GOP paddle store

I think tonight would be a good time to sit back and reflect.  Let's take a deep breath and size up our surroundings coming into this election.  Things are starting to get very interesting here, but there's one thing in particular that I'll be watching in the weeks ahead, and that's the growing conflict between the GOP's Pet Gays and the Party's loyal base of evangelical Christians.

The GOP is in full rout.  I think that's abundantly clear to anyone who's paying attention.  They are under seige from every side and from within.  And frankly, I love the smell of frightened, desperate Reich Wingers in the morning.  It smells like…victory.

What's interesting to me, and what I talked about for a bit on The Young Turks this morning is that the Republican Party is now being forced to make a profound and potentially life-changing choice.  They're going to have to own up to their Dirty Little Secret Number One, and that's the fact that they have thousands of token gays ranged all the way up through the highest ranks of the party infrastructure.  The loftiest positions of power in the Party are occupied by gay Republican operatives.  Ken Mehlman, anyone?  Hello? 

The Mark Foley scandal appears to be the worst thing that's happened to gay Republicans since CBS cancelled Martha Stewart's version of "The Apprentice".  La Cage Aux Foley has alerted the Talibangelicals to the fact that their party of choice is crawling with teh gays.  And Daddy Dobson and his minions are NOT HAPPY about that.

Here's oily, snake-handling preacherman Donald Wildmon on the topic of gay Republicans:

Moreover, Wildmon calls on the Republican Party leadership to promptly purge the "subversive" gay staffers.

"They oughtta fire every one of 'em," Wildmon told me in his trademark Mississippi drawl. "I don't care if they're heterosexual or homosexual or whatever they are. If you've got that going on, that subverts the will of the people; that subverts the voters. That is subversive activity. There should be no organization among staffers in Washington of that nature, and if they find out that they're there and they're a member, they oughtta be dismissed el pronto."

Okay, Marryin' Sam, hang on jest a cotton-pickin' minute, there.  A "gay staffer" kind of can't be "heterosexual or homosexual or whatever they are".  I  mean, that's the definition.  The word "gay" kind of implies "non-heterosexual".  But of course, Reverend, I understand that this might be a little too much nuance for a sheep-porking hillbilly like you.

It looks like it's going to come down to this:  The religious extremists of the Reich Wing are agitating for the removal of all homosexuals from the Repugnican halls of power.  The power-loving "Velvet Mafia" in the GOP want to leave their positions high atop the Republican heirarchy about like they want to eat broken glass.  Who will win the battle for the "soul" (*cough!*) of the GOP?  (Right, okay, everyone knows that Republicans have no soul, but for the sake of argument, can we just let that statement ride?)

According to this piece by Sidney Blumenthal in the Guardian, the migration of Rapture-baiters away from Teh Gay Old Party may already have begun: 

As Christians battle Sodomites under the crashing Republican big tent, several high-wire acts have fallen to earth. Last week Bob Ney, of Ohio, pleaded guilty to bribery, caught in the web of Republican super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff. This week the wacky Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, renowned for his personal hunt for WMD in Iraq, came under investigation for corrupt practices; the FBI has also raided his lobbyist daughter.

At the White House Karl Rove's assistant, Susan Ralston – formerly Abramoff's assistant – resigned for facilitating favours for and from Rove and others, including Ken Mehlman, Republican national committee chairman. This week another Republican congressman, John Doolittle of California, announced he was turning cooperative witness in the federal investigation.

The concatenation of scandals is shattering the last shards of "revolution". "Reform" has metastasised into the Abramoff scandal, "culture war" into the Foley cover-up. And Hastert has transmuted from omnipotent Brezhnev into ghostly Chernenko, presiding over the final decrepit stage.

Nice.  Guy's got a real way with words, doesn't he?   

But really, I can't think of two groups I would rather see go head-to-head for some seriously brutal, bloody, ball-busting political combat than the Talibangelicals and the denizens of Uncle Tom's Closet.  Every casualty of that war is a victory for progressives.  I mean, think about it, as Frank Rich wrote on Sunday:

Cultural conservatives who fell for the G.O.P.’s pious propaganda now look like dupes. Tonight on “60 Minutes,” David Kuo, a former top official in the administration’s faith-based initiatives program, is scheduled to discuss his new book recounting how evangelical supporters were privately ridiculed as “nuts” in the White House. If they have any self-respect, they’ll exact their own revenge.

We must hope as well that this crisis will lead to a repudiation of the ritual targeting of gay people for sport at the top levels of the Republican leadership in and out of the White House. 

Right.  We'll see about that, Frank.  The Christ, Inc. crowd aren't known for their penetrating political insight.  Already, we're hearing that their reaction to David Kuo's book is to demonize and attack Kuo rather than face up to the truth that they've been done over by the Republicans.

We should also bear in mind that a lot of these Gay Republicans are among their party's most effective operators at opposition research and the kind of dirty dealings that have helped the GOP retain their choke-hold on the government since 1994.  Do James Dobson, Tony Perkins, Fred Phelps, and Donald Wildmon really want these people targeting them for elimination?  When Matt Drudge is posting GOP talking points before Ken Mehlman has even thought them up, and when so much of the Reich Wing Stink Machine seems to be staffed and controlled by the "Velvet Mafia", would you want to be a fundamentalist preacher with skeletons in your closet?

I have to say, though,  the resulting carnage could end up being absolutely delightful.  Every body that falls in this field of combat is an advantage to our side.  Ultimately, we want the Republican party so broken and fragmented that Grover Norquist could drown it in the bathtub.

And it certainly should make for some interesting political theatrics between now and the election.  Pass the popcorn, y'all!  I wouldn't miss this showdown for the world!

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