As anyone who might periodically or accidentally view this blog knows, I’m not the best at updates.  I usually only post when I find something so outrageous, so compelling, so motivating, that I just have to let others know.  I don’t pretend to be a major player in the blogosphere, but I hope that when I do say something, the rarity of my speaking up indicates to those who might read it the seriousness of the issue about which I speak.

Today, therefore, I’m going to talk about Republicans.

Leading up to the recent historic election of Barack Obama to the office of President of the United States, we all got to witness the usual shrill screaming of the right wing as is kicked its famed Shriek Machine into overdrive, lobbing claims of Terrorist and non-citizen and traitor at the man who the people would and did choose to be our President.  While aggravating to put up with those daily lies and overwhelming propaganda to the point that I made one of my rare entries about it, that kind of behavior has come to be the norm during our seemingly endless election cycles that begin anew as soon as the old one ends.  While it’s disheartening to see that such childish behavior has become the norm from Republicans during elections, it’s not unexpected, and the rest of us have learned to live with it as we work to marginalize their radical propaganda and bring real truth and facts forward.

But I’m not writing to complain about the mean-spiritedness and fact-free manner in which the Republicans conducted the last election.  The country won and Republicans lost, and that’s satisfactory enough, for now.  What I’m writing about today is the continuing and horrifying nature and manner in which Republicans have been conducting themselves since the election.  I have seen everything from ruminations and serious discussions about overthrowing the government with violence to the advocacy of outright lies in order to fool the people into falling into line with the evangelical, backward base of the Republican party.  It’s scary.

The Republican party used to be a party of ideals that meant something to a lot of people.  Small government, personal liberty, international respect, and religious freedom were all tenets of Republican ideology.  Something remarkable happened over the last eight years of George W. Bush, something which incontrovertibly erased those philosophies.  Instead of small government, we have deregulated the financial sector to the point encouraging mindless greed that brought about the subsequently inevitable collapse of that sector.  Instead of nipping the problem in the bud by enacting reasonable regulation on things like oil speculation and Madoff’s now-infamous multi-billion dollar Ponzi scheme, we, at the hands of the Bush administration and his neo-conservative Republican cronies, sat and waited until we needed more than $1,000,000,000,000.00 (that’s $1 Trillion for those of us whose eyes tend to blur over when so many zeros become involved) in taxpayer-funded bailouts for banks whose irresponsible lending and investment and disclosure policies led to the total collapse of the American and global economy to a level not seen since the Great Depression.  The National Debt Clock actually ran out of digits due to the deficit spending.

Instead of personal liberty, we have the PATRIOT Act, a nonsense collection of Big Brother initiatives that have given us the TSA (better known as the Theater Security Administration for all the good it actually does), the Department of Homeland Security (an embarrassing amalgamation of agencies that were much better off working independently and then collaborating and sharing results to get the best intelligence possible, now reduced to providing color-coded diagrams of specious terror threat levels and promoting the purchasing of duct tape), Guantanemo Bay (where contrary to the Constitution of the United States of America people from around the world, including American citizens, are imprisoned and held without trial, without bail, and without charges while they are tortured contrary to the Geneva Convention for information that has proved useless at best and counterproductive at worst), warrantless wiretapping (which we were assured was used against foreign agents only but have since learned that the NSA has spied on everyone’s phone calls, emails, and letters).  We have given up our liberty to the tune of mis-placed patriotism thanks to this new era of Republican neoconservatism.

Instead of international respect, we have the unjustified and unjustifiable War in Iraq, started on a plethora of lies and misinformation perpetuated by the Bush administration in order to exact revenge on a personal vendetta, at the expense of thousands of our own soldiers and upwards of one million Iraqi citizens.  We have an ineffective token presence in Afghanistan to fight a Taliban that has moved to Pakistan.  We have a sullied reputation thanks to fearmongering and saber-rattling and international playground bullying.  A world that became united with America against radical terrorists when they struck eight years ago has become a world united against America and our drunken frat-boy strike first policies.

Instead of religious freedom we have an energized and radical Christian evangelist movement seeping its way into power among the highest echelons of government, undermining decades of historically unsurpassed scientific progress and education.  We have watched in horror as homophobia and xenophobia have become everyday aspects of the Republican party through measures like Proposition 8 in California and Amen

dment 2 in Florida.  We have seen the false cries of religious intolerance when, in respect of the First Amendment, inappropriate displays of government-endorsed religion are removed from courthouses and lawbooks.  We have a rampant epidemic of for-profit megachurches that have popularized the ridiculous notion that America is somehow a Christian nation.  Instead of nonsectarianism, we have eroded religious freedom to the point that John McCain was forced to tell a deranged supporter that Barack Obama was not a Muslim, but instead a “good man,” as if the two are somehow mutually exclusive qualities.

So how did we get here?  How on earth did the Republican party fall so far?  A large portion of the blame falls on the shoulders of the radical evangelical Christian movement, who, by their very nature, are driven to evangelize.  This, in and of itself, is a harmless expression of religious freedom and is quite certainly a laudable expression of First Amendment rights.  But somewhere over the last few decades, instead of giving sermons, these people have begun preaching politics from the pulpit.  It is of course understandable that believers in a particular faith would believe that their own faith is correct and that nonbelievers should be discounted and disregarded.  But in combination with a lust for unbridled power, these ideas quickly become dangerous, and soon we are left with unfortunate things like “In God we Trust” on our money and the phrase “under God,” jammed inelegantly into the Pledge of Allegiance, which had theretofore been a secular oath of loyalty to the country only and not any particular form of theism.

This radical Christian movement is, in fact, relatively small, as terrifying as it may be.  But it is also one of the loudest movements ever known, taking advantage of the mainstream media and the internet to make itself seem much larger and much more important than it really is.  Noting this ability, the Republican party courted these radicals and absorbed them into the base of its party at the expense of the reputation and character of true Christians.  Unwilling to be seen as castouts or heretics, many otherwise-normal Christians went along with this RepubliChristian sleigh ride from hell, further enabling the continuing erosion of the once-solid wall separating Church and State.

Republicans thus established one corner of the trifecta of everlasting power: an extremely loud, unignorable if ignoble mouthpiece that claimed to have Divine Will behind it.  The next step was obvious: leadership.  These leaders did not have to necessarily be good leaders, as evidenced by the twice-elected (more or less) George W. Bush.  The leaders only needed to be good figureheads suitable for the religious radical right to rally behind while it scared or manipulated nonbelievers into falling into lockstep unison with their ideology.  The image of a President whom you could sit down in a smoky bar and have a crappy beer with appealed to many, and insofar as most people’s underlying political understandings go, that was a good enough image to vote for, when combined with the nonstop radical rhetoric pumped out and perpetuated by the radical religious right-wing mouthpiece.

Stopping the analysis there, however, would be insufficient.  George W. Bush, as already noted, was not a leader, he was a figurehead.  The real leadership of the Republican party worked behind the scenes.  The party itself had come to exist for its own sake, rather than the ideals for which it once stood, and the leadership is eminently responsible for that shift in paradigm.  Composed not of civil servants seeking to advance the agenda of the country or the American people, the Republican party became a hegemonist oligarchy of entrenched families of power and wealth who sought to preserve that power and wealth through any means necessary.  To that end, architects of the disingenuously-named Project for a New American Century like Dick Cheney and Karl Rove used the figurehead to push policy, covering or cleaning it up with the powerful and eloquent radical Christian mouthpiece.  The PATRIOT Act was presented as a collection of Anti-Terror tools instead of its true Anti-Freedom intent.  Guantanemo Bay was justified through religious intolerance and fear of Muslims as it was populated almost exclusively with people of Arabic descent with brown skin and dark beards.  This fear of non-Christians was harped on over and over ad nauseam through reference to 9/11 every time what would otherwise have been a controversial piece of legislation needed to get pushed through.  When legislation through constitutional means was insufficient, Executive Orders were used as dictatorial directives.

The power-hungry fascists that had infiltrated the Republican leadership had solidified their agenda, and they had found a mouthpiece to present it to the world in a startlingly effective manner.  The leadership desired absolute power and absolute control, and the radical evangelist Christians desired absolute theocracy and control.  Combining their talents, these two aspects of the neoconservative Republican party were able to feed off each other and cement their need and desire to undo more than two hundred years of peaceful secular democracy.  Only one more part was necessary to complete the trifecta and overthrow the Republic: people.

In what may be the most disheartening, sad, and tragic part of the story, these ideological radicals were able to get people to vote for them.  Some remained loyal to the party in hopes of returning it to its original honorable roots.  Some were attracted to its warm-sounding message of God and Country.  Most were duped by a constant stream of lies and fearmongering that preyed on a lack of education and a willful ignorance of politics by great swaths of the American public.

Using tried-and-true (by, among others, Hitler and the Nazi party) methods of stirring up hatred and bitterness, the Republican party, now run by religious extremists and regal oligarchs with a royal sense of power entitlement, passed itself off to the American people as if nothing had ever changed.  It claims to hold true to its roots of personal freedom and liberty, small government, and international responsibility.  Whenever something goes wrong in the world,  the Republican party is quick to assign blame: it’s the liberal Democrats; it’s the Islamic Terrorists; it’s Middle Eastern authoritarian regimes.  In fact, the Republican party did such an excellent job staying on their message of hatred and scorn that in many circles the word “liberal” is considered an insult.  It is a testament to the party’s ability to bury facts and ignore history that a word which describes every social advance ever made in the history of humankind has become a dirty word to slander those who refuse to walk the party line.

In an unprecedented effort of coordinated propaganda, the Republican party distracted the masses from its agenda by stirring up hot button issues that almost never had any basis in reality whatsoever.  From a delusional notion that Democrats intend to dismantle the Second Amendment and confiscate guns in an effort to totally disarm the populace; to a histrionically orchestrated and utterly fabricated freakout that liberals wanted to force Christian pastors to marry two men against their religious convictions; to a completely unsubstantiated idea that in an effort to bring the right to health care to all Americans, the left would encourage and actively advocate the dependence on welfare; each of these items was offered by the Republican party as something to get worked up about.

And get worked up people did.  From the run on guns after the election of Obama, to the passing of Prop 8 and Amendment 2 in California and Florida, to the continued obstructionism practiced by House and Senate Republicans at the behest of their constituents with respect to Obama’s economic stimulus passage, the Republican party successfully scared and distracted their base into doing nothing meaningful while the Christiofascist leadership quietly and carefully undermined and dismantled the Constitution and the foundation of Rule of Law that had once so effectively guided our country through both good times and bad.

When these facts are put out on the table to be analyzed objectively, it seems ludicrous that so many American people could have fallen for what seems like such an obvious deception.  But therein lies the brilliance of the Republican strategy: while the religious radicals undermine education and the power-hungry fascists undermine freedom, the general populace becomes less intelligent and more helpless.  Soon enough, we arrive at today, with nearly one in every two Americans believing the earth is a mere 6,000 years old, with people canceling life insurance policies after the election of Obama, whom they perceive as the Antichrist, believing that the second coming is at hand, with teenage mothers raising children in shacks in the deep south because they were never taught what a condom is, with organized religion turning into an industry unto itself.

What we have, then, is a completely ignorant and massively uneducated batch of the American public who do not know any better.  They have been bitter and angry all their lives, raised to hate what they do not understand.  They will latch on to the first thing they hear that sounds familiar and comforting, and the Republican party provides that comfort.  They send out a warm and cozy message of Godlike love and indestructibly strong country and fellowship.  These huge portions of the American public vote en masse for the party that tells them what they need to hear and directs their hatred towards defenseless targets like gays and undocumented workers and Muslims.

And that’s what happened to the Republican party.  A transition, beginning in the early Reagan years, from a party of values and country-first ideology, to a trifecta of three components that seek not to serve America, but to serve only the Republican party: really brilliant leadership, really moving speakership, and really stupid voters.  The leadership enacts the policy necessary to keep Republicans in power, principles and country be damned.  The speakership sends out the message of principles and country, truth be damned.  And the voters eat it all up because they just do not know any better.

If you are a Republican and are reading this, it may seem as if I have just called you an idiot.  But if you are a Republican and reading this and have made it this far, you’re probably not an idiot, just misinformed.  It’s likely you have fallen for the message of small government, personal responsibility, and unrestricted liberty that the Republican party knows sounds so good.  Or maybe you disagree with the Democrats on certain policy issues, and feel obligated to vote and act Republican by default.  There is good news for you!  We today have a unique opportunity to put an end to the two-party rule that has allowed the Republican party to transmogrify itself into the monster it has become.  Now is an excellent opportunity to research and vote for third-party candidates, and fill all houses of government with them.  If you truly find the principles of liberty and small government appealing, now would be a good time to jump the lip-service ship of the Republicans, and explore what the Libertarian Party has to offer.  By diversifying American politics, we embrace the real diversity of this country, whether that diversity is represented in race, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, or political perspective.  And that, my friends, should be our ultimate goal: a government in which we are all represented, running a country in which we all are free.