When all you have is Hate…

…every liberal is a dirty terrorist co-conspirator.
…every criticism is disloyalty.
…every act of dissent is treason.
…every Medicaid check and Social Security Card is a paving stone on the road to undiluted Communism.
…every Republican lie, no matter how huge or bloody, is irrelevant.
…every Democratic lie, no matter how small or trivial, is grounds for impeachment.
…every story about how fucked up Iraq was, is and shall be is mere propaganda.
…every fawning tribute to the Dear Leader is "fair and balanced".

… and anyone preaching hope is a direct and imminent threat.

So when Bobo begins pooping out his little New York Times drivel thusly...

“At first it seemed like a few random cases of lassitude among Mary Chapin Carpenter devotees in Berkeley, Cambridge and Chapel Hill. But then psychotherapists began to realize patients across the country were complaining of the same distress. They were experiencing the first hints of what’s bound to be a national phenomenon: Obama Comedown Syndrome.

“The afflicted had already been through the phases of Obama-mania — fainting at rallies, weeping over their touch screens while watching Obama videos, spending hours making folk crafts featuring Michelle Obama’s face. These patients had experienced intense surges of hope-amine, the brain chemical that fuels euphoric sensations of historic change and personal salvation.
…”

...it can’t come as any huge surprise.

What Bobo misses, of course, is that people are not simply stupid-drunk on hope. It’s that after 30 year of David Brooks' side of the political universe feeding-tube-glutting the body politic with nothing but a slurry of fear, hate, rage, bigotry and paranoia, we're sick of it.

Sick. Of. It.

We are starving for something other than the bile and venom cocktails that are the mother's milk of the Conservative movement. Dying, in a very real sense, for want of something -- anything -- with more nutritional value than the various brands of reeking toxins that Limbaugh, Falwell, Hannity, Coulter, DeLay, Gingrich, Hume, Kristol, Robertson, Brooks and the rest of that long, long, looooong list of Wingnut Heroes have been hammering down our throats for decades.

This is not an endorsement of Obama (You’re smart people so make up your own damn minds) but an observation that while he both connotes and denotes many things to many people, what Obama most clearly represents is this: our National Gag Reflex finally kicking in.

We are, finally, sick and tired of being kept sick and tired at the hands of the people with whom Bobo allies himself.

And since Bobo has always been staunchly on the side of the liars and the poisoners it is no surprise that his ugly little screed on the folly of daring to hope that our future will not be some wingnut “Red Dawn” meets “Mad Max” masturbatory fantasy manifests itself as mocking mystification at the Obama campaign.

But imagine if Bobo had spared just a moment for self-reflection?

Spared a minute to notice that the “Why” behind the Obama movement is the sense abroad in the land that, finally, something good and hopeful must be flung right into the face of the Metastasizing Conservative Darkness that has been busy busy busy smothering hope and snuffing out compassion under an avalanche of shrill fear-mongering and its endless sermons of hopelessness and dread?

Imagine if, over in the Better Universe, Bizzaro Bobo wrote a more honest tune.

With the same melody, but slightly different words.

An imaginary, alternative history version of Bobo's column today entitled “When the Magic Fades”:

At first it seemed like a few random cases of lassitude among Michael Weiner Savage devotees in Alabama, Texas and Orange County. But then psychotherapists began to realize patients across the country were complaining of the same distress. They were experiencing the first hints of what’s bound to be a national phenomenon: Gingrich Comedown Syndrome.

The afflicted had already been through the phases of Gingrich-mania — Terri Schiavo, Purple Heart Band-aids, spending years lying, slandering, investigating ginned-up “scandals” and impeaching. These patients had experienced intense surges of hate-amine, the brain chemical that fuels the entire Conservative Movement

But they found that as the election-cycles went on, they needed more and purer hate-injections just to preserve the Rush. They wound up craving more hate than even the Party of God could provide, and they began experiencing brooding moments of suboptimal hatefulness. Anxious posts began to appear on the blogs. A sense of ennui began to creep through the nation’s “Traitor”- and “Liberal Fascism”-centered book clubs as people began to notice how utterly fucked their beloved movement and Dear Leader had actually left them.

Up until now Hate Radio screeds had seemed to them less like stretches of words and more like soul sensations that transcended time and space. But those in the grips of Gingrich Comedown Syndrome began to wonder if Neocon bullshit actually made sense. For example, Wingtard Dogma tells the faithful that the Evil Liberal Gummit is the source of all problems, but if we are now running the Evil Liberal Gummit and things have gotten dramatically worse and not better, well WTF?

Patients in the grip of G.C.S. rarely express doubts at first, but in a classic case of transference, many experience slivers of longing for the Democratic Party. They see Democrats crisscrossing the country generally debating one genuine issue with each another — Governance for Grown-ups Tour.

They see that their entire political strategy consists of repudiating with a smile and a seriousness of purpose everything the pig people hold most dear.

The Pig People long for that sense of purpose again, as they watch as their leaders struggle to fill the headlines again with trivial, divisive trash like flag burning. As their once and future Hate Radio Kingmakers scramble to feed their own fingers through the Might Wurlitzer Swiftboating Woodchipper. Gibbering madmen lashing people inside their own perimeter to the mast of an ideology that has done nothing but fail for 30 years, and then hectoring their fellow “Conservatives” on their lack of fidelity to that ideology as it sinks beneath the waves and the icy waters of political oblivion begins to lap over the deck.

And in their darker moments they begin to wonder “So is this what it has been like to be a Liberal in the age of the Party of God? Trying to reason with crazy people who call you a traitor as they giggle and gut your country?”

As the syndrome progresses, they begin to ask questions about The Party itself:

The Rule of Law Party that impeached a President because “no man is above the law”, and yet laughs off BushCo lies and lawbreaking that have gotten actual Americans actually killed.

The Privacy Party, that now abides illegally spying on millions of Americans.

The Personal Responsibility Party that now pardons traitors, and counsels its underlings to blow off congressional subpoenas.

The Individual Liberty Party, that now openly celebrates torture, murder, secret prisons and the garroting of habeas corpus.

The Fiscal Responsibility Party, that will leave office next year saddling the next Administration with record debts and deficits, and an open financial wound bleeding tax dollars into the Iraqi desert and Dick Cheney’s crony’s pockets for the next 100 year.

These doubts lead G.C.S. sufferers down the path to the question that is the Unholy of the Unholies for Hate-maniacs: How exactly are we going to govern and repair a nation when our leaders are hell-bent on destroying the very idea of citizens using their government as a means to help their fellow citizens?

After we smashed Iraq to bits, what was the fucking plan?

After we clawed and cheated our way into the White House, what was the fucking plan?

After we get our asses sawed off and made into Happy Meals for the Dirty Fucking Hippies in the last election, and we decided the best strategy would be to virtually shut the government down by filibustering everything including potty-breaks, what was supposed to be the fucking plan?

Of course, there was no plan.

There never is a plan; just a crackpot fundy delusion that when government is liquidated, all regulation eliminated, all labor protection vaporized and the Earth turned over to corporations with guns, then history will end and the world will be transformed into a Randite paradise and the pasty, idiot hordes of True Believers will finally get to plant their little peh-pehs somewhere inside of Ann Coulter's lady area.

The victims of G.C.S. struggle against wingtard-myopia, or the inability to see beyond the “Let’s burn it all down and dance on Roosevelt’s filthy Commie ashes!” rhetoric of right-here-right-now. But here’s the fascinating thing: They still believe. They know that the hate-mongering is cancerous. They know their Dear Leader and his minions know it’s cancerous.

But they still share this dream that they can just plain hate and stoopid and Republican Jebus their way to the Promised Land. That after the fury fades and the bill for their rapacious idiocy comes due, reality can still be held at bay by sheer arrogant misanthropy.

They figure that any new president is going to face gigantic obstacles. And that if a Democrat gets in, they can just go back to their natural state of cutting the legs out from beneath anyone who tries to move the country forward, while simultaneously whinging and squealing about how victimized and powerless they are beneath the iron heel of Evil Liberal Gummit.

Those afflicted with G.C.S. are no longer as animated as they were when they were mainlining that pure, uncut, McVeigh-infused, Clinton-hating fury they got hooked on in the 90s.

That Good Shit is no longer available. But its legions of hate-amine damaged junkies – shaking and jonesing for a bump of that sweet DeLay/Gingrich/Limbaugh/Falwell redneck righteousness cocktail – remain.