The New Political Landscape

Well, it didn't take long for the GOP spin machine to begin it's attempt at dictating the agenda for the next four years to newly re-elected President Barack Obama.

Since the party leadership ceded control to a gang of Tea Party psychopaths they've gotten used to the tail wagging the elephant and figure it should work the same way for the Democrats and the country as a whole.

This 2008 cartoon by The New Yorker's Frank Cotham sums up what I heard today from John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and a host of other right-wing apologists as they talked about how they need to change their message - their MESSAGE, not their agenda!

So it would seem that they don't understand that the land of milk and honey run by angry, white men, the land they thought they were creating in perpetuity for themselves and their heirs, was at best a mirage.

Now they wander in a desert of their own making. But hey! At least the sand is white...

(Segue to passage from Milton's Paradise Lost ...)

‘Is this the region, this the soil, the clime,’
Said then the lost Archangel, ‘this the seat
That we must change for Heaven?—this mournful gloom
For that celestial light? Be it so, since he
Who now is sovereign can dispose and bid
What shall be right: farthest from him is best
Whom reason hath equalled, force hath made supreme
Above his equals. Farewell, happy fields,
Where joy for ever dwells! Hail, horrors! hail,
Infernal world! and thou, profoundest Hell,
Receive thy new possessor—one who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less than he
Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th’ Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reigh secure; and, in my choice,
To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.
But wherefore let we then our faithful friends,
Th’ associates and co-partners of our loss,
Lie thus astonished on th’ oblivious pool,
And call them not to share with us their part
In this unhappy mansion, or once more
With rallied arms to try what may be yet
Regained in Heaven, or what more lost in Hell?’
So Satan spake...