I wouldn't be surprised if my readers sometimes wondered if this is the Tucson Liberal Christian Examiner or a column devoted to politics. Never has America had such an onslaught of religious people trying to take over our government. I am truly sick and tired of those people, but sometimes I wonder if these artificial crises that we have to go through over and over have made an impression on anyone but me.
Every time President Obama tries to do his job, knee-jerk Republican jerks jump up and begin a protest no matter what it is. I think that one of their goals right now is to try to prevent him from having political appointees to complete his Cabinet. Another seems to be breaking the economy of the United States of America in a way that we won't recover during our lifetimes. And of course the racial language that began more than four years ago has never let up.
But now it looks like the President has really bumped into a hornets' nest. Today's announcement of the White House gun-control initiative has set off a whole new vocabulary for some of the younger generation of Republicans--nullification, interposition, not to mention rebellion, civil war and impeachment. Try to control access to battlefield weapons and you will get a whole lot of unbalanced individuals ramping up to start killing people.
If you live in Tucson this is particularly painful. It wasn't that long ago that our Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot along with several other people in the parking lot of a local Safeway supermarket. She survived but others didn't. Now an individual by the name of Yeager uploaded a foolish video in which he threatened to shoot people (he didn't get specific) if the President went one inch farther in his quest to slow down the killing of Americans that is already going on.
Yeager later walked his comments back--coward that he is--but that wasn't enough for the state officials who promptly suspended his gun owner's permit...not that I think for one minute that he locked up his guns and isn't carrying them now. Well, the President took it forward not one inch but several feet, especially if you judge by the reaction from the out-of-control life-is-a-battlefield crowd.
I'm guessing that we are very near the point at which the Republican Party is going to fracture into the actual Republicans and the right-wing fanatics. They are going to have to figure out how to divide up the corporate lobbyists, who will be peeved because they have been thinking that they bought and paid for their Congressmen. But that sort of thing will shake down eventually.
What I foresee is a coalition of Republicans like former Chairman Michael Steele, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Megan McCain of Arizona (who is a force of nature waiting to happen) and possibly retired General Colin Powell and former Senator Chuck Hagel, who is currently nominated for a position in the second-term Obama Cabinet. One of them, I don't know who, will draw a line in the sand someday soon, I think.
When that happens there will be a declaration that the Republican Party is taking back its own, and anyone who wants to have a civil war is going to have to regroup into another political entity. The real money that has always been in the Republican Party will not go over a cliff with the radical right--they have zero political future. These wing-nuts have been trying to force control of the GOP until they lost the election for the party, and they have been trying to deny it since November. However, that can't last; Jim De Mint has already seen what is coming and taken himself out of the Senate to a safe harbor where he can still make money.
Commentators have been predicting this for some time, but it did not happen before the election because Candidate Mitt Romney thought that he could be all things to all people. He gave it his best shot, I'll give him that, but the effort was fundamentally impossible. If you think for a moment, the idea of reconciling the Teabaggers with Colin Powell, one of the most respected men in America, isn't going to happen.
The fact that the Teabagger Right latched onto the Religious Right must have seemed like a good idea at the time--even though the Moral Majority got most of the money, which was what they intended. But now the religious fanatics who unveiled their vicious hostility not only towards the LGBT Community but also towards their own wives and daughters have had a taste of power, and they aren't going to give it up. The Religious Right will ride that horse until it drops to the ground and dies under them.
But out of this, I believe, will emerge a new political party. It is going to be short-lived because it will run out of money and candidates in no time flat, but politicians who have no sense of history will be quick to band together so that they can wallow in their endorphins and keep their righteous high, to which they are addicted like needle-drug freaks in the back alleys of Washington, D. C. And I say the sooner, the better--let Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum wave their banners and head out thataway, while the Republican Party regroups.
America needs our two-party system. The sooner this begins the sooner it will be complete and we will have two reasonable points of view in dialogue. There are some people who are conservative by nature, hesitating to make broad sweeping moves; others are bolder and sometimes need to be restrained. We were doing well with this system before a radical right-wing suicide squad made their move. Due to the glacial rate at which progress takes place in politics, we have had to wait for more than a generation for the extreme right to run aground, but President Obama's legacy to America may just be the surgical separation of the Republican Evil Twin.
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