And Then There Were Nineteen: GOP Makes Its (White Male) Committee Appointments

Rachel Maddow (by way of Abby Zimet at Salon):

So yeah, this is what you can clip and save for the next time someone in the beltway tells you how seriously the Republican party is taking its diversity problem this year.  Clip and save, fellows.

Nineteen white males--in charge of everything that the Republicans remain in charge of in D.C., as Rachel notes.  Not a scintilla of awareness of that diversity problem that the beltway media keep assuring us the GOP now has under control.  Rather the opposite: a determination to go down fighting to the bitter end, waving the reactionary flags of race and gender and sexual orientation that have come to be the Republican party's (and religious right's) defining brand.  The reactionary party of reactionary straight white men . . . 

Who also just happen, not coincidentally, to represent the interests of the 1% against all the rest of us: as Alan McCornick notes at Hepzibah, take a look at the 2010 income tax returns for the 19 white men the GOP has just appointed to head its Congressional committees, and you also have to conclude this:

Whatever you have to say about the GOP, there does seem to be a very high correlation between wealth and power.  

Meanwhile, as Rachel Maddow notes in another recent news segment, where the Republicans have real power--in the legislatures and governors' offices of many states around the nation--they are nothing whatsoever like those chastened creatures we hear about in the beltway media, licking their wounds and seeking to make nice to Latinos, people of color, women, and gays.  They're doing precisely the opposite of nice wherever they have control of state legislatures and governors' offices, cracking down on immigrants trying to go to college, seeking to redouble anti-gay legislation in states already brimful of laws targeting the gays, attacking Planned Parenthood, etc.

Behaving, in other words, like precisely what they are and what they've worked long and hard to become: a political arm of the religious right (the Catholic bishops included), which seeks to rewrite the Christian gospels as treatises about the entitlement and privilege of white heterosexual men, and to subjugate everyone else in the name of Jesus.  As Fred Clark notes at Slacktivist, one of the strangest, and yet entirely predictable, developments in the religious right of late, as the U.S. Catholic bishops morph into right-wing evangelicals and evangelicals snatch at catchwords and talking points of their right-wing Catholic allies, is the adoption by evangelicals of Catholic magisterial prohibitions against contraception.

All driven, as Fred also points out, not by conscience or theology, but by politics.  By the politics of white heterosexual male power and privilege.

And the determination to whip into submission anyone else in the world who happens to stand outside those parameters of power and privilege, if she dares to disagree.

Remember that phony "religious freedom" campaign the U.S. Catholic bishops cooked up with their  super-rich handlers to promote the GOP this election cycle, and on which they spent big chunks of Catholics' money?  In case you've forgotten, the graphic is a photo from the hearings about "religious freedom" the GOP-dominated Congress held last February.