“Shut up! Just shut up!”

Quoting from Herr Doctor Professor Bill O’Reilly there.

The number of campaign emails arriving here at BTC News world headquarters has been escalating steadily during the past few weeks. Many of them are from Barack Obama et Cie; almost all of those trigger my junk mail filter. I click on one and a button pops up with text in red reading “Suspected Email Scam!”

Why, yes: Yes it is. I do not know why the response is exclusive to the Obama team stuff among campaign mailers, but apparently their prose stylings closely match those of the professional spammers the filter is meant to refuse. “Send $25 now and watch your political penis grow!”

Another source of email triggering the email scam warning is the State Department. Their intermittent announcements of job openings in Iraq and Afghanistan almost always raise the flag.

But back to O’Reilly. As I’ve noted several hundred times now, I wasn’t ever a big Obama fan. I understood why people were so struck by him, and I understood why people who weren’t particularly struck wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. Because I’m just that sort of understanding fellow.

I even understand all the alarums and excursions arising from people who think the fate of the Republic rests upon the vanquishment of Republicans in the fall, and the tendency to forgive Obaman excesses—shit-canning the Constitution, liberating way lots of tinted people from the burden of life and suchlike—and the tendency to shout “DON’T YOU GET IT!!!” at people like me when we keep bringing up that the peace-prize guy is blowing people up just every fucking where, and spurring the FBI and other national security organs on to rape your privacy, and making a little list of US citizens who aren’t entitled to due process but are entitled to the honor of getting murdered by the president.

Yes, I get it. It’s only that I still think that killing Muslim civilians in a half-dozen countries is really more of a threat to the image of the US held by Muslims than is the reactivation of the direct circuit from limbic system to mouth among the batshit crazy class here in the land of the free-so-far-from-indiscriminate-death-rained-down-from-above. And that a transparent, glaring disregard for the lives and circumstances of very large numbers of people in one part of the world likely signals a similar if less immediately homicidal disregard for the ones in our neck of the woods.

One of the sillier aspects of the not-ground-zero/not-a-mosque deal is the question of how close to the hallowed hole in the ground is too close. The actual answer is “anywhere where there’s no ocean between us and it,” but if one takes the question seriously for a moment, the answer would be something along the lines of “eight blocks is too close; nine is okay.” Or in our first example, “this side of any sea bounding America is too close; so is anywhere else. Bombs away!”

Wait, what just happened there?

Anyway, the dynamic is similar to that demonstrated by Obama partisans and Republican-fearing fellow travelers. From my perspective, the question is “How close to Republican positions and tactics is too close?” Obviously killing lots of people who have never and will never do this country any harm isn’t close enough, as administrations future will carry on the tradition as diligently as those past and present; neither is executive branch excess, as the current administration has taken that ball and run it through the gaping hole blown open by the violent silence of administration apologists.

After the elections are over, Democrats, appropriately led by the head of the party, will be taking on Social Security, which has somehow become the Devil. They will be working to shrink the Devil down to size.

Will that be too close? No, of course not, because even though nothing is actually sacred to Democrats at the most rarefied levels, they’ve still not gotten around to fucking everything up.

This is not a matter of there existing some places Democrats simply won’t go; it’s only that they can’t fuck up everything at once. But so long as they haven’t gone to those places, their supporters will continue to think that they won’t. Until they do. And then there’s the next thing, and the next thing.

And eventually, despite the speed with which Republicans are moving into the realm of the completely imaginary, Democrats will accelerate to overtake them.

And guaranteed, it’s gonna be my fault.