Mr. Republican

Since the beginning of recorded history, Republicans have always faced the same problem: putting an affable, camera-ready mask on their horrendous, barbaric policies.  

For decades they solved this problem with what I think of as the Two Face Solution.  While their raging racists on Hate Radio and Fox News got the meathead base all fired up and ready to vote to roll back the Enlightenment -- 

-- their tapioca-bland Beltway apologists would spread the gospel in the nations respectable newspapers and Sunday morning public interest shows and PBS and NPR and so forth that we should all ignore the the Conservative bigots bellowing at 120 decibels on mass media from coast-to-coast.

That wasn't the real Republican party.  

Those weren't real Conservatives.  

Real Conservatives cared about high-minded concepts like Laffer Curves and Cat-Food Commissions and implementing a flat-tax system in Iraq --

-- not grubby, bloody-minded gossip about Vince Foster and Bill Clinton the drug kingpin and flag-pins and birth certificates.

Long after leading Republicans made it explicitly clear that the reason they managed to take power in 1994 was Rush Limbaugh and Hate Radio (from The New York Times, December 12, 1994) -- 

The freshman class, which included not a single "femi-Nazi," one of Mr. Limbaugh's favorite epithets for supporters of women's rights, whooped and applauded, proving itself one big fan club of the man it believes was primarily responsible for the Republican avalanche in November.

Mr. Limbaugh was made an honorary member of the class as its members tonight finished a three-day orientation here sponsored by the Heritage Foundation and Empower America, two conservative Washington research organizations.

Barbara Cubin, an incoming freshman from Wyoming, told Mr. Limbaugh that because 74 percent of the nation's newspapers had endorsed Democrats, "talk radio, with you in the lead, is what turned the tide." On behalf of the women in the class, she gave him a plaque that said, "Rush Was Right." He also received a pin like the ones the freshmen wore, saying, "Majority Maker."

"Rush is as responsible for what happened here as much as anyone," said Vin Weber, a former Representative from Minnesota, now of Empower America. Citing a poll taken after the election by Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, Mr. Weber said that people who listened to 10 hours or more a week of talk radio voted Republican by a 3-to-1 margin. "Those are the people who elected the new Congress," he said...

-- the elite, teevee-friendly Conservatives who dominated (and still dominate) the "respectable" media continued to hand-wave away any suggestion that any of the filthy, bomb-throwing garbage that was vomiting from right-wing radio and television was anything other than a fringe sideshow.  Or that the increasingly deranged mob that watched and listened to such tripe were anything other than a tiny fraction of the otherwise sane, sensible and patriotic Republican base.

And anyway, as bad as that tiny minority of right-wing blowhards were, wasn't the Left always worse?

Of course, for those of us who were not members of the complicit mainstream media and who were actually paying attention, what was going on inside the GOP was both obvious and terrifying.  If you're interested in my credentials, here's a link to what I was writing about the fate and future of the GOP +18 years ago: "Little Red State Fundy sez..."  

But that's the point, isn't it?  The general public (the Great Wad, as my friend Harlan Ellison used to refer to them) doesn't pay any attention to any of this.  They don't want to be bothered with politics:  99% of the time, to them politics is nothing but a confusion of loud, garbled voices shouting in a room down the hall.  They have no fucking idea who is saying what about anything: they just want Both Sides to pipe down so they can watch The Voice or football or whatever.  

This was the status quo...right up until Trump ripped the last shreds of the Respectable Republican mask off the GOP and showed the world the Republican's true. leering, bug-eyed-crazy face,  And the mainstream media hates this brave new world of out-and-proud madmen and cowards running the Party of Lincoln because as long as the GOP keeps waving its syphilitic political dick around in public, it's hard for them (not impossible, but definitely a strain) to continue writing the "Democrats in Disarray" and "The Extremes on Both Sides" fairy tales that are their stock-in-trade.

The Great Wad hates it too.  All they want is to remain undisturbed by whatever's going on in politics.  To go back to sleep forever.  And should any political event threaten to rouse them from their civic stupor, they want to be able to hit the "Both Sides Do It" snooze button and fall right back into dreamland feeling smart.  And the current state of the Republican party makes that very hard.  Lord know the Great Wad is trying their damndest to ignore the Republican peril that is a knife to the throat of the country they still pretend to care about, but it's like trying to sleep through an earthquake that never stops.

But in the new Republican Speaker, Mike Johnson, the media, the Republican party and the Great Wad may have all found a temporary liniment to sooth their collective agonies: a new, affable, camera-ready mask for their horrendous, barbaric policies.  

A public presentation as mealy and inoffensive as David Brooks.  Behind which lurks a savage ideology straight out of the Dark Ages. 

From Politico:

‘He Seems to Be Saying His Commitment Is to Minority Rule’

A Q&A with historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez on the Christian nationalist ideas that shaped House Speaker Mike Johnson.

From the Washington Post:

House Speaker Mike Johnson used faith in campaign against gay rights

From the AP:

New US House speaker tried to help overturn the 2020 election, raising concerns about the next one.

From the AP again:

Christian right cheers new House speaker, conservative evangelical Mike Johnson, as one of their own

Evangelical Christian conservatives have long had allies in top Republican leadership in Congress. But never before have they had one so thoroughly embedded in their movement as new House Speaker Mike Johnson, a longtime culture warrior in the courthouse, in the classroom and in Congress.

From Rolling Stone:

New House Speaker Blamed School Shootings on Teaching Evolution and Abortion

Mike Johnson is a Christian nationalist with extreme views on guns, reproductive rights, and more. He's now second in line for the presidency

From Bloomberg News:

House Speaker Mike Johnson’s First Big Bill Cuts Biden’s Climate Change Funding

From HuffPo:

New House Speaker Thinks Creationist Museum Is 'Pointing People To The Truth'

An ark replica with dinosaurs "is one way to bring people to this recognition ... that what we read in the Bible are actual historical events,” Mike Johnson said.

Burn The Lifeboats

Out Here in the Fields, I've Heard All Their Spiels...

That's why I do all of this blogging.

I don't need to fight
To prove I'm right.
I don't need to be forgiven...

This interaction pretty accurately reflects my experience over +30 years out in the Real World attempting to calmly reason with Republicans in my family, my community, my workplace and just out and about socially.

At the NRA Convention someone told us that hammers are used to kill more people than guns. So we looked up the stats in front of them. pic.twitter.com/ju5R8Pqbvk

— The Good Liars (@TheGoodLiars) May 31, 2022

The conversations were more cordial back when it was just Rush Limbaugh on 1,000 radio stations telling them every day that Slick Willie, gays, Libtards, welfare queens and feminazis were to blame for their problems.  

Since then the tone has escalated to venomous, blustering, whiny hostility.

However the Dissociative Rebuttal Box Step they dance has never changed.

First, you need to understand how desperate Republicans are to validate their ludicrous beliefs by sticking it to some smarty-pants Liberal.  Sure, they get plenty of affirmation from their peer groups -- 

Longtime readers know that "The Tribe That Rubs Shit In Their Hair" is my shorthand for inbred Conservative meatsticks who have wallowed in wingnut Hate Radio racist dung and Fox News Liberal Conspiracy claptrap for so long that is has become the quotidian argot of their wretched lives. It is their tavern-talk -- their worst, paranoid delusions, externalized, validated, tarted up as The Unvarnished Truth and then regurgitated back to them by ghouls and treason-mongers like Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly... which are, in turn, passed around again like so many fish stories, getting bigger and wilder and truthier with iteration.

It is the shit they eagerly rub in their hair -- the shit which, year after year, they sculpt into ever more elaborate pompadours because everyone else in their dingy, lightless corner of Universe is doing it and they lost their sense of smell 40 years ago.

They preen over each other. They are happy in each other's company. They praise each other on the little, individual touches with which they have customized their Shitheap Toupees -- an extra layer of Benghaaaazi, perhaps, appliqued over something something the New Black Panther Party because ACORN!...

-- but telling off some know-it-all Lefty well, that's their tribe's idea  of heroically counting coup.  

Of course the flaw in their cunning strategy is that their dearly held beliefs are mostly stupid and the "facts" they brandish with such swagger are easily debunked nonsense.  

For example, from long before the rise of Trump and excavated from deep inside my civilian email archives comes this item which I believe can still be found in the collector's edition of the "Liberals Are The Real Racists" box set.  This was the iron-clad "proof" that Hillary Clinton had once gone in blackface to a party, because that's obviously a young Bill Clinton standing next to her.

Except, of course, it's not, which took me all of 90 seconds of basic internet searching to verify.

We now enter the Dramatic Re-Enactment portion of our show, because what follows is the distilled essence of virtually every such interaction I have ever had with goofs like this out here in the Real World.

The goof replies: Well that's Snopes.  Everybody knows Snopes is funded by ... George Soros!

And just like that the Dissociative Rebuttal Box Step box step has begun.  From this point forward, the goof will forget that he brought his shit to my door and not the other way around, and his replies will get progressively more pissed off and more defensive.  

Me:  Don't see what Soros has to do with anything since the Snopes article links to an original source, but OK, here's another source.  And another.  

Goof:  Yeah, but whatabout this other thing that also proved that Liberals Are The Real Racists.

Pause for 90 seconds while I debunk that too.  It goes on like this for a few more rounds.

Me, eventually:  Look, I've gotta ask, why do you keep believing the people who tell you these things?  They're clearly feeding you bullshit?  You're a smart guy, so what does it take for you to stop listening to them?

And then, out of the mouths of these stone-cold GOP culture warriors invariably comes the Beltway Acela Corridor voice of David Fucking Brooks.

Goof:   Y'know, both sides lie. Lefties are no better.  They're usually worse. 

Me:  Really? 

Goof:  Remember when Clinton said he wasn't fucking whatshername?  Remember when Obama said I could keep my doctor?  Huh!  Remember that!  And don't forget Benghaaaazi!

Fun fact:  These people, who will swear on the lives of their grandchildren that they can't remember or have no idea what heinous shit their own party was up to last week, or what they themselve swore they believed last year, all seem to possess an encyclopedic knowledge of every wildly overblown or outright fake Democratic "scandal" dating back to FDR.

And in just this short amount of time we have escalated from from "Gotcha now Libtard!  Here's the iron-clad proof that you're the real racists!"  to "Everyone's equally horrible and nothing matters so I refuse to feel bad about believing liars and voting for monsters".  

So, now I have to decide, do I really want to waste more of my precious time detailing the actual history of the Republican's Arkansas Project?  Or the actual policy details of the Affordable Care Act?  All the tangible good the ACA has done and the endless shitstorms the GOP unleashed to try to kill it?  

No I do not.  

Because I have already done some variation of this round-and-round literally hundreds of times under all sorts of conditions.  And what I have learned is that, in the end, goofs with the horrible ideas and who are are always betting with Chris Moneymaker confidence on their full-house of easily debunked bullshit will never budge a fucking inch.  

Because their mental morass of bluster and paranoia and performative hyper-patriotism and lies and racism is not something external to themselves that they can be coaxed out of.  It is who they are. 

Because a lifetime of experience has taught me that behind every lie and excuse there will be yet another lie and another excuse.  And another, and another, and another after that.  Because this is not a case of trying to gently and empathically steer someone away from a poor decision. Nope.  This is trying to talk an addict out of their addiction: an addict who will grab onto any tacitic, fling any excuse, to fight to the death to hang onto their addiction.

Well I don't know about you, but my patience and empathy pantry is now bare: emptied out by decades of escalating, gleeful GOP depravity, sadism, sedition and proudly willful ignorance.

And supply chain issues suggest that it will not be restocked any time in the foreseeable future. 

Burn The Lifeboats

Choice -- UPDATE

As an exercise for the class, a mixed-media assignment.

First, this video of serial-adulterer and direct-mail con-man Newt Gingrich making his umpteenth appearance on David Gregory's "Meet the Press" clown show where, as usual, the Gingrich Rules were  in full effect, leaving Newt unfettered by either conscience or moderator to act as a veritable bullshit cyclotron.

The astute reader will notice how automatically Mr. Fundamentally/Basically reverts to his all-time-favorite, all-purpose hysterical rhetorical construction -- "most radical, extreme _______ ever" (as in, "What do you mean you're out of chicken nuggets? That's the most extreme example of extreme radical European socialism I have ever seen!" or "Consuela, back in your radical extreme country that might pass for an adequate floor-scrubbing, but you're in America now, so unless you want me to call INS..." or "Callista, I don't care that it's called a Singapore Filibuster and everyone else in Leadership loves it -- I call it the most radial, extreme Socialist use of glow sticks and turkey livers ever.") -- to caricature the Democratic Party position on Choice.

(The astute reader will also notice how pusillanimous-to-the-point-of-catatonia Tom Friedman was. Tom Friedman is soft and stupid and used to the deference of toadies so when confronted with a red-faced wingnut thug in full, roaring, fake-dudgeon, he cowers and equivocates because cowardice and equivocation are both fundamental AND basic to the Fake Centrist's DNA.)

So according to Newt, the extreme, radical "Abortion" platform of the Democratic Party is little more than a license which permits Barack Obama to sit outside women's uteri and mow their perfectly-healthy children down as they toddle out of the womb.

The astute reader will now compare and contrast Newt Gingrich's fascist bombast to the actual language of the Democratic Party Platform.

Here is the 2012 Democratic Party Platform section on "A Woman’s Right to Choose":

Protecting A Woman’s Right to Choose. The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to make decisions regarding her pregnancy, including a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay. We oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right. Abortion is an intensely personal decision between a woman, her family, her doctor, and her clergy; there is no place for politicians or government to get in the way. We also recognize that health care and education help reduce the number of unintended pregnancies and thereby also reduce the need for abortions. We strongly and unequivocally support a woman’s decision to have a child by providing affordable health care and ensuring the availability of and access to programs that help women during pregnancy and after the birth of a child, including caring adoption programs.

Got that?  Safe.  Legal.  Available regardless of ability to pay.  And bulwarked by strong support for every proven method of reducing unintended pregnancies.

Care to see the same section before ACORN stole the election for the Kenyan Usurper?

Here is the 2008 Democratic Party Platform's section on "Choice":

Choice 

The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to choose a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay, and we oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right. The Democratic Party also strongly supports access to comprehensive affordable family planning services and age-appropriate sex education which empower people to make informed choices and live healthy lives. We also recognize that such health care and education help reduce the number of unintended pregnancies and thereby also reduce the need for abortions. The Democratic Party also strongly supports a woman’s decision to have a child by ensuring access to and availability of programs for pre- and post-natal health care, parenting skills, income support, and caring adoption programs.

Safe.  Legal.  Available regardless of ability to pay.  And bulwarked by strong support for every proven method of reducing unintended pregnancies.

Care to see the same section before the Kenyan Usurper ever got his hands on it?

Here is the 2004 Democratic Party Platform section on Choice:

We will defend the dignity of all Americans against those who would undermine it. Because we believe in the privacy and equality of women, we stand proudly for a woman's right to choose, consistent with Roe v. Wade, and regardless of her ability to pay. We stand firmly against Republican efforts to undermine that right. At the same time, we strongly support family planning and adoption incentives. Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.

Safe.  Legal.  Available regardless of ability to pay.  And bulwarked by strong support for every proven method of reducing unintended pregnancies.

Are you noticing a pattern?

Care to see the same section from back when the Kenyan Usurper was teaching law at the University of Chicago and directing a project to register African American voters in Illinois?

Here is the 1992 Democratic Party Platform section on "Choice":

Choice 

Democrats stand behind the right of every woman to choose, consistent with Roe v. Wade, regardless of ability to pay, and support a national law to protect that right.

It is a fundamental constitutional liberty that individual Americans—not government can best take responsibility for making the most difficult and intensely personal decisions regarding reproduction. The goal of our nation must be to make abortion less necessary, not more difficult or more dangerous. We pledge to support contraceptive research, family planning, comprehensive family life education, and policies that support healthy childbearing and enable parents to care most effectively for their children

Safe.  

Legal.  

Available regardless of ability to pay.  

And bulwarked by strong support for every proven method of reducing unintended pregnancies.

Rock-steady, decade after decade.

Here, on the other hand, is mere fraction of the Republican Party's actual history -- actual, vicious, medieval history -- on the subject of women, abortion

 

 and rape:



After Gingrich's braying fraud, someone needed to be on-hand to tell the "Meet the Press" audience that in Newt Gingrich's America, women will be reduced to brood mares,  put on Earth to serve as divine vessels of male seed.  That in Newt Gingrich's America, a woman would be compelled by a federal Religious Purity Police to bear her rapist's children  -- forced to bear her rapists' child under threat of prison or death;  forced to bear her rapists' child even if it kills her.

After Gingrich's baying lies, someone needed to be on-hand to shove his bullshit right back down his throat.

Instead we got Tom Friedman, folding up like your 401K after Bain Capital sank its fangs into it.

Instead we got Tom Friedman, because David Gregory chose to have it that way.


UPDATE:

It seems punching back hard on choice and calling out the Conservative's medieval "Handmaid's Tale" agenda does have an entertainingly salutary effect: it makes the scuttlefish at places like Ed Morrissey "Hot Air" chew enough glass to actually quote a Centrist tool like David Brooks as he gets all Victorian breathless and fainty at the Democrats veering into those icky "social issues" that  those smelly "human beings" seem way too concerned about but which every good Whig knows are so much better left unmentioned and suppressed (no link's to crazy people):

Brooks: Man, these Democrats really love abortion, don’t they?

POSTED AT 8:41 AM ON SEPTEMBER 5, 2012 BY ED MORRISSEY

Do they ever. Until the Democratic convention got into prime time, speaker after speaker went to the podium to hail the Democratic Party sacrament, to the point that one would have thought that the source of most woes in America was an epidemic of conception, rather than say, oh, jobs. The focus shifted a little when primetime coverage began, but by that time I’d dozed off.

I wasn’t the only one to notice that my prediction for Abortion-Palooza had come true. New York Times columnist David Brooks told PBS that his one “cavil” was that voters want to hear about jobs and the economy, not taxpayer-subsidized abortion on demand:

... “The one cavil I will have … is this speech has — [it] reinforces something we’ve heard all night, which was how much the crowd goes crazy and how passionate they are about abortion and gay marriage and the social issues. And tonight has been about that.

“And to me it should have been a lot more about economics, growth, and debt. And that better be the job of day two and day three because they did not do it here.”

Party of God Outraged

That their medieval, batshit ideas about science are distracting the media from discussing their medieval, batshit ideas about economics.

Perhaps it is time to remind our media that a certain group of traitorous, unAmerican, surrender-monkeys have been warning you assholes since forever about exactly what the Right had in mind and exactly how they were going about getting it.

For example, six and a half years ago (yes, Esquire Magazine, I have been on this beat for a long, long time), as he wandered around Washington D.C. rending his garments in stunned dumbfoundery that Republicans were behaving like Republicans, I carefully explained to David Fucking Brooks what was wrong with the GOP and how it could be fixed.

But did he listen?  Did he write?  Did he ever say "Thank You"?

Noooooo.

Here's a snip:

“Hey? What’s that ‘poo’ smell?” 

 

Bobo whines, having walked a million miles in a diarrhea-fedora and a pair of thigh-high dung-stilettos.

Behind the Great Wall of Time’s Select Dis, Bobo squats on his flat rock and muses over the Absolutely Shocking revelation that the Republican Party is run by, uh, Bad People.

Who knew?

Perhaps if he occasionally got up off his knees and bothered to look at who was paying the freight at the Party he was hired to strip, lap-dance and bareback?

Perhaps if used a 100-watt-bulb instead of a 20-watter in that dimly-lit booth he uses when he knobs his overlords he would have noticed at some point in the last thirty fucking years the True Face of the men who run his Party.

One bit of health advice though; If you stroke that pre-pubescent peachfuzz any harder, Brooksie, and pick at those microscopic nits any more fiercely, your chin’s gonna come right off.
...

But BoBo tricks himself out in “journalist” threads and goes paid-walkabout on PBS, NBC and in the pages of the NYT as such. And yet no one but a partisan propagandist as deep into the GOP swag bag as pocket lint could not have seen this [The Abramoff/DeLay Scandal] coming down the middle of Michigan Avenue at noon a mile away.

Abramoff and DeLay have both simply fulfilled the “other duties as assigned” small print of their chosen professions – bag-man/pimp/crime-boss and his symbiot; the fake-Christian political huckster/douchebag.

OTOH -- and as corny as it sounds -- BoBo betrayed his profession by deliberately refusing to notice the “alarum bell in the night” until it was booming at a thousand decibels from above the fold on the front page of his very own paper.)

...
"First, they need to hold new leadership elections. As Newt Gingrich and Vin Weber told me yesterday, Tom DeLay needs to take care of his own legal problems and give up the dream of returning as majority leader."

Wow. Turning to Newt Fucking Gingrich for advice on the de-sleazification of the Republican party? Wow. This is mockery-on-self-destruct-autopilot. It’s a target too fat and there’s no sport in it.

Like hunting legless mouse babies.

In a teacup.

With an RPG.

I have no words.

I just hope BoBo made him use a condom.

BoBo continues…

...
"But Republicans need to do more than bump DeLay. They need to put the entire leadership team up for a re-vote. That's because the real problem wasn't DeLay, it was DeLayism, the whole culture that merged K Street with the Hill, and held that raising money is the most important way to contribute to the team."

Driftglass Translation:

But the Real Problem with the White House isn’t Bush…its Bushism

But the real Problem with the Senate isn’t Bill Frist or Rick Santorum…its Fristitis and Santorosis.

But the Real Problem with the Entire Religious Right isn’t the slope-browed, knuckle-dragging likes of James Dobson or Phyllis Schlafly or Donald Wildmon or Jerry Falwell or the rest of the Christopaths who power your million-mile-long Electoral train packed to the rafters with an omnium-gatherum of morally diseased, Flag-swaddled Self Righteous Swine…it’s the DobsOnanism.

In other words, the fault, posits Dear Bobo, is not in the Party, but in some ineffable quality that just so happens to perfectly overlap every square inch of the Party.

He continues with a list of technical reforms… but one cannot help but notice that the sudden, late-life conscience growth spurt that Brooks now claims has him positively bursting pastel-togged-Hulk-like out of the seams of his flouncy Little Boy Pants, came only after the Maximum Lobbyist for Life – Jack Abramoff finally announced all over the front page of the NYT that he had flipped and was going to be a Big Ol’ Blabbermouth !
...

Only then did Brooksie the Ace Newshound pick up the faint and highly attenuated scent of a possible story goin’ on ‘round here.

Then Bobo ticks off a series of technical reforms that he suggests that the GOP should make in order to get back on track, ignoring the rather obvious fact that they are on track.

Looting the government…was the plan.

Leaving the poor to rot…was the plan.

Romping into Iraq for oil and plunder on a caravan of lies and at the expense of our nation’s blood and reputation…was the plan.

But to put across the Grover Norquist/Jerry Falwell vision of America as a lawless, oligarchic Jesusland they needed stooges and apologists…like you BoBo.

You, Brooksie, were the plan.

... 

These are the same people who have told us to our faces for three decades that Government Is The Problem. That everything from health to food to oil to torture to coal mines needs to be completely deregulated. That Social Security needs to be eliminated.

That government must be annihilated.

So, BoBo, why in the fuck would a party of looters be interested in oiling the hinges on the vault door?

But that isn’t what’s interesting here.

What’s interesting is, yet again, the Dog that Didn’t Bark in the Night.

What BoBo is NOT suggesting.

The farrago of moral decomposition and indefensibly wretched excess that is the woof and warp of the GOP has been allowed to metastasize to such a scope and scale and worm into the belly of the body politic to a deeper level than the likes of Jim Wright and Dan Rostenkowski ever fucking dreamed of for one reason.

Because your criminals hide behind Christ, Bobo.

It is no accident that shoulder-to-shoulder with a mob-wannabe thug like Abramoff stood pillars of the Christian Right like Tom DeLay and Ralph “Satan’s Babyfaced Fingerfood” Reed.

In the past, Democrats -- like anyone else -- can and have become corrupt, and can and have been punished for it.

Severely.

The thing that makes the Republican Party different is not the rot in their hearts – which is capacious – and their seething hatred of the Brown Poor – which they rationalize away into the mists of market theory.

No what makes them worse – lethally worse – is their Fundamentalist Ideology.

Period.

Because when you are lining your pockets with House postage stamps, you’re just a crook and we’re all sinners here. But when you believe that God Has Chosen Your Party…you can justify any excesses.

When you have grown besotted on the grotesque perversion of the teachings of Jesus that is Conservative Christian Fundamentalism – when you cast yourself as the righteous Christian Soldiers at war with the Evil Liberal Humanists – then all things are permitted.

When you wrap your dick in the Flag and the Bible, then you can fuck anyone and anything any way you like because you believe that God is on your side.

You can justify an illegal war.

You can justify torture.

You can justify murder.

You can justify shredding the Constitution.

You can justify demanding your fucktard superstition trump science.

You can justify impeaching my President for trivia and letting your President skate over treason.

You can justify blaming Columbine on condoms and teaching evolution.

You can justify bombing Family Planning Clinics.

You can justify lynching.

You can justify blaming 9/11 on gays and feminists and the ACLU.

You can justify blaming hurricanes on liberals.

You can justify assassination.

You can justify calling liberal judges a greater threat to America than Nazis and terrorists.

You can justify turning women back into the reproductive chattel of men.

And having swallowed all of those camels, you certainly won’t strain at a few gnats like graft, corruption, extortion, blackmail and all the rest…because all of these things are simply means to the ends of the Greater Glory of the Prince of Peace!

And your Party is the one that is so fucking Blessed and Highly Favored in His eyes, right?

Mr. Brooks, these people are the problem and these people run your party. And what the fuck kind of congenital cerebral malfunction do you have that you cannot see that?

Because one cannot help but also notice the glaring omission from your shopping list. No mention made of that one reform that would actually, structurally alter the carcinoma-based DNA from which the Modern GOP has been bred.

And it’s so easy.

Just dump the bigots, Bobo.

And tell the racists to hit the fucking bricks.

Stop the clown car and kick the science-hating, gay-bashing Christopaths to the curb.

Oh, but then you’d lose, wouldn’t you?

That’s the real dirty little secret behind all of this.

You know that if you really, actually flushed the scum of the Earth your Southern Strategists have so carefully cultivated down the drain, the Republican Party wouldn’t win another election – anywhere – for another generation.

And your Party of God and Used Car Salemen cannot accept that, which is why you will always have Abramoffs and DeLays and Ralph Reeds hag-riding the GOP.

You know it and, more importantly, they know it, which is why they own you.

They are the emergent and inevitable result of the hate-driven moral absolutism, racism and pathologically perverted variant of Christianity that is the bedrock of the Modern GOP. And as long as they are allowed to remain as the pillar of your Party, it will always end in tears...

We've been warning about this rough beast slouching ever closer for a long time, amigos.

A very long time.

Reprogrammable Killbots

Ripping our country further apart year after year after year by methodically regurgitating the same lies to the same flag-waving simpletons over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

All this was inspired by the principle--which is quite true within itself--that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.

Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.

--Adolf Hitler , Mein Kampf, vol. I, ch. X

And then they take a little break to make little jokes about Obama and teleprompters.

[Hitler's] primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

-- A Psychological Analysis of Adolph Hitler. His Life and Legend by Walter C. Langer. Office of Strategic Services

If you still cannot see the problem, then you are the problem.

A Reader Writes:

"While usually supportive of much of the content produced at this site, I believe your recent treatment of a highly-publicized, controversial issue left a great deal to be desired and did not fairly represent other views and/or fully include facts from other sources which may have somewhat mitigated the opinion you expressed.
..."

But another reader writes:

"...
While I often disagree with the content produced at this site, I found myself in agreement with you about your recent treatment of a highly-publicized, controversial issue. Despite my past misgivings I found this change refreshing and positive."