Clinton’s election in 1992 was accompanied by the first rollout of anti-sex fervor to manipulate elections, dividing to conquer such pernicious forces as women and gays from the rest of the electorate to win elections for Republicans.  Here in Oregon, we had a stunningly sweeping and un-American ballot measure that would have essentially mandated discrimination against gays in every area of life and two draconian measures against abortion on the ballot that year, championed by a ragtag group of misfits who finally had found a way to make a living selling hate and sexual frustration to the rubes, the Oregon Citizen’s Alliance.  Founders Lon Mabon and the even spookier Scott Lively, allied with disturbed redneck politicians like Marylin Shannon and Eileen Qutub scooped up tons of money and bedeviled gay and women’s groups in Oregon for years, foreshadowing the eliminationist and hate-mongering that would become the right’s stock and trade from those days on. They eventually lost a case they supported surrounding “The Nuremburg Files,” a righty website that kept a tally of which targeted doctors had been righteously eliminated, of which there were several.  Luckily, most of them collapsed under the weight of their own corruption and court defeats and are irrelevant now, but lo and behold, Miss Lively (not to be confused with Miss Congeniality…) is now in Uganda promoting, with evident success, persecution of gays.  Join the Nazis and see the world, I guess.

The anti-sex movement is sort of like a balloon; squeeze it here and it bulges out there, though, as we’ve been seeing just lately with this, the fourth right-wing act of terrorism since Obama’s election. (Pittsburgh, Little Rock, Wichita, where was the other one?)  Clearly, people who are obsessed with other people’s sex lives are crazier than most, but isn’t it kind of dangerous for a political party and the vast majority of its spokesmen to speak of political disagreements in terms of how much those people who believe differently ought to die?  I mean, there are plenty of my fellow Americans that  I don’t like, but I’m completely okay with the fact that they are allowed to live.  I just don’t invite them over.  I guess that’s what makes me a liberal.  Righties take a different approach, as we see.

When they aren’t dehumanizing Muslims, calling Supreme Court nominees “racists,” randomly picking countries that ought to be bombed, they’re calling some midwestern physician who deals with one of the most stressful and difficult types of practice, “Tiller the Baby Killer.”  Of course, the peculiar pathologies that allow these vermin to to treat other human beings this way, conveniently enough, blinds them to any sense of responsibility for the eventual and increasingly inevitable slaughter of their targets.  One can hear the orchestra swelling to the strains of that hit tune,  ”No one could have predicted….”  Maybe Bill O’Reilly should get Condi on and they could do a little duet.

We have a terrorism problem problem in this country, alright.  Too bad we’re fighting it “over there.”  I wonder who the next victim(s) will be.

At least a dozen years ago, a string of hateful, anti-sex (whether abortion or gays were the target, I don’t recall) ballot initiatives here in Oregon were simultaneously going down to ignominious defeat in both courts and public opinion, and a more than usually scary trailer park state legislator, Marylin Shannon, darkly intoned that soon, all the judges, voters, trees, and fire hydrants that stood in the way of her righteous jihad would lay bleeding on the battlefield, and Oregon would become the fascistic theocracy she envisioned.  Since God was on her side, this just must be true.  Her bizarre overconfidence kind of scared me at the time.  Did she know something I didn’t?

No.  Today, Oregon’s Republicans have been turned out of every statewide office and could pretty much meet in a phone booth.  But you have to hand it to the righties for their loyalty to the team, and as Glenn Beck put it, believing in something, even if it isn’t true.  Personally, I find humor in this.  Witness the reaction to Rush Limbaugh’s “threat” to leave New York.  Gov. Paterson regretted not doing it sooner.  Jon Stewart offering his EZPass.  Ed Schultz, who just got his own show on MSNBC a scant few weeks after Bill O’Reilly’s noxious radio show was cancelled, being offered Rush’s apartment, which was laughed off in a torrent of jokes about fumigation and drug-sniffing dogs.  Comedy gold, if you’re not an idiot.

Like Wile E. Coyote, these righties just pop open an umbrella as the anvil hurtles toward their head, secure in the knowledge that the next ACME gadget is going to turn things around, once and for all.  You have to hand it to them.  They really know how to make lemonade out of lemons.

Back when Bush’s razor-thin and probably manipulated “victory” over John Kerry by a point or two was hallowed as an historic mandate, cracks were already forming in the Power of Positive Thinking on the right.  Did that stop them?  Noooo.  Wall Street was going to swoop in and save Social Security, not. Gov. Blanco singlehandedly drowned New Orleans, not.  Karl Rove’s inscrutable “math” would relegate Democrats, and all opposition, toast in 2006, not.  These laughable ideas, needless to say, were treated with utmost Seriousness amongst the pancaked gasbags, even after the fact, a bizarre tradition that continues to this day.

Now we’re told that Obama’s victory was actually a vindication of Bush, because Bush and McCain weren’t really “conservative.” and unfortunately Obama has not done enough to push back against such idiocy, and more disturbingly, let a lot of it stand. 

One wonders what, if anything, would ever look like defeat to a righty.  Sadly, no one has the guts to tell them, and nobody, but nobody, will ever show them.  Maybe they do know something I don’t know.