Before the new Republican majority in congress begins to ardently build its Legislation to Nowhere, and while Tea Baggers remain intoxicated by the smell of their own detritus after the recent election, it is more than obvious it would be helpful at the present time were I to clarify a number of matters for America’s pre-Enlightenment redoubts.

1. Until you advocate for strict regulation of firearms you are prohibited from calling yourself pro-life. Unless you advocate for universal, affordable health care in America you likewise are prohibited from describing yourself as pro-life. If you favor capital punishment and elective wars, or the shredding of the safety net for the poor and the elderly, you are prohibited in perpetuity from referring to yourself as pro-life. If you choose to classify yourself as anti-abortion, or an advocate for compulsory pregnancy, you’re good to go.

2. When you make a statement such as “net neutrality is Obamacare for the internet” you have revealed yourself as an exceptionally pitiful corporate stooge. We know, Ted, your belief that a small, moneyed percent of the county should own nearly the entire American economy does not exclude the internet. Indeed, the petroleum troglodytes funding your campaigns ought to be considered candidates for ownership. Others with your uncontrollable authoritarian impulses who delight in suppressing speech with the same gusto they have for suppressing votes might prefer Rupert Murdoch to the Koch brethren. Fast streaming propaganda from Fox, and the rest in the pedestrian lane. Yes, I think we have a plan.

3. If you went apeshit with your ebola panic, you look like a damn fool. Calling for promiscuous use of quarantines, and sealing the country off behind an iron curtain, and generally behaving like a shrill, insufferable sissy blaming Obama for your ebola fear, you look particularly hydrocephalic now that the U.S. ebola cases are zero. Nada. Bupkis. Goose egg. Fool.

4. If you insist on being as unforgivably obtuse as to repeat over and over again how Obama and Democrats are acting as if “the 2014 elections never happened” because they oppose your absolutist agenda, after behaving as though the 2008 and 2012 elections never produced a mandate against your candidates and your agenda, you must be executed with a guillotine for the harm you’ve caused the American people, and for nonpareil dimness. There is no place in this democracy for your one-party state radicalism, and feudalist economics.

5. Before Rush Limbaugh and Fox News began dumbing America down, Ronald Reagan indoctrinated a great, god-fearing nation with fiction and fantasy. He repeated the same unsourced, apocryphal anecdotes for over thirty years, and delivered with game show host facility streams of gibberish so indecipherable great minds were stymied by the magnitude of the task of untangling them. Admittedly, Reagan was an idiot savant at this. Keynesian economics produced whatever positive economic results he got, and Gorbachev was the leader in ending the cold war. I would agree that adding his name to every airport and government building in the country, and his face to Rushmore and the dollar bill would be the best indication to the world possible, that our transformation to a banana republic is now complete.

6. No matter how smug your satisfaction with the recent victories of your cynicism, nor how heady the unrepresentative reach of your present power due to senate structure and congressional gerrymandering, for denying the science of climate change and deterring the corrective   measures necessary, history, despite what you confidently believe, will hunt you down like rats in a garbage dump and hoist you on your own petard. This I promise. Refusing to acknowledge the existence and the jeopardy of climate change as the result of anti-regulatory fanaticism and petroleum industry largesse is in fact the most foolish human behavior, the stupidest short term thinking since your Republican ancestors fled in fear from the cooking fire and the wooden wheel.

7. Thou shalt not have the balls to impeach Obama. You’re much too chickenshit. I dare you to do it. I double dare you. If you don’t, you’re not a real man or woman. Cluck, cluck, cluck, cluck, chicken.

8. The American people will blame you for shutting the government down same as last time, if you attempt to do it again, no matter how insistently juvenile your attempts to deflect the blame. I know, I really do, that standing beside a shattered lamp with shards of glass in your hair while pointing in the direction of Obama seems like maybe it’s working, but really, it’s not. Even the lowest of your beloved low information voters likely will figure out you can simply send the man a clean, basic spending bill without an Ayn Rand bucket list attached.

9. Hillary Clinton will eat your heart, liver and intestines in the next election no matter what you do. Spend all the Koch’s money, squeeze Karl Rove’s brain like a dirty dishrag till every dirty drop has fallen, siphon every ounce of embalming fluid from the body of Sheldon Adelson and sell it at peak on the commodity markets, none of it will help. Send out all the Rands, Ryans, Pauls and chubby guys in your benighted stable, it won’t do any good. The Clintons have your number and they always will. Bill, priapic or not, is God.

10. Hard-asses get their asses handed to them eventually, and so will you. If poetic justice, and its big brother harsh justice, could handle Slobodan Milosevic, Joe McCarthy and the Soviet politburo they can handle Ted Cruz. These types always believe they’re smarter and tougher than they are, by far. French aristocrats had an excellent run, but when it came to an end it wasn’t pretty. Something tells me the beneficiaries of today’s halcyon reign of plutocracy won’t end so pretty themselves. Heads won’t roll, but they may explode, shuffled off to obscurity. For a while, you’ll prevent significant numbers of blacks from voting, and a fair amount of students and Latinos too. But when it’s over, it’s really going to be over.