6/21/2012

Your Daily Example of Republican Fuckery:
So used to be that North Carolina, like many states, had a eugenics program. That is, under a misguided belief that you could breed out the bad, the damaged, the feeble, people were sterilized, sometimes for things like being a rude kid at school (which means that Bart Simpson would have lost his nuts) or liking to fuck around. Thing is that most places stopped the practice when they understood, oh, shit, this is the kind of thing that Hitler believed.

Not North Carolina, though. Nope, "it actually ramped up its program after the war. Between 1929 and 1974, North Carolina forcibly sterilized about 7,600 people whom the state deemed 'feeble-minded' or otherwise undesirable. Many were poor black women." Since it ain't something from the distant, distant past, some of the actual victims, not their families or descendants, but the sterilized people themselves are still alive. Keep that in mind: we're not talking reparations for slavery.

So, in an example of decency, after a few years of activism and negotiations, with a formal apology issued in 2002, the Democratic Governor and the Republican House Speaker had come up with compensation for the victims. $50,000 each, with $10 million budgeted for the purpose. It ain't perfect, but it's something.

Enter the Senate Republicans, who said to the victims, "Fuck your pain." Yep, they blocked the effort and the compensation fund failed to be included in the state budget. Said one proud North Carolina Republican, who no doubt sounds like he's gargling balls "You just can't rewrite history. It was a sorry time in this country...I'm so sorry it happened, but throwing money don't change it, don't make it go away. It still happened." You see, like everywhere else, the budget sucks in North Carolina, and they just don't have the money, you know. And you wouldn't want to raise taxes to pay 77 year-old Willis Lynch, who was sterilized at age 14, for the suffering the state caused him. As another GOP spoogebucket really did say, "A great wrong was done, but we didn’t do it."

And there's everything you need to know about the Republican Party. "Shit happened, but so what? People were victimized, but why should we care? That was nearly forty years ago." The dementia in refusing to look backward, refusing to make up for the mistakes of the past, whether it's the Bush tax cuts or the lies that got us into war or the lies that got us into this financial crisis, makes us damned to repeat.

Indeed, what is Mitt Romney's entire campaign based on but a refusal to discuss the past, his own or his party's?