It has been a long, long time since I wrote a political rant. Maybe too long. Anyone who has followed the news lately knows that so much insanity has been going on in politics in the last few weeks at both the federal and state level that just defies any semblance of reason or common sense. So much so that my subconscious, apparently irritated at my inability to post anything about any of it, got me out of bed at 3am the other night, sat me down at my laptop and dictated these words that you see below.
Conservative politicians complain about all the ballyhooing going on these days with progressives demanding equal rights for everyone and protesting to maintain collective bargaining rights so American workers can hold onto hard-fought concessions such as a living wage, health care benefits, a 40-hour work week, child labor laws, their pensions, health and safety standards and other benefits that Americans take for granted.
To the right it's all basically socialism in its most evil form, or Marxism or Fascism or Communism...they are all used interchangeably these days as you know.
They argue that insisting upon civil rights for every man, woman or child is not part of the Founding Fathers plan and therefore has to be wrong. So really they are being patriotic when they vote to restrict some people from the full complement of rights afforded to all the other people. Voting to ban interracial and gay marriage or gay adoptions for example is all fine and well because the Founding Fathers never gave it their stamp of approval either. And where the Founding Fathers fail to be narrow-minded enough, conservative politicians will pull out their trusty Holy Bible and tell you their twisted interpretation of this book's verse and how it spells out all the many ways we are all headed for eternal damnation. These are not your run-of-the-mill church-going folk, these are the holiest of Christians imbued with special powers granted by God himself to arbitrarily deny people their civil rights and deprive certain people of life-giving assistance, especially to the sick and the poor. (God evidently really, really hates the sick and the poor.)
With their Holy Bibles in hand these conservative politicians can freely decide who meets their strict standards of humanity and who falls short and doesn’t qualify for equal rights. Sadly, apparently gays and people of color need not apply. Also coming up short on their list of chosen believers are foreigners, the sick and crippled, people of other religious faiths, the poor, the elderly and smart-alecky intellectuals who prefer to use reason and logic instead of angry bluster and intimidation to get their points across. Conservative politicians claim that logic is just cheating and that any self-respecting Christian has no need for thinking anyhow.
Behind this assemblage of self-righteous, knuckle-dragging, right-wing nutjobs are the corporatist despots led by the Koch brothers and their minions of slack-jawed, ignorant redneck conservatives and racist Tea Partiers. Of course the Koch brothers don't speak publicly themselves, preferring instead to use their batcrap crazy spokesmorons, Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin to spread their fear-mongering and lies. Plus you can't forget the other deranged, pathological lying piles of human waste at Fox News such as Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity and their allies in the affront on reason, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Michael Savage and the rest of the Rethuglican talking heads.
If there is one thing that is a complete certainty, it is that power, wealth and corruption will always win out over decency, fairness, justice, morality and honor. The haves will never voluntarily cede control to the have-nots. Not as long as they have billions of dollars to bankroll a movement that will prevent it. Face it, fellow progressives, the battle for honest American values and democracy is lost. What semblance of a democracy that exists is merely smoke and mirrors with only a few free-thinking, independent hold-outs left in government like Barrack Obama or Bernie Sanders still raging against the greedy power-hungry machine that has all but destroyed them.
It is only a question of time before we lose every bit of progress that our country has gained in the last one hundred years to these corporate overlords who own our country and practically every government official in it, so why not just save ourselves a lot of time, effort and frustration by just admitting defeat right now and falling into lock-step behind the ignorant masses of sheeple blindly swearing allegiance to a phony movement that waves an American flag back and forth and uses words like “Freedom” the way a hypnotist might use a shiny pocket watch to lull his weak-brained patient into giving up smoking? With the top 1 percent already controlling almost all the wealth in this country, can you really see any other way this is going to play out?
Well, short of a revolution that is, and that prospect seems unlikely since most of the nitwits who support these breathtakingly stupid legislators and their outrageously draconian ideas are the same group of people who also own most of the guns in this country.
Here is what I think should happen. David Koch should run for President of the United States. Why waste time with more idiot puppets the likes of Gingrich, Huckaby, Paul and so on? Lets skip all the formalities and call it what it really is…a corporate takeover. Of course Koch will win in a landslide against Obama because he will pay whatever it takes to be sure of it. Them good old boys will be more than happy to vote for Koch just for the sake of not having to look up to a black man, an unnatural act if ever there was one in the Deep South.
Having gained control of the country, Koch will immediately privatize everything because as everyone knows government services can’t possibly function as efficiently if there isn’t a profit motive involved. Conservatives agree, why provide a best case scenario for schools or hospitals when you can simply cut or reduce the quality of the service while siphoning off their needed resources in the name of profits? They feel it’s wasteful to spend money on the poor and needy anyway. Ignore them and the problem fixes itself, right?. Health services should be reserved for the elite few who have the wealth and status to afford privatized care. Everyone else needs to die (except for the few they will keep around to harvest body parts from as necessary.)
And die they shall, by the tens of thousands at first, as Koch removes every bothersome health and safety code regulation, every environmental restriction, and every common sense guideline that ever came between him and making a buck. Yes, the Tea Partiers will finally have what they asked for all right. No more federal controls. It only stands to reason then that there will be tons more jobs and it will lead to the strongest economy on record, right? Those dumb bastards drank their Kool-Aid and all the lies and bullshit that came with it and came back for seconds! How pathetic!
Like a good corporate raider, he will of course sell off parts of the country to the highest bidders, keeping the profits for himself. Every school, library, national park, hospital, museum, and so on will be put on the auction block and sold to his billionaire buddies so they could in turn do with as they wish. We won’t need as many colleges and hospitals anyway because Koch will have rolled back wages to depression era times and widened the gap between the powerful wealthy elite and the common $5 a day wage slave. No money will mean no mass production which means no jobs and more unemployment and poverty.
After a few years of belching poisonous fumes into the environment and dumping toxic waste into our lakes, rivers, oceans, streams and landfills, the world will have become largely too polluted to sustain the billions of people still holding on to life. With our livestock mostly dead or dying and our crops poisoned by pesticides, there won’t be enough food or clean drinking water to keep the billions of people in the world from dying. Class wars will erupt gradually playing out as your stereotypical post-apocalyptic tale of violent roving gangs led by warlords who kill people indiscriminately and without the slightest hesitation while Koch and friends sit on the sidelines from their toxic-free air-conditioned hideaways and laugh at how he reduced an entire society to ruins for his own personal gain.
In the end, as we all begin dying by the billions from the toxic effects of radiation and acrid pollution of our air, land and water, and the depletion of the ozone layer we can all look back on this time in our history when so many conservatives clung fast to inbred hatreds, ignorant beliefs, narrow-minded ideals, phony patriotic fervor and the outright lies and fear-mongering perpetrated by Fox News and paid for by corporate billionaires who cared only for money and power and nothing for anything or anyone else. And I bet there will still be those diehard conservatives left who will probably cast a smile at their surviving families as they take their final halting breaths and proclaim that it was all Obama’s fault.
