What right-wing nut jobs mean by freedom

        Freedom: It's the watchword of the right-wing nut jobs who have turned the Republican Party into a looney bin, the mantra that informs the beginning, middle, and end of every speech their spokespeople deliver, the lingua franca of their narrow, calcified slice of the hoi polloi, the poll-tested word guaranteed to resonate with gullible multitudes.        
       One of their major, Koch-brothers-backed front groups calls itself FreedomWorks. It should add "with billionaires' money." If they had their way, they'd rename the Liberty Bell and Statue of Liberty--and French fries. Sen. Marco Rubio invokes a boutique brand of anti-Fidel Castro freedom. Cong. Ron Paul glorifies freedom from anything and anyone governmental, especially the Federal Reserve. Mitt Romney revels in the quasi-religious freedom of markets. State your preference: There are freedom-lovers only too willing to join your cause or to invite you to embrace theirs. No matter that it's verbal mush, they'll jump at any chance to "let freedom ring."
       Of course, as is so often the case, things--especially those with the most high-minded monikers--are never what they seem. Turns out, members of the right-wing coalition that now controls the GOP may be dedicated to demanding their freedoms, but too often do so at the expense of those of others. Here are seven deadly freedoms freedom-lovers insist fulfill the original intent of the founding fathers:
       1. Freedom to pack heat, to shoot people first and not have to answer questions later: The Second Amendment has been perverted into a guaranteed profit stream for companies that manufacture and sell weapons, as well as for the National Rifle Association, putting the "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" of innocent Americans at the mercy of the freedom-loving trigger-happy. One false move and you could wind up in their line of fire.
       2. Freedom to slur, slander, and otherwise defame others: In the name of our founding fathers, self-proclaimed freedom-lovers will exert their inalienable right to say whatever they wish about anything or anyone, with impunity--especially in political campaigns and when they know what they allege is an outright lie.
       3. Freedom from big government nosing around in their lives: "Get government off our backs" is the liberation chant of the right wing--with some major, hypocritical qualifications: "Don't mess with my Social Security" and "Hands off my Medicare."
       4. Freedom to tell others how they may lead their lives: Because their Bible tells them so, with fervor bordering on persecution, freedom-lovers feel totally justified telling others whom and how they may love and marry, what women may or may not do with their bodies, when life begins, and other assorted private matters that arise willy-nilly.
       5. Freedom to scam the public: In the vocabulary of freedom-lovers, nothing needs to be freer than the marketplace. They defend liars, cheats, and dissemblers out to make a buck, even unscrupulously, believing that by some mysterious moral mechanism markets always self-correct and scoundrels get caught--unmoved by how many victims may be harmed in the meantime and never made whole.
       6. Freedom to speculate in financial markets without oversight or accountability: Even after the recent implosion of the global economy, freedom-lovers insist that controls in the public interest interfere with their God-given right to make billions, no matter who loses in the process. Trust no one with your money.
       7. Freedom from taxes (aka paying your fair share): Ayn Rand, high priestess of personal freedom, believed that taxes should be voluntary. Of course, she's lucky they aren't, because she depended upon Social Security and Medicare in the final years of her life. No freedom-lover has ever told me how you can run a modern, global economy without a source of revenue--or what a fair tax rate would be. Instead, they resort to espousing extremist, untenable positions.
       If you're scratching you're head now, you should be: Freedom-lovers' freedom looks a lot like hypocrisy (at best) and tyranny (at worst). When they talk to each other, they revel in coming unglued, spinning unrealistic, idealistic, even hallucinatory scenarios for saving the republic from itself. But grownups know better. They are less concerned with freedom than with understanding its limits, the extremes we are willing to back away from to live constructively with others.
       So, the next time you hear anyone wax effusive about defending freedom, tell them that you totally agree--and that, for you, it begins with being free of them.#