Good and dead: sadist, child abuser, and mainstream Christian Republican

 

The obituary page of The Massachusetts Spy

By Luke Reschuss
Obituary Editor 

Almost lost in the avalanche of the destruction of American democracy and its replacement by an insane tyranny was the death of one particular prick who provides a vital link between the past glories of the Christian nationalist right and the current triumph of sadistic dictatorship.

We refer to one James Dobson, dead at 89. He hasn’t occupied as much of the national spotlight as he once did, due either to his senescence or the fact that there are so many others in his lane of deranged Christians sadism that he got kinda crowded out, but it’s worth our while not only to celebrate his long-overdue demise but to link it to the current catastrophe.

The writer Talia Lavin '12 summed up his miserable life with admirable concision:

James Dobson is dead, leaving behind the legacy of poisoned politics he created, and countless children and adults who live with the pain of surviving the cruel methods of child rearing—child abuse, in fact—he thrust on the American public. This is a man who boasted in a bestseller about beating his dog, and instructed millions of parents to do likewise with their offspring.

Maybe that’s where Kristi Noem got her ideas about animal cruelty.

Christian mom in action

Further, Lavin makes clear the bright link of barbed wire between the prevailing political universe of white Christian Republican reactionary politics and the sadistic violence against the helpless advocated by Dobson:

In 1970, an obscure child psychologist named James Dobson published a book that would come to spearhead a movement toward biblical parenting. He positioned it as a necessary curative for the permissive, sinful culture that swept through America in the sixties. The book proclaimed its “countercultural” status in the title: Dare to Discipline. Dobson’s vision was undergirded by repulsion at widespread social chaos, and at its core was his solution: the enforced submission of children to absolute authority.

The emergence of evangelicals as an active right-wing political force on the American scene came into full force over the subsequent decade, largely as a backlash to the civil-rights movement and school integration. In tandem, and in ways that are complexly intertwined with an overweening political agenda, a new vision of the domestic sphere arose in popular books, ministries and churches. Raising the specter of student-led activism—the antiwar, civil rights and feminist movements—a new generation of evangelical leaders portrayed strict discipline in the home as a solution to social disorder.

Those who now profess to be shocked at the cruelty and sadism of staunch Republicans and good Christians like Pres VD Amin, Florida Gov. Ron “The tents go up, the tents come down” DeSantis, and their minions and taint-polishers would do well to reflect on how such revolting behavior became part of the Republican and white Christian brand.

Not a day passes when the great hero of Republicans and white Christians who now sits in his gilded throne room in the White House dispenses either threats of, or actual, violence. He always savored inflicting pain on those he deems inferior to him (pretty much everyone except for a tiny handful of billionaires and Vladimir Putin), from his repeated rapes and sexual assaults, to his delight in tormenting his political opponents with threats of jail and baseless criminal investigations, to his asportation of immigrants in the middle of their status determination process to a violent foreign concentration camp, and to his fomenting and wallowing in the violent insurrection on January 6, 2021.

Nor is he alone. Rather he is accompanied by and protected by a veritable Stürmabteilung of sadistic out of control men (and a few loathsome women), including two Supreme Court Justices, his Secretary of Defense, his chief factotum Stephen Miller, and other hangers-on including the “chief of staff” for his clueless but apparently horny immigration enforcer, Kristi Noem.

All to the delight of white men, especially white Southerners, whose lust of violence directed at persons of color has been remarkably consistent over the last 406 years or so:

“For many of our members, President Trump represents the values and energy that have reenergized the Republican Party in recent years, particularly here in Arkansas,” [GOP county chair] Sims said.

Not just Arkansas, but wherever the values of the Confederacy live on today. 

But we can't add anything to the vivid description of the horrors of James Dobson and his views to what Ms. Lavin provides.

We dilate on his long-overdue passing to examine not the miserable Dobson but at how he was treated by our beloved mainstream media during his long and notorious career.  One would think that his unapologetic advocacy of child abuse and cruelty would have marked him as outside the pale of American society.

One would be wrong.

Let's start with his obituary in that high-speed automatic sanewashing and -waxing machine, The New York Times:

 Guess they couldn't fit the child abuse bit in the headline or subhed.  So we'll keep going:

In an era of change that revolutionized concepts of family life, child-rearing, marriage and sexual identity, Dr. Dobson was for countless conservative Americans a rockbound beacon of resistance who denounced the “wickedness” of abortion and same-sex marriage, and who advised parents how to communicate better with each other and how to educate and discipline their children.

That's communicate in the sense that Donald Trump communicated with E. Jean Carroll in the dressing room of Bergdorf Goodman by raping her. 

The closest the Times gets to revealing the horrible reality of Dobson is buried and, as is SOP with the Times, drenched in critics-say:

When you lose the baseball bat

In 1970, he published a child-rearing manual, “Dare to Discipline,” that advocated corporal punishment in moderation to curb disruptive behavior....He was also denounced by women’s organizations; gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender groups; and other activists who said he had made a career of vitriolic attacks on homosexuality and abortion rights. Social scientists, psychiatrists and psychologists accused him of misrepresenting their research to support his religious ideology and political agenda. 

The poor man was just beset by critics including the usual fringe suspects, like women, Lesbians, and weirdo social scientists!  Will they ever stop bitching? And what's so bad about child abuse “in moderation,” anyhoo?

Also buried in the obit was Dobson's long and warm political relationship with mainstream Republicans like St. Ronald of Bitburg and Bush Minor.  Karl Rove persuaded the latter to take time off from lying us into war into Iraq to tape a fulsome (in the original sense of the word) tribute to Dobson back in 2002:

Those who are hurting and helpless, like the children beaten by their parents who are told by Dobson that such sadism is actually a mission from God?  How much do they owe James Dobson?  Probably as much as their older brothers and sisters, sent to death or disability in a pointless war in Iraq, owe Bush Minor.

Dobson, despite his advocacy of child abuse, was regarded as an important enough thinker to merit his own Times op-ed piece, basically threatening any Republican who evidenced a lack of enthusiasm for sticking their arms up women's uteruses to impose the hateful metaphysics of the Christian dominationist right on women who might not want Dobson and his ilk to control their bodies:

Yeah, values.  That's what it was about, according to The New York Times. 

He was also regarded as an authority about crap he knew nothing about, like stem-cell research, and worthy enough to lie about it as a guest on CBS News's long-time Republican tongue-bath, Face the Nation. 

Why should we care? Maybe if the media had not whitewashed batsh*t-crazy Christian-fundamentalist sadists as devoted protectors of the “traditional family,” we might not today be so quick to regard today's demented sadists as advocates for children's health, crime fighters, or protectors from the supposed ills of undocumented immigrants.  We might actually have regarded these evil lunatics as an intolerable enemy to be exposed and fought.

But our media masters tell us that calling these bent hatemongers what they are would be taking sides.

Yes it would: it would be the side of objective truth. 

News from Zontar: Crime in the nebulae puts ZOP on defensive

 

Editors’ Note: Every so often the Spy Deep Space Desk gets a transmission from the mysterious planet of Zontar, located in the Remulac galaxy millions of light years from Earth. The planet is populated by a race of intelligent alien life forms whose communications, while largely incomprehensible to those of us here, may shed some light, however dim and distant, on the thought patterns of these bizarre creatures.  Over the past week our highly sensitive monitoring equipment atop the magnificent Spy Tower has gotten a series of transmissions from this faraway planet about some sort of unrest in the Imperial Capital.  It's hard to figure out exactly what's going on in this bizarre system, so we print this transmission as received simply for the edification of – [OK, they get the setup – Ed.]

By Journobot XP3109FF Build 2845*
The Zontarian Post

The supposed prevalence of violent crime in Zontar’s capital city, the great metropolis of DZ, has put Republicanz on the defensive.

Although Zontar records show crime in DZ to be on the decline, especially compared to the desolate planets of Zenezzee, Zentucky, and Zohio, the public remains concerned over the failure of the ruling ZOP.

Crime in the nebulae puts Republicanz on defensive 

According to pundits compiled by this bot, the issue of crime is a difficult one for the Republicanz for many reasons.

“First, of course, the free availability of high powered blasters just over the DZ line in the swamps of Zirginia has contributed to the level of violent crime in DZ. If any idiot can scoot over the bridge to Zirginia, buy 50 phasers, and then resell them to a bunch of 15-year-olds in the DZ, of course you’re going to have a problem with blaster-related crime, not to mention homicide,” said Pundit Bruxi9532XX12.

Others point to the decision of the Republican controlled Galactic Assembly to cut funding for the DZ, leading to massive layoffs of police, prosecutors, and law enforcement officials. “It’s hard to persuade Zontarians that you are serious about crime when you have cut funding for public safety positions for no good reason other than spite and bigotry,” said Expert 930QWQE!!, a Professorbot at the University of North Zakota.

Most seriously, though, others point to the contradiction between claiming to be tough on crime while at the same time covering up massive criminal activity related to the rape and sexual abuse of children. “If the Republicanz want to be taken seriously on the crime issue, they must release all the files related to the Zeptstein child abuse scandal, including any related to the participation of Supreme Leader Zonald Drumpf,” said Virtual Quote Machine Zilzbot&DIWW(ver. FF.$@@) reflecting the input of 100 million other data points.

Democratz have also argued that if the regime were serious about fighting crime in DZ, it would not have appointed a notorious lush, tax cheat, and talk-show host like Jinni Zero to head up the regime’s criminal prosecution office. Zero’s crime fighting efforts are compromised not only by her intemperance and stupidity, but also by the regime’s termination of scores of professional prosecutors and other law enforcement agents.

They have also questioned the regime’s commitment to fighting crime following the appointment of Zash Patel as ZBI director. Patel, a former children's screen author with no law enforcement experience, runs the ZBI from his favorite cocktail lounge on the vice planet Zegas. He has turned the once-respected law enforcement agency into a revenge force against those Patel deems insufficiently loyal, including former regime functionaries like John “Mad Bomber” Zolton.

Critics point out that the deployment of Galactic Troopers to DZ has been focused not on high crime zones but on safe public places like the Council Sphere and the Solo Monument. Further, the Troopers appear to be focusing on rousting random aliens off of their delivery scooters rather than real criminals.

Why won't Republicanz focus on the real criminals?

“By using the Troopers as alien removal agents, the regime is making it impossible for the real public safety officers to enlist vulnerable populations in helping them fight crime by cooperating with investigations and reporting truly dangerous actors,” said Expert 930QWQE!!.

The Republicanz’ vulnerability on the crime issue was demonstrated by a recent visit of Vize Emperor Jaydee Vontz to DZ’s bustling spaceport. Although Vontz was accompanied by highly-armed Zontarian Troopers, he was nonetheless accosted by furious DZ residents demanding to know if he was still enjoying virtual carnal knowledge with furniture on the holodeck.

This has led many mainstream pundits, such as SulzCXXVIbot592%7///, to wonder if the Republicanz’ failure to address the crime issue could hurt them in the coming elections for the Galactic Assembly.

However, ZOP-leaning punditbots, including Rupbot1939q6, the thousand-year-old mind who runs a network of millions of clone bots repeating his AI-generated talking points including animated avatars who bear a humorous resemblance to carbon-based life forms, have generated a vigorous defense.

The bot network has repeatedly stated that they are not worried about the elections, because they have rigged them by lumping opposing planets together in single districts and restricting the franchise to those who can show 20 generations of galactic citizenship. The network has told its millions of supporters: “Elections? We don’t need any f***ing elections.”  

Across 116th Street: The War That Never Ends

By Legal Correspondent Saori Shiroseki with Alison Porchnik on Morningside Heights

After months of siege warfare, Columbia University has capitulated to the forces of President VD Amin by paying more than $200,000,000 in extortion money to him and doing a few other things too.

The exhausted Columbia General Staff is spinning the armistice as a clever bit of strategy that leaves the University largely unscathed, if you don't count Alsace-Lorraine.

A cursory analysis demonstrates that they are either deluded or straight up lying to the vast Columbia community.

Just to recapitulate how Columbia got here, the campus pretty much exploded after the Hamas terror attack of October 7, 2023 and Israel's subsequent invasion, occupation, and latterly starvation of Gaza.  As you might imagine feelings ran high on College Walk.  Tents were erected on the lawn.  Some horrible things were said, including anti-Semitic slurs, whether articulated by students or the usual New York City hangers-on.

Following the successful coup against the United States launched on January 20, 2025, the usual Likudnik and reactionary suspects saw these incidents as their Ardennes Forest.  It was the opening they needed to destroy their enemies: free inquiry and knowledge.

It didn't take much for Pres VD Amin to declare all-out war on Columbia and other great universities by hitting them where it really hurt: by cutting off $400 million of duly-awarded government grants that pay for vast swaths of research, particularly in medicine and STEM fields (with another $900 million threatened or frozen).  The results were devastating, at least to the academic grandees who had gone from bathed in government riches to impoverished schnorrers overnight.

To some, including big Columbia donors and power brokers like Bob Kraft, the outcome was the usual happy ending.

To the rest of us, not so much:

Ruh-roh:

As part of the settlements struck with two Ivy League universities in recent weeks, the Trump administration will gain access to the standardized test scores and grade point averages of all applicants, including information about their race, a measure that could profoundly alter competitive college admissions.

....The release of such data has been on the wish list of conservatives who are searching for evidence that universities are dodging a 2023 Supreme Court decision barring the consideration of race in college admissions, and will probably be sought in the future from many more of them.

But college officials and experts who support using factors beyond test scores worry that the government — or private groups or individuals — will use the data to file new discrimination charges against universities and threaten their federal funding.

The good old days of meritocracy....

The Trump administration is using every lever it can to push elite college admissions offices toward what it regards as “merit-based” processes that more heavily weigh grades and test scores,... 

Ah, yes, meritocracy; that's all that Republicans want, right?   And if the racist goons and wrestling promoters now in charge of American higher education find that any rejected white applicant had test scores higher than any admitted Black applicant, the furies will be unleashed because using anything other than test scores or GPA's is obviously a racist attack on those poor embattled white men.  

The universities who thought they were buying peace in their time by cravenly signing the armistice agreements will find out what Donald Trump's bondholders have known for decades: his promise is worth precisely bupkis.

Notice what the regime didn't ask for.  They didn't ask for data about the qualifications if any of those admitted as legacies or because their rich fathers gave enough money to grease the admissions process in favor of their little bricks, like Jared Kushner's father at Harvard, or even Fred Trump and his dope delinquent offspring at Wharton.  And they didn't ask to see scores broken down by gender, although colleges routinely admit men with lower scores to keep the ladies from taking over the place (despite what Larry Summers seems to think).

It's not like such non-merit-based factors like accident of birth have any real effect on getting into fancy colleges, is it?

The data say otherwise.  One famous and uncontradicted study showed that 43% of the admitted white students at Harvard were legacies, jocks, children of faculty, or those whose parents might drop a wad of dough on Harvard.  The comparable figure for non-white students was 16%.  

So 43% of white Harvard admits got in for reasons other than “merit,” defined as test scores and GPA's.  This however is not a problem for Republicans, who are OK with any rule that benefits rich white men, no matter how dim.

It kinda sounds like they're worried about something else other than merit.  Can anyone find any clue as to what's really on their minds?

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday announced the controversial “Reconciliation Monument” sculpture will return to Arlington National Cemetery in coming weeks, the latest move by administration officials to return symbols honoring the Confederacy to military sites.

The news came just one day after the National Park Service unveiled plans to rebuild a statue commemorating Albert Pike, a Confederate brigadier general, just a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol.

The Arlington National Cemetery sculpture...was often referred to as “the Confederate memorial” and featured a bronze woman standing on a 32-foot pedestal. Below her, details featured the coat of arms of the 13 Confederate States (and Maryland), with figures of Confederate soldiers and two Black figures implied to be slaves.

In 2022, an independent commission recommended the memorial be taken down, calling it “problematic from top to bottom.” It was removed in December 2023 and stored in a secure Department of Defense facility in Virginia for the last few years.

In a social media post Tuesday, Hegseth criticized that decision, calling critics “woke lemmings” and saying the history of the Confederacy should be honored.  

...they're back, baby!

Used to be that way down south in the land of cotton, old times they were not forgotten. Now they are to be remembered and even exalted across the United States, even in a cemetery built on land confiscated from Confederate traitors.

It appears that the plan of Old Marse Robert E. Lee, who tried and failed to bring the Civil War to the North until the stuffing was knocked out of him at Gettysburg, has finally succeeded.  What he couldn't achieve at Little Round Top his racist successors now in charge of the former Union Government can. They have won the Battles of Morningside Heights and Providence, and are camped out at the gates of Cambridge.  They have invaded the North and their Lost Cause has triumphed.

There's no doubt that the current Republican administration is winning the battle to restore white supremacy, a cause that as recently as 2016 appeared to be gone with the wind.

Which is why despite the economic and policy chaos, including new measures that will deny health insurance and food to millions, President Jefferson Donald Trump remains consistently popular (89% in the latest Gallup Poll) with the Republican base of white bigots.

The only remaining explanation for such rock-solid support while their lives are destroyed and their economy ravaged has to be that Massah Don, for all of his corruption and dishonesty, gave his base what they wanted more than health care or life itself: white supremacy.

And if America's great universities are, like Richmond, reduced to smoking ruins, to these stalwart white Republicans, it's a small price to pay.  

Anyway, we're the ones that have to pay it.

The Glory Days of Very Serious Republicans: A Look Back in Incredulity

 By Spy History Editor Aula Minerva

Former Republican shill and Iraq War monger, now doing business as one of our 37 beloved Republican Allies, Tom Nichols, has a piece in The Atlantic seeking to contrast the insanity and dementia of President VD Amin to the sobriety and probity of supposedly more illustrious Republican predecessors:

Tom remembers when Republicans were serious.

Once upon a time, America was governed by serious people. No longer.

His piece is an unexceptionable critique of President Tiny Toadstool's ridiculously weak supposed threat of repositioning two nuclear submarines closer to Russia.  In fact, they are always lurking in international waters close to Russia.  The whole point of submarines is, as any horny teenager who invites his date to watch the submarine races knows, that you don't know where they are.

But we tripped over the reference to very serious people.  In part, that's because ol' Tom was one of the Very Serious Republican people who shilled for the Iraq War, which, until the reign of the current Republican President, had been the worst foreign policy catastrophe for the United States since the Vietnam War (also brought to us by Very Serious People, to be fair not all of whom were Republicans).

Let's take a quick look back at some great Republican Very Serious People of the past and how they advanced the cause of world peace.

We were going to say the last competent  Republican President was Dwight Eisenhower, but that overlooks some of the Very Serious People he had working for him, like former I.G. Farben mouthpiece and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.

Dulles, who had no patience for Dean Acheson and his College of Cowardly Communist Containment, refused to shake the hand of Chinese Vice Premier Chou En-Lai in 1954, thus perpetuating the insane narrative of the Chinese threat that led us into Vietnam, until it was unraveled by the next generation of Very Serious Republicans.

Speaking of Dulles, he and his buddies ensured the Vietnam War by walking away from the elections contemplated by the 1954 Vietnam peace treaty, on the grounds that their boy would lose.  He sounds like a Texas Republican.

Very Serious John also engineered the overthrows of democratic governments in Iran and Guatemala, thereby insuring those countries would never bother us again.

During the Democratic Presidencies that followed, another generation of Very Serious Democratic People like Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, and McGeorge Bundy, led us into the bloody quagmire of Vietnam.  The definitive book about the arrogant bumbling ineptitude of these men was written by David Halberstam.  It was called The Best and the Brightest.

Doesn't get more very serious than this

Fortunately, these Democrats were succeeded by Very Serious Republicans like Dick Nixon, Spiro Agnew, and Henry “the Mad Bomber” Kissinger.  They needlessly prolonged the war for four bloody years to no end while secretly expanding it to Cambodia and Laos whilst lying about it.  All this was done to permit Tricky Dick to grease his re-election by accepting a cease-fire deal that left North Vietnamese troops entrenched in the South, a deal he could have had in 1969.   

Since then the Republicans have offered us Very Serious People like Ronald Reagan, who sent 241 brave U.S. troops to their deaths in a botched pointless occupation of Lebanon, and the gang who brought us the debacle of Iraq: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and their assorted stooges and shills.  It's hard to imagine a more serious or less competent gang than them.

Which brings us back to our new allies like Tom Nichols and Billy Kristol.  Their contention that somehow the flaming insane clown car of Republican rule under President VD Amin represents a radical and inexplicable discontinuity from the decades of wise, prudent, and serious Republican leadership that preceded it cannot stand up to the historical record, which we've just sketched out.

We suspect that the reasons that our new allies are so eager to promote this yarn are to whitewash the past shame of Republican misrule (which they either supported or participated in) and to set the stage for its recrudescence.

Should we survive the current tyranny and emerge able to rebuild our constitutional order we fear that our new allies will once again advocate for the return of Republican ideas that exploded so spectacularly over the past half century.

We've focused on the foreign policy misadventures of Very Serious Republicans, but their domestic record is if anything more appalling: white racism, subjugation of women (including arrogating to themselves the right to stick their arms into the reproductive systems of American women, like staunchly pro-life Billy), destruction of the environment, tax cuts for the rich, and packing our Supreme Court with bent extremists, including two sex pests. 

This is the very serious world that our Republican allies would seek to recreate if given the chance.  We don't think they deserve the mulligan.

This is why we occasionally point out their sordid pasts, which sometimes generates feedback like this:

This is a fair point deserving of a serious response.  Tom Nichols is right now, but as we've just argued his effort to rewrite the history of the Republican Party is both wrong and dangerous.  It's nice that Tom and Billy and Jen and Nicolle have come into the light, but they should be doing so as a matter of intellectual honesty and moral integrity, not because they hope we will now invite them to our ragers.  You can invite them to yours; it's your party.  

Know your allies

As a practical matter, we'd also submit that the apostasy of 37 former Republican shills and apologists has had exactly zero effect on the larger Republican Party, which remains in the thrall of white racists and plutocracy.

They seem to have had a greater effect on progressives, who welcomed them to our cause with the same misplaced ardor that Republicans once reserved for Communist defectors like Herbert Philbrick and Whittaker Chambers.

For us, though, we can't get over the suffering of those whose lives were destroyed by decades of neocon nonsense and pandering to the stupidest and vilest impulses of their Republican bosses (like Potatoe Quayle) and funders (like Rupert Murdoch).   

That's what makes us so unwilling to give them the voice they think they deserve in planning the future, if any, of the American polity.  And we have no intention of either rewriting or forgetting history to satisfy their vanity.

Generations of Very Serious Republicans like Henry Kissinger, Jesse Helms, Bill Rehnquist, Oliver North, Strom Thurmond, Phyllis Schafly, and Leonard Leo deserve to be remembered in all of their bent glory.

For-f**king-ever.