First, we have Sarah Palin’s novel notion that Paul Revere rode around Massachusetts sporting an NRA bumper sticker on his horse, ringin’ bells and raisin’ hell to “warn the British” about something or other, a delusion so jaw-droppingly ridiculous that even Fox News’ Chris Wallace could barely stifle a chuckle over it.  Surreally, this got Michele Bachmann’s well-teased dander up, leading her minions to solemnly proclaim that Caribou Barbie was insufficiently “serious.”  Before Allen Funt could pop out of the bushes, along came Tim Pawlenty with a “plan” that makes George Bush look like a hippie, and not incidentally would increase the deficit by several trillion.

Not to be outdone, Herman Cain then became the first Republican to propose stimulative infrastructure spending of suitably millennial  proportions; our own Chinese wall to keep out the Mexicans, complete with an alligator-infested moat, to predictable cheers from his addlepated supporters.  In case this idea sounded like too, well, constructive, he hastened to add that no Mooslims would serve in his cabinet, but he might hire a gay or two because they would potentially be a fashionably dressed bulwark against creeping Sharia.  Later, after that, he backtracked a bit…  Mooslims could serve, if they took a loyalty oath over a pizza that resembled the Blessed Virgin.

Meanwhile, Democrats again demonstrated their lameness and political ineptitude by calling loudly for the resignation of Rep. Anthony Weiner, politely ignoring the whoremongers (and just plain whores) on the other side of the aisle.  The Republican leadership has its flaws, but stupidity is not among them, so they largely (and wisely) stayed mum, perhaps partly out of envy.

Then, along came the Frothy Mixture, and I was finally moved to type.  For sheer loathsomeness and anti-electability, no one beats the repulsive and crazy Rick Santorum:  Palin minus the brains, Newt minus the popularity, Pawlenty minus the sex appeal, and Mitt Romney minus the principles.

Behold today’s brief exchange after a “discussion” about climate change, which he naturally considers a liberal plot, with, naturally enough, Rush Limbaugh (h/t Mother Jones…):

Limbaugh: I have a minute and a half. You ever ask yourself where the American people are politically? Do you ever fear the American people just maybe want a European socialist country, that they’d rather be dependent on government? Does that worry you?

Santorum: Does it worry me? Well, you know, Rush, ’cause you combat it every day with the popular culture and the media and academic institutions, that gets pounded away every day into the minds of our young people, and I don’t know how many times I’ve listened on your show where people said, “You know, you opened, the scales fell from my eyes. It’s finally making sense to me. I understand all of these lies I’ve been told.” You tell people lies enough and you indoctrinate them enough, of course I’ve got grave concerns and that’s one of the reasons I’m doing this is because I think we need — look, the person who’s been able to win the presidency since the age of television has had one thing in common. They’ve been the best communicator in the race. We need someone like a Rush Limbaugh who can communicate and can touch the soul of Americans and can reach out across the radio and television and paint a vision that helps drop those scales, that can remind people what a great country we are and that it’s a great country because we believe in free people and the ability of free people to provide for themselves, their family, their community, and the God they love. That’s what America is about, and we can with get back to that. We need to begin to believe in ourselves instead of the having someone tell us that they need to believe in him, the anointed one to provide for them.

Limbaugh: Rick, thanks for your time. Your passion is infectious. It really is.

And there you have it.  Santorum went on Limbaugh’s show to promote…  Limbaugh.  Even he is too embarrassed to endorse himself, and for good reason.  Not for nothing did Pennsylvania voters turn his useless, cuckoo corpus out of the Senate, along with his stillborn fetus in a jar that he carried around in his minivan, and not for nothing did he get his richly earned Google Problem.  The guy is stupid and crazy enough, but Republicans hate him anyway.  Go figure.

I guess Obama can be as lame, ineffective, and as big of a sellout as he wants, and get away with it.  Kind of like being, as Jon Stewart put it, the thinnest kid at fat camp.

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.

Such casual, almost offhand, authoritarianism, coming from those in power fails to elicit much more than a yawn these days, but hearing such boldly contemptuous dismissals of plain facts all the fucking time, from what occasionally pretends to be our FOURTH ESTATE, what remains of the nominal guardians we have left against overreaching power, is really starting to drive me up the wall.  We know they’re all whores, but do they have to perform their craft in Macy’s  window?  The whole reason we have porn is so that no one ever has to see these people doing whatever it is they do.  I really wish guys like Zucker would have the decency, if not the humility, to respect this boundary. 

This disturbing trend of the media joining hands with the government and its bloated parasites in business against the general public has finally gotten to the point where they don’t even try to hide it anymore, not unlike dogs in the yard.  These hookers don’t need no stinkin’ doorway.  Our media stars and their craven, mercenary overlords, having long ago ceased reporting on anything, preferring to write what they’ve been told between beauty appointments,  do have time while the color is processing to blackberry away, enforcing the meme of the day, often quite virulently, against their supposed colleagues.  It’s Miss Manners meets Mean Girls, and it’s frankly so cringingly pathetic and sad, that Jeff Zucker, were he a real person rather than just another daintily cosseted gilded age sociopath, would be ashamed to appear in public, let alone  loudly and proudly running around spewing such astonishingly ignorant and arrogant hogwash.

It really is nice to know what a supposed “News” executive thinks of the art, much less constitutional purpose, of a free press, and his vocal, outright horror and disgust at witnessing such a vulgar and impermissible thing in practice.  

I wonder what his bonus was.