Hell Is Empty... (Death Spiral, Part Two.)

And the rest of the men which were not killed by these plagues yet repented not of the works of their hands, that they should not worship devils, and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and of wood: which neither can see, nor hear, nor walk:

Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorcery, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts. ~Revelation 9:20-21
...Because all the demons are here.

And making that connection is probably insulting to demons.

Seriously, watching the flaming goddamned train wreck that is the 2020 Republican National Convention, it's hard to shake the feeling that Republicans have lost the argument. It doesn't really matter what argument, or how you frame the thing.

When somebody like Kimberly Guilfoyle just abandons all argument or even pretext of having one, and just starts shrieking at people...and keeps it up for seven minutes...this isn't a political nomination convention anymore, it's an abusive relationship in which one of the partners is in dire need of mental health care. I mean, come on, if Hillary Clinton had done something like that, Republicans would still be smugly bringing it up 20 years from now.

When Donald Trump Junior goes from merely being Beardo Von Fail-son to looking like he spent all day snorting cocaine at Benny's House of Blow, y'all got issues and you shouldn't need somebody like me to tell you that.

When one of your speakers is the kid who literally made a name for himself standing there sneering at an old Native American dude...you ain't got a damn thing to say that's worth saying, come on now. When somehow what the Republican Party is now manages to make Ted Cruz look less punchable it's time to take a good hard look in the mirror.

When the calmest-sounding people in the room...virtual or otherwise...are the St. Louis gun couple, whose banal white-bread stupidity is exceeded only by their incompetence at weapons-handling, even the most hard-bitten, jaded Republican pundit should be able to see there's a fucking problem.

And somebody should have...should have long ago had...the guts to step up and clean house.

That no one did simply confirms my belief...backed by personal experience...that the Republican Party has been rotting out for at least a generation.

People think Trump talking about maiming migrants is shocking, yes, and rightly so.

But, as I've written previously, Evangelicals were ranting about burning gay people at the stake in 2002.

The Republican Party has been losing its base for at least a generation, probably longer.

Ivory Tower, Shining City On A Hill, it doesn't really matter all that much what you call it if the floodwaters of evil and unreason have been slicing through the limestone and washing away the sand beneath, often encouraged...at least tacitly...by the Republicans themselves in their eternal desire to screw for political advantage and their unceasing drive to try to make everything political in a balls-out effort to try and squeeze more votes out of the diminishing returns from an increasingly aging and monochromatic...and shrinking...base.

As I've said before I greatly prefer Reagan's Biblical ideal of the Shining City on a hill to the daily tire-fire bullshit-fest of the Trump administration, but when you factor in that by the time Reagan spoke those famous words, Newt Gingrich had been in Congress for a decade stirring up trouble on Capitol Hill and perfecting the tactics that would turn the Republican Party into the compromise- and facts-proof information- and ideological-silo that it is today...and those were the very scorched earth ideological tactics that would lead us to Trump and every bit of the current mess! Reagan's shining city on a hill was being undermined before he even rhetorically built the thing. Trumpism is nothing but a hologram. This mess is Newt Gingrich and his tactics of political warfare carried out all the way to the end.

It's no wonder these fucking people can't even hold a convention without insulting your intelligence, lying to you or screaming at you.

There's a lot of strands of Republicanism that have always been shit and note I say this as a former Republican who was aware of them at the time. And as I've written before I was a mid-stage casualty of those fucking people's efforts to kick everybody else out.

Today's Republicans are the damned devils.

And they are, in point of fact, here.

They don't deserve to have the power that they do have, and if the rest of us don't step up and take it away from them, and protect our own freedom...well that's on us.

If we want a better country we have to be better citizens, We The People have got to be better people.

Part One.