Preach it, Brother Driftglass!

An open letter to Keith Olbermann!

Dear Keith,

Beneath the farts and flourishes of failed amendments, procedural votes and resolutions passed, one fact remains:

About a quarter of the people in this country are just awful fucking human beings.

They walk upright like us. Eat and shit like us. Reproduce like us. But they are not like us.

We are, right now, enduring the final act of arguably the failingest, most incompetent and mentally underclocking President we have ever had. A President who has proven himself every day to be simultaneously a traitor, a sadist and a fop.

We are groaning under a debt his Administration created, an unnecessary and catastrophic war his Administration manufactured, and a failed foreign policy his Administration authored.

And for his sins and crimes he continues to enjoy the blind, rabid canine loyalty of the 27%, whose proxies in Congress -- the same wingnut hirelings who screamed themselves hoarse chanting “Up or down vote!” every time a single GOP nomination got snagged -- continue to happily obstruct even the mildest effort to curb their Dear Leader’s Forever War or in any way mitigate his “Bomb them ‘til they’re Christian” vision of world peace.

He was preceded by as moderate and center-seeking president as we have seen in my lifetime.

One who made it a point to appoint Republicans to his cabinet, give the Right a voice, and triangulate away to them a lot of what they asked for.

For his troubles he endured the blind, rabid reptilian rage of the 27% for seven years.

And then they impeached him.

These are the pod people that keep O’Reilly propped up, keep Limbaugh on the air, and keep Fox News profitable. They kept Jerry Falwell from being run out of Christendom on a rail, and keep James Dobson from sinking back into the tent-show fever swamp from whence he came.

They are the reason the Minority Party knows it will pay absolutely no price for thwarting the will of the majority of the American people.

They are the reason the War Party has, finally, resorted to simply lying outright about Iraq; because they know which side of the Mason/Dixon line their bread is buttered on.

The truth of the matter is -- like the segregationists and slaveholders from whose degenerate ideologies and DNA the modern GOP base springs -- thanks to these people and their leaders, the next President of the United States is going to have several genuine, historic disasters that need simultaneous and focused attention.

And as these people and their leaders amply demonstrated during the Clinton years and over the last nine months, they are perfectly willing to sacrifice the good of the nation to advance their narrow, odious agendas.

With an unbroken record about being completely wrong about every fucking thing, at this point -- if we were dealing with sane human persons -- owning up to being a Republican should be as filthy and shameful a thing as being caught abusing puppies.

With doves.

In a church.

On Easter Sunday.

But it isn’t.

Millions of Americans still wake up every day button-poppin’ proud that George W. Bush is their Preznit and Chief-Christian-In-Charge, and fatback-on-a-hot-stove sizzlin’ mad that Evil Liberals are still allowed to walk abroad in the daylight, plotting and scheming to destroy their beloved Jebusland.

Because the ugly truth is simply that the problem with the Republican Party is not George Bush, or Dick Cheney or Dough Feith or Rush Limbaugh or Pat Robertson: the problem with the Republican Party is Republicans.

The ugly truth is, Keith, that whether or not we’ll be able to weather the storms that are to come depends in large measure on how much longer the GOP base is allowed to control any significant part of our media, our politics or our faith.

I don’t know how much longer we can last until someone swings their camera around, points it at them and says: “You are the problem. You are a cancer on this good land, and whoever stands with you, votes with you or sides with you is unfit to call themselves a good American.”

Without the Base to prop them up, the Republican Party would revert to what it always has been: the Natural Law Party as run by closeted gay men.

And without their front-men in the media, the Congress and the White House, the Base would lose the luster of the limelight that creatures like Coulter are for some reason allowed to wield and would once again have to settle for being no more or less than what they have always been: the last, slavering remnants of the Confederacy.

Squatting in the moral abyss of their Conservative White Jebus-festooned double-wides.

And whining impotently about Jews, queers, Negroes and uppity women.