Some easy pickings for charlatans

The question is: “How are we at this place where there is so much hate and deceit, where selflessness and greed has become the normal?” In 200 AD Tertullianus wrote of demons and he could well have been foreseeing today’s Republican Party: “However intelligent, they are deficient in charity. They prey on the captive and outwitted minds of men.”

The “Big Lie’ is a breeding ground for contempt: Governors DeSantis of Florida and Abbott of Texas know spurious accounts that snare the gullible are readily available, education officials’ jobs and children’s lives be damned.

Abbott has threatened Democrat legislators with arrest for lawfully obstructing the Texas voting bill which is designed to destroy free and fair elections. Amid pressure from Republican lawmakers the Tennessee Department of Health will halt all adolescent vaccine outreach — not just the coronavirus, but all diseases.

In Oklahoma it’s now legal to hit or kill a protestor with a car. Missouri voters passed a ballot measure to expand Medicaid — the Republican Governor “ain’t doing it.”

The top dog charlatan continues to control the bottom feeders, aka the Republican Party.

“Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires vigilance, dedication, and courage. But if we don’t practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us — and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, a world of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who saunters along.” Carl Sagan — 1996

— Roger S. Beadle, Chico