Pulling Down The Golden Idols (American Revelation XVII, Eleven.)

Captain Mandrake: General Ripper, sir, as an officer in Her Majesty's Air Force, it is my clear duty, under the present circumstances, to issue the recall code, upon my own authority, and bring back the wing. If you'll excuse me sir. [Mandrake tries all exits and finds them locked] I'm afraid sir, I must ask you for the key and the recall code. Have you got them handy sir?

General Ripper: I told you to take it easy, Group Captain. There's nothing anybody can do about this thing now. I'm the only person who knows the three letter code group.

Capt. Mandrake: Then I must insist, sir, that you give them to me.

[Ripper lifts a folder off of his desk, revealing a pistol]

Capt. Mandrake: Do I take it, sir, that you are threatening a brother officer with a gun?

Gen. Ripper: Mandrake, I suppose it never occurred to you that while we're chatting here so enjoyably, a decision is being made by the President and the Joint Chiefs in the war room at the Pentagon. And when they realize there is no possibility of recalling the wing, there will be only one course of action open: total commitment. Mandrake, do you recall what Clemenceau once said about war?

Capt. Mandrake: No. I don't think I do sir, no.

Gen. Ripper: He said war was too important to be left to the Generals. When he said that, fifty years ago, he might have been right. But today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

...

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

I saw this yesterday, and it made me think of something.

As I've said before I have a church background and was a conservative for a lot of my life. I was never this kind of that shit, though.

In Evangelical, Fundamentalist and particularly Pentecostal churches there's a fair number of shitty little manipulators who append "God Told Me" to every stupid thing they say because they think it'll make it easier for them to get their way. In my experience a lot of these types fall into two categories; Women with issues, and the abusive shithead guys who prey upon them.

Likewise in Conservatism and the Republican Party, there's a certain weird loser type of dude (and yes, they're most often dudes, and usually creepy weirdos with a side of physically unappealing at that...think JD Vance) who spanks the monkey to the idea of manipulating their way into total control of some narrow slice of life...and then using that to rule with an iron fist over everything else.

And those two groups of people are where Project 2025 comes from.

Basically the "Project 2025" plan boils down to a two step process;  #1 "Declare everything Conservatives don't like is 'Porn." #2 Ban "Porn" and throw pretty much everybody else in jail, or just murder the rest of us. If this line of attack was working half as well as they thought it would've, these motherfuckers would be saying that paying workers adequate wages leads to sexual licentiousness.

This "Porn" thing is literally an all-purpose attack that exists in these fucking people's fever dreams alone, and they'd have to seize totalitarian Power to use it...but these motherfuckers are so far gone off into whacky-land that they think it's all a sure thing, and they don't even realize how weird their freakish sexual obsessions and performative fear of sexuality look to everybody else. (And also, these people are perverts.)

And two weeks ago, these fucking people were convinced they were going to win everything, and that nobody else would even fight back.

These clowns literally think if they can take enough political Power, that everybody else will just submit. They apparently did not pay attention during the Trump years when in 2017 these same morons (with an assist from the media endlessly hyping JD Vance and Hillbilly Elegy) were pretty much going around telling people "You have to be Conservative now, you just HAVE TO!" No reason given, no nothing. They just thought they "Won" and everybody else would have to obey. These people's "Conservatism" is not much more than a childish interpretation of religion.

And they've been mad as hell that the entire rest of the country pretty much shrugged and said "Hell nah, bro, and I'm gonna vote for the other guy." All these years later it's gotten bad enough that probably at least a third of Democratic voters are basically Republicans (And somehow Republicans haven't noticed that people can leave, and are in fact, leaving.)

Then Republicans started doubling down and put up Roy Moore to replace Jeff Sessions in Alabama. Somehow, molesting girls and young women and acting like such a creepy pervert that the local Mall threw your ass out 40 years ago is NOT Porn.

The Holy Roller type Christians have taken over the Republican Party to such a degree that the Pentecostal church model of "Pay, Pray, and Obey" is basically what's expected of most Republicans...and they're getting worse.

So I suppose it's no wonder that these same fucking people think they can just sit there On High and try and dictate who's Black or not, like colonial overlords playing divide-and-conquer games. It's like they have no idea that this is America and Black people done made up their own minds who was Black or not a long damn time ago.

And it's utterly inconceivable to them...especially after they ran Joe Biden out basically just by calling him "Old" ad infinitum that these fucking people are suddenly losing to Kamala Harris.

But the truth is, Joe Biden isn't entertaining, nor does he try to be...and he works off a different, older-school model of Being President, which I appreciated, but then I voted for Bush 43, too.

Please Clap, I guess.

I'll admit I was surprised by the meteoric rise of Kamala's campaign and especially how she basically grew her own organization in like, two days, but the difference is, I'm impressed. Unlike MAGA Republicans, I have the wit to see when things need to change, and apparently they did.

And the Democrats have suddenly seriously wounded the Great Orange Dragon simply by calling Republicans "Weird" and publicly pointing out basic facts (Which I've been doing for nine years mostly just because it needed to be done, so this is a natural fit for me.) 

But Republicans will get worse.

Trump himself is acting like the secret sauce of this whole damn thing is that he can just call for a bloody, glorious revolution and it will magically be so, and that he'll win such a thing by some kind of default.

I mean, you'd think the fact that people have flocked to the K-Hive on an unprecedented scale, that political momentum has been with the Democrats since just a few hours after Biden stepped aside and that it's finally setting in with a lot of us that this MAGA shit could be over (and even a lot of Republican voters seem relieved by that) would be something they'd fucking notice.

So if I had to guess, the Revolution will be short, and it will not work out the way these goons think it will.

In fact, I'd argue that the consolation-prize MAGA Banana Republic they thought they were gonna be able to break off even if they lost gets smaller with every couch-fucker joke and Republicans-are-weird meme.

But if you want to stop it, especially stop it all the way, you're still going to have to step up and do your duty and be a better citizen.

But it seems like that's the way things are trending, and it has Republicans terrified.

They're about to find out the hard way that they cannot turn on a dime from living in constant fear of everything to being brave just because that's what suits the needs of their political masters.

Good.

You have to be brave all the time, and make a good-faith effort to control your fear and act to protect both yourself and those less fortunate. You have to believe in Civilization...for everybody.

Because the alternative is to become These Fucking People.

Remember that, because it's going to be on the test later.

You either believe in freedom or you don't...and sometimes, you have to fight for it.

Freedom isn't free.

The thing that kills me, is that these self-styled heirs to Ronald Reagan and to a previous generation of conservatives and Republicans who taught me to be brave and to stand for things would rather live in Fear than in Civilization, and want to stand for nothing at all...unless it's Donald Trump.

Anything but America.

Anything but "Love Thy Neighbor."

Like what kind of loser makes Trump their God, yo?

And I guess...anything but acting like the people they said they were and facing the future with some courage. Like they think it's easier to just worship Golden Idols?

I can't make that shit make sense, yo.

I'm tired of this Nonsense, enough is enough. Stop with the weird shit, it's not funny.

It's time to pull the Golden Idols down.

Let's get after it.

Слава Україна!

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech, and expression—everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium.

It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.

That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

— Franklin D. Roosevelt, excerpted from the State of the Union Address to the Congress, January 6, 1941.

Ten

"The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride." ~Volodymyr Zelenskyy, allegedly 25 February 2022, Associated Press