The Tea Party has a longstanding love affair with Putin. I wonder if Russia

[Hortensis]

1. Of course? :) We also know the GRU and FSB infiltrated the NRA and

the gun lobby in congress, as well as other, less known routes of infiltration, state and federal. I thought the Kochs dumped all but the ones in congress most eager to keep their seats because of they broke loose and tried to shut down the government. Now it seems likely they were also cut loose to disassociate from this kind of thing.

I remember that 2015 article, just didn't know then how serious the problem was. I also remember when this same kind of people gave patriotism a bad name. Bad as they were, I never doubted their sincerity then, but now?! My head's swiveling from horizon to horizon wondering what they'll fall in behind next.

THE SECOND COMING -- W. B. Yeates

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?