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[image courtesy Rising Hegemon After Dark's 2007 "Character Counts" Calendar] 

for the schadenfreudelicious week ending 11/4/06:

kakistocracy [kak-uh-stok-ruh-see]: government by the worst persons; a form of government in which the worst persons are in power

Welcome to Kakistan, where Orwellian doublespeak and moral hypocrisy are the lingua franca. Have you slipped up and created a massive failure of a defense policy? Relax and enjoy, while you cleave meiotically to your SecDef and blame the generals he leads for the mistakes.  Are you — and I'm beginning to suspect there is no other kind of Republican — a self-hating, closeted homosexual? In Kakistan, you can bray louder than Neil Horsley's ravished mule about the immorality of gay marriage.  Are you the First Lady, blessed with the fashion sense of Mamie Eisenhower on lithium, a former librarian who crusades for that book-larnin'?  Get out there and testify, sister, about the sins of free speech! Are you a bloated, bilious (and flaccid) drug addict with unfettered access to a microphone?  In Kakistan, there's nothing wrong with your verbally and physically mocking a man with a devastating, degenerative disease because he has the gall to campaign with politicians who back stem-cell research. 

Yes, this is the great nation of Kakistan, home to such luminaries as Ann Coulter, the bowsprit of the wingnut ship of fools, the shrieking harpy with a law degree who doesn't see anything wrong with committing voter fraud.  Where Vietnam veteran John Kerry is forced to apologize to the troops for an obviously botched joke, yet where President AWOL can mock dead soldiers with his tres amusant "Where's the WMDs At?" sketch. Where secrecy, it seems, applies only to documentation that might expose the Administration to, say, a war crimes tribunal, but information on how to build a nuclear bomb is made accessible on the Internets for Republican political gain.

You know, when I was but a spudette, I had a book called My Little Golden Book on Manners. To make me laugh (and providing me with a primer on satire in the process), my mother would read to me the opposite of what appeared on the printed page.  She translated "Always serve your guests before you serve yourself " into "make your guests get it themselves." "If you have a new friend who doesn't know everyone, introduce them" became "Ignore your new friend at parties…"  You get the picture.

Parody, it seems, was an excellent teaching aide. I grew up to be a fairly well-balanced adult (albeit one who swears like a longshoreman) with a healthy sense of moral clarity. If only the Republicans had a mother like mine.  But then again, I suppose they wouldn't have grown up to be Republicans.

Onward. 

Hell, if we could've foreseen that so many of these simon-pure Republicans would experience a Perseid meteor shower of moral scandals one week before the mid-term elections, attaturk and I would've considered holding off on releasing the 2007 GOP "Character Counts" monthly calendar, and done one of those desktop Scandal-a-Day ones, instead.

James Wolcott is writing up a storm this week, and Pastor's Ted's Excrement Adventure has him in rare form: 

I wonder if the toothy founder of the New Life Church and president of the National Association of Evangelicals, the mesmerizing Ted Haggard, fell under the spell of trade, the pagan rhythm of tea bagging beating like a tom tom on his brow. I wonder, not because I'm prurient, but because the mysterious currents of human nature fascinate me so. And because it confirms my suspicion that all Republican men are privately, passionately, exceedingly gay. According to this exciting morsel, Haggard took part in weekly conference calls with President Bush–"he and the president like to joke that the only thing they disagree on is what truck to drive."

TBogg notes that if you're going to form your judgments on people based on whether or not they trigger your gaydar, then there are quite a few alleged hets in Washington who might require scanning.

S.Z. at World O' Crap notes:

I think we can see how we’ve misjudged Pastor Ted: he wasn’t having a three-year affair with a male prostitute, he was just wrestling with temptation.

Roy Edroso thinks David Frum's comparison between Ted "No Happy Ending" Haggard's fate with that of Mark "Is Your Mom in the Room?" Foley is TEH STUPID!  Well, there's really no arguing with that. 

And yes, of course The General weighs in.  Being 100% heterosexual, you know. 

The Neocons think we've got it all wrong.  uggabugga's Quiddity performs the now-routine forehead smack in disbelief. And Glenn Greenwald notes that maybe blaming the Iraqis for the Brobdingnagian failure of a war isn't exactly a lucid response.

The Rude Pundit thinks we've entered into the world of plausible deniability. More like implausible deniability, at this point. And Barkley at MaxSpeak notes that we can add yet another (more truthful) reason for our stay in Iraq.

Ahhhhh.  The week never feels complete without an episode of The Poor Man's "Keyboard Kommandos."

Okay, a three-fer from the boys at Sadly, No!, simply because they were all so fucking funny that I couldn't choose which one was the best: (1) Mann Coulter — prison bitch, (2) the smooth, homoerotic tones of Town Hall, or (3) for sheer style points alone, the fact that Gavin M. refers to the sniveling Adam Yoshida as a "hurtling fruit cart."

The Carpetbagger Report tackles the painfully predictable spin the Administration put on its "strategeric" release of classified nuclear documents on the Web.

Let the finger-pointing commence!  King of Zembla's Simbaud reviews the upcoming Vanity Fair article about Richard Perle. 

Now that's planning!  Carl at Simply Left Behind fixes the Republicans' typo:  They're the Party of Death.

As per usual, Norbiz supplies the coffee spit-take with his version of the Oxycontin Kid/Preznit MethMouth interview. 

And if they can't find an ex-Marine law student to put in a chokehold, Tom Tomorrow notes, the Republicans can always look to their superheroes for protection.

Related posts:

  1. Politics With a Human Face
  2. Wanting to attend the funeral with Nikita
  3. Late Night: “Git off, Pa, Yer Crushin’ Mah Marlboros!”
  4. Christian Republican Asks: “Are There No Workhouses?!”
  5. Dr. Tiller, FACE, and the Failure of the Bush DOJ to Enforce the Law