Calm down dear, it's only an election

After the election of Barack Obama in America, I confess to feeling a certain amount of schadenfreude, watching the fear and loathing of the hardcore right-wingers (or in Rumsfeldian parlance, the Bush/Cheney dead-enders) gnashing their teeth and forming proverbial "circular firing squads". [For my Republican readers, schadenfreude is a German word meaning "pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others"].

For a while it was interesting and entertaining, but latterly the debate seems to have been taken over by the certified, Kool-Aid-drinking moonbats. I find myself clicking on links to right-wing articles and blogs, or beginning to watch YouTube video clips of Fox News commentators, only to click the 'back' button moments later. What was once (gratifyingly!) bitter disappointment at their 'side' being out of power, has descended into pure unadulterated rancor and malice. It's not clever any more. I can feel the hatred coming through my laptop screen like radiation.

All of which is slightly difficult to understand, since president Obama has been in office fewer than three months, and hasn't really had much time to do anything truly controversial. Sure, there are legitimate debates to be had about the economics of bailouts and stimulus packages. Frankly, there is probably no single correct answer. Obama inherited a financial crisis, and he's doing his best to fix it, but any reasonable person should be able to debate these things without getting too emotional.

That's why I find all the "tea party" stuff so disturbing (except for the unintentionally funny stuff about "tea-bagging"). There's no theme there. "Burn the books"? What do they actually want, specifically? No one seems to know; It's just an increasingly angry mob making decreasingly veiled references to violent revolution. They're supposedly angry about the budget deficit? Why were these same people so silent while Republicans were spending like drunken sailors these past 8 years?

The hatred and vitriol coming from the rump of the Republican party has long ceased being logically coherent. They're throwing every epithet in the book at their president -- terrorist, wimp, socialist, communist, fascist dictator -- except for the one I suspect many of them wish they could say in public (perhaps prefaced with "uppity").

It seems as if a lot of right-wing true believers in America right now, for example the followers of Rush Limbaugh, would rather see their country fail than see a fellow the likes of Barack Obama succeed. Something has snapped inside of these people. The political wilderness will be a good place for them to spend the next few years having a 'time out'.