I Know Shit’s Bad Right Now...And We Runnin’ Out Of French Fries And Burrito Coverings

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Never argue with an idiot. They will only bring you down to their level and beat you with experience.

• George Carlin

Brace yourself, America. Next year’s midterms have the potential to stock the Republican Party at all levels with rabble-rousers that make the Gingrich revolutionaries of 1994 and the Tea Partiers of 2010 look like RINO squishes.

• Michelle Cottle

I endeavor to remain optimistic despite whatever odds may be arrayed against me. I’ve learned that pessimism too often not only guarantees but justifies an adverse outcome. So while things might not look as if they’ll break towards the bright side of life, there’s a part of me that still has to believe that something good will happen.

If you can’t be positive, why even try? Why even challenge yourself? After all, America didn’t become great because those who achieved quit after being kicked in the teeth so many times they stopped counting. Americans persist. It’s what we do. It’s why we are who we are. It’s how we defeated Nazism, Communism, and won the Cold War.

And yet….

Ah, shit; who am I kidding? The past 18 months have laid bare America’s soft underbelly of selfishness, ignorance, and cruelty. Those of us who still have our wits about us have come to see that there are those among us who simply don’t have two brain cells to rub together. If that sounds harsh, it’s meant to be…because it’s true.

In 2006, Idiocracy, written and directed by Mike Judge, was released. At the time, it was a light-hearted comic science fiction view of a future America. What no one realized at the time was that it should have received an Academy Award in the “Pre-Documentary” category. I know; that category didn’t exist then or now…but it should.

Idiocracy, which was intended to elicit laughs, has become a documentary of America a scant 15 years down the road.

The evidence for the case that Idiocracy was actually a “pre-documentary” is clear:

1. More than 72 million people voted to re-elect Donald Trump, a leader so thoroughly inept, dense, and unqualified that he’d turned America into an international laughing stock. Thankfully, more than 81 million people voted for Joe Biden.

2. Many of those 72 million Trump voters are convinced that their hero actually WON the election. They believe Trump’s propaganda that the election was stolen from him by corrupt Democrats in key states. “The Big Lie” and “Stop the Steal!” have become sad, unfortunate additions to the American lexicon.

3. Thousands of Trump’s supporters, egged on by the outgoing Chief Executive himself, staged an attempted coup at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th of this year. Violent Trumpers did millions of dollars in damages to the capitol, dozens were injured, and several police officers were tortured and traumatized. Several of them died- some at the scene and some later by their own hand because they couldn’t recover from the trauma inflicted upon them.

4. Several Republican Congresspeople have denied the seriousness of the events of January 6th, even referring to the attempted coup as “a normal tourist visit.” As if thousands of angry Trumpers got lost looking for the House gift shop….

5. Despite three vaccines that have proven safe and effective against COVID-19, millions of Americans have refused to be vaccinated. The same people who eat hot dogs, rub moisturizer on their skin, and drink McDonald’s milkshakes say that they have “no idea” what’s in the vaccines, and so they’ll pass.

6. Many of the same folks who refuse to get vaccinated took hydroxychloroquine last year when Donald Trump pushed the drug, which was proven ineffective and, in some cases, even deadly.

7. Among the people refusing the vaccine are those who have no problem taking Ivermectin, a sheep de-wormer pushed on fringe social media sites and even on more mainstream Far-Right news channels.

8. There are too many good, decent, patriotic, Conservative White Christians who wouldn’t lift a finger to help their fellow human beings, yet will demand government assistance YESTERDAY in the event they’re impacted by a natural disaster.

9. Just watch good, decent, patriotic, Conservative White Christians erupt in righteous fury when their Social Security check is late. Remember, it’s SOCIALISM!!! when the other guy gets “something for nothing.” When good, decent, patriotic, Conservative White Christians get the same thing, it’s their due.

Much of the hypocrisy and moral/intellectual decay taking place in America today isn’t new. Americans didn’t suddenly become intellectually bereft and morally defunct. They didn’t wake up one day as raging hypocrites. No, four years of Donald Trump gave them permission to be their worst selves…and they took that license and ran with it.

Mama must be SO proud….

Now that the Republican Party has become the Party of Trump, it’s become the party of racism, lies, and cruelty. Close to half of Americans today have pledged allegiance to a cult of personality whose leader has made cruelty, racial hatred, and selfishness the axis around which his ideology- such as it is- revolves.

[U]nder Donald Trump, the Republican Party set aside policy and principles to become a cult of personality. The driving concern of today’s candidates, with precious few exceptions, is to stay in the good graces of their exiled but still dangerous and vindictive leader. This requires embracing the fiction that the election was stolen from Mr. Trump and that MAGA loyalists are duty-bound to fight to right this wrong.

That lie has spread like a rash across the Republican base, with a big boost from the conservative media. Half to two-thirds of the party’s voters believe that Joe Biden’s win was illegitimate. Over half believe that election audits will “probably” or “definitely” reverse the outcome, according to a Morning Consult poll from mid-June. (Spoiler alert: They won’t.) And a poll from early June found that 29 percent of Republicans consider it at least somewhat likely that Mr. Trump will be reinstated as president this year. (Not. Gonna. Happen.)

Republican leaders are expected, at minimum, to play along with this toxic rubbish. Those who don’t are courting electoral grief. Big Lie promoters are leaping into races at all levels — from state legislator to governor, state attorney general to the U.S. Senate — and making the 2020 fraud myth Topic A.

“Of the nearly 700 Republicans who have filed initial paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to run next year for either the U.S. Senate or the House of Representatives, at least a third have embraced Trump’s false claims about his defeat,” according to The Washington Post. This includes 136 incumbents who voted against certifying the election results on Jan. 6.

One of our two major political parties has become a hostage to its own dishonesty, cruelty, and dezinformatziya. When nearly a third of your candidates have hitched their star to a lie, there’s a reckoning that must be anticipated. It may not be next year or the year after, but at some point, your devotion to dishonesty and propaganda will exact a price.

The problem with living off and profiting from ignorance, reaction, and propaganda is that it’s impossible to maintain control indefinitely. Eventually, you WILL lose control of the message and the direction events move. What happens at that point will be anyone’s guess.

There’s a good chance that America will be run by people wholly detached from the truth at some point in the not-too-distant future. Their only “truth” will be what they can convince the American sheeple is real…and they will closely tie it to whatever is required to maintain their grip on power.

Idiocracy and perhaps even 1984 may well prove to be “pre-documentaries,” predictive looks into a dystopian America created by those who cared only for their own personal power and self-aggrandizement.

I know; it’s not a terribly optimistic outlook, but the past 18 months have robbed me of much of my previous idealism. I can look back to WWII and marvel at the sacrifices made by the “Greatest Generation,” who gave so much of themselves to defeat Nazism and preserve our freedom. Unfortunately, today’s barely “Less Than Mediocre Generation” won’t even make the minimal sacrifice of getting vaccinated to defeat a deadly worldwide pandemic.

There’s not much that warrants optimism these days, though I still try to look on the bright side whenever possible. It’s just that what I see too often reminds me of the old Stealers Wheel song:

Clowns to the left of me Jokers to the right Here I am Stuck in the middle with you

Who knows? Perhaps there’s still hope. In the immortal words of President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho, “So you're smart, huh? I thought your head would be bigger.”

Maybe I’m not so smart after all.

Yeah, things could always be worse, right?

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