Steele Magnolias

The hilarious thing about Ben Stein's column is not that Stein is tired of being played for a sucka donor for Michael Steele's private jets and donut-bumping bondage-club excursions, but his wistful reminiscences of what his party "is" or "was":

But we also give because we have a lingering belief (and a hope) that the GOP is the party of small town, all-American virtues and verities.

Dude, fucking seriously? Did Stein move out of Hollywood at some point, or did I miss it? Nope, he mentions in the column that the Voyeur club is not far from where he lives. This is the sort of happy horseshit Bobo Brooks shovels with a brainless grin -- cushy, pampered suburbanites peddling long-lost dreams of bucolic villages where they themselves wouldn't live in a million years.

More hilarious than that is the idea that either party gives two shits about small towns or their "values", which are every bit as decadent as a Tarantino gutbuster, once you've lived in one long enough to know everyone's shit. Small-town America is unemployed, alcoholic, dealing and doing meth on the side, fucking each other's ex-wives. There's not much else to do, really.

But the Corporate Party, of which both Republicans and Democrats are members, has done its level best to eviscerate small-town America, the idealized one and the actual ones alike. They've fucked over small-towns every chance they've gotten, undermined their tax base and infrastructre with enormous tax deferments -- when they can be convinced to stay in the country, that is. Everything else has been outsourced, apparently with the goal the we'll all just sell each other five-dollar cups of coffee.

Steele's big crime is that he's just been a lot less circumspect about the type of organization he leads than his peers and donors would prefer. He may be counting on the GOP's seeming reluctance to shit-can one of their few non-white players, but that just shows how little he really knows his party, and the sort they cater to. The Republican party is much more concerned with dog-whistling neo-confederates and the like than with preserving a veneer of political correctness.