Hunter of Daily Kos on the contemporary Republican Party:

Honestly, I would begin to regain a shred — a mere, dismal thread — of respect for the Republicans if they had an ounce of self awareness on this one, or heaven help us showed a moment of sheepishness over it, or even just f–ing recognized the duplicity and dumbassed ignorance they’re chucking out over the airwaves like beads at Mardi Gras. But no: doesn’t enter their heads. Now that they are out of power instead of in power, their clocks have been reset; they have amnesia about anything that happened in America for the last ten years or twenty. They are newborns, discovering every basic concept anew, and only when it brushes up against them.

It’s not even hypocrisy, because that implies an ounce of self awareness on their own contradictions. It’s purely an infantile moment of self-pity. Truly, the only America that exists for a conservative is the one they are living in, inside their own heads, at any particular moment of time. Everyone else, whether past, present and future, two doors down or ten states away, can go rot. What’s that you say? That the definition of “instant obedience” is not patriotism, and dissent is not treason? Well, paint me blue and call me Papa Freakin’ Smurf, but that is exactly the teaching moment we liberals have been trying to drill into your thick and addled skulls for eight long years. Congratulations on finally touching your fingers to the lifeline of the Patently Obvious: climb skyward for such further discoveries as Other People Have Different Values and Ethnic People Have Souls Too.

Yes, dissent is not treason: but if you can only realize that when you think it might happen to you, and only feel outrage over it when you feel it might happen to you, then that makes it even worse, because it indeed declares you to be just as narcissistic, just as incapable of empathy or comprehension, just as plain dumb as we all thought you were on our worst, most mean-spirited post-millennial days. That’s what prompts these growing whinefests muttering about your own patriotism, and your own right to disagree, and all the other things that you didn’t give two Limbaughian farts over just twelve damn months ago.

What a spectacle. But is anyone honestly surprised by it?