Regarding the Midterms, Part 1: Allow Yourself to Despair Today:
There's a line from a novel that's been haunting the Rude Pundit for the last couple of weeks. It's from Australian writer Richard Flanagan's incredible 2006 book, The Unknown Terrorist. The main character walks past a bunch of young males beating a beggar. They threaten anyone who attempts to stop them from doing so: "And behind her they kept on for a few minutes more, kicking him as if he were to blame for everything in that dirty, dead decade they were all condemned to live through, a sack of shit that had once been a man, in a place that once been a community, in a country that once been a society."

The overwhelming feeling that the Rude Pundit has this morning is utter disgust with a vast number of the people of his nation, this America, for they have demonstrated, once again, that they are selfish, vain, cruel buffoons who are scared by the wrong things and have decided that the best way to handle it is to say, "Fuck it," build isolated bunkers all over the nation, and tell everyone else to leave them the fuck alone. For what is the end result of the vaguely-conceived ideology that was affirmed last night? It is that each of us should have the right to squat in our shitpiles of ignorance, isolated from one another, coveting our precious money, fellating our guns and fucking ourselves against our 50-inch LED screens in our multi-mortgaged, soon-to-be foreclosed on hovels, and if the world outside our caves goes to hell, well, that's because people don't understand how wonderful it is to engorge your faces with poisoned food and asthmatically heave your chest through polluted air and travel on shattered roads and bridges while picking your unmedicated scabs in order to get to work at Wal-Mart for shit wages but at least there's a wall that keeps the Mexicans and the gays out because that's what pissy God and the screaming ghost of Samuel Adams would fucking want for us. Their ultimate goal is to dismantle society itself in favor of Darwinian anarchy. Thomas Hobbes in action, motherfuckers, the animalistic Yahoos gutting the evolved Houyhnhnms.

There will be time, there will time, yes, to sift through the wreckage of last night's Republican ass-kicking and look for pieces of wisdom. We know that they got here because they lied, as they always do, about what this president has accomplished, about how much he tried to work with the GOP, about how genuinely not-liberal Barack Obama is. We know that had the Citizens United decision not unleashed the floodgates of corporate cash, some of the losses might have been mitigated. We know that the shattered nature of contemporary media meant that many people got their news filtered through Rupert Murdoch's ass crack. But we also know that they made a decision: to win no matter what. If that meant giving up on things they supposedly believed (as John McCain did), so be it. If that meant putting up with the desires of a Tea Party composed of only Mad Hatters, so be it. If that meant breaking down the working of the federal government, so be it. Shit, making a bunch of poor suckers believe that tax breaks for the wealthy was good for everyone and that environmental and other regulation was bad was the easy part. The win was what mattered. It doesn't matter how much mud you're covered with as long as you put the ball in the end zone.

Here's all you need to know in two editorials from today:

Look at what noted nutzoid obstructionist Republican Jim DeMint wrote in the Wall Street Journal to welcome new Senators: "Tea party Republicans were elected to go to Washington and save the country—not be co-opted by the club. So put on your boxing gloves. The fight begins today." He may as well have titled it "A Love Letter to Rand."

And compare that to what punk-ass runaway Democrat Evan Bayh wrote in the New York Times: "We also overreached by focusing on health care rather than job creation during a severe recession...we were too deferential to our most zealous supporters...we must prove to moderates that Democrats can make tough choices." First off, can we stop saying that Obama focused on health care rather than jobs? The fucking stimulus passed (with almost everything that Republicans wanted in it) before work on health care got going. We had to wait to see if the stimulus worked, and it did help with jobs (it just wasn't big enough so it would appease the non-compromising pricks in the GOP). And, second, fuck you, Evan Bayh, who tucked his tail and his $10 million war chest between his legs and scampered away from the Senate like a whipped bitch on a rainy night.

We are heading for a dark, dark period. The Congress isn't going to get shit done as now everything will have to be approved by DeMint and Paul, even if the Senate is still in Democratic hands, or Harry Reid won't let the crazy shit passed in the House even come to a vote. There's going to be investigations of every bit of grime that Andrew Breitbart and Fox "news" can scrape from under the fingernails of even the lowliest members of the Obama administration. Impeachment will be on the table. Mike Pence, Darrell Issa, and Michele Bachmann will not be humble and cooperative with victory. They will be mad and drunk and ready for vengeance on the man who did nothing more than try to enact the will of the people who elected him by doing some of the very things he said he would do.

We the people abandoned Barack Obama yesterday. Hate what you will about him and about how he approached governing. The awful frustration of watching him compromise with a majority will seem like a happy vacation compared to what's coming. No, too many people who supported him in 2008 voted against him through their congressional races this year. And it was for the promise of a couple of extra bucks in their shrinking pay checks each week. Hope dies cheaply in this dirty, dead century.

Tomorrow: Enough despair. Let's make a plan, motherfuckers.