It's time we discussed something rather important. The issue at hand is, well, my presidency. The question has been raised, I know, as to just how I came to be elected to this most illustrious office. Or, whether or not I had been elected at all! To that I must answer: Of course! Of course I was elected, sweet America! Isn't the right to vote the very foundation of a democracy? Unfortunately, in the interest of national security, I'm not at liberty to discuss the details of the election. You understand. But rest assured, I AM your President because the appropriate people of this great nation decided I should be! I AM your duly elected representative. Of course, when the time comes, when my term is up, America will be free to elect a new President. And that person will have our full faith and confidence, and carry our collective values forward, into the future. Democracy, dear America. Democracy, now... and forever. ~"President" John Henry Eden, Enclave Radio, from the Fallout franchise.
Seriously?
Marjorie Taylor Greene said today that people like her are not the fringe, but the base of the Republican Party. So far as I can tell, lately, for once she's not wrong.
As I've said before, I used to be a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican. Over the course of the Aughts I pretty much got ran out of all three positions against my own will simply because I kept encountering...and in different contexts getting bum rushed out the door by...increasingly violent fanatics who'd swarm me simply for standing up for what I saw as the normal, human, humane thing to do. You know, simple shit like "Killing people is wrong" or "Hey, maybe we shouldn't start this war in Iraq based on obviously-made-up bullshit intelligence" and "No, you can't burn gay people at the stake." This shit reached it's first apotheosis during the 2008 Presidential campaign with the Republican Party's full-out embrace of conspiracy theories and racism. When Sarah Palin was nominated for V.P. that was it for me. Yeah, I made a few lame jokes about how she must've sucked John McCain's wrinkly old balls to get the position, but the next week, I ended up going to the Secretary of State and changing my Party affiliation from Republican to Independent.
And I stood by this decision through the 2010 midterms, which brought the Tea Party wave rolling up on our shores, and familiarized us all with people like Tea Party Joe Walsh.
2012, 2014, 2016 and so on. I walked away from the Republicans and never looked back.
I've followed Joe on Twitter since I got on there in 2016. At first it was simply because he said dumb shit and was entertaining to make jokes about. But over that time I watched him...the archetypal Tea Party conservative...become disgusted, at first with the lies and the Russia scandal, then with the bad behavior and racism and then get run out of the Republican Party just like I had. He went from Trump Supporter to outsider to Trump critic to Democratic voter in less time than it took me. I spent twice as long exiting conservatism.
And so far as I know, aside from losing some or maybe even most of his racism, his policy preferences haven't changed all that much. But the fact that he's not a Nazi makes him damned near a liberal at this point. That's how fucked up and polarized this shit is.
Your day will come, Marge. Your day will come. There will come a point where you won't...maybe can't...cross a line drawn in the sand by your Party, just like me and just like Joe. Why?
Because there is
no bottom, these people are moral Black Holes and I have an increasing feeling of dread that we're nowhere
near the Event Horizon.
And as I've said before, if Republican division and hate isn't stopped this is going to end with Americans shooting at each other. That looks to me like exactly what "Conservatives" want to have happen. In the replies to this snipped post somebody remarked that 'by the time we get to that point, women will have no rights and be stripped of office." I disagree with this, but only partially.
There will always be room for women in Republican politics. Sure, you might have to be dressed in some skimpy costume and chained to the dais used by the bloated slug-like forms of creatures like Donald Trump or Newt Gingrich, dancing for their entertainment above a pit filled with monsters, in the middle of their criminal court in a dusty desert palace...
But you'll be there. Their debased desires, their dicks and egos demand it.
Whatever economic and political and social compacts you think you've made, Republican women, they don't mean shit to the Republican
men. Not the current ones, at least. To follow one gratuitous
Star Wars reference with another...they're altering the deal, and telling you to pray they don't alter it any further.
What?
Seriously you didn't think all the anti-abortion crap for the last 50 years was about protecting actual kids, did you?
Yesterday in my state some 15 year old kid shot up his school with a pistol his dad bought on Black Friday, and he killed three of his fellow students. At least one more has died of wounds since then.
They're throwing the book at the kid and charging him as an adult, including First Degree Murder and terrorism charges. And the prosecutor is debating charging the parents also.
Good, but that won't help the dead much, will it? That won't give the kid a future and a life like having parents who gave a shit and kept their weapons locked down would have, eh?
Apparently, in 2016 the kid's mom sent an adoring, yet profanity-filled letter to then-President-elect Trump. I'm going to take a wild guess here and say she probably enabled and instilled the worst possible attitudes in her son.
And that's modern conservatism. "Deplorable" doesn't even begin to fucking cover it. Not at this point.
Hillary Clinton was too fucking kind.
Not only that; They ran with that label, made a big joke out of it, even, and have since done their absolute damnedest to become even worse and worse people. It's as if being the absolute slime of humanity was something they aspired to all along. Hillary Clinton called out the Nazi shit and I'm here to tell you at that point the Nazi shit had been brewing up for more than a dozen years and the "Christians" were balls-deep in making it that way.
And if you think that won't result in violence, consider this;
The atavistic non-state fascists have been outsourcing population control to murderers for years, and they don't give a shit if the people who get murdered are
kids, we've known that since Sandy Hook in 2012.
Now, I'm a gun guy, I'm a former conservative, and I've been following and writing about this type of shit for years. And I'm here to tell you these people's appetite for extremism, for violence, for outright fascism in both form and policy is only getting worse and will get worse yet.
Long term, their contempt for government, for facts and reality and their disdain for public health and science is probably one of the few consistent advantages that the rest of us have, and can expect to be able to exploit and maintain. If these people break off a piece of America like they want to, the first thing they're going to do is attempt to reinstate the 19th century, with elements of the Burning Times, the Dark Ages, the Crusades and the Yugoslav Wars, in roughly that order...
And if it comes to that, the rest of us have exactly as long as it takes the Marjorie Taylor Greene types to pussy-whip the Donald Trump and Kevin McCarthy types and eliminate or subjugate the Nancy Maces to get our own shit together...and then can only expect they will be overcome by something worse. They're already trying to find worse than Trump, for fuck's sake!
We will have exactly as long as it will take the fascists to beat and kill their side into a sufficient state of ideological purity or at least terror-based conformity to get our own shit together and organize a government for our parts of the country and to prepare to defend ourselves.
And lest you think these are decent fucking people at all, well here's some Conservative Catholic gloating about the likely further-gutting of
Roe V. Wade like it's some kind of a good thing for women. He's likely also scheming to try to use whatever social programs he's thinking about to try to force as many people as possible to be his kind of Catholic.
This kind of shit is usually pretty harmful to actual people, if history is any guide. That's what happens when you have dudes with an ideological hard-on going around trying to make other people's life decisions for them. Remember, one of these fucking people used a pregnant nine-year-old as a damn example, like that ain't the most fucked up thing you could imagine. Pro-life my goddamned ass! What the hell kind of life is that?!
And again, if these people get their shitty banana republic...don't think they won't use it to cause problems on a global scale. Don't think the radical Catholics won't find a way to elbow the remaining right-wing Protestants out of their way, much less the secular Trump Supporters...and don't think they won't pick fights with the Holy See, start various and assorted conflicts, or (and I've been saying this for awhile too) just plain form their own new religion with Trump as its godhead and start trying to conquer the world in its name.
The gold CPAC statue wasn't a joke, and even if it was, I guarantee you that enough people thought it wasn't.
But Trump doesn't really represent the Republican Party now, if anything he's their elder-god martyr. It's Boebert's and MTG's party now, with elements of Brett Kavanaugh and Matt Gaetz and Steve Bannon. If you think people like Mitch McConnel AKA "Yertle McTurtle and Other Lies" and Kevin "Et Tu, Marge?" McCarthy are ever going to regain control of their party again, you have another thing coming.
And that's because they abandoned morals in pursuit of power. Republicans set every previous belief they ever had on fire, for Donald Fucking Trump. And now it's the guys who schemed for decades to bring this all about that are going to be the ones to pay the price, to be subjugated first by what they unleashed, because there is no damn bottom.
They've replaced Abraham Lincoln with Donald Trump and then replaced Donald Trump with MTG and don't think it won't get even worse from there.
Prepare yourself accordingly, because they won't take any responsibility at all.
And remember, if you want a better country that means you have to be a better citizen, and a better person.
There is no bottom, until the rest of us say there is, and enforce that shit.
If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. ~Ronald Reagan
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