John Liming is in wonderful form today as he takes on one of the right’s favorite bogeyman – compassionate government.

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“Whenever I see so many people rushing out to buy guns, I think there is real hope yet for America!” my friend gushed as he stirred the brackish brew that he had set before us and which was supposed to pass for coffee.

I believe that is the very first time I had ever heard someone say that our future hopes all resided in the almighty gun and the number of valiant citizens willing to rush out and buy enough of the damnable things to insulate the walls of their abodes with.

“Is there some kind of right wing paranoid insurrectionist or revolutionist-type thinking blooming here in this staunch radical conservative acquaintance of mine?  Is he being serious or is he merely taunting me because he knows my Liberal leanings?”

I had heard my Dad say that The United States had begun to slow descent to “Hell in a hand basket” but I had never before witnessed such angst, anger, and utter bitterness swelling up among my countrymen as to justify someone saying that our best hope for a future depended on acquiring the power to lay waste to others.

“Daddy,” you see, was one of those die-hard Republicans who often expressed his own dismay ( hatred ) ( bitterness ) ( anger ) over how he felt that he was working his fingers to the bone for a pittance while there were hordes of wretches out there, somewhere, who were bound and determined to make their living by “stealing” from him, the honest hard-working taxpayer, by throwing themselves willingly into a permanent dependency on government “give away” programs like social security, medicare, Medicaid, aid to dependent children, supplemental security income, housing assistance for the poor, college grants to economically challenged college students and . .  and . . .and . . . you name it.  If there was a safety net program that was put into place to help people who needed help, my Dad thought his government had taken a dump on his own head by instituting it.

Have I mentioned yet that even dear old “Daddy” had to recant and take his own social security later in his miserable life?

Poor Daddy! Pants on fire!

He had worked his entire life away for literally nothing for Republican bosses in a historically predominantly Republican town ( “What are you griping about?  It’s a job, ain’t it?  It keeps a roof over your head, don’t it?”) – ( Barely.).  And he died with nothing and none of them – not one of them – even came to his memorial service – they did send their lackey around to collect the keys to the tractor they had let Dad drive back and forth to work however.

That is one thing I noticed about Dad and his Republican friends early on – they all seemed to me to despise any government program that was supposed to help those who might need a little help.  I guess what I am saying was that even as a kid ( I am 74 years old now) I was exposed to the original complainers about that mythical 47% of America who are born takers and who want nothing more than to sponge off everybody else – as line of crap that I have long since concluded is nothing but total far right wing radical bullsh*t

There are plenty of nose pickers and butt scratchers and finger smellers who wear the badge ( face?) ( mask?) (pretense?) of conservatism but who aren’t any smarter than to actually believe they own a set of matched luggage if they possess two shopping bags from the same retail outlet – you know, the kind of folks who think that a “stock tip” is some kind of advice on how to worm hogs . . .yeah – that kind!

It is my own personal opinion that it is from among these political bottom feeders that most of the government haters and the Obama Haters and the Liberal Haters among us have their substance and their being.

I know that it is not the predetermined ordained role of government to act as Mother and nursemaid to its citizens, but I also know that any nation where the general population makes such claims as “We are a Christian nation” is probably going to have social safety net programs in place and is going to be more inclined to lend a hand to those who are down and out than they are to disdain the poor and to do everything that is done for the exclusive benefit of those who already have all the advantages of the material world.

What motivates some of these outwardly clean vessels whose inward parts seem to be little more than rotted bones and pig breath is well beyond the power of my own reckoning, but I hear their swill every day of my life as they go about saying awful and hurtful things about the government and about anyone and everyone who doesn’t share their convoluted, nasty, selfish view of the world.

One of the very reasons that I am a Democrat is because I cannot bring myself to accept that it is not just plain wrong to throw people into the pits when they are down and force them to survive on their own wits alone and soothe my conscience by making such dreadfully ass-borne statements as, “Oh it is the responsibility of churches and charitable neighbors to see to the needs of the poor.”

I have, in my own life experience, been pitifully broke, out of work, having to feed a family and knocking on church doors to see if there was some hope of a little help from these “charitable” Christian neighbors and fellow citizens of mine – yes, I have been there and done that and guess what I discovered all to painfully?

I discovered that “Charity is not the work of the church” and that if I had listened to some of my a-wad right wing religious friends, I would have long since starved, died and been buried because I found out that too many churches are more concerned about building bigger buildings and buying more expensive houses for their fat cat preachers than they are in helping the poor.

So do not get in my face with that tired old Right Wing saw about how churches and neighbors with charity in their hearts is going to be the hope of the millions who find themselves in desperate circumstances because it just isn’t going to happen, my friend – not no way, not no how!

I know some Rightie troll is going to come and give us one of the one-in-a-million examples of where what I am saying might not always be true – but these cases are as rare as hen’s teeth as far as I am concerned.

I simply cannot believe the short-sightedness of some people – especially some of those from the farthest reaches of the political right who think that bad fortune can never come their way and who are so damned hard-headed and dead set against their government being of assistance to anyone with a little help from some taxpayer money.

No, the ones I know from that crowd, are more than willing to worship at the foot of big government as long as there is something in it for them, but most of the ones I am familiar with also seem to hate the fact that anyone else besides themselves might actually receive some benefit from a government “Of the People, By the People and For the people” and many of these are the members of “The First Church of Better Than You”  crowd . . . the hypocritical “Haves” who hate the “Have Nots” . . . the  mud-wallowing (expletives)  that represent everything that could possibly be unsavory in American Life as far as I am concerned . . . from my vantage point and in my humble opinion.

Such negativity must, by the very nature of things, be self-destructive in the long run and ever since the recent fiasco of a bunch of primaries and an election that gave President Obama his second term in office, I have seen what I consider to be more than welcome signs that this party of no, nothing and nonsense may actually have reached the limits of their obstructionist intransigence and may be, at long last, on the verge of a renewal or of descending into the very darkness they seem to have been working so hard to shroud the rest of us in all these many years . . . especially since their obscene  temporary and limited ascendancy in 2000.

If it happens, then all I can say is “Good riddance and God Bless America!”

America has always come to Her senses in moments of peril and I have no doubt that the indomitable American Spirit will prevail even in these challenging times in which we find ourselves at this moment.

I think the antiquated nonsense of the Far Right is in serious jeopardy of simply evaporating!  That would be a miracle!  That would be a saving grace for America in my opinion.

John Liming publishes American Liberal Times.
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