Shut the Fuck Up

Life is too short to compromise time and resources… it may be tempting and more comfortable to just keep your head down, plod along, and appease those who demand: “Sit down and shut up”, but that’s the worthless, easy path; that’s a quitter’s way out. And a problem in our country today is apathy. It would be apathetic to just hunker down and “go with the flow”.

Nah, only dead fish “go with the flow”.

[all punctuation sic, by the way--ed.]

So mumbles (former) Governor cum pin-up girl Sarah Palin at her recent press conference, explaining (if that’s the right word for it) her decision to resign her post halfway through her first term.  As the Agenda’s resident Sarah Palin expert-I sat behind her in 10th grade geometry class, her hair smelled like raspberries–I want to have a startlingly piquant opinion about this, but the whole thing makes me feel redundantly bored.  I’m boringly bored.

Although, to be honest, it might be more than that.  I keep closing my eyes and hoping that they’ll go away, and by “they” I mean, of course, the stars of the Republican Party.  Obviously, I didn’t start from a place of affection with the Repubs, but I’m a little dismayed that I’m beginning to lose some of the schadenfreud that I once held and loved dearly.  This just isn’t all that fun anymore, guys.

Palin, Sanford, that dude from Nevada, Cheney, Bachmann, Limbaugh, Steele.  And meanwhile, there’s stuff to do, by which I mean the actual real actual stuff that functioning governments do, as opposed to the soap opera that gets covered every night by the news networks, and yes, even us.  I know it’s nerdy, but I’ve always preferred the drama of C-SPAN to that of CNN:  I don’t need flashing tickers or cleverly manicured pundits when there’s a spicy debate happening in the hallowed halls of government.

To be really, really honest, the whole modus of the Republicans reeks of sabotage; cloak and gilded dagger.  The PAC’s are well-funded, the listening audience is tuned in, the ringers are ringing.  They’ve got the stage, they’ve got their megaphones; the cameras have focused on the whole miserable mess.  Worse, they’ve got no real power (in Congress, anyway) and yet they still manage to determine the terms of discourse while the Democrats flop around like lubed-up jellyfish.  Typical.

The message coming from the right is this:  Watch us destroy everything from sea to shining sea:  California to Alaska to South Carolina to D.C.  Their platform is essentially rhetorical suicide bombing.  Of course, the perpetrators of this modern day Jonestown deflect blame onto the forces of “big government” and leftist media and so on, but peek behind the curtain and you’ll see barrels and barrels of Kool-Aid.  I’m perfectly content to let them drink it–the problem is they don’t have the courtesy to find a nice, quiet place to do it, so as to not bother the rest of us.

It might be time to demote the G.O.P. from its current status as opposition party to something more fitting:  an annoying third-party, maybe–kind of like the Libertarians, or the Constitution Party.  At any rate, I can’t understand any of the Republican laity feeling proud or uplifted by the state of their party.  I’m talking to you, GOP’ers:  you ought to be ashamed of these guys, and fearful of the cesspool they’re dragging us all down into.  And if anyone tries to tell you otherwise, well–just tell them to shut the fuck up.