Really Bad Ideas

Did you ever - when you were a kid or, more likely, when you were a teenager or a young adult - get an idea that you knew was reeeeeeally stupid?

I don't mean your casual idiocy, the sort of thing that you drive by every so often when you're mentally joyriding and look over before moving on. I mean your truly, deeply, invasively moronic dumbfuckery. Genuinely weapons-grade stupid? The kind of complete-lack-of-electrical-brain-function thing that gets people maimed, or killed, that topples governments, that ends up with things exploding, or burning down, with people in full body casts or tipped into a shallow pit along with a Folger's tin full of gasoline and a lit cigarette?

Remember how - since you're here reading this, obviously - you gave this dumbass thought some consideration, weighing the potential enjoyment of whatever goofy thing you would have tried to do against the nearly dead solid certainty that doing it would unerringly, inevitably, as-directly-as-a-pup-to-its-dinner-consequently end up with you in some sort of mental, physical, emotional, and moral shithole?

And how you then either a) chose not to even try it or b) modified the actual act so as to reduce the odds of becoming a Darwin Award nominee, or c) actually tried it but managed through some incredible combination of pure dumb luck, timing, the intervention of a kindly God, and possibly fast reflexes survived?

Assuming you took options a) through c) you are still more intelligent and better adapted to human existence than the Republican Party of the United States and the vast majority of its minions, apparatchiks, hangers-on, bootlickers, and enablers who consider themselves things like "libertarian" or "independent" but still reliably vote Republican when the drapes to the election booth close.

Because, really...what the hell has the GOP produced, intellectually or physically, since 1865 that has been worth a half-dram of warm spit?

The last time any Republican president made any sort of sense was back in Eisenhower's time. And the breed that the Party of God has been producing since Nixon's time makes the droolingly inbred spawn of Mitteleuropean minor nobility look like the result of crossbreeding of Albert Einstein and Marie Curie.

Honestly. Try and think about the last time a Republican - elected official or candidate - proposed or supported an idea that was genuinely beneficial to the average U.S. working man or woman. Go ahead. I'll wait.



Hard to come up with even one, innit?

And yet, like the sort of gopher-brain-quality stupid we started talking about, the sheer volume and appalling stench of the Himalayan mountain-chain of ignorant crap the GOP has either formulated or recommended is childishly easy to bring to mind. It's like most of the crap that comes out of Michelle Bachman's brain is as sensible as playing tackle football in your undies.

I mean, really...it makes you wonder.

And I'm not talking about the REALLY whack stuff, the Glenn-Beck, Pawlenty-Google-Test sort of idea or pretty much anything Rand Paul or his kid say. That's just the endpoint, the feces-scrawl of the ones in the canvas sportjackets with the wraparound sleeves that are kept safely locked away most of the time. The sort of Terri Schaivo-God-guns-and-gays shinola the GOP uses like the Amazing Kreskin uses a shiny object to keep the rubes morons Teabaggers nodding in unison.

That stuff is just the by-the-by sort of bullstuff that any good con man uses to keep the mark from noticing that the "weather seal" he's paying hundreds of dollars for the crew to put down on his driveway is really nothing but used motor oil that will run into his gutter the next time it rains.

That stuff is just there to keep the truly ignorant - the "Reagan Democrats", the feeble-minded scions of bible-bangers and white-flight suburbanites - from seeing the Big Con that's busting their unions, raping their health insurance, cramming down their wages while shipping their blue-collar jobs to Singafuckingpore.

That's just a bagatelle.

Nope. I'm talking about the "legitimate", mainstream planks of the generic Republican platform.

Foreign policy based on ignorant fear, propaganda, estimates of intent rather than capabilities, hubris, wishful thinking, and somebody's grade-school memories of British imperial justifications.