Stop the Hate.

When the forces of oppression come to maintain themselves in power against established law; peace is considered already broken. ~Che Guevara

Last night, I saw that Rep. Doug Collins (R-Georgia) said on Fox News that "Democrats are in love with Terrorists." That's news to me, considering that I'm a Democrat.

Seems to be news to most Democrats that I know or have ever even heard of as well. It's almost like this bitch was just making shit up.

While I'm at it, a lot of those 1960's radicals that wore Che Guevara T-shirts or berets and scruffy beards and dirty green fatigue jackets...a hell of a lot of those people are old white Boomer Republicans now.

Che, Fidel Castro, Nelson Mandela, the Afghan Mujahideen in the 1980's, there's a fine line between a beloved revolutionary and a feared and hated terrorist. Lots of those Mujahideen became the Taliban 20 years later, for example. But let me tell you something; I've never seen anybody wearing an Osama Bin Laden T-shirt. People still wear Che T-shirts nearly 60 years after he died.

And despite the fact that he basically was one, relatively few people these days would actually call Che a terrorist, even people like me who spent much of our lives on the opposite side of things.

Does any kind of in-depth, or indeed any (at all) examination of this stuff convey a "love" for revolutionaries or terrorists? No. In point of fact any effective counterinsurgency campaign has to have somebody who can put themselves in the enemy's shoes and see things their way for a minute if only to find some way to assuage or at least counter the demands of the insurgents and reduce their support among the populace? Endless escalating violence only begets more of the same, and eventually the costs become more than either side can bear.

But then Republicans these days seem to think any response to anything that doesn't include cruelty, harshness and violence toward those they deem as lesser (i.e. pretty much everybody else) as well as a lockstep march ever-rightward is somehow suspect or "weak." And then in the next breath they wonder why most people hate them and they're losing elections these last few years.

I for one am getting goddamned sick of Sniffles The Clown and his Tijuana donkey show presidency. Its twin ethics of "Fuck you, pay me" and "What have you done for me lately" piss me right the hell off.

This is not what I was taught.

Representative Paranoid's Twitter bio says he's a military chaplain. I feel damned sorry for anybody under his pastoral care, and that is not  a joke.

As I've asked countless times in the last 12 years or so "Where the fuck do they come up with this silly bullshit?"

Such statements as "Democrats love terrorists" are of course instantly, provably wrong, at least in the modern sense. They imply that the only valid answer to anything is unbending harshness, as if that in and of itself would not bring about a revolution and their downfall eventually. Given the Far-right fixation with trying to connect everyone from Grover Norquist to CNN to that guy who flipped them the bird in traffic to "Radical Islam" because something something gazpacho or they have, ya know, relationships with actual people who happen to be Muslim or don't parrot stupid hateful rhetoric, it's downright ridiculous if you think about it.

And how exactly does anybody expect anybody to survive in this day and age with constant demands that they stop thinking?

More to the point, the day will come when our enemies...our real enemies...China, Russia, and yes, possibly Iran or Islamic non-state actors like Daesh, will start to game the right-wing Fear-Industrial Complex and boomerang the fear and hate that it generates against other people...including at this point over two thirds of Americans...against our country, its government, or our armed forces, with the intention to destroy us. You could certainly argue that Russian election interference in 2016 was just such an effort.

I do happen to catch a little bit of Fox News here and there, mostly in the break room at work, and I'm going to be honest, I find it nothing but depressing and puerile. I used to be a conservative and I simply do not see any upside to believing in any of the stuff they peddle. Pump out enough fear and hate, and eventually people will hit the point where anger becomes hard to keep going, outrage flames out, and they just give in to despair. Like an ADHD kid falling asleep while staring at the TV, the lights just go out. I say this as somebody who was literally angry at my ex-wife for years.

We have this network pushing out all this hateful crap onto the body politic and then we wonder why we have so many mass shootings and suicides and stuff? I'm pretty sure one could get PTSD from watching enough Fox News.

I quite frankly wonder how Fox News viewers have any hope of anything, considering that all they hear all the time is how much everything sucks, how much of our world is an apocalyptic hell-scape, and somehow, our only salvation is Donald Trump?

Get me to believe that, and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't make it a month before I took my shotgun and blew my own brains out. But then I've known Trump was an adulterer, cheat and useless loser since I was a teenager. Who the fuck finds that inspiring?

Say what you will about the revolutionaries of prior generations, and for that matter even about the established powers that opposed them.

At least they could offer hope, have plans and stick to them (right or wrong) and might say things that might have genuine insight into the human condition, instead of offering an endless diet of fear, hate, and paranoia.

The only "hope" that people like Doug Collins offer anybody is the hope that they might get to have their boot on somebody else's throat before they die.

And that seems to me like a real shitty thing to hope for. Even the damned Communists could manage better than that. It seems to me like we should be doing better than this by now. At least some Republicans are trying to push back against this crap, but they are too damned few. We gotta find a way to do better than this. Stop the hate. Before we all die.