“The Republicans are on a roll, or so the conventional wisdom goes. The American public, with the memory of a kicked dog, is ready to re-entrust power to the Party that Wrecked America. It certainly has the eye-candy for horny white male voters, such as the comely-but-stupid Christine O’Donnell and the leggy half-term Gov. Palin. It has billions of dollars thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling on corporate campaign spending (corporations are people, you see, except when they break the law). And it has issues: Gays and Muslims are taking over the country, along with Obama’s “socialism” — such as the big giveaway to the for-profit health-care sector, the rescue of the casino on Wall Street and continued funding of the for-profit national security economy. Issues such as that the Constitution is sacrosanct, with its mandated theocracy, that evolution is a “theory” (like gravity) and should not be taught, that stem-cell research is, like all science, of the devil and we should just incinerate all those embryos, that tax cuts and no regulation will solve every ill, that brown people cutting your lawn are the biggest threat to American civilization. America has become like Arizona: Ignorant, fearful, disconnected from and hostile to the commons, inordinately dependent on gub’ment dollars even as it rails against gub’ment. And, most of all, locked in a clueless feedback loop trying to avoid reality.”
