’t even about torture falsely described as an intelligence necessity, but about the real reason right wingers love it — as a sadistic fantasy punishment of their innocent enemies.

Consider the obvious relish and frequency with which even the most prominent Republicans announce that they’d like to inflict pain and death on someone. Gov. Rick Perry said he wanted to lynch the Fed chairman, and Sen. Tom Coburn said he wanted to shoot his fellow senators.  Just out of curiosity, is there ANY problem that Republicans think can't be solved by torture and/or murder?

Remember how those “deregulated” Wall Street banks stole the homes of 50 active-duty U.S. troops with mortgage fraud? That’s good, old, deregulated GOP kleptocapitalism for you. Pat the vets on the back as you pick their pockets, then kick the chumps right out into the street with a contemptuous laugh.

“Corporations are people,” Romney famously said. Republicans deny humanity to actual human beings like illegal aliens, gays and Muslims, but grant it to legal fictions created by the rich solely to dodge taxes and evade responsibility.

“(T)he Republicans divert public attention from their culpability in destroying a sound federal financial regulatory system and gifting Wall Street crooks with a platinum get-out-of-jail-free card,” Robert Scheer wrote. “To listen to the GOP presidential candidates, the banking meltdown was caused by everyone except the bankers.”

Republicans will man the barricades of freedom to defend the power of multinational corporations to overwhelm U.S. elections with billions of dollars in lying propaganda and kick Americans out of their homes into the gutter. But they have no problem with the government imprisoning and torturing innocent people, and turning them into corporate slave labor for private prisons. In fact, they rather like the idea.

Republican Florida Gov. Rick Scott spent $178 million of the taxpayers’ money in order to prove that 98 percent of welfare recipients don’t use drugs. He intended to prove the opposite, of course, but Scott’s witch hunt served its purpose anyway, which was never to save money but to demonize the poor in order to justify cruel treatment for them.

Welfare recipients make delightful targets for Tea Party venom. They are denied a voice, so they can’t fight back. And with the Republicans’ billionaire puppet masters busy wiping the American middle class out of existence, they desperately need to find somebody else to frame. Poor people make the perfect diversion.

Republicans worship only money and actively loathe people who do not possess it — including, ironically, themselves. They are fearful of a society in which money might not trump and crush all legal rights and social privileges.

Republicans worship hierarchy, and their contempt for those they’ve shoved to the bottom is palpable. They WANT to see the working class and minorities suffer. That suffering justifies their delusions, and tickles their barely concealed — or in Romney’s case, unconcealed — sadistic impulses.

The Tea Party crowds at the recent GOP presidential debates actually booed a gay veteran and cheered for wholesale executions and the idea of letting uninsured Americans die in agony without medical treatment. If that’s their “Christian compassion” at work, I'd hate to see their idea of cruelty.

Detect a theme here?

“Republicans go after the thinkers for thinking, the poor for being poor, the teachers for teaching, the gays for loving each other, and the Democrats for caring about their fellow man,” Mike Dennison observed.

To paraphrase Jon Faulkner, the Republicans are a political party that regards the unfortunate, the weak and the helpless as pests. Or perhaps as playthings.

Naturally, the cruel want to rule. And obviously, we’d have to be crazy to let them.