Last fall, my wife and I visited the Glenora Distillery in Nova Scotia, Canada's only single malt distillery. We took the tour and noted the science of distillation which, in this case, was to purify the product to its ultimate distillation point. It's all about purity, but the prize for me was the taste.
Today's House of Representative Republicans remind me of the distillation process. Here, however, the product is toxic potion rather than a smooth palatial delight. There are only 185 of them now serving in the House; there used to be 235 in 2004. Distillation process.
Not one of these 185 voted on Wednesday for the stimulus package; not one. Group-think. Zombies, as I earlier denoted.
Today's Republican Party has been distilled down to base-level, a smelly, sticky ooze of bigotry, righteousness, narcissism and frontiersmanship. The essence of humanism boiled off long ago. These 185 have been voted back into office election after election by constituents who, obviously are of the same distillation matter. Take minority leader John Boehner, for example. He represents an obscure part of Ohio along the Indiana border. It has been in Republican hands almost exclusively since the Civil War. Rural, white, in the middle of 'no where. ' Seems folks like it that way. A mind-set that I, as an urban-dweller, cannot understand.
I will have to agree with these people on that last point, with a caveat: the government of George W. Bush was indeed a problem, and clearly not any solution. Do the people from these obscure Ohio counties know that? Or have they been so completely bamboozled by the propaganda and sleight-of-hand that they still wish that they could have voted Bush/Cheney a third time?
When will it dawn on them that they have been completely hoodwinked, betrayed by their smooth-talking congressional representative? Perhaps they are happy in the ignorance of it all.
Like the single malt distillation process, life might very well be an altered state of existence.
