Exhaustion

We're tired. Really tired. No, not the gang here at the Fortress of Crankitude. Nor do I mean the Gentle Readers of Liberty's Torch. I'm thinking of the fatigue suffered by the American people generally, specifically the political sort.

The key is repetition.

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A few days ago I made note of compassion fatigue as an important factor in the steady hardening of attitudes toward America's self-nominated "victims." Physiologically, fatigue is an important signal; without it, we'd exhaust ourselves to death. Politically, it can be just as vital, in that it informs us that we've tolerated certain annoying stimuli too long.

Political fatigue arises from the repetition of political goads. A political goad is usually associated with some typeset phrase:

• "legacy of slavery"
• "women's rights"
• "gay rights"
• "for the children"
• "social justice"
• "save the planet"

...and the like. The associated agendas often start off rather bravely, spurring legislation and programs directed at ameliorating some condition widely agreed to be unsatisfactory. Time passes, the condition remains the same or gets worse -- government action really can't do anything well except kill people and break things -- and under pressure from the special interests powering the cause, the Prime Political Perversion sets in:

"Say What?
"It Isn't Working?
"Let's Do It Bigger And Harder!"

The goad is thrust ever harder and deeper into the public's flesh, eventually eliciting a reaction against the cause and the rhetoric identified with it. From that progression arose the reactions against government activism that brought Harding, Eisenhower, and Reagan to power, and thus temporarily slowed the nation's descent into totalitarianism. Americans had had enough of being prodded, and so replaced the chief prodders with persons who might let us have a little rest.

There are groups still prodding us, of course, but their influence on the attitudes of common Americans is far less than it was at its zenith. The prevalent reaction is "get away from me," and not merely because they irritate us. They also impoverish us, invade our rights, abridge our freedom of action, and all too frequently expose us to dangers we never agreed to face. So we snarl at them in hope they'll leave us alone.

However, such a group is usually a "one-trick pony." Its members don't know how to do anything but what they've been doing. They react to our snarls by trying harder. You don't need a Certified Galactic Intellect to foresee what will come of that.

If the progression isn't halted in time, hostile grimaces and words give way to blows. We the Exhausted People of the United States turn on our tormentors with intent to punish them. And that much, at least, the Left has learned to its sorrow. So it makes a point of having many causes at hand, and many goads in its quiver, in the hope that alternation among them will mitigate the effects of relentless prodding.

But that doesn't alter the effects. It merely generalizes them.

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Being poked repeatedly by a variety of political prods proves to be merely a way of prolonging the interval before a reaction sets in. Just as it would from the repeated digs of a single prod, our exhaustion from the multi-pronged assault on our consciousnesses will morph, seemingly paradoxically, into fury. We lash out.

Just now, Americans are in the "vestibule" of sociopolitical exhaustion. We've stepped through the entry arch and have noticed how the light has faded. We feel an all-pervading fatigue creeping over us, but it hasn't yet reached its nadir. We're not yet at the point of exacting vengeance for the "progressive" exploitation of our tender sensibilities, our attention spans, or our pocketbooks.

But we're getting there. The pollsters know it. So do the powerful ones who commission the polls.

The Prime Political Perversion ceases to have full effect once the strategists behind the special interests, and the kingmakers of the major parties, become fully cognizant of the swelling popular reaction against them. The smart ones are scrambling for a dampener, aware that should their cause turn from a political asset into a liability, they'll become defenseless targets for the public's pitchforks. Some will prove unable to alter their behavior in time to stave off popular vengeance. Others might just be adroit enough to survive the adverse reaction and emerge politically viable on the far side.

Survival lies in maneuverability.

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Let's contrast the behavior of the two most prominent figures on the Left in the face of the developing reaction against the Democrats and all their works: Barack Hussein Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Obama is practically the epitome of the "one trick pony." Confronted with a failure, he lies, evades, and attempts to shift the blame to others' shoulders. Yes, he frequently uses cat's-paws to do it rather than take the burden on his own shoulders, but those agents receive their instructions from him. The "throw 'em under the bus" phenomenon for which he's become known at times of personal embarrassment is both a powerful indicator of his low character and emblematic of his defensive strategy. But then, whether he believes it or not, the buck really does stop at his desk, and the public cannot be persuaded otherwise.

Mrs. Clinton is luckier in that regard, having been merely a Cabinet secretary rather than the chief executive of the Obamunist disaster. Indeed, her good fortune at repeatedly contriving to slide out from under the odium for the total catastrophe of Obamunist foreign policy is a subject worthy of study by political scientists; it suggests that she might really have been the brains behind the Clinton Administration after all. Now that she's no longer an official of the Administration, she's working -- with moderate success, according to the pollsters -- to distance herself from its policies and shortcomings. If she can persuade a sufficient number of persons that as Secretary of State she was only following orders, a loyal subordinate who faithfully executed policy decisions with which she largely disagreed, her Oval Office aspirations might yet remain viable. Of course, the dark side of her distancing strategy is that it will leave her with nothing substantive to campaign on, but that's inherent in the total failure of Obamunist international dealings anyway.

Mrs. Clinton is struggling to maneuver away from the pitchforks, which Obama is unwilling or unable to do. Sooner or later he will be impaled. As for her, we shall see.

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In conclusion, if you want to know how deeply we've penetrated the Vale of Total Political Exhaustion, look for refusals to accommodate or forgive. Here are a few from the recent news.

First, consider this development from England:

Those spikes aren't decoration; they're there to prevent "homeless people" -- we use to call them "bums," remember? -- from taking up residence in that otherwise inviting hollow in the building's entryway. Watch for similar developments in "defensive architecture" here in the Land of The Formerly Free, especially in the tonier districts of our large cities.

Second, consider the hostility being shown toward those poor, bedraggled, pathetic waifs currently wetbacking our southern border:

The Daily Caller has obtained documents used in an off-the-record conference call being conducted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency for Congressional staffers on how the Obama administration is handling thousands of young illegal immigrants who are coming to the U.S. alone.

The young immigrants, called Unaccompanied Children, or UACs, are being housed at several U.S. military installations as well as with 94 Unaccompanied Children Shelter Grantees throughout the U.S., the document reveals.

FEMA is coordinating the effort, which is being called a “humanitarian situation.”

That it's being called a "humanitarian situation" doesn't seem to affect the popular rage at those who've incentivized and facilitated this mass transfer of population -- even though there's a good argument that those children are being brought here by their parents and guardians for a shot at a decent life.

Third and last for this morning, popular antipathy is mounting toward the Bergdahls as evidence of Bowe Bergdahl's true attitude toward his voluntarily assumed and solemnly sworn duties accumulates:

The writing in Bergdahl’s journal, e-mails and laptop spans the year before he walked off his post in eastern Afghanistan on June 30, 2009. Harrison has had custody of the material since a few days after that, except for a brief period when she provided it to U.S. government investigators. None of the writing in the journal or computer files references the Taliban, or the politics of the war in Afghanistan, although there are references to modern war generally.

“Really, how pathetic i feel as i listen to people talk of the hell I will be heading to . . . ” he wrote in a computer file titled, “my army memories.” “Compared to hell of the real wars of the past, we are nothing but camping boy scots. Hiding from children behind our heavy armored trucks and our c-wire and sand bagged operating post, we tell our selves that we are not cowards . . . ”...

[O]ne day in 2006, Bergdahl announced that he was joining the Coast Guard, a decision his friends thought was unwise given his personality. Harrison said she tried to talk him out of it, but finally relented and drove him to a military office in Idaho Falls to take the entrance exam.

Soon after he left Ketchum for basic training, Bergdahl sent her a dozen or so notebook pages filled with tiny writing, diatribes against the rigors of military life. She was alarmed, she said. When he returned after a few weeks, he told her he had gotten out on a psychological discharge.

“He told me he faked it,” she recalled. “I said, ‘You don’t fake a psychological discharge, you have to become unfit.’ I told him that. The reality was it wasn’t okay. I saw it in the letters, the way the writing was changing, the anger.”

As Americans have learned more about the gutless deserter for whose return we released five senior Taliban commanders, men who will undoubtedly return to the jihad and do their best to harm Americans, their willingness to condone the deal, even on a "leave no man behind" justification, has vanished -- and anger toward those who have striven to deceive us about Bowe Bergdahl and his actions has mushroomed.

The lashing-out point is drawing near. Let's hope that the fewest possible genuine innocents get caught in the fusillades that will follow.