Fundraising -- Last Day

A Diet of Worms

The most formidable weapon the despised Liberal has in his or her arsenal is Memory: the unwillingness to go quietly into that good night of Strategic Forgettery upon which the Right's dominance and the media's shallow cravenness completely depend. It is a theme that you may have noticed dancing around between the lines of this blog fairly often, and one of the small blessings of the blogosphere -- that when some mentally underclocking twat in a tri-corner hat rears up on his hind legs and start raving about, say, deficits, anyone with a decent memory (and a willingness to futilely engage with these political CHUDs one more time) can actually dig the past out the past in high-res detail, and ask, if [Insert any issue in the fucking Universe here] is so singularly fucking important, where the fuck were you during the eight, long years during which Bush was making [Insert any issue in the fucking Universe here] infinitely worse.

Of course that is the question the Right will never answer, and the press will never ask.

Which is why I do not have the slightest interest in what they say or think.

See, most every Liberal I know is quite willing to come to the public square and debate debt and deficits and budget cuts and taxes.

But that public square is currently ringed with sniper towers full of Republicans and other Fox News employees who are itching to open up on anyone who comes to that debate -- Republicans and other Fox News employees who open mock the very idea of compromise, and give each other merit badges every time they find some new way to sucker a Liberal into the open with talk of "compromise"...and then drop a "death panel" house on his head.

Whee! Stupid Libs!

So I am not interested in debating the deficit, or debt, or energy, or Social Security, or climate, or Medicare, or education, or Planned Parenthood, or election reform, or workplace safety or, really, anything with anyone on the Right anymore.

Because I already know what their stupid, lazy, toxic, paranoid, Toby-Keith-themed answer to every single one of those issues will be. Because they are wrong. Because they have been wrong about just about everything for as long as I can remember. And they will go right on being wrong -- loudly, whoopingly, murderously wrong -- because we are now living in a time of moral free-fall where there is no longer any penalty on the Right for being repeatedly and horribly wrong.

So I am not interested in them.

I am interested in those who make a living letting these CHUDs off the hook. The professional rehabilitators who get rich by recycling the same discredited fuck-ups and lunatics peddling the same deranged amalgam of Chick Tracts and remaindered copies of "Anthem" over and over again.

The people who are in the business selling indulgences to fascists.

From 2005

Republican Simony


This is what the seller of one kind of Indulgence looks like.


And here’s the purveyor...

...of another brand.



The Catholic Encyclopedia defines “Simony” as:

"...'a deliberate intention of buying or selling for a temporal price such things as are spiritual of annexed unto spirituals'. While this definition only speaks of purchase and sale, any exchange of spiritual for temporal things is simoniacal. Nor is the giving of the temporal as the price of the spiritual required for the existence of simony; according to a proposition condemned by Innocent XI (Denzinger-Bannwart, no. 1195) it suffices that the determining motive of the action of one party be the obtaining of compensation from the other.

Simony was a massive, disgraceful chapter in the history of the Catholic Church: one that dwarfs even the modern priest molestation scandal, and one of the main causes of the Protestant Schism.

Jot it down; there might be a quiz later.

As we strap ourselves into barrels of whiskey and go over the falls into a New Year, I’ve got that feeling in my gut. Maybe you do too.

That fast-dropping, free-fally, contents-are-definitely-shifting sensation of events reordering themselves into something new and alien and breathtaking, so while we need to reflect and celebrate the year that is passing, we also seriously need to get ready for one King Hell Bitch of a ride in the next. Or at least I do.

There is a certain kind of subsonic, “How dare these bastards!” white noise aroar in the land.

All year, edges have gotten harder, and the “Let’s all play nice” voice (that had for years come almost exclusively from the Left since the Southern Strategy Party of Atwater and Gingrich and Limbaugh decided that the lowest, most hateful, most divisive road was the only one that was going to win them the White House) has all but vanished.

It's on.

Or, put another way, when my sweet-and-even-tempered Mom wants these cocksuckers publicly flogged off the continental shelf, and then the pockets of their turncoats stuffed with neutronium, and then the lot of them sunk into the Cayman Trench…something fundamental in our democracy has malfunctioned. Some vital organ in the body politic has died…having been very carefully and deliberately poisoned by the Republican Party.

And now that the check-and-balance smoke detectors have failed, more than half the country is screaming for someone to call 9-1-1…and the rest are demanding that we all go back to bed.

The same people who so loudly and lavishly screamed “Bring us Barabbas!” while Clinton was being persecuted now smirk and fart and pick their toes as the Dubya declares war on our basics rights and freedoms.

Because they wanted it this way. There can be no other possible answer. If the GOP were for one minute as serious about small gummint and bringing Presidents to book for any infraction whatsoever a their lavish and very public pronouncements, they would be storming the barricades around Cheney's Undisclosed Location right this minute.

But of course all we hear from the Right is…silence. Where once there was a hue and a cry and a bellow demanding Smiting Justice that filled up the 24/7 news cycle, now there is a vast, deafening and Very Conspicuous Silence.

Why?

Because Republicans have no use for Democracy.

Their President has lied about matters of War and Peace…and they have shrugged.

Lied in ways that have gotten thousand killed, has bankrupted our nation and pissed our moral treasury away into the deserts of a distant land…and they have sneered, “We won. Get over it. “

Been an accessory to the outing of an undercover agent for pique and spite…and they giggle and call her a bitch.

And now their President has bragged about breaking the law in order to spy on United States citizens. Can’t even be bothered to run it past a rubber-stamp of a court after the fact.

And lied about it – repeatedly – on teevee.

And that’s what makes this a genuine crisis moment. Because George Bush was given every single fucking thing he ever asked for to fight his war.

A prostrate press.

A rechargeable “Get Out Of Jail Free” card to be played like an ace of trumps over and over again on the fatal lies he has told.

A free pass on his failures. And his pettiness. And his psychotic detachment from the real world and actual events. And his various, slurry, dry-drunk embarrassments. And his anti-Lou-Gehrig record as the Laziest, Most Vacationingest President of All Time.

A bigger monetary blank check than almost any man in history.

The most undisputedly formidable military in history.

The most lavishly funded intelligence-gathering system in history.

A One Party Government.

And, on September 11th, 2001, the boundless sympathy and eager willingness on the part of the majority of the human race to stand with him and go wherever he led fell into his lap as the towers came down.

And not only has he fucked all of that into the ground and turned every surplus he ever touched to debt and ruin and hatred, but now comes the worst and most dangerous phase of any alcoholic’s spiral downward.

Now come the peevish complaint that it was not enough.
...

Where were you then, Teabaggers?

Where were you when hundreds of thousands were protesting the very issues you only seem to have discovered when the Black Democrat put his hand on the bible in 2009 and became your President?

Were you just plain, pig-ignorant your entire adult life? Blind? Deaf? Have you been in a coma since 1977? Did your wingnut church or home-school curriculum just choose to elide over the last 50 years of American history?

Or up until the moment the Kenyan Usurper moved into the White House and started having filthy, Commie sex on the very bed where Saint Ronald Reagan gave virgin birth to Roger Ailes, were you this guy...

...and just never gave s shit that your country was being plunderfucked into perpetual feudal penury as long as the guy at the head of the parade was White, Republican, wrapped (as Upton Sinclair predicted) "in the flag and carrying the cross", and shouting USA!USA!

The reason Liberals are so hated by, well, everyone, is not that we loathe America (we don't) or that we want to foist some radical agenda off on an innocent, unsuspecting nation (A. there is no secret agenda -- we're open about what we believe almost to a fault, B. on any given day the bulk of the public is less "innocent" than "zombied out on crap teevee and celebrity worship" and, C. to make room for our sinister agenda we'd first have to pry the entire Party of Limited Gummint out of America's bedrooms and vaginae, and we just don't have the manpower for that.)

No, the reason Liberals are despised is that we refuse to forget the past.

Refuse to forget about your past.

And we refuse to shut up about it.


Pull Newt's finger and help Fight the Crazy...