Have you noticed that President Obama barely acknowledges the raving banshee shriek of the radical right, even as it approaches crescendo across the spectrum of media? When he does, at most he acknowledges legitimate opposing viewpoints while mildly observing that it should not be allowed to derail constructive engagement. He even seems pusillanimous to some in the liberal community for being so solicitous with people openly at war with the very foundations of democracy, and the right predictably interprets that attitude in similar terms - they react with aggression in the face of invitations to cooperate, in perfect sync with their pathology.

Whenever an act of Republican-inspired terrorism has occurred - e.g., the IRS suicide attack - the President naturally condemns the specific incident and consoles the families of victims, but he does not, as some wish he would, call out the pan-media hate mongers who filled the perpetrators' diseased minds with paranoid, bigoted fantasies. He does not call out the Republican Party that supports, coordinates, and often directly determines the content of these propaganda sources, and does not talk about how the lies of the GOP have - with clear malice aforethought - created an environment of hate, fear, and violence that victimizes innocent people and hurts the nation.

And if the Republican strategy of fomenting this violence escalates into a significant pattern, I am sure that for a long time - too long, in the likely opinions of many commentators on the left - the President would continue to appear "obtuse" to the fact that Republican leaders were encouraging it, even as they became increasingly bold in doing so. Some would yet again begin to doubt his courage or competence.

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake. - Napoleon Bonaparte

Now, this isn't to say the administration wouldn't be enforcing the law and making major arrests, but politically they would somehow fail to connect dots that everyone else could plainly see. They would even fail to connect dots that the terrorists themselves openly brag about, and the domain of the progressive commentariat given over to punditry rather than intelligent thought would initiate another circular firing squad cycle: The usual "sound and fury, signifying nothing."

The confidence of the radical right would increase directly in complement to the growing fear and insecurity of everyone else, and pretty soon the ballsier elements on the right would come to the conclusion that The Time Has Come. They would have been watching the whole process unfold, seeing smaller acts of terrorism meet with the tacit approval of the Republican Party and the thunderous applause of rank-in-file extremists, and would lick their chops at how "weak" the administration's response had appeared to be. Plots would become increasingly bold, and eventually one of them would get through and either kill a lot of people or just be so outrageous as to have the same effect.

And then President Obama calls a special session of Congress to address the nation, and makes a Lincoln-esque speech "appealing to the angels of our better nature" while also waxing FDR that democracy would not fall to rule by the gun; that those who would seek to impose their will by force would fail, and the American people stand together, united in defense of their freedom. Some Congressional Republicans might even be so radicalized by this point that they would be dumb enough to shout and heckle the speech, while the Republicans with triple-digit IQs watching the speech would be crying in their soup and trying to think up good names for a new party.

This would almost certainly be accompanied by various legislation - new funding for counter-terrorism, maybe reintroduction of the Fairness Doctrine in broadcast media, strengthening of laws against inciting violence - and the GOP would try to block it, while their paramilitary thugs blow their wad in spasms of random, largely futile violence. In their minds, they would be in a state of Civil War with Ultimate Victory just around the corner, but in reality they would be surrounded, their logistics would dry up, support would evaporate, and everyone who had ever been associated with them - i.e., the Republican Party, that had convinced itself it was now safe to play footsy with them - is now politically radioactive.

There might even be acts of vigilantism, although I think the President would be able to persuade people to corral their passions enough to stop that from being a significant factor. Meanwhile, the Republican Party loses, and loses, and loses; the militants end up dead or in Supermax, loathed for all time outside a tiny fringe; life goes on, and thus endeth the Best Laid Plans of Mice who thought they were Men. President Obama, meanwhile, would look like Abraham Lincoln without the country having gone through even a fraction of the convulsions of an actual civil war.

And this is not even an "optimistic" scenario - this is the one where the right really has its shit together, pulling off things they probably couldn't and killing a substantial number of people before they're brought under control. The optimistic scenario is that they're such cowards that their ranting and raving never leads to anything beyond occasional isolated incidents, meanwhile undermining the political viability of their Republican benefactors.

Don't get me wrong, I am not belittling their ability to temporarily cause localized chaos or inflict suffering on innocent people. They are indeed dangerous, in the same sense that automobile defects are dangerous, but not dangerous in the sense they believe themselves to be - not capable of shaping the future in a nation of 310 million people, the vast majority of whom do not share their values.

A republic does not last forever, nor should immortality be considered a criterion for success: Like all living things, republics grow, merge, diverge, and change, and some day the United States of America will not exist. Maybe it will fission into successor states, some of whom will be degenerate and ugly, but some of whom may be brilliant and glorious; maybe it will become the fragmented territories of future empires; maybe it will be subsumed and disappear into a global (hopefully democratic) government; or maybe it will still exist in some fossilized form right up until a global cataclysm makes Earth unlivable (to the mixed dismay, glee, or indifference of space colonies elsewhere).

But that will not happen any time soon - not now, not ten years from now, not fifty years from now, because I am here now to say so. Because you are here now to say so. Because we are the United States of America, and we are strong. We dream. We create. We envision and seek the New.

And as long as that is true of us - true of those of us who recognize that a nation exists in our own choices and acts of creation, rather than being a state imposed upon us by others - then it doesn't matter what percentage of the population believes in Creationism, chupacabras, or alien abductions. It doesn't matter. We will continue to regenerate, give birth to new ideas and heroic leaders, and shock the world by strolling down the sidewalk whistling a happy song five minutes after the world had written our obituary.

We've done it before, we did it recently, and we'll keep doing it, and there's not a goddamned thing the Republican Party, the Hutaree militia, Blackwater/Xe, or any of their comrades can do about it, because they're nothing but noise and entropy and we are Alive. They are nothing but the shadows that remain when light dispels darkness - the pathetic, whining, emptily threatening echoes of enemies long ago defeated. The days when they had the intelligence to drag us with them into suicide are long gone - they are stupid, alone, and have the pedal to the floor headed straight for a brick wall of their own construction, and this country will survive and flourish with or without their permission.