Question of the Day

Forgive me for the long intro, but I'll get to the question, I promise...

GOP forced off issues it wants to run on—“Republican House members, scattered across the USA for their first week of full-time campaigning, want to talk to voters about the reasons they believe they should be re-elected. Instead, they are dealing with issues they would prefer to avoid.”

Hahahahahahaha! Yeah, instead of holding themselves out as the party of moral values who are the only people fit to keep us safe, while demonizing liberals for being morally bankrupt and incapable of protecting Americans, they’re being slapped silly by the decidedly inconvenient reality that their party is chock full of pervs and they can’t even protect teenagers from themselves.

You know, I totally understand the sentiment that it’s frustrating that a sex scandal is finally the thing that might bring down the GOP juggernaut, especially when Bush is busily undermining the Constitution and revelations are springing forth left and right that the boobs he calls a cabinet were warned about 9/11 and did fuck-all to stop it, but let me just suggest an alternative way to regard this mess: Tell anyone who’ll listen, especially people who are finally listening for the first time, that it’s perfectly indicative of everything that’s wrong with the GOP.

Hollow Moralizing: Whether it’s Bill “The Book of Virtues” Bennett losing millions of dollars in Vegas casinos or Newt “Dump Wife #1 while in the hospital for cancer treatment; Dump Wife #2 over the phone on Mothers’ Day” Gingrich lecturing on ethics, the GOP is rife with some of the most odious turds in America—and some of them far worse than those two shitsacks. To wit: pedophiles, more pedophiles, yet more pedophiles, lots and lots of pedophiles, wife-rapers, mule-fuckers, falafel-creeps, closet cases, gay hookers, Hookergate, dirty novelists, and on and on and on. Meanwhile, they’re also the party that uses marriage and reproductive rights as wedge issues, constantly sticks their noses into our crotches and tries to legislate what’s going on down there, and utters phrases like “the sanctity of marriage,” “family values,” and “moral majority” without a trace of irony. Doctor, heal thyself—and in the meantime, shut the fuck up about what’s going on in my bloody bedroom between consenting adults. In fact, shut up about it forever.

Hypocrisy: This issue, like so many others, underlines the rank hypocrisy flaunted by the GOP on a continual basis. From a Commander in Chief who ignored a Presidential Daily Briefing entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside US” and now invokes the disaster of September 11th he didn’t move a muscle to avoid as frequently as I say “fuck,” to a “Culture of Life” platform that includes sending our troops to die in an unnecessary war predicated on manipulated intelligence, the GOP is nothing but a bunch of sorry, useless hypocrites who wouldn’t know integrity if it was delivered to their front door like a phone-ordered rent boy.

Lack of Ethics: Sending “overly friendly” emails to underage pages is just fine and dandy with the GOP—so long as you’re discreet. Just like keeping Democrats out of committee meetings, taking hand-outs from lobbyists, lying to the public, letting energy companies write our national energy policy, dressing up corporate hand-outs as sound policy, deliberately misrepresenting who will benefit most from tax cuts, and all the rest of it.

Cover-Ups: The Plame outing, the Downing Street Memos, warnings about terrorist attacks, Katrina…take your pick. The GOP is better at nothing than CYA. No one knew anything, it’s not their responsibility, don’t play the blame game. They take accountability for nothing, scapegoat, obfuscate, misdirect, refuse to comply with FOIA requests, lie. Indeed, more crimes have probably been committed by this administration and the current GOP leadership in trying to cover-up non-criminal mistakes than we can even begin to contemplate.

Self-protection above all else: Ask Richard Clarke, Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame, Christine Todd Whitman, any one of the number of government whistle-blowers who have been professionally exiled, the soldiers who are “staying the course” in spite of no chance of “winning” in Iraq to justify a colossal foreign policy failure, the Congressional pages harassed by Mark Foley, and every other American citizen who has seen the GOP’s unquenchable thirst for power trump our safety. They don’t give a good plopper about what’s best for America; they only care about what’s best for them—and if that means ruining the career of someone working on weapons proliferation in the Middle East or not investigating a predatory Congressman of their own party, they’re going to do it.

Yeah, it would be swell if the GOP went down because they care as much about habeas corpus as my cats do about existentialist philosophy, but it’s not so bad that they’re going down for this. It is, after all, a flawless example of how truly, dreadfully rotten to the very core that stinking wreck of a party really is.

Now, tell me: What else did I forget? I'm sure there are plenty of other woeful traits of the ridiculously corrupt GOP of which this scandal is exemplary. So, let's have it, Shakers. Complete my list.