How do you sleep at night?

Absolutely incredible. The country club republicans pushing for bankruptcy reform to help the credit card companies avoid responsibility for their insane behavior have managed to include a loophole for their rich country club buddies who want to file for bankruptcy - a different class of bankruptcy, of course. If you're some poor asshole who gets sick, you're still screwed. But, if you're a rich asshole who wants to dodge a few debts but still have money to pay dues at the country club, just set up an "Asset Protection Trust", and your bought-and-paid-for republican congress will make sure you're taken care of.

In all seriousness, if you are one of the people who voted republican in the last election, how do you sleep at night? Doesn't it gall you that YOUR government is stacking the deck in favor of the wealthy at every turn, against the interests of the common man? Don't you feel stupid for letting tort reform happen? Don't you feel guilty looking at children, knowing that your vote helped impose a crushing deficit on them - a deficit that rich kids are going to shirk? I would ask how you feel when you see the photographs of flag-draped coffins coming back from Iraq, but YOUR government has you protected there, because they won't let us see the pictures, and you can get through your day without thinking of the blood shed in Bush's completely unjustified war.

I remember how I felt during the long night of November 2 and the ugly morning of November 3. I felt like our country had betrayed all reason - like it was wrapped up in some veil of right-wing ignorance that blinded it to tolerance, liberty and the common good. But, in the back of my mind, I had a niggling hope that I was over-reacting, and that time would show me that things were going to be pretty much okay.

People, I'm losing that hope. The right wing is waging war on the America I love - an attack from so many angles that it's hard to know where the next blow will come from. States everywhere are enshrining anti-gay bigotry in their constitutions. Cheney is looking hard at Iran as the next Halliburton conquest. The main-stream media is so cowed by silly accusations of a liberal bias that it is more pusillanimous than ever. When I look at the consistent attacks on the justice system, from tort reform through the Terri Schiavo case, I see a well-thought-out and carefully orchestrated attack on one of the only institutions on our planet where the powerless have a hope of a fair hearing against the moneyed interests. My own brother, a republican-leaning, salt-of-the-earth, mainstream upper-middle-class likeable guy, can't get on an airplane in this country without being hassled because his common name is on some bureaucrat's list somewhere. WTF?? Our country is torturing people, and we're okay with that? The Republicans are brazenly weakening congressional ethics, and that's fine, too? Social Security is a backbone of our support system for senior citizens, and we're talking about chopping it into pieces?

If you voted for the republicans last time around, you deserve all this, but the rest of us don't.