Harbingers of Republican Death:
In folklore around the world, there are figures, symbolic entities and beings whose appearance means death to those they appear to. Irish mythology tells of the banshee, a spirit woman who appears to signal imminent and usually violent death. Sometimes the banshee looks like a washer woman, scrubbing blood out of the clothes of those about to perish. Often, the banshee's voice announces her arrival, and, depending on where you are in Ireland, that voice can be a sweet siren's song or it can be a glass-shattering piercing scream. That is her wail, her eternal mourning for what is about to be lost.

Other cultures have gods, like the ancient Greek Thanatos or the Hindu Lord Yama. Yama's mere glance can result in one's death, and his appearance to wicked men is frightening, with huge limbs and breath of fire, a harbinger of the awful fate they must suffer. Indeed, for evil men in Hinduism, the fate of death is horrible, according to the Arthasastra: "'The hard-hearted men of Yama, terrifying, foul-smelling, with hammers and maces in their hands' come to get the deceased, who tremble and begin to scream. Filled with terror and pain, the soul leaves the body. 'Preceded by his vital wind, he takes on another body of the same form, a body born of his own karma in order for him to be tortured.'"

Sometimes reading the harbingers are difficult - looking at bones or tea leaves to suss out the meaning. But other times, it's as easy as hearing a woman's terrible, ghostly scream or seeing a fire-breathing Indian. And after last night, it's time to say that, for Republicans, it's time to put away the tarot cards and pay attention to the banshee wails crying out, "You're fucked, motherfuckers, you are so, so very fucked."

For it's not so much that the gubernatorial elections last night went to Democrats. It's not even that Bush campaigned for doomed Virginia Republican Jerry Kilgore. It's that it wasn't even close. Democrat Tim Kaine won in Virginia by 6 points (which counts as a mandate these days, no?) in a state that Bush had won in 2004 by eight points. More expected, despite the attempt to spin the race as close, Jon Corzine beat Republican Doug Forrester by nine points in New Jersey. Throw into the pile the let's-hate-the-fags amendment defeat in Maine, the go-fuck-yourself-Arnold results in California, and the we-got-your-intelligent-design-hangin' evolution win in Pennsylvania, and the banshee is a-screechin' loud, man, fuckin' loud, for the blood of Republicans, and you've got the beginning of a rejection of not only a party, by a way of governing. (Yeah, yeah, Texas passed a redundant anti-gay marriage amendment, but, you know, fuck Texas for now. We'll get to Texans soon enough.)

And if that wasn't enough, the pile-on of the Republicans continues unabated, with the non-Fox media perhaps showing a sign or two of rejecting the GOP spin. For instance, there's been a few increasingly common moments on CNN, when, after presenting the Republican spin, a reporter or host actually states not only the counterspin, but the outrage at the issue. This morning, at the end of his report on the GOP's attempt to change the story from the existence of secret torture prisons to a story about the leak about the existence of secret torture prisons, Ed Henry added, "Lawmakers in both parties starting to say not just -- there shouldn't just be investigation of the leak of secret prison, how about a probe of whether or not these secret prisons exist and whether they should stay open."

To this statement, which a year ago would have simply been left alone as evidence that CNN provided a semblance of "balance," American Morning host Miles "Stop Lookin' At Soledad" O'Brien said, "Yes, let's not forget we're talking about a network of secret prisons which ignores all the civil rights we hold dear to us. And perhaps an investigation should be focused there." What? A news anchor standing up for civil rights? How the fuck did that happen?

Henry quickly agreed, saying, "Absolutely. And in fact there's debate in the Senate this very week, because Senator John McCain, as you know, has been pushing to make sure that the torture standards, the anti-torture standards, are strengthened in the United States to make sure these terror suspects are not actually tortured at secret prisons or elsewhere."

It's doom and damnation for the wicked men and women of the Republican party. They tied their destinies to that Bush express back in 2004, and that motherfucker's gone off the tracks. We won't know the full body count until a year from now, but it ain't lookin' pretty. And as Democrats have been learning, the path back from the realm of death is long: "The evil man becomes born as an animal, among the worms, insects, moths, beasts of prey, mosquitoes, and so forth. There he is born in elephants, trees, and so forth, and in cows and horses, and in other wombs that are evil and painful. When he finally becomes a human, he is a despicable hunchback...When there is none of his evil left, and he is filled with merit, then he starts climbing up to higher castes."

Democrats may not be Brahmins yet, but, for certain, they have reached the level of higher beasts or lower humans while the Republicans are about to discover that there's only rocks to land on at the end of the tumble into death. The harbingers are there. Death is coming. The only thing Republicans can do is to try to change their wicked ways so that the afterlife is kinder. Or those rocks'll be sharpened into points.