It’s been an embarrassing pull-back-the-curtain week for stereotypical white man rhetoric. First the news that the Sears Catalog Model/ Republican, Mitt Romney, got a 0% in a NBC/ Wall Street Journal poll of African Americans. Earlier in the week Bishop Stephen Blair had declared Creepy Catalog Model/ Republican Paul Ryan’s House of Representatives budget immoral, due to its inadequate concern for “the care of the poor and the vulnerable.”

There’s the weird ambition to push birth control back to pre-Margaret Sanger via so-called “person-hood” laws.  When will they begin to try to prosecute people who talk about contraceptives under obscenity laws, just as they did Sanger? Not too long it seems. One Congresswoman, Lisa Brown, has already been slapped on the wrist for mentioning her vagina in a public debate about restrictive abortion laws.

As if the great shout out to the stereotypical white man weren’t enough, built on the racial trope that Obama “isn’t one of us,” now we toss in the return of the Welfare Queen in Romney’s claim– deemed false by anyone who looks at it– that Obama is eliminating the work requirement in welfare. What welfare? I’ve been unemployed for six months, in Obama’s liberal home state, and all I have gotten is minimal unemployment insurance.

The Sears Catalog Model lies, ignores the poor, and seems to need to control women.  He’s also out of touch with reality, as the “We Built This” night at the Republican convention rattles in the background on as I write , ridiculed by Rachael Maddow, and rightly so. The convention is happening in a publicly financed building and every speaker, despite their denials– like every American–has been helped by government programs.

…the consultants called for a narrow set of career-oriented majors, large teaching loads for faculty members and more hybrid (mixed online and in-person instruction) courses, and for recruitment to focus on traditional-aged, “driven” undergraduate students (the university’s current student body is composed largely of transfer students). Bain also recommended low tuition and increased enrollment.

“No Thanks, Bain” Kevin Kiley

“A significant number of these faculty members were part of a household that fell below the 2009 median household income in the United States: 21.6 percent reported a household income under $35,000, and 30.2 percent reported a household income under $45,000,” said the report. (According to the American Association of University Professors, an associate professor at a master’s-level public university had an average salary of $60,612 in 2010-11.)

“Non-Tenure-Track Economics,” Kaustuv Basu

In all the Republican convention hoopla in the next week, I have a feeling that the steady dissolution of U.S. higher education is not going to come up at all. The same bizarre logic that dismantled the old system– the idea that a business or profit model and not a public service model should be central to education– continues to be presented, again and again, as if it were a new idea, and as if we had no idea what the results would be. The definition of insanity, according to Einstein, is doing the same thing again and again and expecting the results to be different.  The sweater-vest make over shouldn’t fool anyone. In the Republican future, everyone’s an adjunct.

This week we were offered another glimpse into the creepy right-wing mind, this time of Rep. Todd Akin  of Missouri. Here’s the heart of the matter:

“It seems to me, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare,” Akin said, referring to conception following a rape. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something, I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child.”

Rep. Tod Akin, as reported in the LA Times (Rep. Todd Akin: No pregnancy from ‘legitimate rape’).

It’s the old-school patriarch speaking out of turn. That’s why the Republican party old-guard is so determined to get Akin out of the race. Contemporary Republicanism is, if nothing else, a kind of Trojan Horse ideology which succeeds by advocating populism (aka the Tea party) while pursing authoritarian and nationalistic policy. Especially during this election year, the goal has been to tamp down the authoritarian nationalism and emphasize the populist economic rhetoric. This  incident, though, is like last week’s peek at Ayn Rand lurking behind Paul Ryan; this time we’re getting a peak at John C. Wilke, also lurking behind Ryan.

When Akin suggested that he had “read somewhere” that a woman’s body could do this sort of thing, he was being coy but not dishonest. He’s talking about John C. Wilke’s 1999 piece, “Rape Pregnancies Are Rare,” available online at the Christian Life Resources webpage. Wilke is a long-standing anti-choice advocate. The right needs to argue that rape pregnancies are uncommon, to the point of non-existence, so that they can justify their position that there should be no exceptions to laws banning abortion. Rape pregnancies are not simply uncommon, the right tells us, some of the rapes never happened.

“The most conservative studies,” Rev. Robert Fleischmann the current National Director of Christian Life Resources writes, “have suggested false rape reports account for 4%-8% of all reported rapes. So, 4%-8% of rape reports could rightfully be called illegitimate rapes… Taking Representative Akin’s words in the best possible way,” Fleischmann writes of the Representative’s apology-video, “we can accept his apology for failing to respect the high emotion of the rape issue.”  So don’t fret, it’s just a few woman who will be affected by the no-exceptions ban. Not something to worry about.

It’s that “emotion” thing that’s the real issue (three decades ago he would have surely said hysterical); “most people today can’t get past the thought of the rape event”  to, presumably, the important issue, that is, the embryo not the woman. Akin should “leave the emotionally distorting event of pregnancy from a rape for a later day when society is better educated… the proper education that can come out of all this might better result in tougher laws against rapists, care and support for the women who have been raped, and protection for the most defenseless of all – the unborn child.”  Aka, Ryan’ and Akin’s Personhood law.