For years the American conservative movement pandered to a Christian Right they mocked in private to leverage election victories. Trust me, I heard plenty of Republican consultants and officeholders refer to them privately as “the crazies” in the ’80s and ’90s. Now the religious zealots are leading the GOP around by the nose.

So here comes “Culture Wars, The Sequel,”

We proudly consider ourselves children of the Enlightenment. But we are not so quick to recognize that other parent, the Inquisition. Any attempt to disown it, however, only makes it stronger and more dangerous.

While the gay community have been busy with other matters, members of the religious right are perpetrating a slow but consistent march to a claim that acceptance of homosexuality will soon lead to the acceptance of pedophilia.

The key here is that these folks are not saying that pedophilia and homosexuality are connected, but rather are using a faulty “slippery slope” argument, i.e. – “just like the gay community is receiving more acceptance, pretty soon the pedophiles will be getting more acceptance.”

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 led Enlightenment thinkers to reject the idea that natural disasters have a moral dimension, representing punishment for personal moral failings. Rick Perry leads the charge of the hordes who reject that idea.

Reading the news today is like watching a bad disaster movie. As you shout at the screen for the characters not to open the hatch that will flood the ship, they open the hatch.

The default crisis was sort of like this, with one big difference. A disaster movie “works” because the audience knows something the characters don’t: there’s death behind that hatch. That’s not true of the default drama.

Continuing on a theme started over at my home base, let’s talk some about this pervasive belief that being a total jerkoff is automatically hilarious because it’s offensive and “un-PC” and other such nonsense.

It’s a shocking historical juxtaposition. The pro-democracy movement known as the Arab Spring is in significant part a consequence of rising literacy and declining birth rates in the Mideast. Meanwhile, in the U.S., the Right is mounting a direct assault on education and a renewed war on contraception. This ought to tell us something.

We were idling away the evening on the balcony, drinking wine and talking about everything from the Keith Richards book to Medicare cuts. Our neighbors – she a world class blues singer; he an accomplished painter, musician and entertaining raconteur – were just paying a warm, old-American style social call.

But when I happened to mention that many today consider our generation, the Sixties generation, a failure, I set the singer’s eyes ablaze and we took off on a lively historical survey of the last few decades.

If Orwell hadn’t been writing so early in the age of television, he undoubtedly would have foreseen something like this. In the meantime, if Rupert Murdoch ever sets up a Fox children’s cartoon network (he hasn’t already, has he?), he’ll have some core programming ready to go.

Poopy Pat has been spreading his poop for over forty years, but he’s still mean to people who are different from him. I’m usually a lot less cranky after a big poop, so I don’t know why Poopy Pat is still so mean after all this poop. My Mommy tells me that everyone is different, and that’s what makes us special. Poopy Pat thinks different is bad instead of special. That’s really sad when you think about it.