Thursday, June 15, 2017                                          11:16 AM

I have found myself frustrated enough—after the racist backlash that marred Obama’s two terms, and the madness that gave his haters’ champion an electoral win—after seeing hypocrisy make Congress even more useless and toxic than it traditionally is expected to be—after seeing that diseased knot of disinformation, FoxNews, become a popular channel—I’ve felt myself enraged. I’ve felt the fury at seeing American ideals be dismissed as ‘political correctness’. I’ve seen red while hearing crazy old white men make political footballs out of science, education, and women’s health.

I thank my lucky stars that my mental health (while far from perfect) doesn’t let me slide into Hate, to get lost enough in Hate to start stalking the streets with a rifle in my hands. The misbehavior of the Trumps, McConnells, Ryans, Sessionses, Kushners, Mannaforts, Spicers and Huckabee-Sanderses does, however, create Outrage—second cousin to Hate.

Alongside this confusion between decent outrage and indecent hate, we also have the confusion of whether our politics is suffering from extreme partisanship—or if it is actually a struggle of good vs. evil. It would be foolish to ascribe nothing but good intentions to the Democrats—they are politicians, after all—but if the Republicans have become a force for pure evil, then those who resist them, Democrat or otherwise, are, by default, on the side of the angels.

When a party becomes as morally bankrupt as the Republicans have, and then characterize the outrage engendered in the rest of us as ‘partisanship’, they muddy the water—as with most of their sophomoric debate-team syllogisms. The great experiment of America has always thought of itself as a long-term project—a matter of centuries. But today’s Republicans are not American in that sense—they are a bunch of traitors looking to cash in, short term, and get out of the game before the indictments come down—that’s political success for today’s Republican.

So while I sympathize with the people who were attacked on the ballfield yesterday—and, while I support those who call for non-partisan cooperation—I think the GOP should look at this lone gunmen as a kind of canary in a coal mine.

If their grubby-fingered mauling of the Constitution, and of social justice in general, continues to grow—if their sense of privilege and entitlement continues to blind them to their responsibilities to their constituents—they could conceivably transform that sociopathic would-be killer into a martyr. Not that he deserves it—his mental illness is to be pitied, as is his death.

Likewise, our attention-starved media lends a patina of legitimacy and respectability to unconscionable dunces like Trump, McConnell, Ryan, and Sessions—who threaten our very way of life as Americans—when, in fact, we should simply pity them for their mental illness—and the shamelessness of an industry that uses them for click-bait just as thoughtlessly as they use yesterday’s violence in Virginia

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