APOCALYPSE  (CONT)

(that harlot Eve is gonna pay, dammit), of environmentalism, of caring about air quality and water quality and the EPA and organic foods and homeopathic medicine and resource management and the Alaska Wildlife Refuge and the U.N. and any country that doesn't have a McDonald's and a Starbucks and a decent strip club for lonely gin-soaked Republican expats.

And it explains not only the outright contempt for any view other than Bush's own, but the willingness to legislate that hatred, codify it, to make it outright illegal to think or feel or love otherwise.

Look at it this way: When you have an angry, patriotic God and the red-hot promise of the juicy apocalypse on your side, there is no such thing as a counter-argument. There is no such thing as competition. There is no such thing as giving a damn what anyone else thinks.

How else do you explain it? How else can you understand the most aggressive, war-hungry, abusive, nature-loathing, isolationist administration in American history? How else can you explain BushCo's overall "F" grade from every environmental organization in the world? How can you explain his mauling of long-term Social Security planning? The decimation of the idea of universal health care? A pre-emptive, attack-first-ask-questions-never, warmongering policy that creates more anti-U.S. hatred by the minute?

How can you explain the fact that every human rights organization on the planet is appalled by Bush's actions? Guantanamo Bay to Abu Ghraib to John Ashcroft to the Patriot Act to gutting funding for international women's health care. Hey, if God had wanted us to care about other viewpoints, He would've made everyone speak English. Can I get a "hell yeah?"

This lust for apocalyptica, then, is perhaps the best way we have to at least partially understand the shamelessness of this administration's policies and its blatant disregard for international law, its open hatred of any nation that disagrees with us and the
deep, profound concern only for nations that either cower in our God-flexin' presence and/or have resources that Bush's corporate pals are salivating to exploit.

And it is the perhaps ultimate explanation for the Right's final cattle call, its bitter war cry of a message, its exact parallel to every pseudo-religious evangelical scam artist on late-night cable TV.

Listen, good people of America. If you just send your money to the party and give up all that careful, nuanced thinking, if you just quite questioning our decisions and load up on blind faith, it will all be OK and you can have all the guns and fast food you want and those terrifying gays will leave you alone because BushCo will take care of you and God will reserve your seat on the glory train to salvation. Deal? Praise Jesus! Praise Bush/Cheney! Hallelujah you are saved! Even as we are, you know, doomed.

Isn't bogus salvation fun?

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