Devouring Their Own

In excruciatingly poor hunt years, loner polar bear males have been witnessed stalking a mother and her cubs for miles across ice floes until they are too tired to move. At this point, the male, desparate and hungry, but ruthless and compassionless, will trap the worn cubs, dominate and beat back the mother, and devour the cubs.

Male Grizzly bears have been known to cruelly and needlessly attack a family of young cubs and kill them. Not to eat the cubs, but rather to force the mother to copulate with them.

Bear males also have a tendency to go to great, epic battles. They can slaughter one another for the right to dominate and court a female, to stake out hunting or feeding territory, or for other unknown reasons.

And so too with Republicans. The brutal, bloodthirsty right, not comfortable with their evangelical calls for assassination, have begun to pull against themselves. The violence begins.

Bill Frist is the current stalk. Trent Lott might consider this internal bloodletting an instance of poetic justice, but the rest of us wildlife observers know that this is simply the nature of the beast, the rightwing wild west participates in this cycle of betraying violence every so often.

As much as we wish we could intervene, we can only bear witness lest we get too close.