Last Thursday, during a debate on restricting public funding of  abortions in the District of Columbia, Congressman Todd Tiahrt, a Kansas Republican,
said, “If you think of it in human terms, there is a financial incentive that will be put in place, paid for by tax dollars, that will encourage women who are  single parents, living below the poverty level, to have the opportunity for a free abortion,

“If you take that scenario and apply it to many of the great minds we have today, who would we have been deprived of? Our president grew up in a similar circumstance.
If that financial incentive was in place, is it possible that his mother may have taken advantage of it?
“Clarence Thomas, Supreme Court Justice, if those circumstances were in place, is it possible that we would be denied his great mind? The opportunity to have tax-funded abortions, a financial incentive, is something that I think most of us want to oppose in America and it’s certainly deserves a clean up or down vote.”

Tiahrt is clearly short of much more than a vowel, and long on the  singularly grotesque racist notions  that seem to be the Republicans’ specialty these days.

In fact,  the last good idea the  Republicans had was President Dwight Eisenhower’s valedictory in which he warned against the perils of the rising military-industrial complex half-a-century ago.

Since then, the Republicans have brought us the bombing of Cambodia, Watergate, the neutron bomb, union busting, the first  commandment — greed is good,  funny money, the decline and fall of American manufacturing,

the Grenada war, Iran-Contra,  the Gulf war, the rise of the so-called Christian Right, the muddying of the separation of church and state, the rigging of the 2000 presidential election, the lies that preceded the  invasion of Iraq, the Iraq war, its casualties –American and Iraqi, its costs, the nearly total   destruction of New Orleans, the Afghanistan war, its costs – human and fiscal,  , illegal wire taps, Bill of Rights violations,
torture and war crimes, the largest deficit in history, the worst global financial crisis since the Great Depression, high and more high crimes and misdemeanors than anyone knows. .

In 1904,  the great English writer, H.G. Wells, toured America and concluded that America’s principal  accomplishment was to make “feudalism efficient.”

Today, thanks to Tiahrt, his colleagues and their predecessors,
Feudalism still flourishes, but it’s no longer efficient, it’s  crude.

Text of Tiehrt’s remarks courtesy of  the Hufffington Post.