The legitimate rape of freedom

By Capt. Fogg

I went to bed ruminating about the predicted course of Tropical Storm Isaac, which had it ravaging the West coast of Florida from Fort Meyers to Tampa next week. Am I a bad person for dreaming that a random raging force of nature might do what our miserable excuse for a righteous God never seems to do and tear the Tampa Convention Center to pieces, rending flesh from barbarian bone and yet somehow leave the Tampa General Hospital just across the channel intact to tend to any decent folk who got caught out in the storm? Perhaps I am, but the teeth and claws of the GOP are as visible to anyone with eyes to see as if they were painted red with gore -- as indeed they are -- and who will be there to rescue us when the wolf has eaten Grandma (and blamed it on Obama)? Sadly, today's National Hurricane Center prediction shows Hurricane Isaac passing to the west of Tampa, leaving only some wind and rain to drown out the demented cries of a dying country.

It won't be quite loud enough, of course, to obscure the lies and libels, the slanders, the fabrications, and the calls for armed insurrection against the decent, the humane, and the lovers of freedom  -- nor wet enough to wash away the tea. But don't bring your guns to Tampa. It was OK for the toothless Tea Whores to bring firearms to Democratic meetings and threaten to use them, but the GOP has banned guns at their sabbath.

There will be and there already are howls about spending and taxes and budgets, but put in the form of a passion play that has more to do with reversing the guilt for having started a war on invented information -- the most expensive war in our history -- and proposed that it would cost nothing if only we relieved the richest of us of a few more percent in taxes. They'll go on pretending that a middle class tax cut was a tax hike, that no additional gun control was somehow a "gun grab," and that restoring Ronald Reagan's tax relief for the richest Americans, many of whom like Mitt Romney paid nothing and are still paying almost nothing was "the largest tax hike in history" and a flirtation with Marxism.

They'll continue the tradition of posing pornography, legal birth control, the "personhood" of fertilized eggs, and abortion as the great issues of the day, and the same people who claim that the universe is only a few years older than the pyramids will howl like idiots about how 14-year-old girls won't get pregnant if the rape wasn't forceful enough and how women with hydrocephalic babies can't actually die in childbirth. They'll stand on the bloodstained platform or their vampire religion and call for the subjugation of women, the abandonment of the old and sick and weak, and claim we simply can't survive if we do what everyone else in the free, modern world does. They'll suggest a country with a double standard of morality, where the government sleeps in your bed but not in theirs and where they pay nothing and obey no rules. 

No, sorry, Messrs. Romney and Ryan, I'd like you and your numbered accounts in Bermuda and Luxembourg and Liechtenstein washed out into the Gulf, never to be seen again and soon to be forgotten by the madmen, the congenitally stupid, the misogynists, the sexual perverts who support all the silly, stupid, racist rhetoric. I'd like to drown the contempt for facts, for science, for mathematics, for history, and of course your contempt for anyone who didn't lie, cheat, and steal their way to wealth and power, but of course I can't.

I can't because this is a stupid country -- a petty, angry, prejudiced, bigoted, selfish, and deluded country that thinks it would be better off and safer with no government at all. We're the country that elected George Bush twice and Richard Nixon twice and Spiro Agnew and savaged everyone that spoke up. This is the party that was outraged at anyone who said the economy was unsustainable and now sneers and snarks about how the economy is unsustainable. This is the country that cheered at the biggest borrow-and-spend spree and now looks at the spendthrift culprits as saviors. Perhaps we deserve our fate. Perhaps we deserve even worse. Perhaps a better nation might some day emerge from the stinking wreckage, but probably not and probably some other power will come to dominate the world -- a power that cares less for the kind of country we pretended to be and insisted we were while we danced around a bonfire chanting as America died.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)