Thank you, Donald Trump. And It Pains Me To Even Write His Name

The clear race baiting, the buffoonery of a reprehensible clown - I'm waiting for someone to rush up and mess up that cotton candy comb-over - has achieved one positive thing: he has single-handedly galvanized President Obama's base. There is no turning back. The only way to defeat this ugliness is to work for a gigantic landslide victory for Obama's second term. I've always believed he would be a two-term President, and for anyone who knows me, knows the limitations of my admiration of his policies - but, that said, this is not a policy issue. This is way bigger than that. This is about our humanity, the core of what separates us from...who? aliens? animals? Do animals discriminate on the basis of race? Fur? Leave it to the supposedly highest form of life, humans, to want to destroy one another for some incomprehensible ideal.

We cannot abide the open racism of the right, its fearless expression protected by politicians who validate that racism by not out-rightly repudiating it because they need those Taliban Tea Party votes, after-all, to support their whacked out agendas. 

What Trump has managed to achieve, that I'm not sure even David Axelrod and Jim Messina could do, is to have shocked the base to the point of re-energizing them to work hard for Obama's re-election. And that's no small feat given the discontent over a multitude of issues. Trump has trumped the inertia, the disappointment, the discontent with Obama's performance. There is only one issue we can agree on now and that's WINNING! (Thanks Charlie!)

The more the Right sustains its ill-disguised racism, the more the base will coalesce. It's a horrible reason to come together but come together we will. Winning will be the best revenge.

Tea Party Taliban Imposing Sharia-like Law

With the imminent shutdown of the government by the Teabaggers - make no mistake, they are the ones whose intractability is pushing this country to the brink - they are beginning to look a lot like a cult enacting their own type of Sharia law by imposing their repressive and regressive moral code onto all of us 'non-believers'. NO health screenings for women, NO sex education in school, NO abortion counseling or abortion funding NO matter how you got pregnant, NO arts funding, "Waste of money!", NO learning to read, write or 'rithmetic, "Cut education funding. Now!" It's the uneducated hating to learn anything because it might upset their vacuous core 'values'. And god forbid anyone else should read a book and find out that the Philistine Teabaggers are all full of shit. NO climate change. NO birth certificate. NO government. NONONONONO. 

So, the Tea Party is taking a page out of the Al Qaeda handbook. For al-Qaeda, Sharia represents a perfect system for ordering human affairs. And for the Taliban Tea Party, that is exactly how they want the system to be: no room for diversity of thought, a strict adherence to their commandments or punishment by slow asphyxiation of the mind by depriving one of books, classrooms and learning. They want a country devoid of creative thinking, going down the slippery slope to next banning hip hop, all languages but bad English, and just shooting immigrants on site.

Wikipedia calls the Tea party an American populist party and goes on to describe Populism, as a political philosophy urging social and political system change that favors "the people" over "the elites", or favors the common people over the rich and wealthy business owners. Read that, per the Tea Party, as deriding anything that can help “the people” like crushing collective bargaining (I wonder if they know about the Triangle Fire and other apocalyptic worker tragedies and child labor that would still be going on today if it weren’t for collective bargaining aka unions.) And read that as the Tea Party turning the other cheek with regard to obscene corporations, “the elites” (the Kochs), making out like Jesse James in Vegas. As usual, they have everything ass-backwards. 

Here’s their mission from their website: “A community committed to standing together, shoulder to shoulder, to protect our country and the Constitution upon which we were founded!” Yes! With an exclamation mark 'n all! It’s like somebody in grade two wrote it. Or the Republican caucus. Meaningless drivel, and yet the political muscle of their miniscule minions is stupefying.