It's Been a Long Day

"The tone [of El Presidente's 2nd term] has been too much of a permanent campaign. When you're the minority, you need to fight. When you're the governing majority, you need to produce." --Newt Gingrich, the former Republican House speaker and serial adulterer, quoted in today's NYTimes, complaining about the Karl-Rove-dominated White House.

"They thought because they had slain the Kerry dragon, they could claim a mandate and do what they wanted to. Now they have to sell things, whether it's Iraq or stem cells or John Bolton -- let alone Social Security -- on their own merits." --An unnamed "prominent Republican in Washington," also quoted in the same NYTimes article.

The only good reason we can think of to see another sunrise in the Land of the Perilously Free is that Chief Justice William Rehnquist did NOT announce his resignation today, thus NOT (just yet) setting in motion the machinery of Karl Rove's Permanent Campaign to demonize "lib-ruls" and send all Democrats to hell-fire.

Under even somewhat moderate Republican circumstances, as when El Presidente's father got to nominate a Supreme Court justice (Clarence Thomas, anyone?), we get supremely edgy, i.e., suicidal, about the future of The Republic. Our edginess in this season of Bush II reaches off-the-scale readings, since it's very clear what Karl Rove and all the other little Rovians have in mind for us: Numero Uno, they intend to make us, willy nilly, better friggin' Christians, 'cause we've been very, very bad, particularly women who have sex and men who love other men; and Numero Two-o, they intend to dismantle the federal government, regulatory agency by regulatory agency, starting with the Endangered Species Act and moving on to the really big white-bellied meat of Republican wet dreams, Social friggin' Security, so that all that apparatus that makes us soooo dependent on government to save us from this and that just simply ... goes away, so that when your odd oil company wants to drill off the coast of Whatever, there won't be any mechanism whatsoever by which your ordinary beach-goer or beach-enjoyer will have to stop the wholesale destruction of the environment for private profit. (Hell ... even the so-called "liberals" on the Supreme Court are getting into the act. They just ruled that a municipality can confiscate private property for the benefit of developers -- a terrible decision).

But we digress.

The people running this country right now want to make a religious icon out of the flag, intend to stifle dissent, wouldn't understand Christian charity if it smote them on the (other) cheek. They've got everything else. They want the courts too. And intend to have them.

How do we stop this? Our powder (45 sometimes skittish Dems in the U.S. Senate) ain't exactly dry. The American people are into reality TV, NOT reality. When Newt Gingrich is the best thing we've got going, why, oh why, did we wake up this morning?