On the advisability of
not pacing your rage.
Before it plunges down the wingnut memory hole forever, let us pause to recall that the absolute batshit berserker rage against the Kenyan Usurper is not something of recent vintage, nor was it something that was "caused" by anything President Obama ever said or did.
As evidenced by this little bit of history
from just 10 weeks after President Obama was sworn in, the unhinged hatred on the Right was "caused" by the mere fact that a Black man with a (D) after his name got elected President by a solid majority.
Period.
From the moment his hand touched the Bible (you do remember
he took the oath twice, right?) to President Limbaugh ordering his faithful manservant John Boehner to throw an historically unprecedented hissy fit over the scheduling of a joint session of Congress, every Republican tantrum -- Every. Single. One. -- has been nothing more than various means to the end of undoing the results of the 2008 election.
From Birtherism to Death Panels, the Modern Conservative agenda in the Age of Obama has been
nothing but reckless swine and calculating traitors grabbing whatever heavy object they could lay their hands on and heaving it into traffic, hoping to cause a wreck.
In other words, a relentless, national program of premeditated sabotage at a time of war and national economic emergency.
And don't even get me started on their fucking governors.
If Bush had actually done his job and killed Osama bin Laden, the Right would have cleared room for him on Mt. Rushmore. If Bush had killed bin Laden and helped take down Gaddahfi? Over a single summer? Fuck, the Right would this minute be carving his face on the Moon.
President Obama -- whatever his flaws -- has done these things -- things that the Right would have found admirable in
any other person on any other day -- but since it's Obama, it's...gone. Vanished. Revised, trivialized and miraculous transmogrified into a
Christopath coloring book in which Bush actually kills bin Laden.
Instead we have the Right -- lavishly funded by the fascist industrialists and Fox News propagandists who are so close to their dream of pure oligarchy they can taste it -- holding poor people hostage to tax cuts for billionaires, threatening to blow up the world economy unless they get 100% of everything they want, putting holds on everything it couldn't filibuster, swearing public allegiance to
lunatics and
Dark Ages superstition.
Because you know what? Jon Stewart was wrong. For the Right, going jaw-dropping, over-the-top, foaming apeshit and staying apeshit actually worked just fine. And as long as no Democrat of the First Water is willing to call them out as the depraved thugs that they are (and as long as no major media outlet is willing to tell this story honestly) it will continue to work, because the Right has gone the
Brownshirt Dolchstoss myth one better: pre-loading a fully-articulated "We were betrayed by internal enemies!" fantasy into the tiny, mushy brains of their orc army in advance of the global economic Reichstag Fire they themselves are clearly desperate to ignite.
In February, 2009
I wrote this:
After leading us -- limping and wounded -- away from the precipice of economic disaster, over the next eight years President Obama's hardest job is going to be the reclamation and rehabilitating of a gibbering, toxic scrumfuck called the Republican Party.
In this, I was as wrong as Jon Stewart: if the last two years have demonstrated anything beyond any doubt, it is that that the GOP is rotted from the soul on out and beyond redemption.
I am also keenly aware that the last time these people were allowed to get this absolutely dug-in/fuck-you-crazy it took the entire Union Army to stop them from destroying this country.
I wonder what it will take this time?
