Hunter Thompson started the fear and loathing bit. He also showed how a journalists hatred of say, Richard Nixon, could cause him to rather have a “hopeless old hack”, or a man whose campaign “had the stench of death” be President than him.
There is a lot of fear and loathing out there. Part of the reason is the inability to figure out what is true anymore. Just in the last two months we were assured that the Russians never hacked into someone’s email and now there is a campaign that is spouting that the Russians hacked precisely because they want one of the candidates to win. So which is it? Were the email servers hackable or not?
We were told that Obamacare was working fine and now all of a sudden even Minnesota wants out. Those who predicted exactly what would happen with Obamacare are now sloughed off by a simple statement that “they never wanted it to work in the first place”.
We have been told that one candidate cut his political chops on the “racist lie” that the President wasn’t born in this country and now we find it really was the other candidate, Clinton, whose campaign started it as a part of a package that also included cocaine use and homosexual adoption. How the cocaine and adoption were to be used by Democrats against Democrats is never explained.
Meanwhile Republicans want to protect their leads in the House and Senate but they can’t name anything that Republican majorities in the House and Senate accomplished for the good of the country. The feeling among many is that most Republicans will do exactly as the Democrats do, they are just slower about it.
There is also the wondrous spectacle of a man like Bernie Sanders who now knows for sure that the Democrat establishment was against him, crawling out his third, (count them three) homes to join in prattling about the marvels of a party that was doing everything it could to destroy him. This wealth distributor who was not ashamed to openly proclaim that there is too much wealth concentrated among too few people might want to consider opening up one of his homes (did I mention that he has three) to his millennial followers so they could leave their parents alone. At least let them have the basements Bernie.
The press and “media” have been in the bag for one political party or another since the days of Jefferson. Now they are in the bag for only one party. History shows that newspapers for instance, could be created rather quickly if there was the perception that the prevailing newspaper in a region was in the bag for one party. Those days, like so much else, are gone for good. Reading newspapers is a lost art, and explaining why the corruption of, oh let’s say the FBI, is a really bad thing can’t be accomplished in 140 characters.
There is the sense that the IRS, FBI, Department of Justice and Veteran Affairs have all been corrupted. And now we find out about the contempt in which “they” hold Catholics and Evangelicals. It is a stunning state of affairs. Catholic politicians have always had a loosy goosy connection with their faith. They will piously pronounce on abortion that they are personally against it but that their personal opinion should not effect public policy. Of course they are not shy about bringing their personal opinion to bear in policy about guns and the death penalty and a host of other social issues. So called devout Catholics like Biden, Cuomo, Kaine, Heitkamp, and others learned how to check their religion at the door when they came to work. The point that we learn is that morality without faith is frangible. Republicans can be feckless as well but at least but their sins seem to be of omission rather than commission.
The fear and loathing, at least for about 46 percent of us on one side or another, seems to be that these denizens of the political shadows that have run this country for decades have managed in their wisdom to create a society that neither party will be able to govern. They have created a situation where either sides ability to govern “with the consent of the governed” is going to be impossible.
Yesterdays blog was about corruption and the unrighteous judge and crazy women who keeps bugging him for justice. That may be a great picture of what is in store for us as a country. The folks with the loudest most obnoxious voices who threaten violence will probably prevail. They will get what they want because that is what corrupt systems will give them, not out of justice, but fear.
By the way thanks to John Nordling and a devotion on Luke 18:1-8 found in the theological observer section of CTQ July – October 2015 for the thought starters.
