Blessed to live as we are smack inside the nascent Post Truth Era and its concurrent Age Of Republican Crazy Eyes, preposterous, nay lunatic statements, claims and assertions are thicker in the air than ozone, causing a commensurate severity of damage to brains as the latter does to lungs.

A trademark of this benighted domain of the ridiculous, and surely one of history’s rarer moments, is the carnival of twice choosing a leader through a thoroughly democratic process (if one largely adulterated by money) the chosen leader winning by very substantial margins, and subsequently branded tyrant, dictator and all-purpose crusher of freedom and souls for carrying out the designated functions of his office. Democratically.

Besides the obvious jocularity attendant to the pitifulness of a minority segment of the populace, indeed a segment ideologically inflamed to the point of having its senses consumed by the conflagration, persistently equating majority rule with authoritarianism, there is a much more condemnable aspect to what the fools are doing, which beyond their cheapening of the language is their affront to history, and to the suffering of the genuine victims of authoritarianism, of real dictatorial brutality.

The bandying about by our current Republican base of ideological hothouse flowers of words such as tyranny and dictatorship is beyond glib, it’s profane. It’s indecent, and it is another layer of moral corruption added to many others. Tell the victims of Hitler and Stalin, of Milosevic and Ceausescu you are the victim of dictatorial powers. Say to the faces of those brutalized by Jorge Videla’s junta in Argentina or by Augusto Pinochet in Chile (whose coup was engineered by the Nixon White House) that you are suffering at the hands of a tyrant. Mention to Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma or the terrorized inhabitants of Mugabe’s Zimbabwe your fear of an Obama government.

Let those persecuted by the Marcos regime in the Philippines, or in Somoza’s Nicaragua, governments cheered and supported by America’s right wing and its darlings, Jesse Helms and Ronald Reagan to name two, know of your persecutions at the hands of Barack Obama. Go ahead, damn fools.

The yap one hears of impeachment likewise is not only a signal and a symbol of manifest incompetence, it is verbal and ideological incontinence, identifying the yappers as tools. Any on the right who locate the impeachment of Barack Obama in the realms of the possible or the deserved require stars beside their names designating permanently discredited public officials or individuals. Similarly, all who refer to the Affordable Care Act, made law by democratically elected representatives of the people, a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate as a matter of fact, and signed into law by a democratically elected President as the manifestation of tyrannical behavior identify themselves to the rest of us as gone woozy in the ideological poppy fields.

Pardon the irony, but the continuing effort of a radicalized Republican minority to thwart the majority’s will by crippling the gears of government with obstructionism, to destroy the republic only because they are not in charge of it, to avow the illegitimacy of large swaths of the American population and the political opposition are the only anti-democratic things going on here. Indeed, the organized, nationwide suppression of voting rights and the systematic fortification of the massive powers and hegemonic dominance of wealth and corporations in America is what smacks of the iron boot, the creep of authoritarianism.

And yes, the naiveté implicit in my expectation of levels of decency and sanity above zero from the Republican Party these days likely is risible and indictable.