Beyond Outrage, Beyond Hope

This might be too much for me. Most literally, it makes me physically ill. Trying to put into words the depth of my visceral reaction may be impossible. It's simply the most despicable, horrifying, destructive, and fundamentally threatening thing going on in the body politic of the US. It's beyond the lying of Fox "news;" it's beyond the formless and factless rage of the tea bag people. This even overshadows, as a threat to everything we are as a country, the abuse of Senate rules by the Republicans that has all but ground governance to halt. It is worse than (although it's abetted by) the dereliction of duty of most of our news media. This is, unarguably, evidence of the beginning of the end. Unless even those uselessly enraged and idea-disencumbered right wingers wake up and say, enough. Enough. We are a country of laws, that values laws, whose legal system protects us all. Us all. All of us. Laws.

ENOUGH.

I refer to the demon spawn of Dick Cheney. I refer to her horrible group of America haters. I refer to the fact that there are people out there -- marinating in putrefaction, as expected, on Fox "news" but also, evidently, in all walks of life (using the term loosely) -- who don't see the danger. The disease.

This person, this evil thing, this smirking embodiment of blind hatred and the unapologetic disseminator of desperate lies, has declared revenge on lawyers assigned to defend accused terrorists in American courts. This damned individual, who most surely hasn't the foggiest appreciation of the Constitution or the laws that have stemmed from it, who would destroy the foundations of a legal system that has been the model for most of the civilized world, who is regularly given air time when she should, in fact, be deprived of air (at least the kind that wafts outside of damp and moldy basements), would happily -- because it makes her famous, and garners laudatory grime from the scum that love her, and because she's desperately trying to keep her felonious father out of jail -- ruin the lives of people doing the bidding of that very Constitution which she ignores so thoroughly. (I can't find the will directly to link to her ad, but there's a link within the previous one.) What a horrible, fraudulent, venal excuse for a human being.

Well, I guess those were words; but really, I have no words. This is as low as it gets; were she and her bootlickers to get their way, we'd no longer be a country of laws. We'd no longer be a country at all.

It's so obvious. And yet, there she is, a darling of much of the media, mostly -- but not limited to -- Fox "news" and the radio screamers. And there are listeners who give credence to her, and who (you can read it in comments on various sources that have covered it, but I don't recommend it), in the most despicable of language, filled with the sort of glee that only springs from pure evil (and I don't even believe in such a thing), agree with her. It's not just disheartening; it's not just depressing; it's not just dismaying. It's so far beyond any of those that I can't express it. The words stick somewhere near my diaphragm; they close my throat. Because it means we are so far from reason in parts of this country that there remains no basis for hoping we can get beyond where we are. We shall not overcome. It's too potent, it's too attractive to those that prefer hatred to hope, in whom it's simply not part of their makeup to think beyond their own sad fears and selfishness, to whom the idea of democracy in all its ramifications is as foreign as breathing underwater.

Times are tough. Right wingers, evidently, aren't. They talked tough, oh yes. But they got their deferments. And now, in the heat of great need, they have melted. Called upon by the times to rise to new heights, to honor what has served us through wars and depressions, they have sunk to new lows, descended into the mongering of fear and hate and the wholesale peddling of lies. And they're the ones that claim the mantle of patriotism, even as they reject the fundament of what has -- until now -- made us great. As they destroy us from the inside, deliberately, thoroughly.

Patriots.

I'd laugh, if I could.

It's come to this. When tested, we have failed. Cowed by people in caves, and by the premeditated and self-serving terrorizing of our populus by politicians like the Cheneys and virtually all Congressional Republicans, and the RWS™, we are on the verge of complete capitulation to fear, of renunciation of the rule of law and democracy. At a time when we are most in need of reason, we get this. We fall upon ourselves. We grovel in a level of discourse so low that the founding fathers would fail to recognize what they have wrought. One of the most brilliant of whom, as we know, defended British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre.

How pathetic these distorters of reality have become, how craven in the face of danger, how they recoil from the challenge of real problems that need real solutions. How quickly they shrink from the hard work of democracy. How they cheerlead and stoke anger. How far down people such as Liz Cheney have dragged us, septic, into the cesspool in which they live, when we most need to lift ourselves up; how easily such thoughts as hers take hold and, like the slime that they are, spread over us all, suffocating, eating our bones. And, it seems, we barely notice.

See? I have no words. None, at any rate, that convey convincingly and sanely the awfulness of these people. They will destroy us. And, even as we breathe our last, they'll find someone else on whom to blame it.

Is there anyone on the right willing to speak out? Anyone who calls him- or herself a true conservative willing to condemn Liz Cheney and the horseshit she rode in on?

Anyone?

And while you're at it, anyone on the right want to disagree with this soulless succubus that, even as he keeps arresting terrorists at a greater rate than her putrid progenitor, President Obama isn't serious about terrorism?

Anyone?

[Update, 3/5: Well, well, a couple of conservatives (none who troll these waters, of course) have spoken up. One even went so far as to use the word "unfortunate."]