Republican Dogma

Here are the things you are required to believe to be a Republican today:

• Saddam was a good guy when Reagan armed him, a bad guy when Bush's daddy made war on him, a good guy when Cheney did business with him, and a bad guy when Bush wanted an excuse to invade Iraq and hand its oil fields over to Halliburton, even though his daddy had written in a book that trying to overthrow Saddam would be a bad, bad, bad idea.
• Trade with Cuba is wrong because the country is communist, but trade with communist China and communist North Vietnam is vital to a spirit of international harmony.
• The United States should get out of the United Nations, and our highest national priority should be enforcing U.N. resolutions against Iraq.
• A woman can't be trusted to make decisions about her own body, but multinational corporations can make decisions affecting all humanity without regulation (provided, of course, that they don't get caught, like Bush's former close personal friend, “Kenny Boy” Lay of Enron).
• Jesus loves you — and Jesus hates homosexuals, Hillary Clinton, liberals, uppity women, uppity blacks, uppity hispanics, uppity orientals, immigrants, and everyone else you hate and/or fear.
• Along the same lines: A good Christian obsesses about a few verses in Leviticus that appear to support his biases (they don't; click here for proof), and a good Christian totally ignores Jesus's liberal preaching about loving your enemies and forgiving anyone who does you wrong. (After all, doesn't Matthew 5:44 say, “Detest and revile your enemies and wage preemptive war against them”?)
• The best way to improve military morale is to praise the troops in speeches while (a) slashing veterans' benefits and combat pay and (b) inviting into the military high school students who before 2004 were considered too short, too unwell, too stupid, too fat, too lazy, or too gay to be soldiers, and telling the fat ones they won't have to exercise or eat less.
• If condoms are kept out of schools, adolescents won't have sex.
• A good way to fight terrorism is to belittle our longtime allies, then demand their cooperation and money.
• Providing health care to all Iraqis is sound policy. Providing health care to all Americans is socialism.
• HMOs and insurance companies have the best interests of the public at heart and care nothing about profits.
• Having the top one percent of Americans become even more wealthy while more than 4.1 million Americans slip into poverty is a huge success for Bush economic policies.
• Global warming and tobacco's link to cancer are junk science, but creationism — “intelligent design”— should be taught in schools. (Next, after this admitted “wedge issue” is successful: Chemistry classes will be required to teach alchemy; geography classes will be required to teach flat-Earthism; math classes will be required to teach that pi equals three (1 Kings 7:23); anthropology classes will be required to teach Leviticus; biology classes will be required to teach the falsehood that hares and rock badgers chew their cuds like cows (Lev. 11:6; Deut. 14:7).)
• A president lying about an extramarital affair is an impeachable offense, but a president lying to drum up support for a war in which thousands die — including well over 100,000 innocent civilians — is solid defense policy.
• Government should limit itself to the powers named in the Constitution, which includes banning marriage between free and equal citizens of whom you disapprove; establishing far-right “Christian” fundamentalism as the official religion of the United States, along with an American Taliban whose imams will include Pat Robertson and James Dobson; reducing women to second-class citizens by forbidding them to make decisions about their own bodies; and censoring the Internet (and any other media that promote truth over neocon ideology).
• The public has a right to know about Hillary's cattle trades, but George W. Bush's driving record (sample at right) is none of our business.
• Being a drug addict is a moral failing and a crime — unless you're a conservative radio host. Then it's an illness, and you need our prayers for your recovery.
• You support “states' rights,” or, in English, the right of the Attorney General to tell states what local voter initiatives they are allowed to adopt.
• What former president Bill Clinton did in the 1960s (inhale, probably) is of vital national interest, but what current president George W. Bush did in the 1970s (getting drunk; tooting cocaine; going AWOL during a time of war, a felony) and 1980s (getting drunk; tooting cocaine; driving not one, not two, but THREE businesses into bankruptcy and being financially bailed out at least twice by Salem bin Laden, Osama's brother) is totally irrelevant.