Worst Decade Ever

So I got Time in the mail yesterday. (Stop: before we go any further, I realize that Time still employs Joke Line. I only got it because I was too mushy to tell the adorable clerk at FYE not to sign me up for fourteen thousand not-so-free offers that I’m still paying for.) Anyway, the cover story is about how awful the Aughts or the Naughties or whateverthehell we’re calling it was.

I’m a little reluctant to call truly awful solely because it’s the decade in which I got married, and despite the hostilidays video I posted, Mr. BuggyQ is really quite divine. But I totally understand Time’s point of view–it also was the decade of George Dubya Bush, which should really just end the argument. And that’s without bringing up 9/11 (shut up, Rudy).

Whatever you may think about the decade, however, there is one group that will, I think, rue this decade for a long, long time: the Republican Party. I remember when the Republican Party was awful, but not insane. When 9/11 happened, however, America had a collective panic attack. (For me, it had as much to do with who was in charge as with what had happened, but the point stands.) We all went a little nuts for a while, and Dubya was able to ram through Iraq and rendition and wiretapping, etc…

But here’s the thing: the Republican Party hasn’t gotten over it. While the rest of us realized that yes, there was a terrorist attack and yes, it was awful and horrific, we’re still here, and we’re still pretty much okay, and maybe we don’t really need to kill all the brown people, the Republicans are still looking for the boogeyman in the closet [insert self-hating gay Republican joke here…] This is why people like Michelle Bachmann are the stars of the Republican Party today, where in 1993, she’d have been an obscure, ranting backbencher if she got elected at all. Keep in mind that whileAthenae is right that the Republican Party always accepted Pat Buchanan, he never was able to finish more than a distant third as a presidential candidate in the Republican primaries. Yet through most ofthis decade, Extreme Loony Pat^tm (watch for the action figure–the hair pops off when Rachel Maddow talks) was actuallya voice of reason in the Republican Party. Yeah, think about that one for a minute. Athenae said Pat “hasn’t gotten any nuttier the past couple of years, just louder about it.” And that’s true–but why did he have to be so quiet about it before? Part of what made him unsuccessful in the presidential races was that his more extreme views were known, and wereunpopular. The Republicans always had the nutty uncles, but in this decade, they let the nutty uncles out of the attic and put themon the floor of the House. Hell, even Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly aren’t as loony as Glenn Beck, and look who’s winning the ratings these days! They may have set the stage for the craziness that is the teabagger movement, but I don’t think they expected it to get quite this crazy.

I’m not a fan of prognosticating the end of the Republican Party, and I’m sure there’ll be a resurgence for them. After all, there are a lot of still-panicking Americans out there. The election next year will probably bring in more Republicans, just because there are a lot of contrarian independents out there who’d vote against the party in power no matter who it was. But methinks the sane independents aren’t going to be running back into the arms of the Republicans any time soon. At least not as long as Michelle Bachmann and Virginia Foxx and Glenn Beck are running the show.

So there’s a silver lining to the Worst Decade Ever. Remember, that which does not kill us…