As a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour;

1 Peter 5:8King James Version (KJV)

8 Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour:

I work Third Shift, in the kitchen at a casino. I actually have a pretty decent job, but some things about the place drive me up the wall.

For example, in the break room at least one TV is usually set to CNN, at least one more to FOX News, and the remainder will be on some random sports channel.

Now, I don't know why this is, except that my workplace seems to go with whatever the trends are and both-sides-ism and false equivalence is generally par for the course. Every so often somebody gets mad and changes the channel or shuts off FOX News. I've never seen anybody do that with CNN (although logic dictates it must have happened sometime.)

Last night on my lunch break, FOX News was on one of the TV's that happened to be in my field of view and on it was a replay of the first episode of "The Ingraham Angle" Laura Schlessinger's new show. Okay, whatever. I wasn't watching it, and I didn't hear until later that John Kelly was on there and insulted the collective intelligence of every historian, history buff, and anybody who has ever studied American (or American military, specifically) history...in the whole damned country...by saying that the Civil War was about failure to compromise and Robert E. Lee was an honorable man.

(No he wasn't, he was a fucking traitor who led armies against his fellow Americans in defense of treason and slavery. That is what any historian who is not automatically pro-Confederate will tell you.)

But anyway, I got to thinking about this later...you know, FOX News, that magical place where somehow, movement-Conservatives and right-wingers and various conspiracy theorists and fake military experts are never wrong, and everything gets blamed on liberals.

(FOX News polling also scored Donald Trump's approval rating at 38% the other day...just for the record...)

Now, the big news lately of course, is that Paul Manafort and Rick Gates have been indicted, and George Papadopoulos has plead guilty, and Trump seems to be having an epic flip-out about it (and while we're at it, FOX News seems to mostly be in a state of denial about the whole thing.) It's also quite possible that Mike Flynn, and others, will likely also be arrested.

Trump-Russia is a...if not the...top story on CNN, MSNBC, and most of the rest of the 24-hour news cycle. It has been, for a couple of days...

...And FOX News is busy trying to gloss over slavery?

I've yet to see FOX News say anything about the White Supremacist march in Shelbyville, TN (or the cancelled follow-up in Murfeesboro, but that's beside the point.) While I'm at it, the guy in the picture above, posing with the Russian flag while wearing a Hezbollah T-shirt (Hey, wait a minute, shouldn't this guy hate an armed Shi'a Islamist terror group, just on principle) is one of the organizers of that rally. Just as it's funny to me (as a former conservative) that today's "Conservatives" love them some Russians...it's equally ironic that they apparently love them some Shi'a Islamic Fundamentalist terrorists, so long as those terrorists regularly launch rockets at Jews and engage in regular firefights with Israeli Defense Force soldiers. (Israel also being a major military-and-otherwise ally of the United States and a darling of most of the American conservative movement and religious right despite their abortions, extensive social welfare, LGBT rights, national health care and, well, the fact that they're a-secular-Jewish-majority state that stubbornly refuses to believe in or play along with the right-wing Fundamentalist Christian apocalyptic narrative.)

Then there was this...

This was said on Russian social media by another one of the White Supremacist rally organizers.

Hold on, this motherfucker just specifically advocated both kidnapping and rape and systematic sexual abuse of white women specifically...

If this dude was Black, Brown or a Muslim of any color he'd already have been hunted down and be sitting in a cell and conservatives would be shitting their colons inside out in apoplectic rage.

...And rightly so. They should be doing that no matter what color the murderous asshole is nor what belief system they follow.

So why aren't they anyway? I mean, obviously this guy's fringe, and probably most people who don't go looking for this kind of shit won't find it...right?

Then there was this, a white woman bicycling, not hurting anything, minding her own business, who got handcuffed and put in the back of a police cruiser because something something gazpacho I felt threatened hand-waving silly bullshit.

I guarantee you, if that Officer was a man of color he'd likely have been relieved and placed on suspension the second this got out, and he'd likely have been fired already.

But no, white dude, so it's still being investigated. I'm just saying, police state much? Come on, people, this shit is ridiculous.

Then there's this guy...

Only a major, nationally known ministry and Christian-Right figure, effectively advocating for mass murder and nuclear war...

Praising a Presidential speech to that effect...

Nothing to see here, right?

Happens all the time.

No big deal, eh?

I read yesterday that the College of the Ozarks, a small Fundamentalist Christian college in southwestern Missouri, plans on instituting a mandatory "Patriotism course" that includes land navigation, PT (Physical Training) and rifle marksmanship. That is some serious Young Pioneers style Communist bullshit right there. I'm not joking, that was exactly the type of stuff that young people, from Elementary to High-school age did. Not just Russians or other East Bloc countries...but kids from Marxist-aligned countries the world over, or even the children of movements that might themselves have nothing to do with Communism but were supplied or supported by Communists. I still have a picture somewhere...I think it was a National Geographic poster...from back in the 1980's of Namibian and South African boys in full Young Pioneers getup on the Isle of the Pines in Cuba, standing at attention and shouting Communist slogans.

Is that what we're working towards here? Is that kind of thing Okay, so long as one can tag it with some sort of label of "Christian?"

I don't think it is, but I'm asking you. Do you actually think Communist-style indoctrination in the name of Christ is going to work?

I was born in the early 1970's, that and even more the 1980's was the era in which I grew up. I'm coming into my mid-40's now. I was raised a moderate conservative and a Christian in a very Republican era. I was taught to stand for certain things, yes, but also to think for myself. Now, on the other side of the coin: You gotta figure there are a lot of people like me, my age and up in the many nations that were part of the former Soviet Union...who grew up Communist and far-Leftist and went to their Young Pioneers meetings and were taught to inform on their parents and fellow students for the greater glory of the Revolution...

Seriously, how many of those people do you think are still Communists?

Christ, with the debatable exception of the Chinese and the Vietnamese, nobody calls themselves Communists anymore...and even the Chinese and the Vietnamese aren't really Communists, but rather Capitalists who believe it is glorious to get rich...but have this sort-of socialistic economy and all the legacy trappings of Mao's and Uncle Ho's revolutions, and the memory of which has been shaped by...rather than shaping...Chinese and Vietnamese traditional culture. Cabbies in China will carry idols to Mao in their cars to drive away evil spirits, and there literally is a Temple dedicated to Uncle Ho somewhere. The Chinese government periodically has to put out reminders that Mao Zedong should not be worshiped as a god.

Comrade Irony could not be reached for comment...

...And people wanna stick Jesus into this kind of framework? How does any of that fit in with the raping and murdering assholes mentioned above?

Listen, Fascism was defeated on the field of battle and damned well left there, dead, for a fucking reason. Communism was defeated, ultimately, by bluff and brinkmanship, better leadership, and the fact that capitalist economics and modern democracy could better sustain and support a modern military industrial complex and national budget and more importantly, sustain the people needed for both while providing enough of a measure of personal freedom that...fundamentally...the people on the other side wanted what we had.

Ultimately, the reason that both Communism and Fascism fell was because their internal logic did not hold up against reality. I think the same can safely be said about modern populist-driven "Conservatism" which like China's modern Communism, follows the previous generations movements in name only.

But it's worse than that, really.

Let's get real, conservatives, it's not so much that ya'll have clutched a viper to your collective breast and expected it not to bite you...it's that there are honestly, probably way more snakes than there are people at this point. Ya'll are like Indy and Marion in the Well of the Souls in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the Nazis have just sealed you in, saying "Maybe in a thousand years even you'll be worth something, Cucks!"

They don't care about you. Trump doesn't care about you. The various Nationalists seeking to rewire the global economy to dump money into their pockets don't care about you.

Perhaps more to the point, large segments of the voter base ya'll have cultivated for decades with racist talk and "Screw the liberals," tax cuts, various resentments and white rage...they don't give a shit about you, either.

Ya'll got a problem, and it's beyond my ken to help you find a way out of it.

Besides, I'm going to have enough to do for the next 20 years after this is over helping to clean up the mess you made. Ya'll asked for this, and if you're that intent on not only self-destruction, but my destruction and that of everybody else around you...ya'll deserve what you're gonna get.

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

Remember that.