Even the best possible outcome Tuesday is depressing and scary -- but it's still the best possible outcome

That patriot's patriot Gen. JC Christian, better-known as Jesus' General, knows a real patriot when he sees one, and he's arm in arm with the Teabaggers' juggernaut poised to send sniveling jackass Rand Paul to the U.S. Senate.

"Right now all that should matter to any of us is defeating the most radical, authoritarian, anti-intellectual Republican class in modern memory (and that's saying something.) They were thoroughly repudiated at the polls in the last two elections and they haven't learned a thing from those losses. Indeed, the lesson they took was that they hadn't been aggressively wrong enough. Instead of seeing where they went wrong and making adjustments, they've doubled down on their worst policies and are prepared to go even further." 

-- Digby, in the post "They're From The Tea Party
And They've Come To Take Your Country"

by Ken

Howie has already called attention to this remarkable post by Digby highlighting the stakes in next Tuesday's voting. In it she calls attention to a quick list compiled by our friend Mike Lux, in the wake of the Kentucky curb-stomping incident ("Tim Profitt -- and a Contemporary History of Political Thuggery," of incidents of actual right-wing violence. A lot of other sources have been augmenting the list (I see that MediaMatter's Adam H. Shah has a list of 17), but here's Mike's original, with the bare bones of his take on the subject:

From relatively isolated incidents to ones even more violent and troubling, there's a growing pattern here, and as someone who reveres American democracy, I find it quite frightening. Here's just a few examples from the current era:

* Alaska Senate candidate Joe Miller hires a group tied to a paramilitary militia to do security for him, and his paratroopers assault and handcuff a citizen journalist just trying to get a question answered.
* a bullet is shot through Rep. Grijalva's campaign office window, and obscene threats are delivered to his ofc as well.
* Rep. Perriello's gas line to his house was cut.
* Republican congressional candidate Allen West using a motorcycle gang known for violent criminal activity for security, and then gang members actually harassed and bullied a Democratic staffer trying to videotape a public event.
* Vandalism and assassination threats occur at offices of Congressional members during the health care fight.
* a doctor who performs abortions in KS is brutally murdered while coming out of his church on a Sunday morning.
* a guard at the Holocaust Museum is murdered by an anti-Semitic racist stoked by listening to Limbaugh and Beck.
* a lunatic also stirred up by Glenn Beck shows about the Tides Foundation is stopped on his way to murder people at the Tides office in San Francisco.

These are just the actual acts of violence. In the meantime, we have people coming to town hall meetings and Presidential rallies with assault weapons, Republican Senate candidates talking openly of having to use "Second Amendment means" in case regular politics doesn't work, Republican Governors (both Rick Perry and Sarah Palin) meeting with secessionist groups with ties to racist leaders. Rand Paul's wimpy statement about civility is only the latest in Republicans' utter unwillingness to clearly condemn violent acts or rhetoric on the part of way too many of their supporters.

Surely no one who's been paying attention can be surprised. Just as the New Right shuns any obligation to facts or reality of any sort, its thugs and delusionaries have been making clear that they feel empowered to use any means at their disposal to enforce (and I do meant "force") their crazinesses.

And just as the lamebrains and hoodlums of the Right have delighted in deriding us when we've warned about the threat of right-wing violence, they feel utterly entitled to lie their guts about it after the fact. And so, while Paulist thug Tom Profitt admits to the absolute minimum that can be confirmed from the bit of blurry video that exists of his assault on MoveOn.org volunteer Lauren Valle (my favorite part is his argument that the police should have been called, apparently suggesting that he's not responsible for his behavior because it was the somebody else's job to prevent it), the whole mob feels free to tell whatever lies they feel like about the incident. Only an idiot would take the word of people who -- and I'm choosing my words carefully here -- literally don't have the most basic understanding of the concept of "truth" over that of the victim, but the American public seems to have reduced itself to a gaggle of idiots.

Of course it's not an exclusively Republican problem. As Howie points out on an almost daily basis, and I do my share of piling on, there are an awful lot of Democrats who toe the same line, out of either ideological camaraderie or cynical opportunism. The more of them who are swept away Tuesday, the better for all concerned. But as Digby argues so eloquently in her post, there's a lot more at stake in this election, in which everyone who finds his/her way to DWT has a stake.

Looking beyond Tuesday, though, there has to be an ongoing concern that the hate-mongering liars, fact-denying hordes, and garden-variety thugs who have now become the "mainstream" of both the New Right and the New Republican Party, at the beck and call of the sociopathic ideologues and profiteering megacorporate predators who yank their chains, can still stitch together something like half the vote in the U.S. electorate at large. It will be a relief if that turns out to be slightly less than half, but even that happiest available outcome would hardly be cause for resting easy.

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