If the right wing has succeeded in doing anything (as certainly many of its loudly brayed sentiments have proved as revolting as they are socially untenable) it is the destruction of the office of President of the Unites States as a potent leader.
So degraded has the office become through the right wing's subversion, that it, along with most of the other aspects of a functioning federal government, cannot be mentioned without an attendant sneer. Carny trash invoke more sympathetic responses.
Every day, Congress is observed conducting business at a somnambulistic pace while below the ornate veneer, the real dealing churns and thrums with shocking efficiency; indeed if one were to tune into C-Span (which I do, as watching golf has proven to be too stressful), there is conspicuously interminable boredom, as though the dirty business actually being conducted has become as routine as the suicide-inducing rhythms of a bottling factory; the porky little congressmen and women waddle to a podium, utter faintly irate belches and then return to a place somewhere beyond the borders of the stationary camera's periphery. The poetry-in-slow-motion of the legislative process.
When Barack Obama was elected, he reminded the masses of dreams they heard about in school, and dreams they may have had themselves; that smarts and drive and verve could win the day, could be as antiseptic to the years of diseased ideals, corrosion and cronyism; his youth and grace under pressure would be a tonic to the studiously sown fear under the Bush regime, characterized daily by obvious hypocrisy and brazen disregard for the democratic standards upon which Americans base their allegiance.
So loyal to the myth of American democracy in fact, that the public dared not believe what their eyes so clearly saw, as neo-cons wiped their boots on the Constitution as though it were a wire brush mat, and the real legacy of Ronald Reagan was an unimpeded perpetual corporate shanghai; the dream of Democracy fatally broken by brazen opportunists who looked at America and saw not the greatest expression of a working democratic society but fodder for the most audacious scam ever pulled off. And as a result, "governophobia" has seeped into our national DNA in the same way trace amounts of Bisphenol and heavy metals have seeped into the breast milk of nursing mothers.
Here's the joke: all the hyperbole spewing like a pyroclastic flow from the volcanic right wing about socialism and communism and fascism is just white-guy-chicken-hawk-runaway-capitalist trash talk. Government has been reduced, thanks to their incessant assault on it, to a knuckle-dragging sporting event, with the country as brutish spectators barking ook-ooks and arrgh-arrghs, intoxicated by the contrived spectacle of the Big Government giant brought down by bureaucratic excess. And the punchline is that those cheering in the stands are the ones being buried under the rubble.
The office of POTUS is now as formidable as the winner of a beauty contest, thanks to those traitors in patriot's clothing, the right wing. With all that's happening to our country and our world, think of how effective their single-minded zeal might have been had it been put to use in a constructive way, instead of toward the death of Democracy.