BYE BAYH CIVILITY

Dear Readers,

When politicians in Warshington D.C. start retiring with excuses like 'they want to spend more time with the family', you know there's trouble. This week, the Democrat Senator from Indiana, Evan Bayh, announced he was falling on his sword and leaving an uncivil, bitterly partisan Senate that he says is "where bills go to die".

Well, Bayh wasn't a leading light in Congress, yet I think he had enough nouse to sense that 2010 was not going to be a Democratic year. The Democrats in Congress have looked lately like just what they are: a slimy bunch of dumb, grasping, woefully out-of-touch satraps who inspire nobody and have ruined the first half of President Obama's term. And they're the good guys! The Republicans are even worse! Besides their 'just say no' approach to legislation, the GOP pols look like big lobby glove-puppets, and act like a bloated and snarling bunch of rabid rodents. And since nobody is looked up to in government these days, into this yawning breach steps the loose association of associations called The Tea Party movement.

Led by safe-within-their-glass-booth TV and radio blabbermouths, these are people who couldn't be bothered to get upset at a stolen election (2000), a phony, unwinnable war (2001), another phony-er war (2003), and a decade of letting the foxes of Wall Street guard the chickencoops of middle America, but now feel obliged to come in at the last minute and save the country.

The thought of any sane person believing a word that issues from such poisonous rictuses as Glenn Beck, Rush Limberger, or the other free-speech gangsters who have polarized the country for their own, financial benefit is depressing, to say the least. But these 'defenders of liberty' are looked up to by millions as oracles who's rants inspire the resurgence of interest in the American constitution, so willfully neglected when we most needed it to be lived up to.

Not that I am against people organizing and demanding their 'redress of grievances', but I think it's kind of suspicious that this new 'band of patriots' have emerged at the same moment that an African-American took the presidential oath of office. Goaded on by Fox News and Limberger and his imitators, we suddenly have a 'tyrant' for a president, and are being dragged towards 'socialism' (a term not one teabagger could accurately define, I promise you) by this non-citizen (got birth certificate?). No coincidence there, I'm sure.

The Teabag brigades say they don't like Republicans either, but it's a weak argument, seeing as they hang on every word of the right-wing media giants who have been little more than Republican Party flacks for years and years, and have taken on as their hope and saviour the GOP half-wit, Sarah 'I can see Russia from here' Palin. 'Taking back the government' has been a rallying cry for the Tea Party movement, but then handing it over to a puppet who will make Quisling look like an independent is sheer madness. Instead of 'The Tea Party' they might as well call themselves the 'Peyote Mushroom Party'.

So as pitchforks rise in the hinterlands, a decent and sensible adult like Evan Bayh exits the stage, probably for his own sanity and self respect as for anything else. He leaves behind a Congress looking more and more like the Roman Senate of Caligula's reign, the one where the Emperor appointed a horse to fill a vacancy. Nobody said or did anything about it, except to wonder why lately there was so much more sh*t all over the place.