Surely if i should fear suicide bombers who kneel on one kind of prayer rug, then i'm just as right to worry about the abortion-doctor murderers and their fan club, who simply kneel on differently patterned rags, or intone their respective adorations with slightly varied inflections, yet still head onto their own mayhem, singing glory to their god to be. As if we should see their work as holy. As if the choice of words said made a difference.
Of course, for some evangelicals, the potential for igniting an international America-centric hate-fest against our own brand of "Christianity [copyright 380 AD, patent pending]" IS the whole point. For those folks, this mess means messiah and this is all just a page in the Master's master-plan. Taking up the zealots' unfinished crusade against the Arab world seems like the quickest way to create their own sequel to a certain Jenkins-LaHaye series. For you, that may have been a fad best left behind, but for the religious right, it's their daily bread. Oh well, for the unraptured rest of us, it's the fabled lake of fire, while Christians get to enjoy box seats in a handy cloud-side perch to revel in our roasting and chirp, "I told you so!" for eternity, and ever and ever, amen.
Of course, that's just one voices amongst the many co-conspirators the Republicans have promised our next two years to. Don't forget the "never-met-a-tax-they-would-not-try-to-skip-out-on-&-then-insult-my-intelligence-by-calling-that-act-'patriotism,'" Libertarian voices in Tea Party chorus of the GOP's hallelujah symphony? These are the folks who call for no laws what so ever, except the ones they intend to place on a woman's body once they gain the power, to keep the "Christians [void where prohibited, some restrictions may apply]" quiet.
And the most important freedom for a liberty-loving Libertarian is freedom from taxes. This cabal intends to get you to want to repeal the Sixteenth Amendment and end all federal income tax, thus wiping out about 45% of the national revenue. So with no one paying taxes, not only could Grover Norquist finally drown the by-then-vestigial federal government in the bathtub of his choice, social services could also be slaughtered, leaving millions to starve, die of illness or homelessness.
If these "Tenther" types get their way, Social Security, like all other social services, will be sold to the highest bidder, and would then deliver the lowest-possible-cost services to only the oldest of survivors. See? Through the miracle of privatization, public sector responsibility gets deferred; and yet we still have to pay for half the service purchased at twice the price. That's the power of the market for you. Capitalists call this "competition" and "Ayn Rand-style idealism." The humans in the audience probably just cringe and hiss "heartless."
Abortions would be banned, faster than one could say "saline solution," swelling the population third world country style, further straining our resources and expanding the rolls of the poor. Businesses could rape the public with impunity, as they have tried to do every since the invention of money whenever a government will not stop them. And they would once again offer only the lowest wages and the highest of prices for the shoddiest of goods. Though at least there'd still be plenty of jails.
And don't even ask me to tell you what they'd do to gay people.
Oh yes, and everybody would have plenty of guns! If you cannot see the potential hazards to corporate profitability from such a doomsday scenario, you must have been cribbing your investment strategies from Meg Whitman.
On the other hand, if any handful of liberal "pet issues" should really, unimaginably, somehow actually rise to preeminence, then that would also be fiscally fatal to corporate interests, guaranteeing a monetary shift that would have to be measured in the trillions. Universal health care, ethical immigration and wage laws, corporate crime prosecution for Wall Street manipulations and robo-foreclosures, 9/11 truth, FEMA camps, dismantling the military- and/or the prison-industrial complexes, eliminating derivatives trading, mandating clean energy development and, most importantly, every poor man's fantasy--getting the rich guys to once again pay their due in taxes.
I'd even settle for a flat tax if they just paid theirs like the rest of us and didn't "capital gains" their way out of it. If they paid into social security, like the rest of us based on our whole income, instead of topping out around $107,000, even if you make millions. Tricky, huh? Of course, they know all the tricks. Their servants built in those loopholes, just for them to swim through. Now that they got away with building this government to be custom-designed to their liking, at our expense, the least they could do is pay for it, i say. Wait, did i say rich guys paying their share? Silly me.
So none of that stuff will ever happen.
That's why the rich generally prefer to buy their own Congress instead of using the ones the unwashed masses might accidentally pick for them. With the Citizens United case we got a speculum-eyed view of the birth of the upcoming kleptocracy. Now that the rich openly buy their servants, we'll see what happens when the Masters charge what Americans express. Not surprisingly, more and more these days, when the rich shop for their congressmen, they tend to stare in the mirror.
In a job market where the starting pay is $174,000, and then there's all those expense accounts to abuse, 44% of Congress are already millionaires and the average combined wealth is more than $660,000, with an average of well over a million apiece in the Senate. The Millionaire's Club has finally lived up to its name. In Boehner's speech declaring victory for their glorious revolution newly anointed Chairman John announced his plan for the new People's Republic of America. "People's agenda will be our agenda!" Boehner proclaimed. I guess we know which people he is referring to. His own.
As Michelle Bachmann brayed when asked on MSNBC about the message of election night, and it wasn't her long promised investigation of Congressional Democrats as "UnAmerican." No. She said the president has to learn to work "for all the American people, not just those who make under $250,000!" In other words, not just the 98% of the population she is not a part of. No wonder Congress has turned on Obama, or anyone else, that talk about taxing the rich. THEY ARE the rich. It all makes sense now.
Like the rich, their pet poker table, Wall Street, did just great this election year, paying out new "record bonuses," "earning" new record dollars freshly manufactured by the Federal Reserve and then loaned back to us from Chinese banks at still more interest. But don't worry folks, these derivative Wall Street dollars are not merely minted out of thin air. If the bank, or the government, ever needs to come calling for them, they'll just dig them out of your pockets. Hey, it's nothing personal, just those rich guys gotta eat.
The only consolation for liberals is that, despite their own recent abysmal performances, the Dems' badge of dishonor is still nowhere near as sleazy as the one the GOP leadership have earned through their own efforts over the past couple of decades, so i hope there's still hope for the next couple of decades. There is some suggestion the future of American values may continue to evolve for the better.
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