How the fringe GOP is shanking your future.

Sully [L&R] has it:

No one in the Congressional Limbaugh-run GOP will back anything this president does. Not only that; they will assault him, race-bait him and insult him in a continuous reel of populist bile.

It seems to me that the GOP was once recognizable as a human personality.

What you have now is just the rage at the world and its confounding trade-offs and compromises. The knowledge of the Rove right's total failure in the last eight years has only made the far right more fervent in its theo-ideology. Do they have a plan to balance the budget? To salvage or cut losses in Afghanistan? To integrate illegal immigrants rather than use their lives as political fodder? To get the working middle classes reliable healthcare insurance? Not that I can see beyond utopian platitudes. 

But they do know that anything this president does is a threat to them. And the noise they can make and violence they can foment is out of all proportion to their numbers.

From Reverent Wright to the birther movement to the town hall crashers to the 9/12 protesters (and that's not counting the people in office!)--it all signifies to me that there is a section of our population that refuses to even recognize our president's humanity, let alone his office.

I know what some of you may be thinking: that W. got put through the same ringer, so why complain? This argument has credence, but let me remind you of this: W. spent years in office before being villified as an abuser of executive privilege and that was after he usurped an election before our very eyes. On the flipside, Obama has been dodging mud on even the shakiest of grounds (remember the "sexist" lipstick-on-a-pig comment?) since he beat Senator Clinton in Iowa.

Understand that my goal is not to out-matyr Obama against all past presidents. My goal is to point out that the obstruction Obama is facing is unprecedented in a time when we are desperate for an effective president. This is a time when we're seeing what is (hopefully) the last dregs of an old society, that is hell bent on stopping progress, going kicking, screaming, biting, and stabbing. We cannot wait for these people to die out. If you're politically active, you know what to do. But if you're an idler who knows better, your time to act is now.