Hanging By A Fred

It's the end of an era, folks.

Even before he left the race Thompson made it clear he would not be terribly disappointed with a loss.

Apparently the feeling was mutual, though given the current chaos of what's left of Ol' Fred's Party, it's hard to tell exactly what these people are thinking (if anything) at this point. The people seem to think they want them some Saint John (Poor Ol' Straight Talk) McCain, which means it's now up to the rented scriveners to convince the rubes that they really want Romney's corporate sheen over POST's faux-populist rambunctions. Either that or they start building up their arsenal of rhetorical IEDs with which to sabotage whichever Democrat is lucky enough to be selected to clean up Fredo's messes.

In any case, it may behoove the green-eyeshade brigade to follow the donations to the Friends of Fred Fund, just on the off chance that a lifelong lobbyist and lawyer might have figgered that a guy could trade on his name recognition and rake in a few mil spending a couple months on the road crackin' wise 'n' havin' folks pull his finger. Even factoring in the countless Rotary speeches featuring addled codgers and Aunt Bea's wax-bean casserole, it's not a bad payday.

Right Said Fred

This is precisely the sort of tedious horse-race coverage sensible people should deplore:

Fred Thompson came out on top in Wednesday's debate among the Republican presidential candidates in Iowa. Of all the candidates, he did himself the most good.

Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney also scored well. They avoided any last-minute derailments of their front-running candidacies in Iowa and shored up the support they've built.

So let me get this straight -- a candidate who has basically fallen off the radar, because he's decided to play this like a job he doesn't want to appear to want too much, topped the two prospective front-runners? Well, no, not exactly. It's just that Fred showed a pulse for one night, which is more than he's done in the past six weeks. Lowering expectations always helps with this crowd.

So what exactly did the esteemed lobbyist from Hollyweird say that rejuvenated his malingering excuse for a candidacy?

He had several high points. One of them came when he flatly refused to play the "raise your hand" game in answering a question about global warming. Another came when he said the biggest problem facing education was the National Education Association. (Bashing teacher unions is always popular with Republican audiences.)

Thompson also gets credit for being a stand-up guy willing to take on entitlement programs that threaten to bankrupt the country if left unchanged. He made it clear that wealthy, older Americans could no longer expect full Medicare benefits if he's elected. Thompson also teased Romney about his wealth and how the former Massachusetts governor is "getting to be a pretty good actor."

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold up a second there, hoss. Talk about your loaded euphemisms, the "entitlement programs that threaten to bankrupt the country if left unchanged". There are plenty such entitlement programs that will do that if permitted to fester, starting with our catastrophic foreign policy. How many more bungled invasions do you think we can stand? I'm sure Fred has a folksy metaphor to answer with, but I don't really care how many ticks his uncle's bloodhound had, sorry.

But hey, at least he's letting those elderly parasites know exactly where he stands on things, so they have no excuse if they fall for his schtick. (Of course, Fred's needs are well-met, thanks to those same taxpayers who are expected to throw away what safety net they might have.) And as for teasing Richie Rich about being rich, well, pot meet kettle. Fred may not be worth Willard's reputed $200 mil+, but he's not going broke either. Nothing worse than one rich asshole trying to play the class warfare card with a richer asshole.

The biggest problem with the debate was that it wasn't really a debate. Candidates got almost no opportunity to grill one another. Often they ran out of time and were cut off just as they started to probe an opponent.

The event would have been more nourishing had the format allowed for more back-and-forth.

Sure, and if your aunt had balls, she'd be your uncle. "Nourishing", that's freakin' hilarious. We're talking about a set of candidates -- and an audience -- that still happily supports this failure of an administration. These people are so malnourished, I almost feel like I should try to save them for only pennies a day, and they can write me heartwarming letters about the new well in their village.

As much of a dog-and-phony show as these things are, at least this wasn't cluttered with a preening celebrojournomoderator. The last thing any of us needed was Tweety Matthews spanking his beleaguered monkey behind the podium over how tall Fred is. In the meantime, I still assume that, given the sheer incompetence, buffoonery, and baggage of the rest of the field (and seriously, what the fuck is wrong with Alan Keyes?), Romney will get the nomination. He's got the money, the telegenic demeanor, and he seems the least certifiable, which is saying something with this lot.

The question is, who gets Romney's nod for veep? I think he'll throw a bone to the CPAC losers, it's just a matter of to what degree. Of his competitors, I could see McCain getting pulled on to a ticket, despite his age. Beyond that, it all depends on how cray-zay they want to get.

The Hunt for Fred October

Eugene Robinson seems to be taking a pretty accurate pulse of Senator Leghorn's lackluster performance in the debate earlier this week.

Yes, I'm focusing on style rather than substance. Thompson's supporters might think that's unfair, since he was arguably less vague on economic issues -- the intended focus of the debate -- than his major competitors. He offered a specific fix for Social Security, for example, saying he would index benefits to prices rather than wages. The others simply promised to make everything better by growing the economy, which apparently means eliminating all taxation.

But style, or the promise of style, is the only reason Thompson has been able to credibly enter the race so late in the game. If all that Republican primary voters wanted was a reliable social conservative, they could vote for Mike Huckabee, Sam Brownback, Duncan Hunter or Tom Tancredo, none of whom is tainted by long association with evil Hollywood. Thompson's potential appeal to the party is that he can do that "District Attorney Arthur Branch" thing and make people believe in his wisdom and authority.

Eh, yes and no. Thompson's appeal was always wildly overestimated, I think, but he has sufficient name recognition that it tends to cloud what the collective perception of his viability is. What it really is is that the authoritarian cultists, who have clung to Bush like the flimsy reed that he is, are finally starting to figure out a couple things.

One is that Bush is not -- was never -- the daddy figure they craved; he simply enjoyed playing dress-up and telling the same hackneyed anecdotes over and over again. Another is that their current prospects consist of a corrupt Count Chocula lookalike who sings the same note and whose own kids can't stand him; a war hero whose declining fortunes track his precipitous fall from straight-talkin' maverick to crazy uncle; a rich guy whose religious mythos read like a pioneer version of Scientology; and an assortment of single-issue clowns who would carry about a two-district radius in a national election. Really, Romney's only viability is his sheer wealth, which leaves Mike Huckabee as their most palatable candidate.

It makes sense they'd place all their hopes on Fred Thompson, and it makes sense that he'd disappoint at least the first time out. I would really keep an eye on how the narrative arc develops in the commentariat after upcoming debates; they are just lazy and unimaginative enough to foist some retarded Comeback Kid story arc on us, while drooling over how tall he is. Saves them from talking about the inescapable fact that Thompson simply promises more of the same, but with more height and better oration.

With or without Thompson, this thing should be a blowout for the Democrats, not that they'd know what to do with it. They can't even disempower a preening twat like Lieberman; what the fuck are they going to do with five more Senate seats and a preznit whose first order of the day is to show the rest of the world what they can't even forcefully demonstrate to the minority-party droogs across the aisle from them -- that they're tough and won't take shit from no tinhorn dicktaters 'n' such.

That would still be better than getting stuck with a man of Thompson's phlegmatic indifference, not to mention the rest of that bad lot. But let's not pretend that a solution is at hand, that a Preznit Hillary would automatically reverse the dangerous unitary executive trends the Cheney junta has initiated. Everybody thinks they could wield more power with the greatest of wisdom. Indeed, a Democratic administration would be less likely to use such power to harass internal dissidents and other such enemies of the state, not to mention kidnapping nationals and furriners and spiriting them off to some hellhole where either the PMCs do the wet work, or the Syrians or Egyptians or whoever just break out the pliers and get serious. But it's like making "not a drunk-driving child-molester" the only job requirement for a school bus driver.

But again, that's not a solution, that's not a guaranteed reversal of potentially catastrophic trends. It's just a temporary dialing down of the heat, at a point in time where Republicans probably figure they could use a break anyway to regroup while the noise machine keeps the victors on defense. Just let the Dems take some heat for a few years while they try to fix Junior's fuck-ups, and come back with a smooth Jeb! run in '12.

And of course, just because it should be a blowout next year doesn't mean it will be, not with gutless incrementalism and focus-grouped tough-guy ploys being the likely order of the day in the eventual Democratic nominee's playbook. I recall this feeling of inevitability back in 2000 when, despite "Clenis fatigue", despite the media mean girlz snotty campaign on Gore and his earth tones, despite the Naderistas' god-awful nerve at thinking that they had a right to be heard in the discussion -- despite all that and more, it was supposed to be a slam-dunk for an intelligent, loyal career politican over a wet-behind-the-ears reformed cokehead and drunk black-sheep son of a one-term preznit, an incompetent speaker with a frat-boy mean streak, whose most notable tasks up to that point had been trading Sammy Sosa for a sack of magic beans and mocking a woman whom he was about to execute.

But something funny happened along the way then, and beyond the media bullshit, beyond the Naderistas, all that, a sizable bloc of reg'lar 'merkins decided that the election was a choice between Eddie Haskell and a drinkin' buddy who had quit drinkin'.

Getting a Republican elected president in 2008 is definitely going to require suspension of disbelief.

emphasis in original

Mm-hm. Heard that one before. Mencken only scratched the surface when it came to chronicling the willful stupidity of the electorate. The modern Republican party figured out how to commodify it. Good teams don't just squeak past bad teams 21-20, they pound the shit out of them, 41-3. If 2000 didn't teach us something significant about "suspension of disbelief" and all, nothing will.

I think Thompson's a joke too, and I don't see him making it through or even deep into the primaries, but I also do not take for granted that there aren't just enough people to vote for him or any other cartoon character just out of sheer spite, if nothing else. At this point, that's all they've got, but they've already proven that sometimes it's enough.

Can't Get You Out of My Fred

D. Sidhe, in this comment at TBogg's, provides as astute an explanation for the appeal of Fred Thompson as I have heard or read anywhere:

He's the perfect candidate for K-Lo. He tells her everything's fine, and that's what she wants to believe anyway. I was pondering this earlier and it occurs to me that Fred is handling this campaign as though America has asked him if this dress makes us look fat. "No, honey, you look great, I still love you. The girls at the office are just jealous of how pretty you are. Hey, let's go have ice cream, whaddaya say?"

I know from my own relationship that this is a winning strategy from day to day, but over the long term it's a disaster. But all Fred has to do is get people to vote for him once.

That seems to be pretty much it, especially when you peruse the hostile, vituperative (as Dean Broder might say, when he's not busy transcribing the NRCC's sales pitch) nature of Thompson's brand of nutroots supporters. Once you get past the heavily worn rhetoric and straw-man arguments, it all boils down to everyone else being wrong and out to get us for no good reason at all. It makes sense that they would jump through hoops and lick the spaces where their own nuts used to be, just for the opportunity to pimp (much less vote) for someone who affirms those fantasies.

As for Thompson himself, I still stand by all my previous prognostications, that he'll hang in just long enough to generate some cash, and then duck out abruptly. Originally my over/under date for that probably would have been between Thanksgiving and the end of the year, but I can actually see him riding it to the first or second primary. The competition is certainly weak enough to give him some added longevity, but it's still hard to imagine a more temperamentally ill-suited person for the rigors of campaigning, much less occupying office.

(Intellectually, you could obviously say the same about Bush, though Bush's stupidity is his strength here -- Thompson seems intelligent enough to have genuine disdain for the pud-pounding nonsense of whistle-stop campaigning and sound-bite regurgitating, where Bush clearly enjoys any and all opportunities to have his ego stroked or to play dress-up, all the while actin' like it don't make no never mind diff'rence anyhoo, he'd jes' rather be a-chasin' tumbleweeds.)

From all the reportage I've read so far on tonight's "debate", it seems a predictably dismal affair, a bunch of armchair tough-guys lobbing homilies and bromides as if they were spitballers from the Casey Stengel era. If you're into empty qual-flashing -- and your modern conservatard is certainly that -- then you may have a tough time eeny-meeny-miney-moeing your way through this collection of fartknockers.

But it's time someone told the truth, girlfriend, however diplomatically -- that dress has shrunk and faded, and your ass is looking like two hundred pounds of chewed bubble gum. It doesn't hurt to change once in a while, maybe even shower first. It's the people who actually care about you who tell you the truth; if you want your fake friends who tell you what you think you want to hear, you know where to find them.

One Flew Over the Pundits' Nest

Why are these chumps allowed to drive our political narrative?

Todd and Simon are so locked into the same narrative here that both of them actually use the same formulation -- that all Thompson has to do is not "drool" for them to say he defied expectations.

Some follow-up on that might even be in order -- Todd's and Simon's respective wordings are eerily similar. I mean, Thompson does, for all his size and perceived gravitas, also project a vibe of "withered coot", but for two hacks to latch on to the exact same Grampa Simpson meme simultaneously is passing strange. At the very least, it says more about them than it does about Thompson.

I think that what's most irritating about these smug little fuckers is the way they blithely whistle past their own tautological feedback loop. They create the spin on candidates; they are not the helpless passengers they portray themselves as. They helped Bush in 2000 with the soft bigotry of their lowered expectations, while the bar was heightened on Gore. They smeared Howard Dean in 2004, because his intense nutroots support threatened to seriously cut their lobotomized horse-race bullshit right out of the loop.

Kerry they damaged simply by being gulled into stenographing the Swift Boat smears just long enough to kill his momentum. God forbid they should find respectable work. Instead they pretend that the dumb people are smart, and the smart people are assholes. Why? Because that's how they perceive the vaunted heartland -- as a bunch of inbred yahoos who don't cotton much to no one with a fancy triple-digit eye-kew.

And as long as they keep falling for George Bush's schtick, or Fred Thompson's happy horseshit, maybe there's some degree of truth there. Maybe they could do some reportage on why that is, why people continue to vote against themselves just because a lifelong lawyer/lobbyist/actor slaps on a flannel shirt and rents hisself a pick-em-up truck and a driver for the hunnerd-yard drive from the nearest parking lot to Cooter's Stump.

But that's beside the point here. The problem is that these would-be prognosticators think of this in terms of narrative, rather than fact. What does Thompson say at these speeches; what is the substance of it? Well, we never hear that, we just get goober-on-the-street endorsements of how Thompson made them feel, which we already fuckin' knew.

I'll even be intellectually consistent here and posit that if Thompson is passable at the debate, and the media weasels do exactly what they said they were going to do -- that is, praise him because he doesn't drool and dig in his ass while he's on stage -- they would be doing a disservice to Thompson himself, on the off chance he actually said something worthy and substantive.

Since this collapsing circus tent of a party has nothing new to say or offer, that's not going to happen, but since the media have already decided what this year's storyline will be on our groovy campaign reality show, we'd never know it in the first place.

Chickenhawks of a Feather

Shorter Fred Thompson:

Rush, I say, Rush Limbaugh and his trusty butt boil Ralph are the next best thing to actually showin' up for war.

Is this what Leghorn means by "strongest supporters"? [emphasis mine]

On the October 2 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, Rush Limbaugh denounced a recent ad by VoteVets.org that featured Iraq war veteran Brian McGough, calling the ad "a blatant use of a valiant combat veteran, lying to him about what I said, then strapping those lies to his belt, sending him out via the media in a TV ad to walk into as many people as he can walk into." Limbaugh went on to say that "[w]hoever pumped [McGough] full of these lies about what I said ... has betrayed him." Limbaugh denounced the ad despite admitting "I haven't watched the ad."

No, McGough seems quite clear about what you said, fatboy.

In the ad, which was created in response to Limbaugh's recent characterization of U.S. service members who oppose the war in Iraq as "phony soldiers," McGough says to Limbaugh, "Until you have the guts to call me a 'phony soldier' to my face, stop telling lies about my service."

Let's see, Limpballs has already been caught lying about what he said, and clipping and changing the audio excerpts in a self-serving effort to minimize the fallout. It makes sense that an insufferable hump like Thompson would bother to defend a motherless fuck like Limbaugh; after all, there's obviously a great deal of overlap to their respective fan bases.

And Limbaugh's gotten away with a lot over the years, in terms of who he'll pick on and how he goes about it -- women, children, the disabled, dissembling and mischaracterizing (and outright lying) along the way. Since he's saying what his retard listeners are thinking anyway, it's all good.

Has he finally crossed a line here? It's tough to say. It depends entirely on whether he can sell the retards on this latest grift, if they wanna keep on believing a drug-addled liar with chronic wimmin trouble, a likely sex tourist, someone who is clearly nothing more than a prevaricating butt-boy to the scum who have sold this country down the river.

Since they're part of the problem, I'm betting most of them stick with the devil they know. That's what makes them morons. And they deserve him, just like they deserve to get their chains jerked by Fred Thompson. But it'd be nice if the Democrats keep up -- hell, ramp up -- their volleys at Limbaugh, and by association Thompson. It's time to quit letting these cockroaches get away with this shit, and just squash them already.

Little Fred Corvette

Senator Leghorn lets a bunch of rubes buy him breakfast. Awful large of him, doncha think?

When Fred Thompson stopped for breakfast in Jackson on Friday morning, he had only one thing to say about critics who say he is not up-to-date enough on current issues to be president:

"They're wrong; they're wrong.”

Oh, well I guess that settles that, doesn't it?

Thompson's visit to Jackson came the day after he told reporters in Franklin that he did not know about a federal court ruling that found the state's lethal injection procedures unconstitutional. Thompson was a stout death penalty supporter during his 1994 Senate bid.

It was another in a pile of such moments for Thompson, who has said earlier that he was not familiar enough with the 2005 Terri Schiavo right-to-life case in Florida or recent civil rights protests in Jena, La., to comment on them.

In the face of those questions, campaign spokesman Jeff Sadosky maintained that Thompson is a strong conservative leader who is bankable in a general election.

"He's the same person he was in 1994" when he was elected senator, Sadosky said. "He's not going to change for election-year expediency."

Which means what, that he's still not going to pay attention to hot-button issues that his own party cynically uses from time to time? And this is supposed to be a good thing? What's wrong with these people, seriously?

Well, we know what's wrong with them, obviously. They're afraid of even the hint of change, and they have deep-seated daddy issues, so they're more than happy to pay $250 for someone to show up late and tell them that everything they think they know is just right. Thompson has no plan except to function as a psychological mirror and reflect their "concerns" and insecurities. Then again, since he'll be out in a few months with a fat wad of cash in his pocket, it's as good a plan as any.

Friday's event was closed to the press, but those who attended said Thompson talked up the need for stronger national security and immigration controls as well as the preservation of Social Security.

Kathryn Wilson, 70, of Bruceton, Tenn., said Thompson showed he knew what Americans care about by tapping on those topics.

“I think all that time he was keeping up with it,” she said.

Bullshit. If he was up on those things he would have allowed the press in, so's he could shout it from the sagging rooftop of every outhouse in Spittle County. That people care about things like "stronger national security", "immigration controls", and "the preservation of Social Security" (insofar as that last, coming from a "conservative", always means letting Wall Street piss it away on some fucking hedge fund, followed by bailing out the grifters that lost the money in the first place) is not in dispute.

The issue is whether Fred Thompson has any coherent idea of what to do about any of those things. There is nothing to indicate that he does, because he is running a stealth George W. Bush campaign, straight outta 2000 -- let the press reverentially cover every dump you take, enhancing your name recognition, let the rubes spread the word of mouth, and never tell anyone what you actually think about anything, much less let sensible people get the impression that you have no idea what you're talking about.

That's how you get a home-state newspaper to do a fluff piece called "Critics are wrong", while never explaining at all how they are wrong. Thompson could have wrestled a greased pig the entire time, and this guy wouldn't have known it, because he wasn't allowed inside. Yet he, as an astute reporter, feels compelled to transcribe the deep musings of attendees and spokesweasels. I feel very informed now. Thanks, free press!

Campaign officials declined to disclose how much Thompson pulled in Friday in Jackson. The cost of the fundraiser was $250 a plate, and those who kicked in an additional $750 could snap a photo with the former Law & Order star.

Hey, who let the French guy in?

Fred Dawn

So 'merka's once 'n' future king, Joe Don Baker Fred Thompson, has finally decided to answer the New Hampshire Union-Leader's challenge to shit or get off the pot by, well, punting -- he'll formally enter the day after the debate. Great timing, especially since the paper had already pre-emptively floated the notion that Thompson would attempt that very tactic in order to avoid the rigors of an actual debate.

This is no small issue for Thompson's putative viability, illusory as it is -- Romney has already proven that he can paper up the straw polls with his hefty bankroll, and Mike Huckabee of all people seems to have the most pound-for-pound momentum out of Iowa. Giuliani and McCain seem to be fading fast from disdain and disinterest, respectively. Plus they've already been, you know, debating for several weeks now, and Thompson's honeymoon seems to be well and truly done already. He's got some catching up to do, considering this started as the would-be Summer of Fred.

So I will just reiterate my earlier predictions, once again, that Thompson's candidacy is just a sideshow for the rubes, grift them of some money for Ol' Fred's finder's fee, round 'em up and send 'em to whomever offers Our Boy a fair sop. As TPM commenters noted, Thompson looks like hell, and he was a notoriously lazy man in some notoriously lazy gigs well before he got old and sick. Running for president is at least as much work as actually being president (well, unless you're Vacation Boy the Texas Tumbleweed Chaser), and even if Thompson had no medical issues, it's a gig that would wear out a man 15 years younger.

But Thompson's not so lazy that he can't see that this is an insanely easy way to pick up a couple mil and have everyone line up to kiss your ass for a while. Not a bad summer hiatus' work, and then he can go back to Walking Tall Law & Order, ego and bank account well gratified, with thousands of grifted goobers wondering what the hell to do with their advocacy blogs. Maybe Tancredo will still be in by Thanksgiving, who knows?

Straw Dogs

So Dullard Willard Mitt Romney managed to buy hisself a hollow triumph in the vaunted heartland. I think I speak for most of the people who couldn't make the pilgrimage when I say, in all earnestness, "Whoopdee-freakin-doo".

Really, without Mrs. Doubtfire Giuliani and Saint McCain as competition, with all the money he spent, Romney should have clobbered the remaining dwarves. Instead, he inadvertently dangles the illusion of electability in front of Mike Huckabee. Aside from Romney and Huckabee, the only one who came out okay on this was -- wait for it -- ol' Lonesome Rhodes himself, Fred Thompson, who is wisely keeping his powder dry for the big September publicity blitz. Hijinks are practically guaranteed to ensue.

Speaking of McCain, who turns 70 in a couple weeks, after his dismal showing, maybe it's time he gave himself an early birthday present and just walked away from this mess, while he still has some shreds of dignity intact. It's getting a little embarrassing, and it's just not going to happen. Most of us are never going to be President, Senator. Life goes on. Bob Dole thought it was his turn, too. How'd that work out? It's better to make the decision before it gets made for you, even though in all practicality, it's a done deal. 2000 was McCain's window; it's long closed. He wouldn't have placed much better if he had shown up at the straw poll, which is why he didn't go. But his veneer of plausibility is much thinner than Giuliani's.

Not that Giuliani doesn't have his own growing set of problems. His sordid personal life and the backstory of the current future ex-Mrs. Doubtfire are fodder for an infamous Vanity Fair piece, and now the Village Voice has taken a serious poke at the 9/11 legend Rudy has wrapped himself in, perhaps a bit too snugly. He should have been able to beat clowns like Brownback, Tancredo, and Paul without even showing up; that he couldn't do so shows that the honeymoon is over, that his Springer-esque personal life doesn't float too well in Des Moines. Jesus Christ, his own kids can't stand him, why would anybody else?

I am a bit surprised at the traction that Ron Paul, who is a certifiable quack of a politician, has maintained. I figured that the more he talked, once you get past his quirky affability (or is it his affable quirkiness? I get them confused), it would become clear that aside from profound foreign policy disagreements with Bush (because Paul, a libertarian, is an isolationist), he has little to offer even self-proclaimed independents, much less the antiwar crowd. You want a gutted, privatized armed forces and a "walk it off" health-care system, Paul's your guy. Otherwise, he's mainly differentiated himself by being the only one with balls enough to openly disagree with Dear Leader.

Which brings me to the money line of the entire article, courtesy of Romney:

"Today, the people of this great state sent a message to America, and that is that change begins in Iowa," Romney told an exultant crowd of about 200 supporters after the results were announced. "We've got a long way to go."

Seriously, what exactly has Romney talked about "changing"? He's pro-war, he's pro-life, he's pro-bidness. He's not going to change a damned thing, and he's said as much. Nothing that crawls out of his piehole has any meaning past the exact moment it is uttered, and only for that micro-sliver of time.

Which means that, since he's got the bankroll to keep going and the telegenic visage to make the retards in the media swoon, he's the odds-on favorite for the nomination. He's the perfect candidate for a hollowed-out, desiccated party that's living on the ropes (not that the Democrats have shown the guts or sense to simply knock them into the canvas already). Look for plenty of helpful articles over the next few months, explaining how the scam of Mormonism is no worse than the scam of Catholicism or any other -ism (and really, when you get down to it, it's not any worse, though its history is sadly even more Barnum-esque than that of most religions).

Still, this is just a sad, embarrassing story, involving a bunch of sad, embarrassing people, not the least of whom are the sort of simpletons who actually want to vote for people like Tom Tancredo. Why not just fill up a gunny sack with barn straw and manure and hang a "Anybody But Hitlery" sign around its neck?

My Milkshake Brings All The Boys To The Yard

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