It has begun to form an elective dictatorship, in which the three major parties are united in their desire to create a security state; to wage unprovoked wars; to defend corporate power against democracy; to act as a doormat for the United States; to fight political dissent all the way to the bedroom and the birthing pool.
With the notable exception of Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine, a moderate who announced last week that she'd had enough of the ugliness and would not seek re-election, the Republican party has regressed to a pre-modern state, making war on any woman who, to borrow Rebecca West's words, "expresses any sentiment that might differentiate her from a doormat or a prostitute".
I see women convincing themselves that it is somehow "capable and strong" to be a doormat for the status quo.
"Colonel Qaddafi must understand", the human-rights minister told Le Parisien, "that our country is not a doormat, on which a leader, terrorist or not, can come to wipe the blood of his crimes from his feet".
When, in 1996, the first members of America's vast generation of baby-boomers reached 50, many were aghast to find on the doormat an application form from the American Association of Retired People AARPP).
With America's Congress now back from its summer break, Democrats are scrambling to do something, anything, about the mess.Ideas are already piling up on the doormat like so many bailiff's letters: a rescue fund for borrowers, fines for unscrupulous lenders, federal regulation for state-supervised mortgage brokers and greater liability for buyers of mortgage-backed bonds.
This guarantee of league-wide salary parity created a dynamic in which a team can turn from doormat to contender in a year.
They will nonetheless be far happier to see him take the job than anyone who might have been appointed by a President Mitt Romney.Mr Romney's running mate, Paul Ryan, once accused Mr Obama of allowing China to treat him "like a doormat" and Mr Romney himself routinely promised to declare China a currency manipulator on his first day in office.
Palace insiders, rightly or wrongly, had long believed they were being treated like a doormat in their own country.
Hence, the focus on Mr Kennard.Some people think that he will prove to be a doormat.
When the president invited Libya's Muammar Qaddafi to Paris, she insisted to a newspaper that France was "not a doormat on which a leader, terrorist or not, can come to wipe the blood of his crimes from his feet".
