Not feeling the Panic du Jour

Once there was a political subculture that used to have ideas about conserving the best of Western civilization.  That subculture is dead.  In its place is a pack of militarized carnival barkers who divide their time between enriching themselves at expense of the poor, ginning up violence, and figuring out ways to stampede their base from one fear to the next with

• birtherism panics
• fist bump panics
• Harry Potter panics
• Liberal Batman panics
• “Francis the Modernist Evolutionist” panics
• vaccination panics
• FEMA concentration camp panics
• panics about such dangerous films as “The Lego Movie” and “The Muppet Movie“
• fraudulent James O’Keefe panics
• Saul Alinsky-the-Satan-worshipper panics
• Lattegate panics
• Jade Helm Obama-is-coming-for-our-guns panics
• Sandy Hook Conspiracy theory Obama-is-coming-for-our-guns panics
• Obama is coming to kill us with Ebola panics

and a host of other hysteria big and small.  The most recent of these, after the big Benghazi Panic that never went anywhere and that the GOP Investigators finally admitted was a Big Nothing, was the Email Panic.

Having long ago lost faith in governance-by-panic I pretty much assumed this would go nowhere too.  My certitude was based on the fact that the Boys Who Cry Wolf in the Wrong About Everything Party were prophesying like Isaiah that it would surely end with Hillary behind bars and their base of gullible suckers were believing it with the same faith they had believed all the other panics above.

Not that I think Hillary should be above the law.  I’m perfectly aware that if some low-level slob like me handled her emails the way she did, I would be behind bars and my life wrecked forever.  It’s just that I live in Adult World and am also perfectly aware that, like it or not, rich and powerful members of the Ruling Class enjoy all sorts of immunities and privileges the rest of us do not–and always have.

It’s a lesson driven home every few years, as for instance, when the Bush Administration did essentially the same reckless stuff as Hillary and kept all its email correspondence, not on classified gov’t servers, but on the Republican National Committee servers and then deleted 22 million of those emails.  Remember the way the Right Wing Noise Machine panicked about our Sacred National Security and called Bush a criminal and demanded investigations and suggested that secession and Revolution and the End of the Republic were all things serious adult people should be discussing as a response?

Yeah.  Me neither.  But that’s the kind of nonsense they are trying to gin up now because they are shocked–shocked!–to discover that the Democrat half of the Ruling Class is as immune and privileged as they are.  Or, at any rate, they are stampeding their base–the same base that seriously believe Donald Trump is Presidential material–into the latest Panic du Jour.

Is what Hillary is getting away with just as wrong as what Bush got away with?  Pretty much.  But getting stampeded into idiotic talk of Revolution and Secession and such rubbish When Democrats Do It while turning a blind eye to cynical manipulation of the Right Wing Noise Machine pretty much guarantees more of same.  When the GOP has something constructive to offer and not mere cynical scare tactics and panic, I’ll be happy to listen.  Till then, this is just more of the empty-headed guff they have offered for years.  They are a Party without ideas.  The only thing they have to offer is fear itself.

And incredibly, they have managed to offer up as candidate one of the few people in the US who could *still* make me feel morally bound to support this duplicitous elitist in order to stop him.