Put down the LSD and back away slowly.

Via HuffPo:

It’s like facial recognition technology: if the features match up, you conclude, “It’s the same guy.”

So it is with the match between the force that drove us to Civil War more than a century and a half ago, and the force that has taken over the Republican Party in our times.

In both cases, we see an elite insisting on their “liberty,” by which they mean the freedom to dominate.

With Citizens United, in our times, the corporatists have declared that their “freedom of speech” gives them the right to buy our elections, unfettered by any concerns about the rights of the average citizen to have an equal say in their government.

Back in the 1850s, the slaveholders insisted that their “liberty” meant that they had the right to take their human “property” anywhere in American territory, an insistence that swept aside the previously respected concerns of millions of their countrymen that there be regions of the country free of slavery. […]

Today’s Republicans have done everything they could to nullify the presidency of Barack Obama, whom the American people duly elected twice. Like no other opposition party in American history, they have refused to accept the temporary minority status to which American voters have consigned them. Blocking the president from performing the function for which the people hired him has been their top priority.

Back on the eve of the Civil War, the Southerners — who had disproportionately dominated the upper echelons of the national government from the time of its founding — considered the election of Abraham Lincoln an intolerable insult, and promptly made a unilateral decision to break apart the Union; they then raised an army to defend that decision, rather than accept the outcome of the democratic process and regroup for the next election.

As with facial recognition, the configuration of the features tells us, “This is the same ugly thing, come back again.”

HT: Daily Caller