Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here

(10 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Midway through their journey to Election Day, Americans found themselves in a dark wood.  The media called it the first debate.  There are other words for it, but this is a family website so I’ll just point out that the viewers of that “debate” weren’t enlightened, they were deceived, they weren’t led out of the darkness, they were led deeper into it.

Mitt Romney, who as we all know is the third greatest political genius of all time, right behind King Louis XVI and Pharaoh Phukitallup I, is now busy fine-tuning his message for the home-stretch run to Election Day.  I don’t know what he’ll proclaim to the electorate in these final days, but I know what the message would be if the truth mattered . . .  

I Am the Way Into the City of Woe  

I Am the Way To Go Among the Lost

Those words, engraved on the archway above the Gates of Hell in Dante’s Inferno, precede the final words, Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here.  If Romney wins, Americans can abandon all hope, because this country will keep descending from one level of Hell to the next, until we reach the last and deepest level.  

Dante had the poet Virgil to guide him through Hell and lead him out.

Who do we have?   Two corporate candidates and the corporate media.  That’s who we have.  

Romney surveys the desolation of a wrecked economy and blames Obama for it.  Obama surveys the desolation of a wrecked economy and says it’s not as desolate as it looks. The media salutes Romney’s pathological lies every time he runs them up the flagpole, it sees the resurgence of racist hate, the massive voter suppression, the billionaire blitzkrieg of attack ads, and tells us this is what democracy looks like.

This is not what democracy looks like.  

This is what Hell looks like.

Among progressives, the “lesser evil” argument has been trotted out again, but it rings hollow in this dark wood of the damned, where Romney’s lies fall like acid rain in a thunderstorm that never ends, where the truth is dismissed as quaint and irrelevant, where joking about Romnesia is the best Obama can do.  Yeah.  Losing to a pathological liar is hilarious.  It’s almost as hilarious as rightwing madness raging like an epidemic, as corporate greed crushing everyone in its path, as this billionaire blitzkrieg of attack ads we’re all enjoying so much.

Thank God for free speech.  Please open your hymnals to page six-hundred and sixty-six and sing along now with the rest of the Centrist Choir of the Holy Bipartisan Church of Perpetual Austerity . . .

Wall Street loves me,

This I know,

Citizens United,

Tells me so.

This has been a wonderful worship service so far.  Thank you, Pastor Romney. Thank you, Pastor Obama.  Thank you Jesus, thank you Lord for this election we are about to receive.

I can hardly wait to vote.  I voted in 2000 and Bush and the Republicans took us down into the second level of Hell.  I voted in 2004 and they took us down down into the third level of Hell.  I voted in 2008 right after we plunged into the fourth level of Hell. Now Romney wants to host the rest of the Grand Tour for us, he’d take us across the River Styx and into the City of Dis, into the Malebolge and the deepest level of Hell, where millions of new jobs await us and contraception won’t be an issue anymore.

So verily, most progressives are saying we have no choice but to vote for Obama, we have no choice but to take the lesser evil path again this year.  Yeah.  Maybe it’ll start sloping upward somehow, yeah . . . and maybe I’ll win the lottery tomorrow and buy my own spaceship and follow Pioneer 10 out of the solar system so I won’t have to vote anymore.    

Pick your path.

Pick your poison.

It’s great to have enticing choices, isn’t it?