But the Pope, after all, is no Ted Haggard or Jim Bakker, not least because of the 2000-year head start his larcenous and fraudulent cult had, so you can understand his Kappa Kappa Gamma level of self-entitlement and overconfidence in the face of a few thousand lurid  and recurring global felonies.  He quite understandably considers himself immune to such minutia as “dominant opinion,” which seems to be that which holds that it’s not only gross but a serious crime to cover up and thus condone sexual abuse of children and adults of both sexes.  What are they going to do, arrest the Holy Father?  One could only hope.  Look what happened when that fear went away.

At the other end of the spectrum, we have ol’ Michael Steele dropping RNC cash like it was a Palin inlaw, this time in the nefarious dives of Liberal Hollywood, one of which had nekkid gals dangling from the ceiling and making out with each other.  If this was Steele’s attempt to create a Big tent, he may have been onto something, but I’m guessing that the poles were inadequate.   No diapers were involved, but honestly…  could the Family Values Party be any more cheesily perverted?  Even as they tirelessly campaign to deprive real lesbians from marrying and living normal lives, they proudly and extravagantly get their vicarious thrills from watching fake ones, and do so in groups?  Well, since they’re the self-appointed guardians of American Morality, I guess they have to cut loose once in a while, just like those choir directors at the Vatican.

It’s always dangerous to set oneself up as a moral guardian, and doing so definitely makes it a lot more problematic to have a little fun, given any semblance of a functioning and informed society.  That’s not what we have, though; we are governed by a “do as I say, not as I do” elite, who simply dismiss public opprobrium as “petty gossip,” since they know that there won’t ever be any real penalties for such blatant hypocrisy.  Rules, like taxes, are for the little people.  The Pope and Michael Steele might have gotten a little carried away, but history is as always on their side, and though the names and institutions may change, the story is as old as time.

Of course, the predetermined Beck/Teabagger memes will have to be used; Socialism, Death Panels, Hitler, Woodrow Wilson, Government Takeovers, blah, blah, blah.   It would be inconvenient, you’d think then, that the Republican “Road Map,” as it were, presented by the naively direct Wisconsin wingnut Paul Ryan, has a whole lot of socialism in it (for rich people, natch), envisions steadily increasing Medicare cuts which will undoubtedly cause premature deaths, incorporates the worst aspects of both Hitler’s and Wilson’s “Internationalism,” and takes the most popular and enduring “Government Takeover” in US history, Social Security, and hands it over to Wall Street.  You’d be wrong.  For Republicans and their fawning cheerleaders in the media, down is up if Jim DeMint says so and FOX News unsurprisingly agrees.

The tinny Victrola of terrorism is of course going to be cranked up anew, to play scratchy recordings of 2002-2003 and somehow claim that we’re not clobbering the Constitution fast enough, not torturing people with sufficient eagerness, and not invading enough countries to Keep America Safe.  This angle may be dropped later because in early rollouts it only fooled Richard Cohen, a feat akin to convincing Tom Friedman that Lexuses are preferable to olive trees.  You heard it here at CHNN first, but I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that the terror well will finally be recognized (by the voters, not the media…) as having run inconveniently dry in a country with 10% unemployment and an economy still collapsing.  Please make a note of it, Rudy.

Of course, the real power behind the GOP, money, has already set the stage, and as such one can expect a lot more unnatural couplings between square pegs and round holes to ensue.  The way to “create jobs” is to abandon environmental regulation, any vestigial remains of progressive taxation, and give more tax-free money to worthless heirs and heiresses.  Neither remarkably nor evidently as a joke, the strikingly unattractive and almost as untalented version of Paris Hilton, Steve Forbes, has a new book out, not entitled “I Got Mine, Fuck You,” but might as well have been, to emphasize these not very new ideas.  Frank Luntz has almost just absentmindedly trotted out the same old anti-government crap that was so successful in perpetuating our third-world health statistics for another decade or three, to stop desperately needed banking reform,  but will people really fall for the notion that Wall Street banks that every day continue to rob Americans blind ought not be regulated?  That’s some pretty heavy lifting, even for the Wall Street Journal and CNBC.

As they always do when they’re in a pickle, the GOP is making a lot of noise about teh ghey, this time about the long-overdue abandonment of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” a policy so ridiculous on its face that I have trouble believing it’s been the law of the land for almost eighteen years, and touting the purported “uprising” against marriage equality, financed by a bunch of wealthy churches whose primary concern is avoiding reality, even when it drops on their curiously adorned heads.  But time has shown that since the cynical 2004 “victories” that resulted from gay-bashing have only driven more younger voters away from the GOP, and even if John McCain doesn’t listen to Cindy and Megan, America does, and has.

They think, of course, that they have a new big thing in the Teabaggers, which is the first sign of actual non-astroturf political activity on the right since Tomothy McVeigh, and they understandably don’t want to waste a development like that .  Sarah Palin surely didn’t…  she got half a wardrobe’s worth of Teabagger dough for mouthing vaguely intelligible Randian Haiku in Nashville, just tonight, so I’ll bet she’ll be wearing something extra pretty for the occasion.  Still, given that even some of the craziest Republicans, Michele Bachmann and Marsha Blackburn, finally slinked away from the teabaggers, realizing they were already so bought and paid for by Wall Street and the real corporate Death Panelists in the Health “industry” that they might not have much in common with the teabaggers after all. Rotten vegetables are notoriously unflattering to the complexion.   Naturally, they both disingenuously blamed the annoying “big government” intrusion of pesky “ethics” laws for their fortuitous absences from a crowd that in the end, evidently didn’t “share their values.”

No wonder Sarah Palin quit her part-time day job; this evolution-denier can gaily fleece her (socially) Darwinistic inferiors for all they’re worth and not be unduly shackled by silly old “big government” ethics.  The Republican Party, not so much.  The policies they have chosen and continue to fight for are the exact ones that caused and will only merrily perpetuate the very pain the Teabaggers are feeling, and their overconfident claim to Teabagger loyalty is already wearing alarmingly thin, given that their craven, almost Cheneyesque money-grubbing went on lurid display at about week three of their “revolution’s” existence.

I have previously criticized the Democrats for running against Bush, after  all this time and so many of their own failures, but the only thing stupider than that would be the Republicans running as “Bush, Only More So.”  I can’t decide which one I want to lose more.  Let the (h/t Jon Stewart) “thinnest kid at fat camp” win.

Oops.  Forget Maryland.  On November 16-19 in Baltimore, the US Council of Bishops is meeting to decide for other people (as they always do, despite their somewhat striking inexperience in their favorite area, matters of intimacy and reproduction…) whether or not indefinitely sustaining vegetative patients should be mandatory at all Catholic hospitals.  Pay the bill, we’ll inject the swill….  Don’t like it?  See you in Hell.

Here, that means almost every good hospital, from the one where I was born to the one where my mother died in 2008.  We were lucky.  A very compassionate and realistic older doctor told my brother and I that we made the right decision when we finally opted, after much anguish, for “comfort only,” meaning that the machines that now kept her alive only on a screen would be shut off except for her morphine drip, after she had endured months of aggressive care, most of which only made her worse.   The Catholic intimidation was palpable for me, though, as I passed crucifixes and Blessed Virgins in the Four Seasons swank of the hospital where I knew my mother would die.  Deep down, I feared that what the US Council is now contemplating was already in force.  Seemingly confirming my fears, a priest appeared at her door one day when I was visiting, and introduced himself.  Joan said, sarcastically, “You’re here to administer my last rites?  I’m not ready for that yet.”  Startled, he said somewhat apologetically, “Your profile says you’re Catholic, so I thought I’d stop in.”  Warming to the ballsy insouciance that imminent death brings, the old Holy Names girl said, “I just wrote that to keep the other religious crazies out.”  Father whatshisname beat a hasty retreat.  I was relieved, and I felt that her display helped to convey to me her wishes.

Three days after she died, we were at her condo, and my brother checked the mail, which contained fresh bills from the hospital, addressed to “The estate of….”  We speculated, jokingly, whether the EKG was hooked up directly to accounting.  Onward, Christian Collectors. and all that.

Basically, I’m getting tired of this.  I always was suspicious of the motives of other seemingly more fervent religions, but growing up my own seemed fairly benign, and certainly not the bible-thumping political player it’s turning out to be.  But now we find it’s just as bad, and maybe worse because of its immense wealth and power.  Like the Mormons and the Evangelicals before them, the Catholics have decided that the potential new recruits are among the most zealous and eager to oppress, and have jumped on the bandwagon to nab them and their collection plate moolah, even inviting antigay Anglicans to join the greedy and bigoted fold, and loudly denying communion to politicians who support others’ rights not to follow Catholic Doctrine.  It seems that the Catholics have embraced the methods of that other great Italian work of art, the Mafia.

Who the Hell do they think they are?  Catholics were once a persecuted minority in this country, having to establish their own schools to shelter their many children from the heretical Protestant bibles then used in public schools.  Mormons had to light out to the territories, twice, to escape violent persecution as well.  Now, they and their imitators are like the last players standing in a particularly lengthy and brutal game of Monopoly, where he who has the gold makes the rules, and they’re ready to party; around the world governments and public policy dance to their tune.

They’re not religions anymore, and should no longer be treated as such by either tax codes or any presumption of virtue.  When I was Sales Manager at a theatrical lighting supply house twenty years ago, our customer base was schools, arts organizations, and churches.  (The ickiest churches put on the best shows, you know..) and among them all, the churches were the only ones who ever asked for a discount, and virtually all of them did.  I would say, privately fuming as a former Oregon Ballet administrator who would never have dreamed of asking for such a freebie, despite our much more penurious state, that “All of our customers have their financial difficulties, and all are good causes; we don’t discriminate among them.”

Today I’d say, “Churches pay extra.  Maybe God will send you that fog machine.”

See first comment …