Forget populist social issues which hog headlines and provide cud for every pundit (or "pundint," the term poised to overtake "nuc-u-ler" as the go-to malapropism) to chew, as those things are just peripheral, personal and damned to incessant, never ending Möbius strip debates.
What's really the preeminent issue of modern American politics is the war against the democratic process being waged by the corporate right wing.
But you can't call it "war," without inciting outrage at the accusation.
You dare not call it "treason" as that is as incendiary to political entities as The N Word is to any sentient being.
And woe to you that simply call it "crime," as that will get you a passel of trolling trouble, angry ad hominem attacks leveled with the intellectual capacity and volume of a Gatling gun's output, just as manic and cranky as it is manically cranked.*
(*That last sentence bordered on the unforgivably indulgent. But I will entertain complaints only if and when I cross that border. There. I did it again!)
In actively pursuing Obama's overthrow, no opportunity to thwart this sitting president is missed, even if the particular issue being thwarted is one which theoretically favors the opponent. Characterizing Obama's approach to gun legislation as being a clever ruse covering his fascist intent to impound every gun in the country in advance of his totalitarian intentions is but one example, especially since he has been decidedly (and bewilderingly) hands off.
Fitting his health care initiative with the blood-boiling epithet "socialist" and decrying it as yet another way he will drag the country to ruin, is another example, given that it was originally a construct of right wing think tanks and the bouncing baby of proud Republican presidents.
Need I list them all? Nah. The catalog of specific acts is less important than the organization(s) issuing the malevolent edicts. All-out attacks on Obama's every word and gesture, the blatant hypocrisy and sleight-of-word employed to perpetually fill the air with flack, and the direct and naked appeal to that portion of White America's innate fears of a Black Man In Charge is all in a day's work for a machine bent solely on domination.
Hyperbolic? No more than 2 + 2 = 4. One only has to look at the record of unhinged antagonism to see that it all adds up.
But what if the opposition was loyal? What if the bat-guano crazy leadership on the right chose the democratic route instead of the demagogic one, chose not to infect their followers (who, in their hearts, must know better) with their own broken, bitter frustrations and greedy dead-end ambitions? What if the emphasis was on the civil rather than the seditious? What if the right took its legendary focus and applied it towards constructive, inclusive solutions instead of concentrating on the demoralization of America's diverse peoples and her institutions?
But the nation's welfare is not their aim, regardless of their statements to the contrary (statements? Shrieks, rather). They have unfairly piggybacked the system, using it worse than any welfare queen ever could. They've wrested control away from the ethical stewards of democracy more violently than any zealous hijacker could. They've corrupted the media more efficiently than any hacker could dream of doing.
One reason why the right has gone so ninnynannynoony bananas is because there is no way their fringe agenda would ever thrive on a level playing field, that the conventional democratic process would invariably breed out the corrosive crapola they peddle in order to even remain in the conversation at all. Hence, the endless doublespeak, the big budget distraction, the low-brow button-pushing, the cartoon vilification.
There's a name for that kind of destructive madness. Call it GOP.