Grunt...Click...Eep!
The world will go mad on November 3, 2004.
The world will go mad because either way, the current Republican constituency will surrender the remaining dregs of their sanity and give themselves over to either a wailing grief or a hateful finality. Just as there would be no stopping a soi disant conservative George W. President who doesn't have to win another election from running amok over freedom, liberty, truth, decency, good will and humility, to name a few.
It won't be the first time that a regime has convinced its people that they are under threat, that they deserve better than that, that they are better than the rest, that they don't need the rest, that they can guarantee the security of their own people, and that, by might if not by right, they are destined to take what they want in whatever way they want.
Nationalism is a terrible thing; terrible in the sense that a storm can be terrible; terrible in that dictionary definitions #2 & #3 sort of way.
Nationalism flies under the conscious radar and lodges inside somewhere unassailable by rationality, but available to manipulation by threat and by fear.
As I said, it's been done before by others who led their respective nations into ruin.
They say that a good leader is what distinguishes a mob from merely a crowd. And any leader who would create or even attempt to use an unthinking mob in a play for personal ascendancy is, by my own definition, the worst kind of leader.
To think you can control a thing such as that, to think you can even aim such a force of nature for any length of time is pure folly.
One needs only to look at the stances and behaviors of the Republican constituency to find the folly:
- a decorated war veteran is called "Hanoi John"
- a triple-amputee's service to country is trivialized because it "didn't happen during combat"
- abandoning their own ideologies of smaller government and libertarianism in favor of huge spending and increased tax burdens to the majority
- inability to admit that they themselves are capable of mistakes
- ironic lack of faith in fellow christians
- refusal to fact-check even the largest of statements by their own leader
- accusations of "despicable" behavior in those who oppose, while using the same behavior in the attack
- utter lack of long-term vision
- utter lack of any big-picture view
- reactive, not proactive
These are people who don't wish for less crime, just for more punishment; who don't want a better life, just a better life than you have; who believe that they will be the Chosen People of the Oligarchs and Plutocrats, once they're installed in all the important places.
These are behaviors that desperately strive for a wallet that's even just one dollar-bill fatter than it was before; behaviors that suggest they have no problem with shitting where they eat, because clean-up is someone else's problem; behaviors that suggest walls on either side and bad guys behind, instead of a bright open vista ahead.
I was going to suggest that the Republican mobs play a Zero Sum Game, but they're not playing a game.
Games have rules.