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So 2016 Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum was at a gathering of conservatives this past week and some loony old tea party lady asked him in reference to President Obama:
"Why is the Congress rolling over and letting this Communist dictator destroy my country? Y'all know what he is and I know what he is. I want him out of the White House; he's not a citizen; he could have been removed a long time ago...Ted [Cruz?] told me I've got to wait for the next election. I don't think the country will be around for the next election. Obama tried to blow up a nuke in Charleston a few months ago! And the three admirals, and generals. He has totally destroyed our military. He's fired all the generals and all the admirals that said they wouldn't fire on the American people."And how dear readers do you think that someone who has aspirations of being the leader of this great nation responded to such a dump truck load of bug-eyed dementia?
Santorum's response was:
"I'm not a sitting member of the Senate, so I'm not taking blame for any of that stuff."
Just fucking WOW!! Not one single word negating the old loon's ridiculous charges or questioning her sanity. What a breathtakingly gutless reply to a truly horrific set of claims against our president. It is simply incomprehensible to the nth degree in The Gadfly's view.
Charlie Pierce over at Esquire online has truly had enough of these fellow citizen jackasses as well and lately has been utilizing the valuable space on his Esquire blog to openly acknowledge the reality of just how deeply unhinged the modern day, conservative movement, and by proxy, the Republican party has become -- and it just so happens to be the exact same observation that The Gadfly has been screaming from the rooftops for years:
This is the party that modern conservatism has built, brick by brick, one indulged lunatic at a time, over the past 60 years. I leave the details to Rick Perlstein, but there is no question that this was a conscious choice made over time by one of the only two political parties that we have allowed ourselves. It began with the decision to side with the remnants of American apartheid. It continued with the decision to ally itself with the most virulently retrograde elements of American Protestantism. It was energized by the tragic historical truth that this stuff is an effective means of gaining political power. The thinking became more and more magical. The rhetoric became more and more unhinged. The willingness of the Republican party to tolerate an almost limitless amount of sheer public lunacy has led us to this moment, where the only answer Santorum dares give to a woman who believes the president intended to nuke an American city was to say that he wasn't in Washington at the time.
There is no Republican middle any more. Pundits go searching for it and never return. Their bleached bones are found two years later in a ditch surrounding an Iowa cornfield, or their entrails are discovered hanging from a pine tree in northern New Hampshire as a warning to anyone else who dares undertake the quest. Just over the past few days, we have seen two alleged Republican "moderates" take positions that, a decade ago, would have marked them as fringe nuisances.
Centuries from now, historians, probably working on houseboats floating above what used to be Delaware, are going to look back at this period in our history and wonder how we tolerated a political party gone so completely mad, much less how we continued to empower it, election after election. They are going to marvel at how all the institutions designed to check the spread of the madness refused to look at it and call it what it is. These people are going to think American democracy was some sort of weird contagion that overcame the country, like ergot infecting the nation's wheatfields. They're going to believe we all just went crazy and ate ourselves.http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a33766/everything-in-moderation/
One can mosey on back through the archives of The Gadfly's blogging history, going back a decade now, and you will find posts very similar to Mr. Pierce's post above.
The conservative movement was not always this batshit fucking insane. They did have at one time some thoughtful, intellectual, and respectable voices in their ranks -- and they were people that you could very easily have a rational discussion with and even if you ultimately disagreed with their viewpoint, you walked away from the engagement knowing full well that you had participated in a legitimate, sensible and fair debate.
Not anymore. And especially not so since the Kenyan, Muslim, Communist, Socialist, terrorist appeasing, gun confiscating, vote stealing, power usurping negro dictator became a squatter in the people's "white" house.
The lunatics have overrun the GOP asylum and their mass psychosis/mental illness is the chief obstacle to this country realizing the full potential of it's capability to be the most powerful force for human goodness and advancement in the world -- 'nuff said.
And it goes without saying that it has become abundantly clear that the only kind of debate which the right wing is interested in having is the one between themselves and the creepy, fear-mongering, cynical and pious voices rattling around in the dark recesses their own heads.
Seriously -- how else is one to judge the mental capacity of people who believe all of the following:
>> Obama is a Muslim plant who wants to impose Sharia Law on all America.
>> Obama engineered the Sandy Hook school massacre as a false flag operation to used as an excuse to confiscate all guns from conservatives, round them up and put them in FEMA re-education camps.
>> Sandy Hook was a hoax - it never happened, it was just a bunch of Obama paid actors on television.
>> Obama is the Anti-Christ.
>> Obama planning to murder tens of millions Americans so he can name himself dictator for life.
>> Obama planned to set off a nuclear device in Charleston, SC - for some reason or another (see above).
And don't even get The Gadfly started on the Bill and Hillary Clinton conspiracies.
It used to be that the people who had beliefs in such idiocy as that outlined above would be shuffled off to the fringes of society, and treated not very unlike the demented old family uncle living in a shack on the outskirts of town. Nowadays they are known as "the base" of the Republican party and given carte blanche access to the public discourse arena. Worse still - the lily-livered, contemptible mainstream media is extremely terrified to publicly acknowledge just how fucking insane they are and how much of a danger they pose to the future of our representative democracy, much less the ability for the nation to confront the myriad of real world issues affecting all of our lives.
The Gadfly has stated it on many a prior occasion -- The Gadfly fears these psychotic, right wing, American nut jobs infinitely more than he does a handful of Islamic militants scurrying from cave to cave in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
And that is why The Gadfly writes about them and speakss the god-honest truth about them. It's dirty fucking job, but somebody has to do it.
----TFG
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