I'll tell you what I want, what I really really want...

Photo credit: Tony Ramao. Source: The Huffington Post

As a former, world-weary political organizer, I've strenuously avoided politics for the last year. Call it burn out. Call it fatigue. I finally worked on a successful campaign, and I could no longer tolerate the emotional, empty, patently false constructs of the inflammatory rhetoric--particularly from the now representational minority and their puppet news syndicates, but also from news organizations I used to consider reliable and fairly independent. I can't watch cable news. I'm tired of being yelled at. I'm tired of quick zoom, diagonal camera angles on news anchors. I'm tired of news anchors with no credentials whatsoever editorializing on issues they have barely a baseline vocabulary to describe, conjecturing with ill-conceived logic and a complete lack of freshman English argumentation skills. I want to shake the bottle blondes and high-powered, bleached teeth power suits and scream into their empty skulls, "Keep your lip-glossed, insipid incredulity to yourself!"

And that says nothing of how I feel about politicians and other fellow citizens guilty of that same lip-glossed, insipid incredulity and empty, emotional rhetoric, but I'll get to that.

My disenchantment goes deeper: I no longer watch Sunday morning political news shows such as Meet the Press and Face the Nation. I deleted all political sections of the nation's newspaper headlines from my iGoogle front page. If I want news, I'll watch PBS, BBC, or listen to NPR. I follow a few decent, professional journalists assigned to the White House on Twitter. I listen to "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me," but watch "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report," far more rarely than I used to, mostly because if I don't laugh, I'll cry...or storm out of the room in a huff. I tune in, mostly in passing, to the current political struggles of the administration, Congress, and Supreme Court.

That is...until this last week.

For the last few days, I've been cautiously lifting my head out of the sand to monitor these last stages of the Health Care Reform bill passage. While DH is watching basketball, I may watch C-SPAN upstairs as the vote is cast in the House of Representatives.

I'll tell you what I want, what I really, really want: I want for HCR to pass, and deliver a decisive STFU to the bigoted mouthbreathers in the 'Tea Party' and noise-machine news syndicates who've taken their disgusting rhetoric to new, offensive heights. Here's what I'm reading this morning, with a focus on incivility in political rhetoric and discourse:

• From The Huffington Post: Tea Party Protests--'Nigger, Faggot' Shouted at Members of Congress
• From Daryl Cagle's Blog: Cartoonist on the Ground for Tea Party Protest
• From Peter Sagal's Blog: Whence the Hatred?
• From The New York Times: Dose of Venom for Candidates Turns Ads Viral
• From The Washington Post: 'Tea party' protesters accused of spitting on lawmaker, using slurs
• From Media Matters for America: Conservative blogger on racial epithets: 'So what?'

Dear God. Listen to your nuns and not your bishops. Amen.