{"id":2319,"date":"2016-05-02T13:07:05","date_gmt":"2016-05-02T21:07:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=2319"},"modified":"2016-05-02T13:07:07","modified_gmt":"2016-05-02T21:07:07","slug":"end-stage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=2319","title":{"rendered":"End-stage"},"content":{"rendered":"

So it looks like Hulu is making a series out of The Handmaid\u2019s Tale<\/em>, Margaret Atwood\u2019s landmark novel of religious-patriarchial dystopia. It was written in the 1980s, if memory serves, and was an obvious reaction to a Reagan presidency and the rise of the Religious Right in a world where Roe v. Wade was only ten years old or so and restricted access to legal abortion was living memory. So you would think it\u2019d be kind of dated now\u2026except that in 2016, we have not only states attempting abortion restrictions by a thousand cuts but prominent businesses and Republicans fighting against birth control<\/em> on the grounds that a corporation\u2019s religious liberty is infringed if they\u2019re forced to pay for their employees\u2019 slutty slutty slut pills.<\/p>\n

This is where I pull another block quote from a prior post on this very blog:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

…The House returned to a Democratic majority, the Senate to an essentially Democratic majority, and then both majorities were expanded as a Democrat was elected President. The GOP, as constituted for the last two decades, has been taking it square in the face for two electoral cycles.<\/em><\/p>\n

So how is it possible that the Republicans are steadily becoming ever more conservative, ever more redneck, ever more extreme? How is it possible that we can have Republican candidates for Senate openly talking about \u201csecond amendment solutions\u201d to \u201cdomestic enemies\u201d in Congress? Or saying \u201cclimate change doesn\u2019t exist\u201d as decades of data pile up and the average temps rise? Or saying that rape and incest exceptions for abortion aren\u2019t permissible? Or turning over Social Security to some sort of privatization plan \u2013 less than three years after the stock market implosion wiped out billions of retirement dollars in 401(k) accounts? Or talking about all the bits of the Consitution they\u2019d like done away with \u2013 things like entire amendments like the 16th and 17th? Or doing away with the entire principle that if you\u2019re born here, you\u2019re a citizen?<\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019m not talking about message board wingnuts or isolated basement bloggers, I\u2019m talking about duly-elected GOP nominees for high Congressional office. How \u2013 when a \u201cliberal\u201d President is pushing things that were the GOP alternative to Democratic plans twenty years ago \u2013 <\/em>how is it possible that they can keep going further off the crazy end?<\/p>\n

And since the economy is still stalled, and the wind is at their back \u2013 <\/em>what\u2019s going to happen if they win? What\u2019s going to happen when you get a bunch of Birchers, birthers, tenthers, and other assorted teabag lunatics actually placed in office, convinced they have a popular mandate to do everything they\u2019ve yowled about?…<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

That was almost six years ago. Since then, the GOP has gotten its Congressional majority, shitcanned its Speaker of the House for insufficient conservative fealty, shut down the government twice<\/em>, almost defaulted on the national debt while breaking the USA\u2019s AAA credit rating in the process, refused to allow a vote on or even meet with a Supreme Court nominee so they can run out the clock, and is now on the verge of nominating for President a blowhard, self-contradicting, delusional reality-TV windbag with no political background, multiple bankruptcies and divorces, and an openly and avowedly racist fanbase. And here\u2019s the thing: even if Hillary does<\/em> get elected and kicks Trump\u2019s ass up between his shoulderblades a la<\/em> 1964 or 1972 or 1984, what\u2019s going to prevent the GOP from saying that Trump was a mistake, Trump was a fluke, Trump wasn\u2019t a real conservative, and now we have to double down and get even more<\/em> conservative to fight that harridan in the White House? Well, I\u2019ll tell you what’s going to prevent them: Nothing. At. All.\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n

This is the dream<\/em> scenario for the modern GOP; putting their A-number-one-gold-medal-super-bitch-empress-devil in the Oval Office will let them raise hell and raise money for at least four years. They know what every wrestling promoter knows: the money isn\u2019t in the good guy winning the belt, it\u2019s in the chase. Nothing but good times ahead for the usual Beltway Bandits and their amen corner in the Very Serious Sorrowful Evenhanded Press. Meanwhile, you can expect a lot more suffering from real people, and not the \u201creal people\u201d strawmen of Thomas Friedman or David Brooks. Real people with real needs who are struggling to get by in a world where every effort at recovery for people making less than $200,000 a year got killed by Republican obstruction.<\/p>\n

This is the inevitable result of the GOP\u2019s mainlining of Southern-ness for fifty years. They\u2019ve graduated from prescription pills to morphine to heroin, and after decades of courting Wallace voters and rebranding their base as the Tea Party and engaging in a systematic dismantling of things like political norms, basic logic and empirical fact, they\u2019re finally on to the last stage. Donald Trump as their presidential candidate is the krokodil<\/em> stage; they\u2019ve smoked so many cleaning chemicals out of foil that the party\u2019s very body is decaying and sloughing off dead tissue.<\/p>\n

The risk is that the stupid has finally metastasized beyond any opportunity to heal. Maybe we get Hillary, and maybe we flip one house of Congress on the way, and maybe<\/em> we stop the bleeding and maybe<\/em> what\u2019s left of the non-mental-defective GOP comes to its senses and we go on somehow. But maybe we don\u2019t, and this is the beginning of the end. \u00a0But it does make you wonder who\u2019s the more stupid: the Trump voter, or the self-righteous prick who insists there\u2019s no difference between Trump and Clinton.<\/p>\n

Either way, well, it won\u2019t be my problem anymore in forty years or so, assuming we don\u2019t get nuked before then.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So it looks like Hulu is making a series out of The Handmaid\u2019s Tale, Margaret Atwood\u2019s landmark novel of religious-patriarchial dystopia. It was written in the 1980s, if memory serves, and was an obvious reaction to a Reagan presidency and the rise of the Religious Right in a world where Roe v. Wade was only … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “End-stage”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2319"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2319"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2319\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2320,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2319\/revisions\/2320"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}