Given the dark turn of fortunes the Republican mafia has so deservedly suffered in the last few months, and the whiff of even more well-deserved bad luck coming their way soon, I have started allowing myself to hope and believe that the elections of 2006 and 2008 may put the Democrats back in control of Congress and the White House. And then my mind wanders to this question: then what?
It gets radical after the fold....
Ladies and gentlemen, what good is a Democratic victory in 2008 if the cock-roaches of corruption scurry under the fridge for a few years and regroup? What if Jeb (or your favorite right-wing loon) runs in 2012 and wins, and the Republicans win back one or both houses of Congress? The American public has a short memory, folks, and does not seem to learn any lessons for very long (see, e.g., Iraq and the long-forgotten "lessons of Vietnam").
I, for one, have come to the conclusion that the Republican party, at least in its current incarnation, is a cancer in our midst. It is a threat to the nation and, indeed, the planet. Torture? Unmitigated class warfare? Unprovoked war? National security state authoritarianism? Ignoring the threat of catastrophic climate change? This list -- the most defining features of today's Republican party -- could go on and on. I do not want this mindset ever to be in a position to influence national policy again.
We do not just need to defeat this monster election cycle to election cycle. We need to drive a stake through its heart. We need, in a word, a kind of de-Nazification of American society.
Now, before you go all ballistic on me, please note I am not talking re-education camps, or chain gangs (though W, Cheney and quite a few others within spitting distance of those two do need to do some hard time), or anything similar. But we certainly need more than a battle of vapid political advertisements every two or four years to defeat this threat to humanity. So, I'm all ears. What do we do -- apart from winning the next few elections -- to change the face of American culture and make the likes of Karl, W, Dick, Grover and the rest of the gallery of fools too ashamed to show their faces in decent society?