“If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn’t help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we’ve got acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don’t want to do it.”
– Stephen Colbert

And me, every time I see a photo or video taken at the RNC. The Republican party has become such a dangerously absurd mess of racist, jingoistic assholes that it seems kind of like a big, terrible joke. This is a giant group of people so absolutely committed to the subjugation of women, minorities, gays, and the poor and the refusal of science and education that nothing their leaders say – not even the most hateful, stupid, and wrong statements I have ever heard, ever – seems implausible or even concerning to them.

Take Todd Akin as an eternal example. Not only has he only fallen 9 points in the polls in my own fucking state, but he’s got all kinds of conservative lunatics coming to his defense, including Mike Fucking Seaver. I’m not even that surprised by the fact that they agree with him, I’m more amazed that he hasn’t even apologized. Instead of admitting that he was totally, empirically wrong or spoke out of ignorance, he said he misspoke. And these people believe him. How does a person misspeak an entire paragraph? And why can’t they admit that they’re wrong, especially when they are?

The Republican party of today is drastically different from the Republican party of ten years ago. I still disagreed with the old party on a visceral, fundamental level, but I wasn’t made afraid of it and the overwhelming levels of ignorance that seem to give this new one power. It is literally astonishing to me that people are able to be swept up in this backwards, vicious rhetoric, and that they have turned Manifest Destiny into an all-consuming White Man Parade that crushes the rights of the other citizens of this country. These are people who want to cancel funding for scholarships, Social Security, healthcare, and PBS, for fuck’s sake. PBS. Sesame Street, Nova, Masterpiece Theatre. All those really subversive Commie pinko shows.

I mean, WHAT IN THE FUCK.

How in the fuck does this even happen? How do so many people get their brains turned so inside out? How, in any part of this country’s history, did they learn that what this country needs is to turn inward, away from knowledge, aid, and progress, because these women and those homos and all of the fucking brown people need to learn their fucking place, because it’s all their own fucking fault, anyway?