Some might recall that my last column partially dealt with my suggestion that GOP hatespeak was leading us to a new civil war (2007) and Sean Hannity, Brent Bozell and Ted Nugent’s on-air freakout about it. Today, (or toady) Town Hall columnist Kurt Schlicter cooks up this meadow-muffin of a column:

Why Democrats Would Lose the Second Civil War, Too

It’s obvious that the central tenet of the Democrat Party platform is now hatred and contempt for Normal Americans. Taking their cue from the elites in Europe and Canada who are stripping dissenters of their free speech rights and religious freedoms, the leftist elite is moving to solidify its hold on power here with the eager assistance of tech companies and the moral support of the Fredocons who yearn to return to pseudo-relevance as the ruling class’s slobberingly loyal opposition. In California, the leftist government is practically firing on Fort Sumter…

Aside from the vile characterization of a plurality of our fellow Americans in the most grotesque political terms imaginable, I would like to respond — save that I already responded, on December 29, 2013. (I remain a good five to ten years ahead of many pundits, I fear.)

Why the Republicans will lose the upcoming Civil War

[Originally Published 2013/12/29, included in my ebook, Reality 101 — Political Self Defense for Progressives]

Remember, he started his career as a car thief. Then, he “rehabilitated” himself by inventing the “club” to stop jerks like him from stealing your car. Now, he’s in Congress. What could possibly go wrong?*

[* 2018: Issa has recently stated that he is retiring from congress this fall.]

Issa Disputes NYT Benghazi Report (VIDEO)
Caitlin MacNeal / Talking Points Memo

Chairman of the House Oversight Committee Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) on Sunday disagreed with some of the conclusions in the New York Times investigation on Benghazi, specifically that the attack was fueled in part by an anti-Islamic American video.

But that’s not the half of it. The entire flying monkey corps. is gearing up for a poop run:

Rep. Castro Rips Issa After Benghazi Report: He ‘crusaded For Over A Year On A Fairy Tale’

Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) lashed out at House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) on Sunday for spending over a year on what he said was a crusade on a “fairy tale” …

Fairy tale? What you believe is a fairy tale, GOPs. If facts emerge, you AUTOMATICALLY decry them? “Fairy tale”? I’ll give you a fairy tail. [sic]

Here: Let me send a special Holiday Greeting to the Republicans in Congress.

The fact that you’re AGAINST facts ensures your extinction.

Look at what your “beliefs” are:

That there should be no compromise.

This goes against the entire construction of the Constitution, which is, in fact, treason, but let that pass. By “going Galt” you’ve managed to write yourselves into the pantheon of villains of American history. Nothing can erase that blot. But no worries. You’ll be dead.

That facts are less important than talking points.

I offer the evidence of VIRTUALLY EVERY REPUBLICAN POSITION SINCE 1980 (to keep it to a manageable time line).

How did you stray so far from Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, both masters of reality?

No, the real issue here is a very simple one.

Ideas/ideology (make believe) versus reality (reality).

An imaginary baby trumps a real woman.

Right wing congressman claimed
in 2013 that fetuses masturbate

An imaginary future  “fiscal crisis” trumps an actual fiscal crisis harming actual people.

An imaginary notion that “trickle down” economics is the way to go versus an economy rotting from the head down.

An imaginary notion that the rich are “job creators” trumps the very real evidence that they are a cancer on the body politic.

I could go on. But the simple ideology of Republicans is “What we imagine is more important than what we observe.”

(And its corollary: “What we say is more important than what we do.”)

There’s a word for that.

But let me just say this, as our Republic falls apart, as your committed claque of anti-Human fake “Christian” fake “values” gaggle pushes us to the brink:

The American people are stupid. So dumb, in fact, that they often say “They ALL do it,” and “a plague on both your houses,” when we all know who is to blame for keeping the government NOT working through the worst economic meltdown since the Depression.

Which means that when your obstructionist, anti-human tactics finally push us to a Constitutional crisis, they will have no problem rejecting ALL democratic action in favor of someone who can “make the trains run on time.”*

[ *2018: Did I just predict Donald Trump?]

Why?

Because, in the final analysis, ANY form of governance is inferior to starving to death. And the necessities of life are more important than any ideology.

In case of emergency,
try using this

I say this because, while it might seem obvious to anyone with an IQ above, say, 40, it clearly hasn’t sunk into your thick skulls.

So: before the guillotine sinks into your fat necks, let me game it out for you.

(For a slightly more specific version, see “Unreality 101” and, if that proves insufficient, see the Reality 101 series linked within.)

Anybody who’s ever lived through serious shit successfully, knows this much: you have to take crises (e.g. wars, hurricanes, etc.) ONE DAY AT A TIME. There has to be a continuous feedback loop between what’s happening and what you think is happening.

What you WISH is happening CANNOT interfere in that process.

Read the military histories. Over and over, the best laid plans go awry, and great victories turn into defeats because one general grabbed tight to reality and his counterpart grabbed tight to UNreality and wishful thinking.

Think of George Armstrong Custer at the Little Big Horn.

And, now we return to YOU, GOPs.

If you don’t grasp reality soon, and tightly, we are headed inevitably to a complete social meltdown.

Because when ballots no longer work, bullets are used instead.

@ Jefferson Davis’ grave in Richmond, Virginia

And remember, while you may have the best propaganda that money can buy, it’s no accident that Mussolini and Hitler were early masters of media as well, and used it as a tool to take and retain power.

Insert your own Santayana quote here.

When the shite hits the fane, you will have the shiniest beliefs on the block, and the best wishes of all wishers you wishfully wish for.

But, as the saying goes: if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

Which is why you will inevitably and irrevocably lose.

Your choice.

But there are hundreds of thousands of veterans who are angry that you sacrificed to your self-deluded hallucination that you know anything about economics, let alone FUTURE economics. (Remember, there is zero evidence that GOPs can actually deploy economic policy that doesn’t melt down national and world banking systems, or had you forgotten the little S&L meltdown, that American taxpayers are STILL paying off?)

And millions of unemployed are NOT feeling the “tough love” of a Rand Paul saying that giving them insurance (e.g. food) while they look for work is “coddling” them.

And those voters you insist on trying to KEEP from voting would like to send you back to your former profession of stealing cars.

Which reminds me of an old Washington joke:

The opposite of Progress is Congress …

The socialist, Taker, feather-bedded, moocher, parasite elevator-operator in the Senate elevator lets two senators on. And they are debating something or other and one suddenly turns to the old Black elevator operator and says, “Charlie, you’ve worked here for forty years, and I’ve never asked you, what party are you registered with?”

Charlie says, “I’m a Democrat, sir.”

The other Senator nods and asks, “Why is that, Charlie?”

Charlie says, “Well, my daddy was a Democrat, and his daddy was a Democrat.”

The first Senator takes this in, and then he asks, “Well, if your daddy had been a horse thief, and his daddy had been a horse thief, what would you be then?”

Charlie doesn’t blink. “A Republican,” he says.

Courage.

2018: Let me add a soupçon of Mr. Schlicter’s hilariously vile commentary from today [I have condensed the rabid foaming-at-the-mouth somewhat]:

… nationally, these aspiring fascists are especially eager to disarm Normal Americans… Civil war is unlikely, but never underestimate Democrat stupidity and hatred. The Schlichter family learned that lesson a century and half ago, the last time the Democrats decided to try to impose their hatred of basic human rights on the rest of the country, when an army of Democrats burned our family hometown*. Oh, they paid for it. And they would pay again. Democrats are 0-1 in insurrections, and if they went for another round, they would be 0-2. It’s a matter of terrain, numbers, and morale.

Democrats, who think history began when Obama was elected, don’t understand the dangerous game they are playing when they talk about how they want to impose their brown shirt vision upon red America….The Democrat threat to peace is based on its policies designed to deprive Normal Americans of their right to speak freely, to worship freely, and to defend themselves and their rights with firearms…. But who is the leftist big talker willing to die to impose the fascist dream of censorship, religious oppression, and disarmament on Normal American citizens? … Hell, we just heard our liberal opponents explaining why a cop shouldn’t be expected to go fight a scumbag murdering kids because it’s scary. America might split apart, but it’s highly unlikely Team Kale n’ Vinyl would fight should their big talk finally push Normal America too far.

[* As the descendent of one of the Union heroes of Chickamauga, and a member of Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War, I find this phony victimhood an obscene arrogation of the Party That Now Defends the Confederate Flag. It was Confederate troops, no longer “Democrats” in the literal sense of the world. See A=A below.]

Res ipsa loquitur:  the thing speaks for itself. A man who cannot remember that it is not the “Democrat” party, but, rather the “Democratic” party since, say, 1828, is not exactly going to give Immanuel Kant a run for his money in the brainiac stakes.

So let me conclude with this observation, which is the one that I made when I first cracked open Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and which formed the epigram beginning her penny-dreadful science-fiction doorstop:

A = A

Ok. For those of you who are edumacated, it’s Aristotle’s first precept of formal logic. For those of you who aren’t, it’s Aristotle’s first precept of formal logic.

In Schlicter’s case, it’s the absurdist notion that the Secessionist Democratic party (and that was not, BTW, the entire Democratic party) is exactly the same as the current Democratic party.

A = A

and

Democrats = Democrats

But you might snort, as I snorted when I first saw Ayn Rand’s use of it, but my snort was based on my then-current studies of formal logic, symbolic logic, and thence to metalogic.

A = A works just fine in non-four-dimensional fora, like, say, mathematics.

But in FOUR DIMENSIONS (i.e. TIME) it does not work so well.

Are YOU at your present age equal precisely to yourself at three years old?

Not even remotely. You don’t look the same, you don’t weigh the same, you aren’t the same height, and, most importantly, you are not intellectually even REMOTELY the same. Your current incarnation, for instance, can READ.

[And, if you want to go the obligatory contrarian snotty stance and pretend you were a child prodigy, then: you can read FAR better than you could then, and have read far MORE than you had read then.]

My point: A DOES NOT equal A in this instance. Nor, for that matter, in nearly all four-dimensional contexts. A, at best, approximately equals A. In this case, making the equivalence between the Southern Democrats of 1860 and the Democrats of 2018 is specious at best, and satanic at worst.

“Satanic” because it intentionally slurs the lines between several unrelated SPECIFIC terms to create a false amalgam of intentional confusion meant to … well, see Don Juan’s climactic conclusion below.

However, Mr. Schlicter neatly provides in his speciousness the proof of my 2013 column: the Republicans would be doomed PRECISELY because they are more concerned with the fictional construct they hallucinate to, than to the clear-eyed view of hard and ofttimes harsh reality that the serious journalist/observer/politician aspires to.

This is Don Juan’s objection to the pretty hallucinations of the Devil and his Hell from Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell in spades [emphasis added]:

DON JUAN Yes, it is mere talk. But why is it mere talk? Because, my friend, beauty, purity, respectability, religion, morality, art, patriotism, bravery, and the rest are nothing but words which I or anyone else can turn inside out like a glove. Were they realities, you would have to plead guilty to my indictment; but fortunately for your self-respect, my diabolical friend, they are not realities. As you say, they are mere words, useful for duping barbarians into adopting civilization, or the civilized poor into submitting to be robbed and enslaved. That is the family secret of the governing caste; and if we who are of that caste aimed at more Life for the world instead of at more power and luxury for our miserable selves, that secret would make us great. Now, since I, being a nobleman, am in the secret too, think how tedious to me must be your unending cant about all these moralistic figments, and how squalidly disastrous your sacrifice of your lives to them! If you even believed in your moral game enough to play it fairly, it would be interesting to watch; but you don’t: you cheat at every trick; and if your opponent outcheats you, you upset the table and try to murder him.

‘Nuff said.

Courage.

[Today marks Mr. Williams’ 14th blogiversary. His blog is now old enough to get married in Mississippi.]

Cross-posted from his vorpal sword