There’s not believing something because it seems so wrong.

There’s not believing because the wrong keeps happening.

There’s believing because of precedent.

And then there’s not believing again because the precedent is just too much.

Tuesday night, the scales were tipped into lala land.

After eight Republican debates, we have now found a list of things that are worth cheering/booing by large numbers of attendees at these debates:

1. Cheering for the increasing number of executions in Texas.
2. Cheering for the deaths of the uninsured.
3. Booing a gay serviceman for asking a question about “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.”
4. Cheering the blaming of unemployment solely on the unemployed.

Now, I don’t care what your political affiliation is, but if you think it is worth cheering increased executions, thousands dying needlessly, blaming the victims of economic strife, and booing honesty from a member of our military, then you are not normal.  You demonstrate neither the lowest standard of compassion or the slightest interest in solidarity.  You are the problem.

The regularity of these occurrences, the refusal of the candidates to reject this behavior (even after the fact), and volume of these vocalizations lead me to only one conclusion: maybe this is their normal.  Maybe this is part of that alternate universe that Goldwater’s disciples began planning in the late 1960s.  Maybe this is part of that alternate universe with its own rewritten history in which the Founding Fathers were all devout Baptists of singular mind about faith and states’ rights.  Maybe this is part of that alternate universe in which protecting a fetus is a moral obligation and starving a child is one too.

As alternate universes go, that one is terrible and unlivable.  It is like the alternate reality in Fringe, devoted to the unraveling and supplanting of our universe.  It is violent and mean and immoral.