They Want to Do Bad Things to You

by Michael Flannigan

Antiquity informs us that up until just after the first quarter of the 20th century, there was one infallible defense against vampires. Better than garlic, crosses, holy water, wooden stakes or polka and rap music, one need only keep a Republican handy. When accosted by the undead in a dark alley, one who could afford to retain a Republican in their pocket needed only present one with the words, "By the power of Hoover, begone, thou foul thing!"

And the merest glimpse of a right wing industrialist or politician such as Prescott Bush, Henry Ford or Remington would be more than sufficient to make the hungriest, hardiest Transylvanian transplant shrink and hiss back into the shadows from whence they came. Even those suckers knew their limits.

Sadly, we've fallen on hard times. Even those of us who once thought of ourselves as affluent now can no longer afford to keep a Republican in our pocket (although the top 5% can surely rent one from time to time).

But the Republicans were admirably effective. Vampires no longer exist (when was the last time you or anyone in your circle was bitten by a vampire? Just what I thought. As with terrorists, if vampires haven't victimized us, that's only because of Republicans). But then a strange thing happened in 2001: The cure had become worse than the original curse. Things only got worse in the wake of the 2002 midterms when we lost two of our best senators (Cleland and Wellstone) to the red menace.

They're still, thankfully, in the minority. But what we're seeing and hearing from the Republican party is eerily similar to the basic premise of the new hit HBO series, True Blood. Vampires are now coming out of the shadows to live in mainstream society. People no longer have to fear them because some Japanese corporation made a sanguinary substitute called "True Blood". Since they no longer have to kill humans and drain them of their blood to survive, vampires and humans coexist.

Of course, it isn't as simple as that. Every story, every premise, needs dramatic conflict and no one wants to see a vampire series in which the quick and the undead sit around campfires singing "Kumbaya".

After the 2008 elections a fortnight ago, the Republican party has been making a public relations comeback. The more reasonable-sounding ones go on the news and even Bill Maher to inform us that they've seen the error of their ways, reinvent themselves, that they can co-exist with their human counterparts because they're no longer guzzling the Koolaid. Because now, with the miracle of modern beverage technology, they have something better than Koolaid. Now, there's Troo-laid!

Troo-laid contains everything a growing Republican needs only with 50% less pork.

Now, like the vampire faction in True Blood, the GOP, even after their humiliating loss during which they were almost fatally exposed to the harsh daylight of truth, is organized. Insulting them, even calling them on their evil is now punishable as a hate crime, the offenders doing so under pain of arrest.

Now, with the New World Order taking shape, Republicans will be in our Cabinet once again. Our next president promises to work with them in a spirit of bipartisan harmony and comity.

And adding to the parasitic cast of characters are witches,

witchhunters

and shape-shifters.


In other words, the same exact entities of which liberal and progressive parents warn their children during bedtime.

Forgotten are the bad old days when Republicans left out Democrats during the legislative process, Republican Secretaries of State conferring only with Congressional Republicans in closed-door meetings and even giving Democrats the slip when meetings were held. Unheard were Republicans saying mere hours after the elections were concluded that they would offer "loyal but principled opposition."

Forgotten are the bad old days of their brutal attempts at One Party Rule, the depravity, debauchery and moral cancer. That was so four years ago, girlfriend! Can't we just let bygones be bygones and just pretend the Constitution was never broken, shat on and ripped into parakeet cage liner?

They have Troo-laid, after all. This is a different element than the one made infamous by horror writers of the past like Naomi Klein, Ron Suskind and Michael Moore.

Yet no one examines who makes this new miracle elixir that promises the change that we all deserve, this kinder, less homicidal Republican party or what goes into it. Like the original Koolaid, Troo-laid is still made by the likes of the Bilderburg Group, the Carlyle Group, big pharma, big oil, the big lenders. And the frightening thing is, many of these Troo-laid makers are catering to the Democrats.

And we're being lulled into a sense of false security because they sound so reasonable and pragmatic and really, really sound committed to reform, despite the fact that when Republicans start mentioning the word "reform", assholes from coast to coast begin to pucker. It never occurs to anyone that these people aren't content with Troo-laid and that they aren't up to their old tricks, waiting for their moment in the moon.

Do not trust them. Do not trust the New Koolaid.

They want to do bad things to you.