That thing was just plain sad. [View all]

[madamesilverspurs]

Tonight’s “debate”, I thought, would be just more of the same, and it was that and then some. There would be the usual shaking-my-head, the occasional eye roll, a small burst of cussing here and there, and yes, that all happened. What caught me by surprise, though, what I hadn’t expected — when it was over there was a very real sense of sadness.

It took a few minutes, just sitting back and thinking about it, then I realized that it felt like I had just watched, of all things, an obituary. In a way, I think that’s what it was. The Republican Party, a longtime American institution, has effectively given its own death notice. No viable party that truly believed in itself would put forth such a vapid field of candidates; no party that held any real allegiance to our founding documents or affection for the people served by those principles could seriously display such hideous disregard for the intelligence of the population. It can be stated of every one of those candidates that there is no devotion to anything but personal gain, period.

I won’t miss the malfeasance, the manipulations, the incessant and insistent prevarications and historical revisions, not to mention the racism and misogyny and faux-faithism. The sorrow isn’t for the almost departed; rather, it’s for those who hold their noses against the stench of decay and continue to prop up the rotting corpse. May their moment of acceptance come sooner rather than later, for the sake of all of us.