North Star Writers Group - Syndicated Commentary: Opinion, Humor and Features

August 3, 2009

Zealots of the Right: Demons! Demons Everywhere!

One of the assumptions one must make if one hopes to maintain a functioning democratic process is that the opposing political sides will be possessed of at least a modicum of sanity, as well as the electorate that chooses between them. That, however, no longer seems to be the case in the United States.

The “birther” nonsense is bad enough – you know, the maelstrom of piffle alleging that Barack Obama was born in Kenya rather than Hawaii, and thus is not a “natural born citizen” and consequently ineligible for the office of the presidency. For such gobbledygook to gain currency amongst trailer-dwelling cousin marriers in Arkansas is sad but expected. For it to be trumpeted from the airwaves by Lou Dobbs and from the floor of Congress by the insipid Roy Blunt is a sad measure of how far American culture has slipped into the sewer.

Those who think that such fevered imaginings of the protofascist propagandist Republican footsoldiers had finally attained an unplumbable depth of inanity and absurdity had best think again: No lie is too big, no premise too absurd to get traction amidst paranoiaic slit-eyed Fox-watching whiteys. The latest? Barack Obama is literally the antichrist incarnate.

Yes. The horned one. Beelzebubba. Mephistopheles. The Big D. And no, they’re not kidding. They’ve got YouTube videos to prove it.

The evidence? Well, according to the aforementioned video and its cheerleaders at FreeRepublic, Jesus himself named the antichrist lo these many thousands of years ago: Baraq U’Bamah, provided you accept the narrator’s translations from ancient Aramaic, Greek and Hebrew.

Yes, these people are walking punch lines. Walking punch lines who vote, and who for generations have served as the racist rump of the rapidly declining party of Lincoln. They’re the flag-waving, slogan-chanting, tea party-staging flying monkeys for the likes of Sarah Palin, George “Macaca” Allen and Mittens Romney – when they aren’t assassinating doctors, bombing abortion clinics, shooting parishoners at Unitarian churches or otherwise embodying the teachings of their Lord and Savior in their every word and deed.

They are zealots. They are demented, they are dangerous and, given the slightest excuse, they behave like cornered animals. And in a media environment dominated by rightist corporatism of the sort that allows the likes of Fox to thrive and prosper, and with the pseudo-democracy of the Internet to spread their messages of hate via millions of repulsive electronic tentacles from one diseased mind to the next, their miserable voices are amplified a millionfold.

They are the People of the Lie, comfortably wrapped in myriad layers of self-reinforcing falsities, willingly accepting any idiotic premise handed to them provided that it reinforces their unwarranted belief in their own righteousness and their own entitlement. This, they say, is Their Country and they Want It Back. Back from whom? Well, from the majority of voters in the last national election, of course. But beyond that, from the Liberals. From the Kenyans. From the Antichrists. From the Jews, the Bilderbergers, the Elders of Zion, the Illuminati, from the space aliens, from The Other, from the Communists or for whatever other bogeymen they have imagined into being and which they believe to be hiding inside every federal building and under every bed.

They have long since become everything they claim to fight against. The only demons are the ones that live inside of their tormented tiny brains, battling for primacy with crystal meth, backwoods superstition and senseless instinctive hatred. And unfortunately for the country they pretend to love, their numbers are legion. If America survives, prospers and remains civilized, it will be in spite of, rather than because of, them.

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