A self-satisfied and smug Republican wrote to me:

You are so dependably predictable. How fortunate that we seem to exist in worlds of different ideals.

Yes we do live in different worlds. I am quite proud to not live in your world. You live in a world in which you are proud to be associated with a group of criminal and immoral Republicans in which:

* torture is supported by Republicans,
* the president can conduct a war in a shamelessly corrupt and inept manner with no accountability or oversight from the Republican congress,
* armed forces officers are so desperate to help save the lives and limbs of the armed forces members that they are stepping forward to blow the whistle on the stubborn president's strategy of allowing our troops to suffer death and permanent injury for the profits of his corrupt financial patrons, and so that he can give jobs to unqualified cronies in Iraq,
* whistle-blowers are persecuted and their characters attacked to discredit them,
* numerous Republican Senators and Representatives, the Republican White House executives, and Republican executive branch officials are already in prison or facing criminal corruption charges,
* Republican candidates and Republican National Committee operatives, lacking all human decency, accuse their opponents of being traitors and preferring terrorists to Americans; attack war veterans, Parkinson's sufferers, promote racism, hate-monger vulnerable groups, and trump up sexual improprieties to win elections,
* Republican leaders protect sexual predators for campaign cash,
* science that is in opposition to corporate destruction of the environment or the beliefs of a small group of religious extremists is denigrated while fake science is taught in the schools and used to guide government policy,
* it is better to throw human embryos in the trash rather than put them to a use that might help people,
* the constitution is eviscerated by a president and his party terrorizing the voters with claims that we will die if we vote for Democrats
* a small group of religious extremists claims the right to dictate morality through the force of law upon everyone else with the "support" of Republicans who pander to them in public and ridicule them in private,
* protecting the environment is liberal plot to destroy capitalism,
* everything that goes wrong is blamed on Bill Clinton because the immoral Republicans in power refuse to take responsibility for their corruption and greed,
* the religious beliefs of those who do not comport with the beliefs of the small group of religious extremists supporting these corrupt Republicans,
* anyone who wins the womb lottery is deserving of their life of wealth and privilege, while those lose the womb lottery deserve a life of poverty-level wages, inadequate health care, and lousy education into which they were born and are therefore intended to do the bidding of the womb lottery winners as serfs on their corporate plantations, servants in their homes, or to die in immoral wars run by the war-profiteering Republicans.

I could go on for at least a month describing your world, but instead I'll refer you here:

http://blog.radioleft.com/blog/_archives/2005/11/22/1418152.html
http://blog.radioleft.com/blog/_archives/2005/6/12/930738.html
http://blog.radioleft.com/blog/_archives/2006/9/24/2353693.html
http://blog.radioleft.com/blog/GeoffStaples

You see, Relic, you are proof that Lyndon Johnson was correct when he predicted passiing civil rights legislation would cause Democrats to lose the South for at least a generation.