How Long Has This Been Going On?

Here is a piquant little number I bottled over a decade ago as part of a Sunday Morning Comin' Down post (yes, I have been running that feature here for a very long time.)

Other than a few name changes, see if you think it still rings true?

From March 19, 2007:

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

...

[Richard] Perle and [Tom] DeLay are interesting to watch not for their arguments – which are ridiculous – or their McCarthyesque pronouncement – which are trifling lies – but rather for the anthropological experience of seeing two perfect specimens of utterly failed, utterly corrupted wastes of meat and skin go thought their paces, gibbering and smiling away, completely impervious to reason or conscience.

Two moral corpses walking among the living, still raving out the same lies they have told for years. Lies that have caused the death and suffering of untold hundreds of thousand. Lies each now told as onelongjammedtogetheronrushingsentence. Each lie now just noise; a feverish, talismanic incantations – ritually enacted these days like Stations of the Neocon Cross, rather than spoken.

As if their old power to simply shut down reason and truth by bellowing “Traitor!” at anyone who looks at ‘em cross-eyed were still a hot and lively weapon in their clammy hands.

But those days are gone, and these true Enemies Within are now seen for what they are, naked and toothless in the noonday sun.

Because now, at last, the specific gravity of the sheer dead weight of the layer upon layer upon layer of bloodsoaked lies on which this Administration stands – centrifuged by time and events and simple facts -- has at least temporarily stratified the political world into divisions as distinct as the Permian-Triassic boundary.

On one side, Good and Light…

On the other, DeLay and Perle. Two slabs of ambulatory cultural cancer that are about as wholly, unsalvageably vile as creatures get who don’t literally burst into flames in direct sunlight or need to bathe in the blood of virgins to stay perky.

As I said, at one level, a simple exchange.

It was, at another level, quite remarkable. Like watched Ebola virus squirm and breed, and then storm and destroy healthy tissue under a microscope. Perle – who radiates the aura of something fangy and hairy and partially undigested that Dick Cheney had to have chiseled out of colon with a steam hammer -- belongs in perp-orange in a glass cage at the Hague.

DeLay, who belongs in non-remunerated Federal custody, continues to serve as a valuable, Poster Child-reminder that there are still millions of our fellow citizens who, every two years, yank themselves out of their sister’s bung long enough to jump fireman-style into their overalls and shitkickers and slouch off to the polls to vote straight fascist ticket.

Perhaps “Ta piss off the naygers”. Perhaps “Ta show them fags whose country this is!” Perhaps because, if they don’t, sweet baby Jebus will fuss and cry and cross them off the Champaign Room list in Heaven.

Their specific motives are irrelevant. They are simply Bad Americans – democracy’s failed men -- and they need to be loudly reminded at every opportunity that they are -- personally and specifically -- what is wrong with this country.

...

Ten years ago, saying such things about the leadership and the base of the Republican Party was enough to get a fella permanently and unemployably ostracized from polite company.

Ten years later and whole lot of the clowns who made a living calling us traitors for even suggesting such things have now smoothly transitioned to making a fine living saying things about the leadership and the base of the Republican Party that are as bad or worse.

Funny old world.

Behold, a Tip Jar!