I'm Depressed, Enraged and Frightened.

Over on Poor Impulse Control Tata opened up an article with

If you're feeling a bit depressed, skip to the next entry. This one's serious.

Which, no matter how depressed I may, or may not, be, is sure to suck me in.

She notes that 21 years ago, when Saint Ronnie was holding court, she had nightmares about nuked landscapes where nobody had a chance of survival (and yes, there were a number of close calls, where nothing more than stupid luck and some divine intervention kept us from making most of the globe glow a soft Cherenkov blue at night).

And The Anointed Leader didn’t care that his international policies were putting the entire world at risk, and his domestic policies were putting the poor of the United States into a generation’s extra gulag of being an “underclass” and accelerated the process that was putting the then-middle class into the same camp.

And, fast-forwarded to 2005, she noted the horror she felt at realizing that the federal government didn’t care, was incapable, or both, to do anything with the spectacle of seeing part of the continental United States turn into a 3rd-world suburb.

And that the President has said, in as many words, that if the avian flu goes to a “worst-case” status that your federal government is going to say “tough love kids, you’re on your own.”

The same government that is composed of elected officials, including the President, who have sworn an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution that is the basis for the governing law of this nation, the same Constitution that says, in the first paragraph, that one of the aims of that Constitution is to “promote the general welfare.”

Now I understand that this administration seems to have amply demonstrated that they seem incapable of *reading* that “Goddamn piece of paper,” but somebody in the Cato Institute should be capable of reading it to them.

No, Tata, I’m not frightened. I’m enraged.

No, I’m enraged and frightened.

And I’m even more enraged that it feels like I can’t do anything more. My state (Massachusetts) Senators are pushing the conservatives in the Senate, my representatives in the House are pushing as well, but it feels like the whole damn house of cards is starting to slip away.

21 years ago I was under the thought that there was some sort of continuing thread in the Congress and the Executive that felt that continuity and cooperation between the two sides of the aisle was a way to stability and continued progress, and that the absurdity of "tickle-down economics" was recognized by some in the GOP as "Voodoo.".

But then the GOP decided that courting the far fringe of both politics and religion was the entrée to power, and all that went out the window. With the accession to power that marked the Contract On America, cooperation, moderation and any pretended nod to pluralism vanished. And the meager setback to that assault that occurred during the presidency of Clinton has been more than erased.

This "administration," from the delusional cowboy and his sidekick drunken shot-gunner to the power-mongers in the senate and the house, to their real paymasters, the religious right, the neo-con wingnuts and the players behind the K-street lobbyists do not give a flying ***** about the people who are ordinary citizens. The "productivity gains" in the "job-loss economic recovery" are at the expense of overworking those people who haven't been moved out the door yet to shift their jobs overseas, and we're running up debt in billions for a war my great-grandchildren will be paying off, and basic food and healthcare are deemed "too expensive entitlements" by the Party's ideologues that control the Executive and Legislative branches and has managed to pack the Judicial as well, and bitch that they are being blocked by trhe Mean Liberals.

In the event of a pandemic the religious fanatics will claim that it was "God's will" and anybody who dies is a “Sinner” who deserved to die, the neo-cons will view it as a way to cement “emergency powers” and extend hegemony over the Middle East “for the Good of the United States.” And the moneyed elite will view it as a confirmation of their elevated Right To Rule and as a way to control more of the lives of those who really generate the wealth.

God.

The current landscape in the United States is looking more and more like Russia in 1916, complete to the conscription into the armed forces of large numbers of skilled workers.

Is this what two hundred and twenty-five years of our Republic has come to?