What shall it profit a man...

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow. 

~Winston Churchill

Seriously? This shit again?

I'll tell you one thing, speaking as a child of the late Cold War here, I am GOD damned tired of seeing "Conservatives" take the side of Russia in this ongoing political shit-show.

Russia, you know, the central focus of the Communist Soviet Union, that had nuclear weapons pointed at us for 40 years and was...and indeed still is...one of the main bogeymen of conservative fever-swamps.and probably will be until the last Baby Boomer is naught but shadows and dust. Russia, ruled by former KGB agent Vladimir Putin, and as the saying goes in Russia...there are no former KGB men. Russia, where there is an ongoing political project aimed at rehabilitating the political image of brutal Communist dictator Josef Stalin, who killed so many of his own people that even Moscow can presently only guess at the numbers.

And Tucker Carlson thinks we should take the side of Russia over Ukraine?

Fuck that.

Let me put it another way.

I don't ever want to hear another damn word about Jane Fonda ever again.

In July of 1972, Jane Fonda went to North Vietnam, as a lot of activists, civil rights leaders, pastors and teachers had done, for humanitarian and political purposes and, often, to see the damage from US bombing campaigns.

Somewhere along the way she posed with North Vietnamese soldiers, sitting on an anti-aircraft gun.

This led to an endless spew of hatred, primarily from Conservatives, but also from some US military veterans and even active duty troops, for at least 40 years. I still occasionally hear about it. Hell, there's people who weren't even born when this happened who I've heard this crap from down through the years.

Listen, yo, I have every damned reason to be one of those people myself. I certainly remember hearing the occasional disparaging of Jane Fonda from military people even in the mid-1990's and yet somehow I never picked it up. I honestly can't imagine why people would still get that worked up about some stupid thing some famous person did the year before I was even born, that had no real, lasting effect on...well, anything except to light their own fairly useless reputation on fire.

And most of the time, when that happens, people just move on.

I mean, for fuck's sake I mostly remember Jane Fonda from exercise videos in the 1980's and never saw why I should give a fuck.

To be quite honest, except that I see his smarmy, sneering face on the TV screen a lot of nights at work before I change the channel on break room TV's I wouldn't give a damn about Tucker Carlson, either. I've thought he was a useless twit for years, and thought so before he was on Fox News.

But in this case, it doesn't matter what I think and it's not some irrelevant political grudge from almost 50 years ago.

Lots of people watch Tucker Carlson's snidely sneering every night. I see a small but fairly persistent number of people at work, almost all of them older folks, watching Fox News with the glazed-over, zombie-eyed look of severely ADHD kids. I'm serious.

It's like a real Zombie Apocalypse, except that it somehow only ate these people's brains.

And not all of them are dedicated Republicans either, there's been more than one older registered Democrat in that group as well. 

So yeah, it's a problem for me when somebody with that kind of a following is teaching their viewers how to betray America and support Russia.

I mean, maybe it's just me, but I'm so old that I can remember when expressing this level of support for Russia on TV would result in a bunch of conservatives beating you up and then using your face to clean a toilet after a bunch of them took a shit in it. I remember prejudice against Chinese and Vietnamese neighbors on the part of older folks when I lived in California...because of Communism. I can remember hearing stories from my grandparents about people losing their jobs, indeed entire careers, for exactly this kind of talk. Hell, for statements that didn't even rise to this level.

And Fox News people have done plenty of hating on Jane Fonda...over something that happened before I was even born...and mind you I'm 46 years old.

But they're perfectly Okay with Tucker Carlson saying he supports Russia, multiple times?

What does Tucker, or Barr or McConnell or Trump have to do, pose next to an S-400 SAM system for you to get it?

I never thought I'd live to see the day when Conservatives forgot what Communism was...to the point where a lot of these stupid motherfuckers that claim the label these days unconsciously seek to emulate it, complete with desiring central control of the economy, leaders who want big parades with missiles and tanks, personality cults, and total disregard for truth in favor of whatever the party line is today...even if it contradicts what they said yesterday.

Conservatives desired to "Win" to so totally defeat Liberals, that they lost. It's not just that they've lost control of the culture, or the narrative, or this or that thing, or the other. They lost themselves.

Unless it was all a lie in the first place...which is a real possibility.

Unless their hatred for their own fellow Americans was so great...that they literally willingly became what they said they hated for so many years. Or maybe they're just plain stupid and don't know the difference.

Either way, 30 years after its own fall, the Iron Curtain has claimed the Republican Party at long last.

What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world, yet lose his own soul?

If you wonder why I'm not a conservative anymore, that's why. I can't sign on to the idea of hating my fellow Americans and my own country just because people don't agree with me.

Conservatives, the "America, Fuck Yeah!" people until about 2015 or so, are now openly preaching hatred of America since over two thirds of us didn't join their cult.

If we don't vote the bastards out and drive them from the public sphere down to the subatomic level, what do you think these fucking people are going to do with that hatred?

Vote the bastards out, and then be prepared for when they want to make a fight of it.

Without apology to 1950's conservatism, better Dead than Red, I say.