The Party of God

As much as it pains me to admit it, I’ve been at something of a loss when it comes to commenting upon this election cycle. It’s easy to be overwhelmed by just how wrong the McCain/Palin ticket is. I’m like a frog who doesn’t know which way to jump, and so I wound up going nowhere at all. What do you write about? How John McCain has reversed himself on nearly every position he’s ever held? About how the record that John McCain is running on (the maverick reformer and all that) directly contradicts everything he stands for today? Hell, it contradicts his own record. You can’t say that you have a record of going against your own party when you think they’re wrong if that’s twenty years ago and you’ve been their damned lap dog for the past decade.
And what about Sarah Palin? Oh, my God. She’s a train wreck. As mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, she left her town 23 million dollars in debt (which means that she left each resident of Wasilla owing over $2,500), and yet still has the gall to talk about runaway government spending? She doesn’t believe in Evolution. She thinks dinosaurs roamed the Earth 6,000 years ago. She thinks abortion should be illegal even in cases of rape and incest. She doesn’t believe human beings had anything to do with causing Global Warming. She hasn’t even tried to explain why her husband is part of a political party that denounces the United States and supports the secession of Alaska from the country. As both mayor of Wasilla and governor of Alaska, she has a long record of cronyism, firing people who disagree with her and putting friends in positions of power. She is currently under investigation for ethics violations because she pursued a personal vendetta against her sister’s ex-husband, and then fired someone for refusing to fire the ex-husband. And to complete the lovely portrait, there’s a video on YouTube of her being blessed by an African preacher who conducted a literal witch-hunt in Africa.
You couldn’t pick a person who was more “out there” than Sarah Palin if were trying to. She’s a walking charicature of Neo-Conservative Right-Wing delusion. The kind of person who would have called for Gallilao to be burned at the stake. The kind of person who has stood in the way of reason and progress since the Middle Ages. Yet somehow she wound up on the Republican ticket, and, if elected, would be just one heart attack away from the Presidency of the United States. Holy crap! Right-Wing Evangelicals have been trying to paint Barack Obama as the risk? If you look at all the incredibly wrong crap that Sarah Palin has done and believes, and then look at how breathless her supporters are about her potential to wind up in the White House, I don’t know how you don’t come to the conclusion that she’s the Anti-Christ. The Anti-Christ is supposed to be charismatic. And if we really look at it honestly, the only thing Sarah Palin has going for her is that she’s charismatic.
I’ve also been deeply dismayed by the Republicans’ use of the language of hate. They can’t talk reasonably about the issues, and so they spew lies and hate. No, I don’t mean because Barack Obama is a black man. While some of their supporters might, the Republican establishment doesn’t hate Barack Obama because he’s black. They hate him because he’s a Democrat. I mean that in the literal sense. I’m sick of this divisive hatred the spews forth from the Republicans and the Conservative talking-head media. I feel like I’m living in a country filled to the brim with ten-year-olds whose arrested development leads them to believe that if they shout “He eats boogers!” loud enough for long enough and their opponent walks away, that it’s the same thing as winning an intellectual argument.
I’ve been watching the hatred get ramped up in the past few weeks. The McCain/Palin campaign is slowly falling behind in the polls, so they’re getting desperate and are using the only weapon left to them. Hatred. They’re trying to scare the Kool-Aid drinkers by asserting that Barack Obama pals around with terrorists because he’s crossed paths with William Ayers, a founding member of the Weathermen, a radical leftist group in the 1960s; the obvious implication being that if he hangs out with one terrorists, he’s as good as buddies with Osama Bin Laden. It’s the same tactic they’re using when they refer to Obama by using his full name, Barack Hussein Obama, and stress his middle name; as if he’s a distant cousin of Saddam Hussein or something. They’re whipping their supporters into such a frenzy of unbridled hatred that people at campaign functions are chanting during speeches, “Nobama, Nobama” mingled with cries of “terrorist”. They even trotted Sarah Palin out before the cameras to make the laughable accusation that Barack Obama is “palling around with terrorists.”
I’ve faced this hatred before. A lot of Americans have. I first faced in the 2000 Presidential elections, when I occasionally almost came to blows with Bush supporters. Not because I sought out the conflict, but because they were people whose initial reaction to discovering I wasn’t in their club was to identify me as their enemy. During the 2004 Presidential election I got into a shoving match with a gentleman at a truck stop, because he took it upon himself to interrupt a conversation I was having with a John Kerry supporter by shouting at us that if we didn’t love this country we should “fucking leave it”. My wife was verbally accosted by a man while leaving Wal-Mart in 2004, who told her that if he’d seen she had a Kerry/Edwards bumper sticker on our van, he “would have run you over”. I couldn’t count how many Kerry/Edwards signs were stolen from our front yard.
I’m sick of Republicans. I’m sick of the so-called “party of God” spewing this filth and vitriol all over my country. I’m sick of these people telling me that I’m somehow less of an American than they are because I actually quesion my political leaders, and often find theirs’ coming up short. What am I supposed to think about a political party who, in 2000, inherited an enormous budget surplus and then ran the country into a financial ditch, resulting in historic defecits? And what about that war in Iraq? Most Republicans think Saddam Hussein attacked us on 9/11, and yet I’m not supposed to assume they’re a bunch of idiots? Look, you might be proud of the fact that you’re ignorant and uneducated, but don’t get mad at me for realizing that you are.
I keep hoping that somehow we’ll rise above this religion-driven hatred of everything this country stands for. In my book it’s the so-called “party of God” that has been tearing down this country. They’re the ones who want to do away with the rights and freedoms that our ancestors purchased for us with their blood. They’re the ones who want checkpoints and armed guards and Americans not being able to go anywhere without the proper papers. They’re the ones who wrap themselves in the American flag and make speeches about freedom while using the Constitution of the United States as a doormat. They’re the ones who talk about Jesus being their moral compass while advocating torture and denying prisoners the due process of law.
The Republican Party is a cult. That’s the only way you can look at it. If you bring the evidence and the facts before a group of people who, without even looking at it them, dismiss them as lies and propaganda, you are dealing with a cult, my friend. In a cult, members are taught to close their minds to outside influences, to listen only to their leaders for guidance. Only their leaders can tell them what is truth and what is fact. Cult members live in a fantasy world in which the natural order of reality has been replaced by religious or, in this case, political ideology, and it governs everything. That’s how John McCain and Sarah Palin can stand up there before their supporters and point to Barack Obama and say “there is your enemy; you must bring him down”.
Yes. It scares me when I hear people at Republican rallies shouting “traitor!” in regard to Barack Obama. It says to me that if Obama wins the election, the Secret Service is going to be working overtime to protect the President of the United States from some of the same loonies who have bombed abortion clinics and assassinated doctors. It’s not a matter of if the proverbial Bubba is going to get his hunting rifle out of the rack in his pickup truck and go looking to score extra points with Jesus by taking out the country’s first black president. It’s a matter of when. How long past the election do you think it will be before all this hatred that the Republicans have been spouting will come to fruition? If the cult-members already think Barack Obama is the Anti-Christ, won’t some of them feel compelled to strike a blow in the name of the party of God?
Some would say that I’m un-American because I question my country. But I say to you that I am one of the truest Americans, because I believe my country represents a higher standard, and I expect us to live up to it. So if the Republicans want to get down in the gutter and make the dialogue in this country all about prejudice and hate, I have no choice but to identify those people as the enemies of Liberty and Freedom. People who are, therefore, my enemies. But they will never dampen my sense that this country represents the hope and promise of the entire world. We are the shining beacon of freedom that the entire world looks to. I won’t stand by quietly while some cult takes over this country and turns it into a theocratic police state.
To me, John McCain and Sarah Palin represent what is wrong with this country. John McCain has compromised every ideal he’s ever held, just because it was to his political advantage. Sarah Palin can’t look into the camera without causing a chill to go down my spine, because she’s the living embodiment of the Neo-Conservative world-view that strikes me, simply, as a force of evil. Our country has a cancer in its underbelly. We can’t afford to let these insane people retain their grip on power. If nothing else, we have to ensure that the cycle that has afflicted this country for over 125 years reaches its logical apex during this election cycle, and that the Democrats will again get into the White House and gain seats in Congress so that they can begin to clean up the mess that the Republicans have made. That’s what the cycle is. When times are good the country tends to lean Conservative and vote in the Republicans. Then after a long ideological nightmare, when the Republicans have done enough damage to our country and our institutions, the country gets tired of it and elects Democrats to clean up the mess.
I pray that it’s time for the Democrats to get to work again. Thanks to the Republicans, there is a lot of damage to repair. And even though I know that ten years or so down the road, when people are comfortable again and corporations aren’t allowed to roam the countryside feeding off of us little people, those who’ve benefited from the Democrats being in the White House will again start listening to the Republicans, we’ll at least have had a short time when we could collectively take a breath and thank God that he has, again, saved us from his followers in the party of God.