Lizard Brain

Simon Adebisi: See, we are all of us bad men, even you. I know you have come to destroy me.

Kareem Said: Simon, I don't want to destroy you. I want to help you change.

Simon Adebisi: That is what would destroy me.  

~From the HBO Series "Oz" Season 4, Episode 8 "You Bet Your Life."

Over the course of the last five years, I've come to believe that basically everything Republicans said they stood for, for at least the last 25 years, was a lie. 

Over the last one month and four days, I can see that even the things these fucking people have said they believed in since Donald Trump slimed his way into our political discourse are nothing but bullshit. After five years of an endless firehose of bullshit from an increasingly dementia-addled liar, too many Republicans no longer know which way is up. After five years of covering for the same with slavish devotion, even as they cursed Trump behind his back, too many Republicans no longer care enough to try and find their way out. 'I go to parties sometimes until four, it's hard to leave when you can't find the door' as that old song goes.

After just five years of "Conservative values" being whatever Donald Trump said they were, Republicans have forgotten that there ever was anything else, and more to the point they stand exposed for this, whatever spell they had over the electorate as a whole is broken, and the only thing they had to hold themselves up was, in fact, Trump.

Republicans made it that way, on purpose, with malice aforethought.

And now that Trump is going down, for reasons that should mostly be obvious, they have nothing to stand on. Worse, because even some of them did their jobs and ran elections in their states the right way, even their own voter base no longer trusts them.

I tried to tell them, whether it was hate for Obama or love for Trump, making your entire Party, indeed entire political movement all about one guy was a bad idea. Now they have nothing to stand for, or on.

But nature abhors a vacuum. Faced with an absolute lack of conservative or Republican leadership, and having been on a diet of increasingly cult-like Trump-worship for the past five years, the Republicans' idiot lizard-brained voter base itself is rushing in to fill the gap, while too much of it doesn't know anything, hasn't the slightest idea of how anything works, and hasn't been taught any of this stuff because Republicans spent 50 years defunding education and another 30 years spreading hate for profit on talk radio.

And that's what the base has been left with to hang on to, hate. Hate, and unwavering blind worship of Trump.

True enough, one hell of a lot of Republicans...and their base...have accepted that reality is what it is and simply moved on. They'll try again in another four years, or at least try to keep the Republican Senate majority.

If you haven't noticed, those people have been cast out of the tribe.

Not only that but MAGA in general, and Trump in particular have the knives out for them.

I strongly suspect that these motherfuckers are going to end up making the Bernie Bros and the Progressives look level-headed before this is done, except that they already have found their unicorn and have no need to hunt one up.

Of course the difference between modern Republicans and the Democrats as a general rule is that Republicans absolutely will line up behind some random drunken bum that somebody fished out of a dumpster and bought off with a bottle of Jim Beam, so long as that bum has an (R) next to their name and expresses enough hatred of liberals and moderate Republicans. People like Steve Bannon and Donald Trump are proof of this, especially the former.

Not that what's left of the Republican base is, itself, any better. Part of the problem is that political partisanship is a hell of a drug, and for a lot of these people it has become a substitute for religion. This is what happens when you have a generation of teaching political conservatism as Christianity. 

And I'm here to tell you drugs and religion are two of these people's favorite subjects, since the "Get High On Jesus" crap from the 1970's and the increasing push to spread Pentecostalism and the Prosperity Gospel in American Christianity, drugs, money, and religion are increasingly blended together and seen as one and the same. More to the point, when you can get high off your own brain chemicals...who needs anything else?

Throw in 20 years of the glorification of reality-show stupidity and simple indecency, mix with five years of Trump-cultism and the picture to your right is where that ends up. 

I found this picture on Twitter, if I have to be scarred by having seen this, so do you.

I'm not sorry. I can remember when conservatism and/or Christianity meant that a person wouldn't conduct themselves like this, or dress (?) like this or go out in public this way. I can remember when people had self-respect.

This bullshit is getting out of control and if you can't see that we need to start doing something about it you're part of the goddamned problem.

I'm not sure how we're going to do this or what we're going to do about it, but realizing that you have a problem is generally the first step towards fixing it, and having the moral courage to face the journey that it takes to do that. From my own experience it's a long, hard road and it's usually pretty hard to tell where it will end up. 

But I can damned well tell you where it began.

Assholes like Newt Gingrich, and Tom DeLay, and those who are like them, adulterers, cheaters and liars who were oh-so-conveniently forgiven upon their adoption of either Evangelical vaguely-Christianity or Right-wing Catholicism...until their personal proclivities or various hypocrisies became too much and might become a negative, and then they were out and that was that.

Modern Republicans lack even the level of conscience, intelligence or scruples that they had 20 years ago, and that wasn't much.

But here's the thing, they didn't have a President who embodied the shittiness of people like Newt Gingrich until Trump came along. Now? They crave to have nothing else, again, ever. They want to be able to mainline being told how great they are by a fake-ass racist reality TV clown who couldn't make a profit running a casino and who's kept afloat by billions of dollars of credit...forever. They want incompetent government, societal disruption, and The Cruelty Is The Point...forever.

Think about that, for a second, because they won't.

And that's what we have to do something about.

Voting Trump out was only the beginning. Even now, Republicans are studiously trying to ignore that the last five years since Trump slithered down his golden escalator are a Thing That Never Happened, And Even If It Did, It Wasn't Our Fault.

Because nothing ever is, is it? Come on, really?

If we ever want to have a better country, we have to be better citizens.

And we have to vote these Republican motherfuckers out, all of them.

This lizard-brain crap ain't going to cut it.