You watch the Republican Party impotently thrash around in its death throes, searching for a thread, a purpose, a cause other than hate, with its dysfunctional tea-baggers, health care reactionaries, town hall hecklers, storm trooper talk radio hosts, assorted hillbilly would-be serial assassins, gun nuts, Klan racists and you're-going-to-hell religious xenophobes.
It almost makes you feel sorry.
If not for them, the nuts, then at least certainly for the poor people who remain in that party, who for some reason have left some shred of intelligence, some dignity, and who for some reason, still remain in the Republican Party. Those who want to cling to the notion that it somehow is still a party of decent people.
It makes you think of the dinosaurs, the giant lizards who once commanded the awe of the earth, but who were done in either by the blinding flash of an asteroid they never saw coming, or by the climate change to which they couldn't adapt, and which they themselves partly enacted with gigantic methane blasts of hot air farting. Or perhaps, simply fate, which decreed that things would get cold, life-giving rain forests dry up, mountains rise, and little furry creatures the great beasts couldn't fathom, scurrying unseen, un-felt between their giant toes---the meek---would inherit the earth.
There is an inevitability to it. For the GOP, like the dinosaurs, things changed, but they couldn't change along with it. They had to continue plodding on into the extinction of irrelevancy. They could still scream however and make a lot of noise and desperately struggle about.
Here are 10 similarities between Republicans and the Jurassic Age.
The most cherished Republican myth is that Republicans are for small government. During the eight Bush years government set astronomical record debts partly due to pursuing two un-ending nation-building wars. This is like a giant brontosaurus that is so big that if it looks back, it can't see its own tail.
The giant lizard grew so huge through evolution that it could only support its tremendous weight by standing for hours in water for buoyancy, in this case, in the filthy muck of a swamp. The Republicans stand in the filthy muck of crass behavior, heckling people (including the president) with whom they disagree, calling everyone other than themselves disloyal traitors and bad Americans. It stinks, just like the swamp they took refuge in.
Both Republicans and dinosaurs are adverse to worrying about climate change.
The biggest dinosaurs had tiny brains and bloated bodies. So do many right wing talk show hosts.
The top of the food chain, the scariest dinosaurs, were the huge snarling screeching meat eaters. The leaders of the Republican Party are also the scariest, and make the most noise, Limbaugh, Beck and Sarah Palin.
Many dinosaurs laid eggs. So did Republicans in strategic planning both Iraq and Afghanistan . For example, they initially sent troops to Iraq without flak vests.
Dinosaurs had no concept of time. For them, time stood still. Likewise, Republicans want time to freeze. Or even reverse. For them ideally, it will always be 1948, when blacks knew their proper place, when women knew their place, when immigrants knew their place, when white men (no Jews or Catholics) were the only ones who mattered.
To the very end dinosaurs, the big ones, remained creatures of mass consumption. A fatal flaw. It took a ton of plant matter every day to feed one of the great green eaters, munching away, and whom the flesh eaters in their turn depended on for their food. The chain was fragile. Likewise, the Republican Party has remained the party of mass consumption. Live big like there's no tomorrow. A Republican wants to be a big man (like his hero John Wayne), even though physically he is usually a small angry white guy. He wants to live in a big energy consuming house, and drive a big powerful gas guzzling car or truck, sometimes with a Confederate flag adorning it. To ride a bike is to be a liberal traitor. Environmentalism is seen as an anti business plot against business-as-usual. Likewise, the dinosaur, if it could think, would probably have disdain for the unseen tiny, more environmentally efficient creatures at its feet.
Some dinosaurs had extremely odd-shaped (duck-bill) heads. Look at some of the town hall hecklers.
Republicans have proven time and again they are incapable of rational compromise, or at least trying to meet others half way so some kind of forward progress can be made, the most basic requirement of a two-party state. They exist in the status quo, and the past. Like the dinosaurs, they have to predominate, or nothing. They left behind their bones.
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