My bad! Seriously. I humbly apologize for my oversight. I adore Mary and watch every one of her interviews that I can track down. Thank you for pointing that out. I am having trouble wrapping my head around what I keep seeing. I knew there was hate in This Land still; but had no idea how far reaching it is. Golden idols take it so far over the top.
Right? As soon as I saw that thing I thought "let the Golden Calf memes commence" and they sure did. (And rightly so). CPAC was supposed to be a place for conservatives to advance serious ideas. It probably was never exactly that, but at least way back when (in the 70's) it could make that claim a lot easier. For years now, it's been nothing but a right-wing comic con (with all due apologies to comic con). That was never more true than this year. Along with the literal golden idol, all you really need to know about this year's CPAC can be summed up thusly: a). Trump Jr. gets on stage and trashes Biden for bombing Syria. The audience dutifully boos along. b). At this very same conference, mind you, Pompeo gets on stage and praises Trump for bombing Syria. The audience dutifully cheers along wildly. That right there tells you this conference is not a place where serious ideas are discussed. And there IS a serious discussion to be had about Syria. It's complicated, it's heart breaking, it's difficult. But the attendees aren't interested in serious policy discussions, and didn't react to the two speakers on that level; they reacted in a 100% tribal way. Not to mention that the Big Lie of a "stolen election" was advanced (subtly or not all subtly, depending on the speaker) consistently. And any Republican who had previously rejected or even questioned the Big Lie was told in no uncertain terms that they were not welcome there.
I hated to like your post as it makes me so sad. But you stated it all very well. Never mind the Highest Courts in the Land, just pay attention to the man behind the curtain. My favorite bore the caption, "Did these people actually read the Old Testament??!!??" Their undying and total hypocrisy is what gets to me the most.
I read it in a Tweet that showed up on a news feed. I do not do Twitter myself so only read ones that I see posted somewhere else. It is not a meme I guess (I have never been able to figure out what makes something a meme.) Golden Donald Trump Statue At CPAC Has Twitter Warning Idol Worshippers | HuffPost
It's rather obvious that whether they read Exodus or not, they didn't read The Gospel According to St. Matthew (particularly Chapter 4, Verse 7.) Nor The Gospel According to St. Luke (Chapter 4, Verse 12). Nor Deuteronomy (Chapter 6, Verse 16, to which the cited New Testament passages refer.) And there is nothing the slightest bit "conservative" about Trump and his base. "Conservative" comes from the same root as "conserve," to protect a resource, "conservatory," a place where either musical or botanical heritage is protected, and "conservator," one who protects an incompetent person from his or her own foolishness. By contrast, the people who have been in the driver's seat of the Republican Party since Gerald Ford lost the election are lunatic-fringe reactionaries, shading into counter-revolutionaries.
Well, it doesn't exactly help matters that even if we expand from "conservative/liberal" to "counter-revolutionary/reactionary/conservative/moderate/liberal/leftist/revolutionary," it still doesn't define much, because it's always relative to a time, a place, and the general direction in which a given society is moving. And even adding a "libertarian/authoritarian" axis doesn't help much, because that is an absolute. Consider a plane defined by "elitist/populist" (what they really mean, not the Orwellian doublethink definitions Trump and his ilk keep claiming they mean!) and "libertarian/authoritarian" axes. That explains a lot. But if we split "libertarian/authoritarian" into two axes (giving a 3-dimensional space), with the "libertarian/authoritarian" axis referring only to personal behavior, and the new "regulatarian/deregulatarian" axis defined in terms of business behavior, we explain a lot more. And we can easily add more axes, creating a higher-order space.
