Who needs Zombies when we have Republicans?

O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America! God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
~America the Beautiful.

When I got to work the other night, I saw that Fox News has already begun fear-mongering and spreading disinformation about Coronavirus.

Then, the next day, I saw this.

I'm not sure I get this shit. One news source sounds like it won't be happy until you're hiding under your bed with a shotgun, getting your Fox News alerts on your cell phone and waiting for the world to end...then this sack of shit tries to blow it all off as some kind of effort to "get" Donald Trump.

Because of course, it has to be. Conservatism, meet your orange Messiah.

I don't think he's gonna get you into heaven, though.

I really don't get these people, I just don't. They seem to want the end of civilization...but then expect that while they're hiding under their bed with a shotgun waiting for Boko Haram or Bernie Sanders or whoever they don't like this week to come crashing through the wall like the Kool-Aid Man, that when they plug their phone into the one wall outlet they can reach...it'll still charge, their favorite fear-drug will keep broadcasting, etc. etc. The world is ending, but the President is still campaigning for re-election, the stock market just took a major (and probably overdue, to be honest) dump, and will likely tank even more...but it's still trading. Life goes on, and somehow the addled and blinded mob pretends that it doesn't.

Yet because Bernie Sanders idiotically enough praised the Cuban Revolution and Fidel Castro's literacy program on Sunday, to hear "Conservatives" tell it you'd think that common citizens were fighting Zombies in the streets of New York City with baseball bats, pipes and hockey sticks while rich people watched it all absent-minded like on CNN as the Army massed in the suburbs, setting up its full Cold War green kill-power to try to show the 24-hour news cycle that "something" was being done.

Yeah, except this ain't World War Z, and I'm nowhere near as good of an author as Max Brooks. And no, that doesn't excuse Bernie's abrasive attitude or political stupidity...

And then I see this.

Acting deputy secretary in Homeland Fucking Security and the son of a bitch is using a Johns Hopkins Coronavirus map app?

Say what you will about Bernie Sanders or Mike Bloomberg, I somehow think either one of them would be smart enough to be getting their updates from the CDC and various intelligence agencies, and if either didn't understand something I rather suspect they'd at least have a person with a brain in their head nearby to tell them to at least keep their questions in-house rather than Tweeting about it like they're Joe on the street and displaying their utter ignorance before all and sundry. I mean, don't get me wrong, I could see either of those guys screwing it up some other way, but not like this, not something that should be this goddamned obvious.

And of course, why would Republicans let something as serious as a global pandemic that's threatening to crash the global economy and already has the United States economy well on its way to recession get in the way of a good old fashioned political rat-fucking by somebody's ninny of a wife who has no business being any closer to people in government than an after-work cocktail party?

Not to mention, if it hasn't already it's about to slam the door on a hell of a lot of global just-in-time supply chains but good...kind of hard in this day and age to compile lists of "the disloyal" to weed out, all without computers and networks that function, because without a functioning global supply chain we're not much more than a few weeks or months out from just that as things stand. So, unless your old bag bitch ass wants to write that shit out by hand I'd shut the fuck up.

 'Cause ya know what? That's how they did it back in the day. You want to try and act like you're some kind of Dark Ages Catholic big shit motherfucker? Get out a quill pen and write it your own damn self...except oh, wait, in the kind of world Opus Dei thinks it wants to go back to, European women...right along with their men, even men of power...often did not know how to read and write.

In the Dark Ages, the Islamic World was a place of science and learning, while Charlemagne and his lords struggled to master the high art of writing their own names.

Oh, and don't ask what that kind of world might hold for Clarence, either. I'm pretty sure neither of you want to know.

Here's a pro tip from way back before they had computers, when global pandemics took longer to spread and your ass wouldn't have been allowed to speak to a man in any position of power other than your husband, Ginny.

Republicans act like they want to burn heretics, and yet somehow for all their claimed conservatism and historical understanding and religiosity, they don't understand that one sure way to be branded a heretic or a witch and put to the question (torture) and condemned to the fires was to be a woman seeking power or even control over her own life or anything beyond that which the Church dictated was acceptable.

And here's another freebie for your dumb ass:

The loyalty of civil servants, elected representatives, government officials and military personnel is the the Constitution of the United States. The Framers put that in there for a goddamned reason, because they didn't want to live in that kind of a world and neither do the vast majority of people now living today.

Stick that in your angry-ass looking mug and chew on it, bitch.

And then there's this goddamned nut, some Eastern EU Nazi-wannabe from the look of him.

In this guy's world, Literacy is "Communist."

Listen folks, I was taught to read and write by Christians, Baptists specifically, most of them certainly conservatives. These were people who did not shy from telling me that the Church of a different historical era would have wanted me to be an illiterate fool, so as to preserve its own power. It wasn't enough, they taught me, to just believe. You had to know what you believed, and why you believed it, and believe it because you wanted to. That meant knowing Church doctrines and theology and the Word so you could check for yourself if somebody was lying to you.

And checking somebody's words against the Bible requires being literate.

Understanding what the Bible says, requires being literate, not only in how to read words and string sentences together, knowing the Word requires an understanding of culture, of history, and of the principles of rhetoric and writing so as to understand parables and themes.

Because let me tell you something, if these faithless sons of bitches will lie to you about some virus that can take your life on this Earth, they'll sure as hell lie to you about the Truth. They'll sure as hell lie to you about the Word of God so they can take your life in the next world, too.

Because these people? From the lowest MAGA-hat wearing schmuck all the way up to Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin? They don't want to be Presidents or even kings, they want to be gods.

Without literacy, without understanding, they could tell you that the Bible is an auto parts manual, or that an auto parts manual is the Bible. And don't think these fucking people don't have just exactly enough contempt for their own followers to try precisely that, if this mess goes on for much longer.

And don't think many of their followers wouldn't be braying like jackasses right along with them if they could be convinced such might scratch their itch for partisan hatred or upset the people they don't like.

It's not about Jesus, and it never was. It's not, in any meaningful sense, about political conservatism as that term's meaning is commonly understood. It's about hate, and nihilism, and power and wealth for the very few at the expense of the rest of us.

A functioning modern nation, or hell even an agrarian Enlightenment-era republic that still held part of its populace in chains and denied the vote to all but property-owning men...requires and always has required an educated and informed citizenry and an effective non-partisan government apparatus to run it. These fucking people? They don't want that. If you think they give a fuck about America other than what they might steal from it, you have another thing coming.

Any functioning political or religious system, let alone a thriving one, requires educated people who give a shit to provide input to keep it from stagnation and death.

By that estimation the Republican Party died ten years ago. It's since turned into an undead horde that's trying to kill us all.

One more thing: The pull quote, that first stanza of America The Beautiful? That song was written by a teacher, Katherine Lee Bates, who is today generally understood to have been a lesbian and lived with another woman for most of her life.

Yet conservatives sing that song all the time.

Education, expertise, facts, history, and proper theology matter, people. Truth matters, even when it's inconvenient, in fact especially so, because if you go by it and live according to it, it can be an absolute defense if you're accused. By the same token, after awhile, if you don't believe in the things you say, it shows and people are going to find out. Respect is earned, by every action, every day. Like one's credibility or honor, once lost...you can't get it back.

There is a baseline of reality, period.

To believe anything else is to end up accepting the absurd notion that a virus cares about your politics.

It's time to get serious and drive these motherfuckers out of power. Vote, among other things, like your life depends on it...because it probably does.