letter1.thumbnail.jpgDavid W. Shelton tips us off to the existence of a truly bizarre ecstasy-of-fear rant document from right-wing preacher James Dobson’s outfit, Focus on the Family Action. The missive, titled "Letter from 2012", purports to describe a future America under Obama where gays run roughshod over us, Bush administration officials are sent to prison, Israel has been all but destroyed by Iran, we’re all forced to become goatee-sporting Socialists who read lots of pointy-headed intellectual books but blow off The Protocols of the Elders of Zion The Bible, gays run roughshod over us, prominent conservative preachers are hounded by the IRS and forced into bankruptcy, right-wing hate artists are booted off the airwaves (the alleged suppression of poor innocent righties by that meanie Obama being a popular wingnut smear), abortions are readily and messily obtained, and gays run roughshod over us. Oh, and did I mention that gays are running roughshod over us?

If you think I’m joking about the obsession FotFA has with gays, read the silly thing yourself. As Shelton says, "it’s interesting to see what this letter is all about. Terrorism gets a mere two paragraphs. Homosexuals get nearly three full pages." That’s nearly a fifth of the fifteen-page document. It obsesses so much over homosexuality that I really think the author doth protest too much, as it were. (Reminds me of Jonathan Swift’s famous self-styled churchly prude, Phyllis, who never looked men straight in the eye, preferring instead to keep her gaze below their waists. But I digress.)

Here’s my own take on a letter from 2012:

October 31, 2012 12:42 pm CDT

To: johnbull@gmail.com

From: scaryliberalperson@gmail.com

Subject: The Last Four Years

Dear John:

American politics must look pretty bizarre to a guy from the UK, but I’ll try and explain what’s been going on here over the past four years.

When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, he came into office with a sizeable number of Democrats behind him in Congress and the Senate. However, a lot of those Democrats are what we call "Blue Dogs", meaning that they tend to vote like Republicans (because the same corporate entities that prop up the GOP also prop up the Blue Dogs). The 2010 midterms whittled away a number of them, mostly due to primaries funded by the "Accountability Now" movement. The party that wins the White House in a presidential election cycle usually loses ground in Congress in the following mid-terms. But the Democrats managed to hold steady, thanks to the troops coming home from Iraq and the winding down of that huge drain on the Treasury. We lost a few Blue Dogs, but we gained a few true progressives, so we’re better off on the whole.

One of the biggest hurdles was when the Pentagon finally undid "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" and allowed gay men and women full rights as citizens, including the right to serve in our armed forces. I know that you guys have had this for ages now, but it still is a big deal over here. Ironically, what ended the craziness was the Iraq war — there was such a need for warm bodies, even during the drawdown (because you can’t just up and leave, especially with a force that large — it has to be well managed), that the Joint Chiefs essentially told the anti-gay (and anti-Semitic) bigots over at Colorado Springs to go pound salt. Poor Dobson — he’d thought he’d managed to pack the Air Force’s leadership with his minions to the point where the USAF was just another extension of his church. He thought wrong. Or at least, even the Dobsonites knew that something had to be done to get talented people into the military, which was not a popular career choice because of the long Iraq war.

Another biggie was getting Obama’s tax plan through Congress. The Republicans and some of their corporate-funded Blue Dog friends fought it tooth and nail, and their buddies in the Chamber of Commerce repeated their behavior of 2008, running the most disgusting garbage ads about how making rich people pay taxes would cause massive unemployment — as if we didn’t already have massive unemployment and underemployment. It finally did pass, and the tax breaks for the vast majority of Americans, coupled with the lower gas prices and the tax breaks for renewable energy, helped tide us over until the electric cars started hitting the market just before the 2010 midterms. They haven’t quite taken over the road, yet, but they’re about where the Prius was six years ago in terms of adoption. The biggest thing is getting them charged — our transmission lines as well as our utilities need upgrading to handle the load on the power grid. Luckily, the early adopters are likely to have separate off-grid solar or wind power generators, like the new super-efficient 3-D solar cell installations, on or near their garages and homes. They’re making it possible to charge the cars, and other things, without overly taxing the existing grid. The electric cars are also boosting the domestic steel industry, both by themselves and by spurring the building of more wind turbines and transmission towers for electricity.

Speaking of which, the green jobs growth has really spread across the country, and in all sorts of ways. Communities in the Rust Belt are retooling their industries to be greener than they were in their heydays in the first part of the last century. They’re also using bioremediation to clean up brownfields and to provide clean biofuel for cars and trucks, to help ease the transition from gas to electricity. The days of exporting our garbage on barges have ended, as we’ve found ways to take our trash and use the methane from its decomposition to provide power for our big cities (and keep the methane, which is a greenhouse gas, out of the atmosphere), as well as make other biofuels such as ethanol. The landfills also provide excellent sites for solar and wind power installations. More and more people are seeing the benefits of going green, if for no other reason than to stick it to OPEC. Even in oil-producing countries, going green is growing popular: Dubai’s example showed that it can be done and makes sense. The resource wars that have plagued humanity for millenia may finally be coming to an end.

The theme of Obama’s administration could probably be best expressed as "learning to live within our means." His administration has been of necessity fairly austere fiscally — the Bush bankers’ bailout pretty much ensured that — but he has also found clever and cheap ways to promote sane and sustainable growth in all facets of American life. The business community has been coming around, even to the extent of backing his health care plan. Real wages are starting to level off from their four-decade tailspin, a tailspin that previously had been seriously interrupted only by the prosperous period of Bill Clinton’s two terms in office.

There is still a lot to be done, and there’s still a lot of opposition to what Obama and the progressives are doing — and there are, as there always have been, complaints (many of them justified) that Obama and the Congressional Democrats haven’t pushed hard enough for change. But enough of the fruits of their actions have materialized to give Americans a good taste in their mouths, enough to keep Obama and the progressives in office come November of this year. Meanwhile, the Republicans still can’t stop using their old tactics, even though the elections of 2008 and 2010 showed that they just aren’t as effective as they once were. The Huckabee-Palin ticket tries to put a happy face on the whole thing, but the RNC’s own ads have undercut the bright shiny image Huckabee and Palin try to project. All they have are lies based on fear, and Obama’s mere presence as national leader has severely eroded the racism that served to help prop up their movement.

Anyway, my fingers are crossed, but things are looking a lot better than they did in 2008, and we’re poised to make them even better still.

Your friend,

PW