The Nightmare Years

Arguing with girl friend, he
forces her out of her car
and pushes it into the river.

I realize that politics is not bean bags, and I know there have been times in the past when vile tactics have been employed by one political party against another, but I can’t help but wonder if what we have been seeing for the past few years on the part of Republicans (and fellow travelers) really has any precedent. Let me start with the Republican attack on Bill Clinton if only for convenience. It does seem that the Republicans deliberately set out to bring down the Clinton Presidency no matter what they had to do to succeed. This was not designed to change a policy or direction but, rather, to actually destroy him. They brought up Whitewater (a nothing issue to begin with) and then proceeded to accuse Bill and Hillary of everything including murder (I don’t know if any previous President had been accused of murder but I suppose I could be wrong). In any case when all of their attempts and false accusations proved groundless they mounted an unprecedented attack on his private, particularly sexual life (an area that had previously not been considered fair game, so to speak). While they succeeded in getting him impeached, they failed to bring down his Presidency. I believe this whole extreme episode was basically something new in American politics.

At this same time the concept of roviating (my term) was born. That is, it became an integral and acceptable part of the Republican strategy to use tactics that in their extreme form were probably unprecedented. They deliberately set out to slime, malign, denigrate, humiliate, and lie to whatever extent necessary, and however false, to bring down their “prey.” I think they had some success with this although I cannot think at the moment of a specific example (other than Bill and Hillary Clinton).

Now turn to the election of 2000 when, as far as I know it had never happened before, a gang of Republican thugs were sent to Florida with the express (fascist) purpose of stopping the vote count and, then, with the Supreme Court in a completely unprecedented action on their side, managed to steal an election. Subsequently there have been cases where it is known that the new electronic voting machines were fixed to steal votes, also unprecedented.
Apparently buoyed by their successes in the field of stealing elections by cheating and threatening and lying, they have continued on a campaign of “anything goes” to try to get their way. When, for example, was their ever before an organized attempt to simply shut down community meetings by shouting and disrupting the proceedings more or less randomly? That is, the purpose was not to argue a point but, rather, to just shut down any dialogue at all. And when did anyone previously shout out “you lie” during a Presidential address? When before were women deliberately shouted down when they attempted to exercise their right of free speech in Congress?

And what about the so-called tea-baggers, organized groups to protest anything and everything the President wanted to do, using signs and slogans as vile as could be imagined, with comparisons of the President of the United States to Stalin, Hitler, and even monkeys and apes? A major media organization printing a cartoon of the President as a Chimpanzee, knowing full well it would be a deliberate insult and smear, a cartoon printed by the same paper that has now admitted to its deliberate goal of bringing down the President of the United States, and also acts as an ally of the Republican Party rather than a legitimate news organization (and owned and operated by an Australian). While cartoons lampooning Presidents and others have long been employed, I do not believe there is any precedent for Fox “News.” Nor do I believe there is a precedent for using horrible pictures of the Holocaust to compare it to health care. Nor, as far as I know, have individuals been showing up armed at public meetings.

When did members of one party come to believe it is appropriate to actually assassinate individuals who were doing perfectly legal things they did not agree with? Abortion doctors have been fair game for these fanatics who show no remorse for their vile acts. Now they have even taken their terror tactics and obscene pictures to the school in which the President’s children are in attendance. What bothers me the most about all this is that there seem to be no limits to how low they are willing to go to get their way, it’s as if once they started down this basically criminal, mafia-like career path it has just gathered more and more momentum and thrown morality, ethics, and common decency out the window. I have not even mentioned the deliberate lies about death panels, concentration camps, and what have you, and I have not mentioned the lies that led us into an unnecessary “war,” the torture, the war crimes, war profiteering, renditions, etc., etc., There appear to be no depths of depravity they are unwilling to descend into in order to maintain their power and their inhuman “free maket” capitalism. I hear this evening on Maddow they are even resisting laws against slave and child labor (we know they have always been opposed to decent wages, unions, health care and anything in the public interest).

I do not know the specifics of previous political periods very well, but I suspect there has never been a period quite like this one. The first decade of the 21st century should deservedly be described as “The Nightmare Years.”

At the End

He was so old his bones seemed to swim in his skin.
And when I took his hand to feel his pulse
I felt myself drawn in. It was as faint
as the steps of a child
paddling across the floor in slippers,
and yet he was smiling.
I could almost hear a river
running beneath his breath.
The water clear and cold and deep.
He was ready and willing to wade on in.

Ed Meek