Okay, first there was the way Bush ‘elbowed’ his way into office while more rational people still had questions about the actual vote tallies. Then there was the way 9/11 was used by Bush to create a department of Homeland Security (cops without rules) and pass the ‘Patriot’ Act (a rescinding of the Bill of Rights) and use the political climate to declare war on Iraq under false pretenses. Then, having destroyed Iraq’s government, he allowed chaos to rule Baghdad, which led to the destruction of the infrastructure of the city we were supposedly ‘liberating’ (with severe loss of irreplaceable museum pieces–anthropological artifacts from man’s earliest civilizations—there’s something vast and sweeping about that BIG a screw-up).

Then he bumbled his way to a complete, global economic meltdown just as the country elected Bush’s opposite–a thinking, sincere, and respectable President, Barack Obama. And from the very first, the GOP behaved like a spoiled child–swearing that no matter what else happened, they would discredit our newly-elected president. And, true to their word (for once) they have spent the last four years trying to distract us from Obama’s sterling performance, from their own bankrupt, disproven policies, and from their religious zealotry. They have forestalled important legislation for four years to give themselves something to blame Obama for (how they expect the public not to see through that is beyond me–I call it treason, plain and simple).

Confederacy of Dunces

The richest people on earth ‘own’ the GOP–there’s no other way to explain their psychotic strategies and insufferable ignorance. I could fill page after page with a list of their incoherent behavior all through this dawn of a new millennium–some of it just stupid, some of it almost comic in its clumsiness, some of it terrifying to see held up as ‘family’ values. Whoever is touting Family Values in a country with a 50% divorce rate is living in a fantasy world, a world where we still haven’t seen through the pompous pieties of ancient religions, revived anew by good ol’ boys who willfully turn away from proven science, and use 21st century hi-tech communications and marketing techniques to snow their supporters.

I am speechless on the subject of the Tea Party. I shall hereafter refer to it as the Em-Tea Headed Party. I cannot fathom how Mitt Romney supposes we can support tax breaks for rich people–does that man actually know arithmetic? I don’t think he does. And his efforts to stay within the bounds of insanity delineated by his Republican base are hilarious. Apparently, even a blockhead like Mitt can’t support the more extreme idiocies of his party’s majority. If you lie down in a trailer park, you’re gonna get up with white-trash fleas–sorry, I couldn’t help it.

I’m not trying to be snippy. It’s just so hard to discuss some neo-con positions with a straight face. Are we supposed to have forgotten that the legalization of abortion was first hailed as an end to back-room abortion horror stories, and an end to centuries of men interfering in women’s rights? We men don’t even know what it’s like to have a single menstrual period! Yet we feel justified in telling the other half of the population how they should have unwanted children for the sake of some biblical mumbo-jumbo about an old man in the sky.

The most cherished ideals of the United States of America have been ‘separation of church and state’, religious freedom (which includes the right to not have one), and all people being born equal. By those lights, the GOP should be renamed the Anti-American party. Or maybe just the ‘death to all who refuse to bow down to the almighty dollar’ Party–but that name’s kinda long. Well, you know what I’m saying.

Because most Republican agendas for the last ten, twenty years have all been attacks on what were once touchstones of the American Spirit. They try to ignore–and get us to overlook–their trampling on our Constitution and our Bill of Rights–except when they want to distort it to their own advantage, as with this Chik-fil-a garbage being ‘religious freedom’ and ‘free speech’, when it is clearly hate speech dressed in red, white, and blue bunting.

It has me dazed–I cannot handle the volume and frequency of their desecrations of our way of life, or their purposefully and knowingly lying about Obama, the Democrats, and a host of other middle-to-liberal regular folks who got in the way of their vituperation. They have made celebrities of people like that druggie radio-nut and the former Governor of Alaska (you betcha). This is a woman who complained about Katie Couric innocently asking her what newspapers and magazines she read–because her answer was ‘none’. Now, whose fault is that, really? The anchorwoman who assumed anyone vying for executive office would read at least one gol’durn newspaper–or the pit-bull with lipstick on?

Sartre comes to mind. Are just about half of this country’s voters really behind these evil people, and their views and plans? These are the same people who fought slavery in the1860s, who supported anti-Semitism in the 1950s, who fought integration in the 1960s, who railed against the women’s lib movement in the seventies—the same people who still, today, want us to hate all homosexuals, when homosexuals clearly don’t hate us. Aren’t all those deluded people as ‘out of work’ as the rest of us? Can they really blame the guy who took office virtually the day after the ‘economy-bomb’ exploded on Wall Street—instead of the party that spent eight years getting us into that crater?

That new guy, btw, has been doing wonders with our economy, especially since he’s had to drag the Republicans kicking and screaming towards some kind of stimulus, regulation, and recovery. The GOP-led House of Representatives has carped, obfuscated, and turned up their noses at any attempt to restore this country, simply because it would be a Democrat President who would sign the legislation. Treason! There’s no other word for it.

But the past is prologue. They have crossed a line now. Now, they are trying to keep Democrats from voting, using the same old ‘Jim Crow’ bull that they used to use only on the African-Americans! How naked. How obscenely overt. How definitively reactionary. I must be going crazy. This is not the USA that I grew up in. That USA was far from perfect, I can’t deny that–but this nightmare landscape of devolutionary Social Justice, this macabre festival of Spin, Lies, Racism, Sexism, Evangelicalism, Greed… –and their lust for Power overriding any sense of responsibility to the ‘Land of the Free’. Ha. Not if they get their way…

A political party that purposely makes it more difficult for the poor, the elderly, and any-other-demographic-that-skews-left to cast their Votes! If they can manage to obstruct enough of the disenfranchised, they think they have a shot against a second term for Obama. I’m hoping this election will break their hearts as badly as they have broken mine, not only for the eight years their ‘W’ind-up Monkey trashed our nation, and its reputation, but for the last four years of their unabashedly irresponsible behavior towards the most dis-respected President that ever was. They should be ashamed of themselves, but I’m not sure they know what ‘shame’ is.