Just when you thought you'd reached the ground floor in the well of American self-destruction, you find out once again that that pit is absolutely bottomless.
Now that primary season is almost over, the far-right tea party movement has scored impressive victories over the far-right establishment in a slew of Republican primaries. I've always said that the regressive movement would end up eating its young, and now it is.
The new batch of Republican monsters includes a candidate - now the official Republican nominee for the United States Senate from Delaware, mind you - who has staked out a tough position against - no, I'm not kidding here - masturbation.
Christine O'Donnell once averred that "The Bible says that lust in your heart is committing adultery. So you can't masturbate without lust."
And why the hell not? Surely the reason that our country has so rapidly fallen into decline is that god is punishing America because so many of us are jerking off all the time.
You know who you are.
Oh, and did you hear that she was once a witch? That she believes that scientists have bred mice-men with human brains? That she has no job? And that - despite running on a platform of cleaning up Washington's fiscal disaster - she has a train wreck for a record of her personal finances?
I'm not kidding. Remember way back when - like, you know, yesterday - when you would have accused me of bad comedy writing for making such things up? Guess what? None of these are.
America, this is you, 2010. Kinda makes you pine for the good ol' days of the thirteenth century, doesn't it?
Here in New York the nominee is a bazillionaire who sends out racist and pornographic email to people. Hah-hah. Love that kind of real working man's humor, don't you? After being rejected by the Republican party initially, Carl Paladino hired Richard Nixon's political hit man to run his campaign, injected millions of his own money to fund it, and trounced the hapless establishment candidate, Rick Lazio, who just couldn't get extreme enough to win, whore himself as he might, and as he readily did.
The Christian Science Monitor notes that, "Paladino, who espouses family values, has a daughter with a former employee who is not his wife." It is also noted of this great and incendiary paragon of small government that, "As a landlord, he made a lot of money renting space to the state in Albany and using state tax incentives for his real estate empire."
Similarly, Paladino has compared labor unions to pigs, and, according to the Huffington Post, "said he would transform some New York prisons into dormitories for welfare recipients, where they could work in state-sponsored jobs, get employment training and take lessons in 'personal hygiene'."
Did I mention that his father was employed by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression? Perhaps if Franklin Roosevelt had incarcerated pere Paladino and instructed him in better hygiene - instead of wasting taxpayer money to create a monstrously big government in remote Washington, DC that continually oppressed the people with stupid wasteful programs that like, oh, you know, kept starving Americans alive - we in New York wouldn't be stuck with the fruit of his loins assaulting our senses today.
Whatever. I mean, what's the point of having Republicans if it's not gonna be all about hypocrisy and twisted sexual obsession, anyhow?
Meanwhile, America's thirty year March to the Sea goes on unabated. It is the most astonishing thing, if you think about it. Of course "thinking" and "America" are increasingly becoming words that can no longer be smashed into the same sentence anymore, even with the use of advanced new weaponry the Pentagon is producing. But indulge me for the moment.
What has happened to this country is that the United States - which was holding a pretty goddam good winning hand, thank you very much, by the middle of the twentieth century - started following (what were inaccurately labeled) conservative politicians and policies in the 1980s, and things got a lot worse. Then we followed even more regressive idiots this last decade, and things got a whole lot worse yet.
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