Unreality check

"We are all born mad. Some remain so."

-Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

With sagging support and precious few weeks left to lift it before the general election, Republican ticket duo John McCain and Sarah Palin were locked on task: Tightly link, in the minds of voters, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama with scary ex-"domestic terrorist" Bill Ayers -- no matter how skewed the logic, no matter how many nonpartisan entities have researched and explained the tenuous connection, no matter how trifling it all may be compared to, say, ongoing neoconservative-crafted mayhem overseas or a national economy in agony. Madness? Yes. An election-winning move? Very possibly.

In a United States where, as recently as June 2007, a Newsweek poll found an astonishing 41 percent of Americans -- the vast majority Republicans -- still believed Saddam Hussein's Iraq regime was "directly involved in planning, financing, or carrying out" the 9/11 attacks (another 9 percent weren't sure), madness has entrenched itself as a viable political platform.

And not just any madness. This is a dedicated divorce from reality shared by nearly half of America. Yes, we know the Bush Administration has helped cultivate the confusion. A McCarthyist strategy of fervent nationalism, alarmism, calculated lies and "watch what you say" advice has been invaluable in keeping the "terrorist" enemy alive and everywhere in the minds of many of us. The goal? Uniting against a common enemy, as any self-proclaimed "uniter" like Bush well knows. But don't take it from me or any other liberal dissident. Take it from Nazi Party second-in-command and expert 20th-century uniter Hermann Goering, who explained the madness and its simple nurturing with a child's amoral ease:

"[I]t is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship ... [a]ll you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

So the madness isn't a Bush thing, or even a Nazi thing. Like Goering says, it's a "country" thing and it's a "people" thing. Here in America, we're looking at a widespread delusion fueled for the last seven years by fear ("Terrorists killed us and, my God, they could do it again"), fanned by ignorance ("Whatever they're doing, those freedom-hating Arab animals are all in on it") and that no amount of appealing to reason can ever set straight as long as the fear keeps flowing from above, keeps washing away whatever braver, more empowered, dangerous-to-our-unity impulse might take root in the mind of Joe Six-Pack if it stopped.

The flow of fear hasn't stopped yet, and it won't under a new Republican administration. McCain and Palin will continue to insist on how ideologically separate they are from a failed Bush White House, but they'll do it while repeatedly invoking the words "Obama" and "terrorist" in the same breath.

Why? Because it's a fear tactic that's worked in the past and the man's name happens to be only one letter off from the Mother of All Monsters Under the Bed.

Why else? Because fear is what Republicans know best.

Of all the mistakes made by Democrats over the last decade (and there have been many), this one's been the worst: a persistent mischaracterization of Republicans as insensitive.

Republicans are extremely sensitive. The fear they know so well comes from having their childlike sensibilities wounded, and it happens constantly. While we're all born with an irrational tendency toward self-absorption and rigorous conservativism ("No bread crust on my PBJ, ever!"), it's Republicans who've carried these things into adulthood more stubbornly than Democrats. Faced with a big, confusing world full of interdependent adults who just can't see how important they are, Republicans tend to get their feelings hurt.

They cry. They gnash their teeth and talk of those who deserve and those who don't. They say, "It's my money" without thinking much about where it came from and why it was easier for them to get than it was for others.

If allowed into high elected positions, they flee from good-faith international efforts such as, say, a climate change convention being held largely because of their own excesses ("It's my rules, or I'm taking my ball and going home").

When they're finally smacked by a few furious, dark-skinned kids across town they'd been bullying for years, they scream about unfairness and become terrified. To keep it from happening again, they dupe the poor kids on their own side of town ("I'll be your best friend!") into throwing rocks -- not at the enemy they can't even find, but at an uninvolved neighbor they still don't dare face themselves .

They make a new Department of Homeland Security ("We'll build a fort and keep out anyone who looks like them!"), create a system of color-coded alerts ("Cool! Yellow means kind of scary, red means really scary!") and draw up a tattle-tale Partiot Act ("I made Justin steal your note to Emily and I saw what you said about me").

Then, when asked about historical accountability for their actions, they say, as Bush did in 2004, "History, we don't know. We'll all be dead." In other words, "I can't help you clean up. It's my bedtime, and milk and cookies are waiting for me in the afterlife." (It's no coincidence the religious right "hijacked" a bad-boy Republican Party already craving the presence of an Eternal Parent).

It's true, John McCain isn't technically George W. Bush, despite his repeated lackeying for the idiot man-child. But it's also true George W. Bush isn't the mere bad apple McCain and other Republicans, now squinting in the light of day, wish he were. Bush was the logical product of a political party (and an electorate) gone so weak-minded, corporate-compromised and morally adrift in recent years that it didn't see the clear and present danger in nominating him to the highest office in the land.

Now we're to understand that Republicans McCain and Palin are better suited to lead than Obama and Biden? That they're the ones better suited to correct this unprecendentedly vast and expensive mistake than candidates from the other, more grown-up party? Madness.