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I want to be careful here. I have conservative friends. Obviously they’re not my friends BECAUSE they’re conservative, but in SPITE of it. And I like them. Of course, it helps that they recognize that the gibbon in the Oval Office is an anencephalic disaster for the country.

But I’m seeing some weird shit coming from them right now.

I understand the difficulty of maintaining one’s conservative credentials when one’s champion is a draft-dodging, porn-star-porking, twice-divorced cretin who’s too stupid to even credibly fake believing in God. His racism and sexism and xenophobia are slightly easier to swallow, because they’re all pretty much part of the Republican platform, but no one outside of the Beltway/Infowars Matrix can believably claim that Donald Trump represents the core principles of conservatism. There have been several instances in which the man has had to have his words walked back by his increasingly-frantic team of handlers because he doesn’t have the foggiest notion about what conservatism is. It’s just something he adopted to run for office. One gets the sense that, had he been told that the Clown Party was ripe for a takeover, he would have shown up at debates wearing a big red rubber nose and carrying a seltzer bottle in his belt holster.

The moral cowardice of the Republican Party has been on full display over the last year and a half. It can’t claim to be the party of family values anymore, or the party of fiscal responsibility, or the party that will stand up against Russian imperialism and adventurism. It’s no longer the law-and-order party, or the party of Lincoln, or the party that accepts that the Constitution gives the President the right to have his Supreme Court nominee get hearings and an up-or-down vote, not if the President is a black man near the end of his term. It’s now a party that accepts that nepotistic morons don’t actually need security clearances, that accused child molesters are worthy of funding, that governors who take pictures for blackmail purposes of their tied-up, naked mistresses shouldn’t be condemned or censured. It’s a party that has bought, all-in, the war on the media, on the judiciary, on federal law-enforcement, on science, on reason, on fact. Just so long as they get their corporate tax cuts and their gooey, slippery love affair with semi-automatic weapons and their quixotic assaults on transgender people and Muslims and black activists kneeling on the sidelines at NFL games, they are perfectly willing to give up every stance that hitherto had made up their mask of respectability, the glamour that had made them seem like the adults in the room, concerned about ethics and morals and righteousness. All that shit is gone, now, and the GOP stands revealed for what it truly is--the party of Muslim bans and gun fetishes, of Jim Crow gerrymandering and dictator-worshiping, of ignorance and fear and hatred; the party that considers murdered black men and murdered children and murdered gay people an acceptable price to pay to Make America Fucking Great Again. black prom dresses 2019

Like I said, though--my conservative friends aren’t murderous racist bastards. They know that they’re in an impossible situation. But for some reason at least three of them, in the last week or so, have expressed worry that the various movements that have risen up against the potential Trump Reich, no matter how worthy their goals, have started to DIVIDE AMERICA.

I’ll say it again. My conservative interlocuters are worried that those kids in Florida, that the MeToo movement, that the investigation into the extent of the Russian meddling in our national election, all of these things are causing dangerous divisions among our citizens.

And I hope my friends realize that when I say ‘Well, fuck THAT,” I’m not attacking them personally.

But fuck THAT.

You do NOT get to worry about dividing the populace of this country, not when your elected President got up there in front of his meager crowds in Washington and delivered an inaugural speech full of looming portents, terrifying dangers, and ‘American carnage’. Not when your elected President BEGAN his fucking campaign by calling Mexicans rapists and murderers, later suggested that judges of Mexican heritage couldn’t be trusted with American law. Not when your fucking family-values elected President talked about grabbing women by their vaginas and chortling that they’d LET you when you were rich and famous. You do NOT get to talk about division when your guy is firing everyone who’s trying to get to the bottom of Russian interference in the most sacred ritual America has, and ignoring the reality that they’re gonna do it again in a few months. Those kids in Florida are standing up, in all the best traditions of the United States of America, and demanding action and justice. They’re facing down Senators and global corporations and the N-fucking-RA, and they’re WINNING.

Black Lives Matter is winning. Those women with their pussy hats? They’re winning. The ACLU? It’s winning. There have been dozens of special elections since Trump took office, and the Democrats have flipped 39 seats from red to blue, and have outperformed Hillary Clinton by something like twenty points across the board. Sexual predators are getting fired left and right. And Dick’s Sporting Goods just decided to adopt every goddamn common-sense gun-selling regulation the poor, beleaguered Left has been trying to enact since Reagan banned sales of assault weapons.

If the Florida kids, the kids who watched their friends and teachers murdered in front of them, are dividing the country, then more power to them. It’s an ugly, uncomfortable truth that there are a LOT of sick, stupid, crazy people in this country. They’re out there in their MAGA caps, hoarding their guns in their cellars, watching Alex Jones and ‘Duck Dynasty’ and praying to Baby Jesus to take the nigras and the towel-heads and the faggots away. They are completely fucking terrified that some guy wearing a dress is going to be able to walk into the women’s restroom while their daughter is in there, but they don’t give a single shit that Judge Roy Moore might shove his palsied, liver-spotted old hand down the front of their daughter’s Guess? jeans on a ‘date’. Because he’s a man of God, and he hates the nigras.

And if the President walked in on their daughter while she was changing clothes for a beauty pageant? What a fucking honor that would be.

The Republican strategy has, since I’ve been alive, to divide the country. It’s always been ‘god-fearing family values’ versus ‘liberal permissiveness’. It’s always been ‘Michael Dukakis wants to let this big black buck out of jail on a weekend furlough to rape your daughter’, and ‘Jimmy Carter wants to give the Panama Canal back to Panama, even though WE built it’, and ‘John Kerry, the Vietnam War veteran, hates his country so much that he threw away his medals’, and ‘Barack Obama is a Muslim, an atheist, a communist, a Kenyan, a cocaine-user who frequented male prostitutes, his wife calls us ‘Whitey’, he spent years sucking Saul Alinsky’s toes, he’s a cog in the Chicago machine, he smoked pot and was proud of it, and he puts fucking Grey Poupon on his all-American hamburger.”

The Russians wanted to hurt America during the last Presidential election, obviously. It’s not like they tried to support Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump because they thought those guys would be the best choices for an increasingly-dangerous world. They supported those guys because they wanted exactly what’s happening now--the sudden, shocking attack on every democratic norm that has served America for two centuries. The attack on law enforcement, on the media, on science, on international comity and amity, on reason and fact, on propriety and good governance, on the judiciary, on rights and diplomacy and compromise.

Again, conservative friends, this is not an attack on you.

But fuck that.

You do NOT get to worry about the Stoneman kids, or the dozen women accusing the President of sexual assault, or the black guy kneeling during the national anthem, or the scientists and transgender people running for office, or the women wearing their pussy hats, or the success of fucking BLACK PANTHER dividing the country.

A hard rain’s coming. A cleansing rain. And it will rain on the just and the unjust alike.