The right-wing just loves making a big entrance.
It loves calling out the freaks.
It loves condemning the godless.
It loves admonishing the shiftless.
It loves packing the heat.
But it rarely thinks about what follows such Grand Ostentatious Poses (see what I did there? Book learnin'!).
Take "Shock and Awe." Lots of things went boom, corporate-owned media stocks mushroomed, W landed his codpiece on an aircraft carrier, America did some pec-poppin' and everyone was swimming in Old Glory Gravy.
And then the aftermath: years of missteps, deflections, misleads and funerals. Thousands of funerals. Shaken confidence. Feathered nests. Big moves and big talk yielding a big fucking mess.
The "You'd better do this or else!" approach to siphoning money from the people's pockets into the vaults of big bankers, who hoard their unfathomable largess to this day.
Or recent statements by past and present Republican candidates for a variety of offices summoning up images of witchcraft, blunderbusses and scarlet letters.
It's like a party of armed Cosmo Kramers banging through our thresholds screaming crackpot ideas.
The GOP/corporate right-wing, it seems, never really considers the consequences of their actions. Because almost immediately, those consequences call their big splashy opening salvos into question.
You can't blame them for not looking ahead -- they'd only see where they've been.
It's (sort of) hilarious now, watching the high dudgeon of low-browed boys as they continue to posture and swagger their way through the terrorized sociopolitical landscape, a landscape they themselves created, never thinking ahead to the certain results of such behavior: widespread derision and karmic blowback.
The most recent utterances by the ever brash GOP make great use of the explosive first blow, usually followed by garish ultimatums of eternal damnation for anyone who supports baby-killin,' commie health care or just about anything to do with the Kenyan-In-Chief. And they invariably make such statements after they've been lulled into their comfy zones, forgetting as they so often do that there's more to their bluntly wielded media than Fox News and AM hate-radio; that the bubbles they float in are actually see-through! Uh oh! Science! C'est pesky!
In fact, their choices are the kind a chuffed-up kid playing checkers would make, sliding his flat discs along their narrow, slanted path, snickering at the ease with which he progresses along the simple pattern of connected squares, but never dreaming that somewhere out in the Beyond it's Chess which is, statistically speaking, the game grown-ups play.
And now more gun deaths and more swaggering calls for more people with more guns to combat the bad guys who have guns. Yeah. People who like it when things go boom want more guns. Hmmm.
Fantasy-based ideologies invariably have neat happy endings where all the bad people and all the bad behavior goes away when the volume is turned up and enough force is applied. It's akin (Akin? I did it agin!) to people crapping up this world because they believe there'll be virgins or harps waiting for them in the next.
But as anyone living in the actual, tactile world knows, after the big entrance, there are consequences. You just have to get past the "con".