Friday Open Thread [12.6.13]

Really, the Republicans are a sick people. I’m serious. They have a pathological condition. This obsession with socialism and Obamacare. They cannot talk about anything without linking that anything to it. During an appearance on Fox News Thursday night, former Sen. Rick Santorum discussed the death of Nelson Mandela, saying the former South African president fought “great injustice” just like Republicans who are battling Obamacare.

SANTORUM: Nelson Mandela stood up against a great injustice and was willing to pay a huge price for that, and that’s the reason he is mourned today, because of that struggle that he performed…and I would make the argument that we have a great injustice going on right now in this country with an ever increasing size of government that is taking over and controlling people’s lives, and Obamacare is front and center in that.

Here is Andrew Sullivan’s reaction:

I just don’t know what to say about that. I really don’t. Except that Santorum’s mind is simply unhinged, and that the reflexive need to describe anything that this president has done as pure evil has become a kind of sickness of the mind and soul on the right. It has abandoned any connection to the real world. It lives in a narcissistic, warped, ideological echo-chamber of victimhood and utter obliviousness to the real tragedies of human history.

The statement came after Fox News host Bill O’Reilly claimed Mandela “was a great man, but he was a communist.” So wait… by O’Reilly’s logic, Communists can be great men! I now expect BillO to be burned alive by Tea Party Purists. Remember, communism and communisim-lite (i.e. Socialism) are evil, and anyone espousing such theories are evil, and anything these Communists and Socialists say or do is evil by default and must be opposed by all good freedom loving people. Since the African National Congress was socialist back in the 80’s, we along with much of the West opposed the ANC in South Africa, opposed sanctions on South Africa. We, in affect, endorsed apartheid. Simply because we viewed everything in the spectre of the Cold War. And by we, I mean that era’s conservatives. President Reagan. Margaret Thatcher. Here is some quality quotes:

President Ronald Reagan: In 1981, Reagan asked “Can we abandon a country that has stood beside us in every war we’ve ever fought, a country that strategically is essential to the free world in its production of minerals we all must have and so forth? I just feel that, myself, that here, if we’re going to sit down at a table and negotiate with the Russians, surely we can keep the door open and continue to negotiate with a friendly nation like South Africa.”

Four years later, in a 1985 interview, Reagan claimed that South Africa had “eliminated the segregation that we once had in our own country—the type of thing where hotels and restaurants and places of entertainment and so forth were segregated.”

He later went on to condemn in 1986 the “calculated terror by elements of the African National Congress: the mining of roads, the bombings of public places, designed to bring about further repression.” This same year, Reagan fought tooth and nail to block lawmakers eager to put sanctions on Apartheid South Africa, which he considered a valuable ally in the fight against communism. He vetoed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, though his veto was overridden by Congress. He also had the ANC and Mandela placed on America’s terrorist watch list.

Dick Cheney: Cheney, a Wyoming congressman, voted against a 1986 resolution calling for the release of Mandela from prison and the recognition of the African National Congress as the legitimate representative of South Africa’s black majority. Despite his vote, the resolution passed. Decades later, Cheney would explain that he voted as he did because “the ANC was then viewed as a terrorist organization.” He went on to say Mandela was “a great man” who had “mellowed.”

Ron Paul: James Kirchick gave a good rundown of Ron Paul’s hardline racist newsletters in a 2008 New Republic article, including this tidbit regarding what the newsletters had to say about Nelson Mandela: “South Africa’s transition to multiracial democracy was portrayed as a ‘destruction of civilization’ that was ‘the most tragic [to] ever occur on that continent, at least below the Sahara’; and, in March 1994, a month before Nelson Mandela was elected president, one item warned of an impending ‘South African Holocaust.'”

Margaret Thatcher: Just like Reagan, Thatcher preferred “constructive engagement” with the racist Apartheid regime to issuing tough sanctions. In 1987, she said this: “The ANC is a typical terrorist organization … Anyone who thinks it is going to run the government in South Africa is living in cloud-cuckoo land.” One of her allies and supporters, Member of Parliament Teddy Taylor, said Mandela “should be shot.” When Thatcher died earlier this year, former ANC executive Pallo Jordan said “good riddance”: She was a staunch supporter of the apartheid regime. She was part of the right-wing alliance with Ronald Reagan that led to a lot of avoidable deaths.”

ANC = Communinist = Evil. Thus ANC = Evil. That was the logical game they played. It is the same paradigm now. Obamacare = Socialist = Evil. Obamacare = Evil. And since Obama has his name on it, Obama = Evil.

Now, personally, I also think racism plays its role here. But I will be kind and just say that conservatives are simpletons when it comes to logical games.

More good news on the economy:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the private-sector added 196,000 jobs in November, seasonally adjusted, and government added 7,000 jobs for a total of 203,000. The official unemployment rate—which BLS calls U3 and calculates in a separate survey, fell to 7.0 percent, a five-year low. The seasonally adjusted 204,000 job gain the BLS reported for October was revised to 200,000. The September figures were revised from 163,000 to 175,000.