Pole Lit is I a Shun

I take for granted that most people who might constitute my readership know I am political and know where I stand politically.  However, in the, perhaps, delusional hope that my audience continues to expand, I will take a second to address those of you that might be less familiar with my habitat on the Ideological Spectrum.

First.  I am a Republican.  Now, most of the time, when someone gets to know me prior to learning of my party affiliation, they then, upon learning of my allegiance, do one of three things. 1) Laughter.  Haha.  Surely you jest.  No, I'm serious, and stop desecrating Leslie Nielsen by stealing his material.  Fucking plagiarist. 2) Confusion.  Perhaps it is opposite day.  Sometimes, people forget to mark opposite day on their calenders (or else, they mark every day but opposite day.) 3) Anger.  As if I have betrayed everything they thought they knew about me.  Sometimes, then they accuse me of drinking unicorn blood, to which I scoff.  Do you know how expensive that shit is?  I generally have to settle for a soy substitute.

In the case of the meat, the substitute is preferable.  Also, don't ever do a Google images search for "unicorn" if you value your sanity.

Somewhere along the lines, we, as a nation, as a people, as a group of humans that sort of tolerate living on the same massive expanse of land as one another, have forgotten that party affiliation does not inherently have anything to do with a greater ideology.  I am Republican because I believe in reserving power to the states.  I am Republican because I believe in the free market.  I am Republican because I believe in the rights in the constitution: all of them.  Being Republican does not mean I have to support privatization of  schools, or banning abortion, or burning books, or the mythical creature that is Ronald Reagen who, I'm told, single handedly punched Communism in the face with an American eagle perched on his shoulder while he pissed gold down upon rich Americans and watched it trickle, trickle down to the starving masses who had just been cured of their crippling drug addiction thanks to another war Reagen won.  Being Republican does not make me either righteous or evil.  It just makes me Republican.

I'm not going to bore you with the litany of where I stand on various issues, or what I believe.  If you don't already know, you will learn soon enough, trust me.  It's only important to know that I am Republican to shed some contextual light on the rant I am about to unleash.  Are you ready?  Are you ready for my witty, biting satire?  My keen, intellectual insight?  Alright.... here goes....


FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!!  WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!?!  JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP AND GO AWAY!!!!!!!!  YOU ARE ALL WORTHLESS BLIGHTS ON HUMANITY!!!!!

Alright, well then, good talk.  So, I'll be shooting for another post-- Wait.  I'm being told that I need more content in order to attract readers.  Really?  But there is nothing else to say.  Jesus, alright, um... where to start...

And she could kick Palin's ass without breaking a sweat.

This is Gabby Giffords.  For those of you who haven't heard, she was shot yesterday.  Also, for those of you who haven't heard, there was a terrorist attack on 9/11.  I know, it's a lot to take in.  I'll give you a few moments to collect your thoughts...

Okay.  So Giffords is not my congressperson.  I live on the the outskirts of Tucson, in Raul Grijalva's District.  There is a well-established history of my dislike of the man.  Hell, I even flirted with running against him and, quite possibly, will flirt with it again in the not-too-distant future.


But, whereas I do not care much for Raul, I always liked Gabby.  She's smart, hardworking, moderate and a true Tucsonan.  I won't go on and on praising her.  There are thousands upon thousands of sites that are doing that exact thing as I write this.  Suffice to say, she's totally bitching.


Also, I don't do positivity.  What I'm concerned with is the aspect of the past days events that makes me want to light the entire country on fire.  It began before the blood had even dried on the pavement of the Safeway parking lot.  "We don't want to politicize this!"  Who was screaming it?  The Republicans, of course.  And do you know why they didn't want to politicize it?  Because of this:

A lot of you are probably already familiar with this image.  It provides a convenient snapshot of the problem.  Of course it also goes hand in hand with Palin's statement that it "isn't time to retreat, it is time to reload."  Other notable eloquent statements:

"I hope that's not where we're going, but you know if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness what can we do to turn this country around? I'll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out." —Nevada GOP Senate candidate Sharron Angle, floating the possibility of armed insurrection in a radio interview, Jan. 2010

"Our opponent is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around terrorists who targeted their own country." —Sarah Palin, while running for Vice president in October of 2008.

"It was only when Hitler invaded their (ed: liberals) precious Soviet Union that at the last minute they came in and suddenly started saying oh no, now you have to fight Hitler." –Ann Coulter, "The O'Reilly Factor," May 7, 2010

There are many, many others out there.  You can feel free to research them yourselves and I see, based on my limited Google search that many places are already reporting on them.  Hell, Chris Matthews warned about inciting language back in March of last year.

Now, before I go any further, let me say this:  There is no indication the shooter in this case was a Tea Party member or committed this crime because this atrocious rhetoric incited him to.  He is a severely disturbed and it seems like he had a personal vendetta against Giffords because of some his own internal demons.  So, I in no way contend that the Republicans are to blame for this.  Let me repeat that, in bold text, for those of you that are just skimming and looking at pretty pictures.

THE REPUBLICANS ARE, IN NO WAY, TO BLAME FOR THIS SHOOTING.

They are, however, to blame for the shameful way in which they responded.  Almost immediately, I heard cries from Fox News and Republican pundits, even Republican friends of mine, saying how awful it would be if we politicized this.  Make no mistake, the Republican party politicized this shooting before there even was a shooting.  They were politicizing hypothetical shootings all last year.  The party hitched its wagon to the insane ox of Tea Party extremism and rode that son-of-a-bitch all the way back to Congressional control.

Of course, like an Ozian Wizard, they projected a glowing, holographic face on Boehner and Cantor and talked about how they decried violence.  Meanwhile, behind the curtain, they gave money to Angle and her Tea Party friends, they booked Coulter for their speaking engagements and, of course, they've continued to prostitute Palin out any chance they get then slap her across the face when she doesn't give them their share of the political capital.

In exchange for "campaign contributions"

And the Republicans know they've been disingenuous.  They know they've been paying lip service while patting the extremist wing on the back and handing them the checkbook.  That is why, as reports were still circling on who was dead and who was injured, they were condemning anyone that would "politicize" this.  You see, there is one thing the modern party is exceptionally good at.  Stealing symbols.  They politicized the death of troops, condemning any Democrat who would speak out against the war as dishonoring them.  They politicized the Constitution, reading it before the beginning of the latest Conressional Session.  Now, what they've done, is a master stroke.

It would be one thing if they took the position of an adulterer.  If they'd stood there like a cheating husband, caught in bed with his secretary, who started telling his furious wife, "Now, now.  Let's not point fingers here.  We've all made mistakes.  Let's not focus on who slept with who and who got whose sister pregnant."  Merely saying "Let's not politicize this" as a way of masking their own potential guilt would be clever but relatively banal.

No, what they've done is actually make "politicization" a weapon.  They have stolen Giffords's shooting.  When the Democrats come at them with just criticism about how their actions and policies have bread this sort of violence, the Republicans will respond with a chorus of "HOW DARE YOU"s and talk about how the Democrats are disrespecting poor Gabby Giffords.  That's right.  The Republicans are going to actually accuse Democrats of exploiting their own tragedy.  Watch.  It's going to be epic.

They say, on a silent night at John Boehner's house, you can actually hear Machiavelli slowly clapping.

The word "appalling" gets thrown around a lot.  Like most words, its true definition has become somewhat apocryphal and, instead, it is used contextually interchangeably with a few dozen other words.  As is often the case in the English language, the writer's decision to use the word has less to do with a desire to reach precise meaning and more to do with phonetic or poetic structure.  One might use "appalling" as opposed to "disgusting" to obtain greater alliteration or in order to form a smoother transition between sentences.  Here, however, I am calling this reaction appalling and meaning it in the strictest sense of the word.

The Republicans politicized a public servant getting shot before one was ever shot.  Then, when one actually was shot, they politicized the potential politicization of it.  That is appalling.  That causes horror and dismay in me.  It was not their place to talk.  The only acceptable words from any Republican pundit were, "This is a terrible tragedy.  My thoughts and prayers to those injured and the families of those killed."  That would then be followed by the inevitable criticism of their tactics and rhetoric the last two years.  The only acceptable words from any Republican pundit would then be, "I'm sorry.  We never meant for this to happen.  We will stamp out any such extremism from here on out."  And then, you know, it'd be sort of nice it they actually DID THAT, but let's confine this entry to the realm of nonfiction.

Instead, they have the unmitigated gall, the arrogance, to start preemptively slandering Democrats.  No one had politicized a goddamn thing and your statement of "Let's not politicize" rose to the level of accusation.  Shut your mouths.  All of you.  Take a second to pay even the slightest bit of respect before you say or do anything else.  Then, let the chips fall where they may.  If you are to blame, if the American public follows the condemnation of Democrats, then take your punishment and move on, like actual, responsible humans do.  And, if you are not to blame, then trust the American public will see that and will reject the condemnation and rally to your side.

But, that's really the problem isn't it?  The Republicans don't trust the American public.  They have to constantly control the story, control the media cycle, tell people what to think.  They don't trust Americans to think for themselves.  They haven't for years.  Granted, they pretend to.  They sit there and shout this dogma about how we're all free people, we're all responsible citizens.  We should have a voice.   We should run the government.  Libertarian, tea party nonsense.

You want to know why I'm Republican?  Because I believe in that dogma.  I believe in that nonsense.  And I, for one, am sick and goddamned tired of this party patronizing Americans.  That's all this is, isn't it?  You talk out of one corner of your mouth about empowering Americans, about giving them to tools to be responsible for themselves, then out of the other corner, you slander the Democrats who actually provide those tools.  We want you to be educated, but we're disbanding public education.  We want you to be able to chose your health care provider, but we're opposed to reforms that increase competition.

I am Republican because the party needs decent people.  Not me, I'm a selfish, arrogant, bitter asshole.  But I know there are good Republicans out there and I want to be able to vote in the primary so that THOSE people can represent the party.  I'm sick of the hypocrisy.  I'm sick of the fictitious outrage.  I'm sick of watching the Republican oratory slowly rebuilt into a factory; mass producing straw men at a rate that would make Henry Ford shed an anti-Semitic tear.  I hope that, when all is said and done, Americans won't blame the Republican party, but will start realizing the new movement within it needs to be eliminated.  That it is in everyone's best interest, no matter your political position, to support the good, intelligent, respectful members of the party.  And I hope, soon, those people might get more of a voice, instead of the ones with pitchforks and effigies.  I hope people embrace a new, new movement.

The Republican Party is dead.  Long live the Republican Party.