Gleeful cruelty, part deux

Since my last post, I've been reading Joseph Anton, Salman Rushdie's memoir of living with the fatwa. He cites H.L. Mencken's delicious definition:

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

That says it all.

The gleeful cruelty of Republicans

The gleeful cruelty of today's Republicans goes nicely with their frantic rapaciousness. By rapaciousness, I mean the fact that some of them seem to have a compulsion to lay waste to our rare resources as quickly as they can, and to sell off our protected lands so that they can despoil them for a couple more bucks. It just irks some people that they can't own everything they set their eyes on.

By cruelty, I mean their determination to make life harder than it has to be. They want to dismantle all of the government work that has made life a little easier for Americans: Social Security, Medicare, Obamacare. And, for God's sake, they want women who miscarry to have to bury or cremate their fetuses.

Birth control has been a life saver for women, but the Republicans even want to get rid of contraception if they can, even though the lack of contraception would make the number of abortions go up.

And, make no mistake, these wealthy paragons of virtue would take their own wives, daughters, and mistresses for abortions in a New York minute, if they had to. The women who suffer most from abortion bans and contraception bans are the poor, who are, by the way, suffering already. Just not enough for the Republicans' liking.