by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash
Compound the crackbrained crock of these clowns, and you have the cryptology of why the political party known as the GOP has converted itself into a crazy cult — and now represents the one big thing that's really wrong with America. Take the GOP out of America, or ban it, and America would be an excellent place. Sane. Noetic. But with the Republicans alive and toxic, they're able to hold America back and keep our country a major crap zone — the most dysfunctional industrialized nation on earth. We have the makings of Nirvana, but unfortunately Rasputin is running paradise.
A very uneasy Jeb Bush confessed the other day: “I used to be a conservative and I watch these debates and I’m wondering, I don’t think I’ve changed, but it’s a little troubling sometimes when people are appealing to people’s fears and emotion rather than trying to get them to look over the horizon for a broader perspective.”
Hey, Jeb, the Republican Party is not your Daddy's party anymore. It's changed. It's moved out of politics into the twilight zone.
Let's face it. The GOP has created a home for all our entitled and nasty people. They include the millions of Americans who hate-the-Other — the other being all those icky gays, blacks, Mexican immigrants, Latinos in general, Muslims, poor people, and those uppity women who don't want the state of Virginia to shove its footlong probes up their vaginas, or the 99% of women who use birth control and don't think this makes them sluts.
I hate therefore I am. These shudder junkies add up to at least 40% of Americans who are thoroughly hate-pickled and fear-tickled: all our homegrown crazies, Talibangelicals, right-wing talkradio listeners, and bigots. They're Nietzsche's ressentiment writ large. They live like a bunch of addled zombies among us, their brains half-eaten away by maggots of tinfoil-hat excrescence. You can't call them anything but members of a cult. They're just too weird. I mean, Republicans are weirder than Scientologists or vegans or Mormons or Moonies or Hare Krishnas. They're as weird as UFO abductees. What's wrong with America is that there is a semi-respectable haven for these backward bizarros: the erstwhile quite sane Republican Party.
It's a haven because it's the weirdest place of all: the Home of No Shame. There's something deliciously cozy about a meeting place so self-righteous in its bizarre hatreds, shame cannot enter it. You don't have to feel ashamed of anything you feel in the Republican Party. You can give your hate free rein. The haven encourages it. You can all be comfortably crazy together. You can all watch Fox News together, and listen to Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. That's why today's GOP isn't a political party anymore: it's a cult. A kind of male coven with a penchant for employing blonde female Stepford anchors.
What's remarkable about this cult (and what makes us a universal laughing stock) is that it is so big. It's absolutely incredible that our nation harbors so many of these lumpen locos. In other industrialized countries, people as freaky as today's Republicans amount to no more than 15% of the population. They're what one calls marginal. But here in America there are enough of these malignant morons to maybe vote a homophobic, adulterous or entitled bastard into the highest office in the land.
The cult has elevated three extreme cult members into actual Presidential candidates. You know you're dealing with a cult when they get all hung-up and inbred about the purity of their membership: one of their would-be candidates is not crazy enough for many cult members, even though he's a Mormon, forchrissake — those folks who baptize dead people like Anne Franklin into their faith. America, oh, America: we're basically as nuts as Saudi-Arabia. (Come to think of it, there's something crazy even about those Americans not in the Republican Cult: let's not forget that when the greatest protests in human history took place — against America's threat to go to war against Iraq — most Americans went quite docilely along with this Republican war crime that led to the deaths of over a 100,000 innocent Iraqi civilians.)
Why are there more cretins in America than in most other countries?
1. Racism. We have just enough black people to drive the white people crazy. Just like European countries are getting just enough Muslims to drive them crazy. Just like Germany had just enough Jews to drive them batshit crazy. Years ago I worked for a black advertising agency, and one time we all went to the beach in the Hamptons where our owner had a spread. There were a lot of white folks on the beach when forty of us blacks, which included two white people, my wife and I, hit the surf. My black Creative Director told me with a big smirk: “Watch what happens to the white people when we get to the beach.”
It was mighty instructive. The white people on the beach recoiled. I saw it with my own eyes. They fucking RECOILED. Who are these loud, brash, laughing-and-enjoying-themselves black intruders on our quiet white beach? The black people in America drive the white people crazy, and that's just a fact. When Whitney Houston died, did you read the commenters on the Fox News website announcement? Thousands of Americans wrote in to vent about the “nigger crack ho,” and they all spelled “nigger” with spaces — “n igg er” — so they could get their comments past the filters. That's how crazy white people are: they can't even take a harmless black singer who used to be America's sweetheart. Heck, she had the effrontery to be kissed by Kevin Costner in her hit movie The Bodyguard. Sure, America voted a black man into our presidency, but his ascendancy has driven Republicans so nuts, they think he's a socialist Muslim who wasn't born in America. That's the kind of crap a typical cult member believes.
2. Religion. America is more religious than most other countries, and therefore more cretinous. And we have a really crazy and weird home-bred offshoot of the Christian religion: our fundamentalist evangelicals, better described as Talibangelicals. Their leaders found out years ago that they could milk truckloads of cash out of their devout followers by hating on gays. And with that easy prescription, they built huge tax-free businesses. Being really crazy and really weird is a highly functional business model in America. MBAs, take note.
When non-church-going Ronald Reagan co-opted these crazies into his Republican coalition, he had no idea that this crazy tail would end up wagging the entire GOP dog, and become the foundational base of a born-again Republican cult.
3. Bad elite. We have the worst elite in the world. Our CEOs think they're on average at least 300 to 500 times more valuable than the folks who work for them (in Europe they think they're 20 to 30 times more valuable; in Japan 11 times). Really weird, that. And the ones on Wall Street are total welfare queens: when they tank the world economy because they tend to be really stupid, and really crooked, they keep their bonuses and stay out of jail because they're clever enough to buy Washington. They're ninnies: they can't take their medicine like real men. In fact, they get Washington to bail them out by sending their bill to us taxpayers — the very people they conned. Heck, they got bailed out three times: with the Bush bankster bailout, with the Fed's discount window spigot, and now with the Foreclosure Fraud Settlement (the single biggest stay-out-of-jail card in US history).
These crooked welfare queens see nothing whack with this whoppingly whambanged whackedoo picture. They believe they're totally innocent of any wrong-doing. Which makes them weird too, as weird as UFO abductees themselves. It's like our Masters of the Universe have been kidnapped by some outlandish alien Ayn Rand-cum-Milton Friedman fundamentalist cargo cult doctine which has surgically removed from their interiors via their posteriors all vestiges of any recognizable morality. Capitalist moonies. Something really weird happened when the noblesse-oblige country-club Republicans like George Romney and George H.W. Bush passed the silver spoon to their offspring Mitt and Dubya: noblesse oblige morphed into screw-the-poor and pass the Pernod-Ricard Perrier-Jouet Champagne ($50,000 for a set of 12 bottles).
4. The Republican Party. Their elected officials spend their lives devising ways to funnel more money from the middle class and the poor to the rich. They've found out that they can provide cover for their Great American Experiment in Total Inequality by flim-flamming a handy slice of the American people with an anti-gay, anti-science, anti-women, anti-immigrant, anti-reason and pro-war platform. They do this by creating phony issues: illegal immigration, abortion, gay marriage, broken Social Security, voter fraud, onerous taxes, onerous regulations, big government, debt ceilings, nuclear Iran.
Weird stuff. Made-up crap. Total BS. Cult beliefs: to increase revenue, cut taxes. Bizarro prescriptions: Wall Street needs less regulation, not more. Spooky voices-in-the-head: death panels. Weird sex obsessions: birth control insurance means we're paying for co-eds to have more sex, and to pay us back, they should put sex videos of themselves online for us to watch. The problem? The guys who come up with litanies of phony issues are themselves beginning to think these issues are real, and at least 40% of Americans think so, too (you do as well). That's what Fox News tells them. The GOP has created a symphony of psychos singing the same silly ditty: a Gesamtkunstwerk of the Godly, the Greedy and the Ghastly.
So there you have it. There is a cancer in the American body politic, and it's called the Republican Party. A crazy cult.
The rest of us should beware. There is no compromise with these nutters. We should not be looking for bipartisanship with bipeds whose brains have descended lower than their testicles.
There is only one way to deal with them: attack, annihilate, exterminate — until the last cult member has been rooted out. A war on the Republican Party and everything they stand for is the most noble undertaking for any patriotic American who loves our country. Think of it as a Civil War sans guns. Until we start that war in earnest, and carry it through until there is no Republican left standing, we will always have a shitty country.
So get to work, my fellow patriots. Save America. Destroy the Republican Party forthwith. Dump them head first in the dustbin of history, where these cretinous cultists belong.
(Afternote: I have a book out, self-published at the moment, based on my many provocative posts to 3QD. It's called The Real Obama: Progressive Tiger or Wall Street Poodle? You'll never have more fun reading about politics. Only $12 — order a copy here: lulu.com/product/paperback/the-real-obama-progressive-tiger-or-wall-street-poodle/18939747)