Poison and the Rope

The fact that tomorrow a contest between a flawed but decent Eisenhower Republican and a contemptible oligarchich fabulist deeply in hoc to plutocrats, luddites, Christopaths and unregenerate racist shitheels will likely be decided by the narrowest of margins fills me with rage, despair, and loathing and the deepest contempt for my "fellow Americans".

I'll be the first to point to the problems that Mr. Obama represents for the Democratic Party. A bloodless policy wonk unwilling to go to the canvas for any sort of policy resembling an upgrade for the non-trustafarian America, he and his party resemble the party of FDR the way a dead spaniel in a roadside ditch resembles the Hound of the Baskervilles.

But the stark staring alternative is simple madness. The GOP as currently constituted, as led by the mendacious poster boy for white privilege, is crazier than a shithouse rat and about as cuddly.

And by that I don't mean the grifting greed of the plutocratic classes that dominate the top of the GOP food chain; stuff like the 15% capital gains rate, attempts to kibosh the inheritance tax and kill any meaningful regulation of financial chicanery, environmental rapage, and the vicious cramdown of jobs and wages. That stuff, while loathsome, is at least comprehensible. It makes sense for these larcenous fucktards to WANT this stuff. It's terrible for the nation and for anyone who doesn't own a yacht, but it makes sense if you DO.

No, I'm talking about simple gonzo nutball stuff, real canvas-sportjacket-with-wraparound-sleeves shit. "Privatizing" things like emergency relief and health and safety regulation. Regulating what people do with their sexy parts. Returning to the gold standard. The entire Ryan "revenue plan". "Islamofascism".

I'm talking batshit crazy, tinfoil-hat nonsense. Things that no human with a functioning reptile brain could believe. Complete and utter crap that forms a huge proportion of the ideas central to the GOP ideology.

You can stand afar off and gaze down at this contrast, the unfruited plain on the one hand and the immense, groaning mountain of lies, damned lies, and stupidity on the other and the stench from the right hand would inform a blind man that there is only one sane choice for any American who doesn't own his or her own timber company or live off mommy's trust fund.

The most stunning characteristic of this election is what we will NOT discuss.

The appalling upwards transfer of wealth. The defenestration of the middle class. Poverty. Regulation and fiscal policy that favor wealth over work and the rentier over the worker. The value of foreign wars, secret prisons, and torture. Our addiction to the petroleum tit. The value of taxation as the support of civilization; roads, cities, ports, libraries, schools, and universities.

The GOP will put all of this; the entire mass of the social contract we have forged since the dangerous days of the early Depression, into the noose and hang it. They will do their level best to kill this America as quickly as they can so they can revive the unquiet corpse of the Gilded Age and hasten forward to the New Feudalism they dream of.

Their opponents are a slower death of the American Dream, the Great Society, of the New Deal. Their poison is the poison of abandoned belief, of triangulation, and compromise with the unslakable. But a slow death is at least less sure, less violent, than the noose. And there is at least to hope of an antidote, even if a small hope.

The noose leaves nothing but dead meat.

And yet...here we are, poised on the perilous point, within a whisker of getting four years of a man whose integrity and intellectual constancy make George W. Bush look like a mashup of Socrates, Solon, and goddamn Albert Einstein. We are poised to hand this sonofabitch the noose and thrust our own heads through it. We the People are within an ace of electing a man President that we know is a grossly arrogant lying douchenozzle.

The entire business sickens me.

And I can only leave you with the devout hope that my "fellow Americans" are not

That.

Fucking.

Stupid.