Kind of Blue?

Anyone who saw Karl Rove raging around the Foxhole in the moments after Fox News and all the others called the election for Obama -- and anyone watching him waving a tablet with numbers on it and squeaking madly yesterday; explaining why Obama beat the Great White Dope, might not suspect that this is all over now or that the nation has decided or will decide that the United States has now gone kind of blue. 

They might look to the past and not expect the far right will settle down and go along with the tide of the future any more than they did after the humiliation of Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon.  Ask Bill Clinton about the revenge of the Republicans or their patience while waiting for retaliation.  Hell no, the fight is still on, and while Fox News broadcasts and there are people who watch it; while Limbaugh roars and while Coulter hisses and snarls like a syphilitic witch, it's still on. While money talks, it's not over.

Hell no, you can be sure that for the coming years, Obama will have won only  by "suppressing the vote," by enlisting the help of the Black Panthers or the Neptunian Trotzkyite Front -- or by any other means apparent only to the collectively paranoid psychotic Tea Party base. Their number one priority will not now cease to be the removal from office by any means possible, the blocking of every initiative and the unrestrained and unfounded vilification of Barack H. Obama.  To them, they are still the majority and when they lose it can't be their own fault.

Democratic urges to make nice and play well with others, and Democratic expectations of a sudden comity and cooperation may be dangerously premature. We're not facing a chastened and contrite enemy, newly motivated to re-examine its outmoded assumptions and tired tenets, we're standing next to a wounded and very powerful beast, and what beast has a conscience?  The Republican machine is hardly moribund and is still as red, still as rich and even more motivated to lie, cheat, steal and filibuster than ever.

The GOP may be a party in grief and shock, it may be acting out the first two stages of that Kübler-Ross hypothesis: anger and denial, but any expectation that we'll see an attempt to bargain honestly, much less to get to any kind of acceptance in the near or near-distant future -- or perhaps ever, is terribly premature, in my opinion.  Yes, we may have dodged a bullet this week and the next four years may be a reprieve from the GOP success in their war against human rights, liberty and Democracy and perhaps  the war against real Capitalism, but we have to temper our great expectations. 2014, 2016 are the numbers of the beast and there never will be an end of their era.

It's all over but the eschatology

There's a point beyond which I can no longer pretend to be an open-minded or fair-minded person disposed to find reason in others' opinions, or at least to try to be tolerant of them.  I think I reached it today, shortly after a flurry of last minute political calls from ( supposedly illegal) robots delivering diatribes from Ann Coulter, Allen West and the NRA.  Gungrabber Obama?  War Hero West? Seriously?  Am I listed as Hatch, Booby in the phone book?

In another venue I joked today about inventing a Taserphone that one could use to zap annoying, if not felonious and even treasonous callers like these, but honestly that's only an attempt to cover up, to add mirth to the boiling volcanic eruption of rage that's been keeping me up nights; has been filling my dreams with violence and wondering if I really have enough ammunition in the house.  I also joked about watching the election returns from my boat so that if things go all to hell, I could be in international waters within half an hour and in the Bahamas in three.  But that would not be to protect me, it would be to protect others from a large, rude, green hulk stomping toward Washington in an uncontrollable rage.

But really, the level of criminal indecency to which the Republican Party has descended should sponsor far more rage than even this half mad writer can feel.  If it had come all at once rather than incrementally over a period of years, I'm sure there truly would have been blood in the streets.  Had we not had a multi-billion dollar industry soothing and rationalizing and reinterpreting the rape of reason and the murder of truth and the deportation of ethics, Republicans would have had to flee the country for their lives a decade ago, if not sooner. But as it is, stories like this one about an Arizona non-profit laundering eleven million for the GOP  which may be a true drop in the bottomless bucket of  corporate money, offshore money and other somewhat less than sanitary money being used for things like starving public education, sure, but perhaps the straw that broke this old back. As God knows, and has the GOP has stressed, an educated public is a "brainwashed" public, an 'elitist' and snobbish public less likely to buy into the raging idiocy they sell. So education is another beast the Tea Terrorists, the bar room brown shirts and the ruthless pirates of industry need to starve.

Will all these crimes ever be punished?  Not likely, no matter which candidate wins and if someone is prosecuted, their soulless, corpse eating associates will manage to make it seem all political and public opinion will turn against that damned liberal press all the more.

I'm not ready to say "you can't win" or that it's all lost, but I'm afraid it's none the less true.  Our debt problem isn't going to be repaired no matter who wins.  Obama or the Mutt, even if all spending were to cease, it may take a lifetime for the debt to go away, unless it's through massive inflation we haven't seen the likes of in our own history.  Think Zimbabwe, think Weimar Republic, think third world America.  My biggest worry isn't about the post-prosperous America, it's about the post-Liberal America; an oligarchy of entities deriving their power not from the consent of the governed, but of global financial interests, of religious demagogues and corporate feudal lords.

So no, I'll likely watch the circus from the local Democratic headquarters, at least until it gets late, but win or lose, the difference is, I fear only in the nearness to the abyss toward which we're inexorably headed and no, I'll probably not push those throttles forward and head for West End, no matter who wins Tuesday night, but I'm sure as hell not going down without a fight or go gentle into any Goddamned Republican night.