Gawd, I hate reading letters to the editor around here. There are some with which I agree, of course, but the ones that feel like fingernails on the proverbial chalkboard could have been written by Fox "news." Well, in effect, they were. Talking points transcribed. Wild claims repeated, dutifully, verbatim. Takers versus makers. Socialism on the march. The end of our "freedoms," as yet unspecified.
For a minute there I allowed myself the delusion that the election night meltdown on Fox was a life lesson for the lied-to; a fix for Foxification. But no. It's only gotten worse. Facts? Clearly not wanted. Reality? Ask Alan West, who'll probably refuse to concede even when Patrick Murphy is sworn in. (Update: he conceded. Grudgingly.) Since the beginning of this blog, a main theme has been the furious flight from reality by today's Republican party. The election results, so far divergent from the unanimous claims of every single Fox commentator, would serve to shine light into the darkness that is Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes, deceivers of a magnitude not imaginable mere years earlier. Is what I thought. Because it was so obvious.
How wrong I was. They've just increased the heat and squelched the light even more heavily. Want proof? Check this out. Is there even a word for that? A sentence? A pot calling a kettle a hypocrite? Stoned people throwing glass houses? McCain missing a closed-door session providing information on Benghazi to go on TV to complain about not receiving information? (Why is he even given airtime anymore? There should be a separate 24/7 cable channel, all McCain and Trump and Palin and Dick Morris and Karl Rove, all the time. Let people who feel the need to be dumber watch whenever they want. And save the rest of us from having them show up, uninvited, ruining our evenings.)
Because (and who's the one ignoring reality here?) I'm still being told my weekly column will be up and running soon (I've written, you might not be surprised to know, a couple dozen already) I find myself feeling I must read everything that's on the op-ed page. And so I do. Same old thing: paranoid fantasy about our president, his actual record notwithstanding. Even under the irresistible logic and powerful persuasion of my soon-to-be column, I don't doubt it'll continue. Long after Obama's term is over, no matter how well the economy might be doing, no matter how few UN tanks are rumbling in our streets and no matter how little influence Sharia law will have had on the body politic, no matter how much further along we are toward budgetary balance, they'll write in; decrying the evil socialist, the secret Muslim, the Kenyan hater of America. Screeching. Fingernails on the chalkboard.
And to them, I'll be part of it, too.
[If I maintain my plan of silent running for the next few days, Happy Thanksgiving. It could be worse.]
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