They Love Our Troops, Except When They're Terrified of Them

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

It’s been said that everything’s bigger and better in Texas. They claim their beer is colder, their women are prettier, and even the nighttime stars are brighter.

Well, I don’t know about all that, but I can tell you this: their wingnuts are wingnuttier. And apparently, they’re running the state.

Seems the U.S. military is planning a large-scale training exercise called Jade Helm 15. JH15, as we’ll call it, is a “challenging eight-week joint military and interagency (IA) Unconventional Warfare (UW) exercise conducted throughout Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah and Colorado,” which is scheduled for this summer.

Sounds OK, right? Similar to the sort of exercises run around here all the time from Fort Bragg.

OK, that is, except to the paranoid, conspiracy-mongering right, to whom no move by the government, even by the military, is anything less than a harbinger of The Death of Freedom.

Someone got hold of a map that identifies Texas, Utah and a small patch of Southern California as “hostile” territory for purposes of the exercise. To wingnuts, this could only mean one thing: The United States was preparing to invade … itself.

“I’ve hardly ever heard of something joint like this unless they’re planning an invasion,” asserted Alex Jones of the online nut-farm Infowars. Except for, you know, the dozens of other joint exercises the military has conducted on American soil.

Aging martial arts star and conservative icon Chuck Norris joined in, writing for World Net Daily: “What’s under question are those who are pulling the strings at the top of Jade Helm 15 back in Washington.” Poor Chuck. All those shots to the head he took from Bruce Lee are finally taking their toll.

It just keeps getting crazier and crazier. Walmart had to publicly deny that recently shuttered stores are going to be repurposed as prisons for people on a so-called “red list” of dissenters (all red-blooded conservatives, naturally) who’ve been pre-targeted for arrest when the Evil Obama Administration brings the hammer down. Or food distribution centers for Chinese occupation troops. Or something.

This sort of lunacy would have been no reflection at all on the current state of the Republican Party had not the governor of Texas his own self, the Hon. Greg Abbott, decided to buy into it, or at least pretend to. He’s asking the Texas State Guard to go down to the area of the exercise to keep an eye on things and make sure our military doesn’t get out of line, freedom-wise.

“It is important that Texans know their safety, constitutional rights, private property rights and civil liberties will not be infringed,” Abbott wrote in his letter to the commander of the TSG.

Huh. I thought the Republicans believed that’s what our troops were for.

It should be noted that the “Texas State Guard” is a different organization from the National Guard, and appears to be mostly concerned with things like disaster relief.

Sorry, but if the government really was executing a military takeover and the TSG was deployed to stop them, they’d barely register as a speed bump as the Army rolled into Austin.

With Abbott standing tall, other Republican pols just naturally had to weigh in against the imaginary plan for the Kenyan Islamocommiefascist Usurper to put Texas under martial law.

Loony Louie Gohmert, the Texas congressman and teahadist mullah who’s taken over the coveted Michele Bachmann Chair in Bat-Spit Craziness, said he was “appalled” by the map, especially “that the hostile areas amazingly have a Republican majority.” He demanded that the “tone of the exercise” be changed “so the federal government is not intentionally practicing war against its own states.”

Even presidential candidate Ted Cruz allowed as how he had “no reason to doubt” the assurances of the military, but he understood “the reason for concern and uncertainty” because that Obama is just so very, very awful.

Poor wingnuts. Their ideology so often requires that they hold two diametrically opposed ideas in their heads at once. They have to revere the “troops” and the police while at the same time being terrified that those organizations are going to impose martial and/or Sharia law any minute.

They have to love their country while maintaining a big ol’ cache of weapons at all times in case they have to make war against it if they lose an election (which would also include firing on those same soldiers and cops).

It’s no wonder some of them go insane. But it’s a pity that some leaders of the GOP feel like they have to don the tinfoil hats of the conspiracy theorists to pander to the party’s lunatic fringe.

Reader Mail, plus More Hilarious Wingnuttery

So this letter ran today in the Pilot: 

Dusty Rhoades’ column in the Dec 7 Pilot disturbed me. To say that the prosecutor in the Ferguson case “threw” the case or deliberately lost it for the state involves a level of cynicism that is difficult to take.

Certainly, the prosecutor could have gotten an indictment if he “wanted” to. And just as certainly, there were political pressures for him to do just that. But Mr. Wilson is not a ham sandwich, of popular grand jury lore.

No he was not. But the rest of us would have been treated like one, which was part of the point. 

Imagine for just a minute, even if you are as arrogant as Mr. Rhoades and are able to reach conclusions based on a superficial view of the evidence from newspapers and TV reports, that the prosecutor who did see all the evidence had a good-faith belief that the actions of Darren Wilson may have been justified.

Wrong. I actually read the transcripts. And I'm betting I read more of them than Mr. Muller. if actually doing your research is your idea of "arrogance," then guilty as charged. 

A prosecutor represents the state in an adversarial system, but he is not a pure advocate and must believe that the evidence on review supports a criminal conviction. Can you imagine a prosecutor asking a jury to find beyond a reasonable doubt that someone is guilty of a criminal offense when the prosecutor himself has significant doubts?

Yeah, actually, I can, because I live in the real world. 

But, understanding correctly the highly charged nature of this case, rather than deciding himself to not proceed further against Wilson, which prosecutors do all the time, he presented the case to a grand jury as a check on the use of his discretion.

Again, a break which no one but someone like Wilson would get. 

Yes, doing so and presenting evidence on both sides was highly unusual.

And thus, not "equal justice." 

 But viewed in this way, the prosecutor was hardly giving Wilson a “break,” and just maybe was trying to do justice in the best way he could.

Justice which the average Joe (or Michael) would not have access to. 

I acknowledge that I don’t know where the truth lies, but I respect the process and don’t share the view that “justice” requires a particular result here.

William Muller, Pinehurst

"Justice" does not require a particular result. It does, however, require a fair trial, not a sham. 

At least Mr, Muller was (mostly) polite. But then of course, our old friend "Francis" needed to weigh in in the comments with his usual brand of wingnut fuckwittery: 

More surprising than the article you have commented on is the fact you succeeded in having the Pilot post it, you have openly criticized, and even called arrogant one of those who John protects from any unflattering remarks, not often will you read honest appraisals on the individual you mentioned, even this comment may have gone too far, a very thin skinned critic who lashes out at others with no restrictions.

Get that? The guy with over 1100 posts on The Pilot website, the vast majority of them vicious personal attacks on me (including one that said I should die a slow and painful death from Ebola) is whining that The Pilot is "protecting me" from "unflattering remarks." Not only that, he's doing so in response to a letter disputing one of my columns that's on there as a "Top Letter to the Editor." And as for no restrictions, let's not forget that he's still allowed to post and I'm not. 

 Classic wingnuttery: using a public forum to complain endlessly, week after week, about how that forum is violating their right to free speech. 

Pass a Bill, Congress

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

A U.S. president, without action by Congress, takes unilateral executive action to delay deportation and grant work permits to children of undocumented immigrants who would not otherwise be eligible for citizenship.

The president: Ronald Reagan, patron saint of the right wing. The year: 1987. Cries of “tyranny!”, threats of lawsuits, and calls for impeachment: zero.

Another U.S. president expands the program to defer deportation for even more immigrants, again via executive action. The president: George H.W. Bush. The year: 1990. Cries of “tyranny!”, threats of lawsuits, and calls for impeachment: zero.

In 2014, a U.S. president takes executive action after numerous requests for Congress to do something about the broken immigration system. The president: Barack Obama. Cries of “tyranny!”, threats of lawsuits, and calls for impeachment: too many to count.

Actually, I’m sure that the “Republican leadership” (two words I can hardly put in the same sentence without laughing) breathed a huge sigh of relief after the president gave his speech announcing what he planned to do. This is exactly what they wanted. I knew this the minute the Republicans started talking about how any executive action would “poison the well,” meaning that they wouldn’t even try to take action on immigration if Obama did.

The thing is, the GOP really doesn’t want to talk about reforming immigration. John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are terrified of even bringing it up. They know that any realistic immigration reform will have to include some kind of path to legal citizenship for at least some currently illegal immigrants. But they also know that that will send the Teahadist wing of the GOP into a frothing rage.

No matter how many conditions, background checks, payment of back taxes or other conditions that proposed path may require, Boehner and McConnell are very aware that the Raging Right will call anything short of mass imprisonment and automatic deportation “amnesty.” They know that they won’t be able to prevent crackpots like Louie Gohmert or Tom Coburn from saying something racist, xenophobic or condescending that will alienate Latinos even further than their party already has.

Any actual debate on immigration reform, even among the majority, would split the Republican Party and drive America’s fastest growing constituency even further away than they already have.

Immediately after the president’s speech, Boehner told the press: “With this action, the president has chosen to deliberately sabotage any chance of enacting bipartisan reforms that he claims to seek.”

This position is patently absurd. There is absolutely nothing about President Obama’s executive action that keeps Congress from passing its own bill on immigration reform. There is no provision in the Constitution or any federal law that says “should the president do something that hurts the feelings of the majority party, said party shall thenceforth be without power to pass legislation, so there.”

The only thing that’s stopping the Republicans from doing their job of passing legislation is the inability of their “leadership” (chuckle) to actually get their motley collection of nutcases, prima donnas, grifters and future Fox News hosts to fall in line, stop playing to the cameras, and, as the president challenged them in his speech, “pass a bill.”

The Obama administration’s response to every question or complaint needs to be those three words: “Pass a bill.”

“This is dictatorship!” … “Pass a bill.”

“You’re acting lawlessly!” … “Pass a bill.”

“You’re not the boss of us!” … “Pass a bill.”

“You should go to jail for this!” … “Pass. A. Bill.”

In fact, a comprehensive bipartisan immigration bill has already passed the Senate — 68-32, with 14 Republicans crossing the aisle to vote for it. It provides for increased border security, requires mandatory verification systems by employers, and yes, contains an arduous 13-year path to citizenship that could only be called “amnesty” by people completely unaware of what that word actually means. That bill was strangled in its crib by the House.

The House could take up the Senate bill or provide its own version. But that’s not going to happen. The Republicans will stomp their feet and yell and send out fundraising letters and emails. They’ll threaten and maybe even file lawsuits. They’ll threaten to shut down the government and maybe even do it. They’ll threaten to impeach, and maybe even do it. Will they do the one thing that would make this unnecessary, which is pass a bill?

Nope.

We can expect more useless political theater from the party that can win a midterm where only 36.4 percent of the voters show up (a 72-year low), but which is utterly incapable of actually governing afterward.

The Hot New Fad For the Right Wing Asshole On The Go

This is, I guess what you'd call the "Director's Cut" of this week's column,  since I can't say "asshole" in the paper. Even though it's exactly the right word).

Imagine, if you will: You’re driving along the road, minding your own business, when you pull up behind one of those great big pickups that would be very useful hauling feed and seed or towing a horse trailer, but which is way too clean and unscratched to have ever seen an actual farm.

As you prepare to pass this wheeled behemoth, your car is suddenly enveloped in a cloud of choking black smoke that causes you to weave dangerously. As you fight your way clear of the blinding cloud, you see the truck pulling off and faintly hear the derisive laughter of its occupants.

Congratulations. You’ve just encountered some Good Americans who are patriotically protesting against Obama’s fascist nanny state by engaging in a practice they call “Rolling Coal.”

Are you the kind of “conservative” who thinks that the first question that needs to be answered when analyzing a political position is, “Will this annoy liberals?”

Are you the type of person who, if the First Lady comes out in favor of something like, say, healthy meals and exercise, immediately starts howling that your rights are being violated worse than those of Jews in the Holocaust and declare your intention to stuff as much junk as possible into your face because that’ll show them, by golly?

Are you the type of person who’s decided to shop every week at Hobby Lobby, even though you’ve never shopped there before and you don’t actually have any hobbies, but you want to show those danged feminazis that you’re not taking any of their guff?

In short, are you a typical right wing asshole?

Well, you could always run for a Republican congressional seat. But if that seems like too much trouble and/or expense, then maybe Rolling Coal is for you.

Get yourself a big ol’ truck, go to an Internet site like Dieselhub.com or one of those magazines aimed at truck aficionados, and order you some “smoke switches,” “aggressive tuners and modules,” and “special injectors” which will, and I quote, “trick your engine into thinking it needs more fuel.”

This will allow you to blow out a huge cloud of black smoke on command when you encounter, say, a Prius or other hybrid. (You can even get a sticker along with your gear that says “Prius Repellent.”)

But don’t stop there. You can also use your new gizmos to smoke people with liberal bumper stickers. Or bicyclists. Be sure to use your smartphone to record your hilarious encounters with those enemies of all that is free and good about America.

Then you can join the Coal Rollers on YouTube, where your fellow freedom fighters have posted videos of their blows against The Man, a category which includes the aforementioned Prius drivers, liberal bumper sticker displayers, and cyclists, as well as cops and pretty girls walking by the side of the road (because nothing gets a woman hotter than having acrid toxic gases blown in her face by a truck the size of small aircraft carrier).

Of course, you knew that once a few brave souls began spewing The Black Cloud of Liberty in everyone’s face, Obama’s Islamocommiefascist Iron Fist of Doom was going to come down to crush it the way the Chinese crushed the flowers of freedom in Tiananmen Square.

The jackbooted thugs of the EPA have issued one of their fatwas, saying, “It is a violation of the Clean Air Act to manufacture, sell, or install a part for a motor vehicle that bypasses, defeats, or renders inoperative any emission control device.”

Translated into American, that means that after-market devices intended to increase fuel consumption and belch clouds of pollution into people’s faces are regarded as illegal by Obama’s EPA. This is how freedom dies, my friends.

If there’s one silver lining for the right, it’s that the Republicans in the House finally may have found the grounds for bringing the Articles of Impeachment they’ve been feverishly fantasizing about for so long. I mean, to heck with requiring some sort of “high crime or misdemeanor” as grounds to impeach. You just do NOT mess with a man’s truck.

Is Hillary Clinton a Replicant? Some Say Yes, Some Say No...

You know, if I was to tell you in these pages that a Republican politician was contesting his loss in a primary election on the grounds that his victorious opponent was, in fact, dead and being impersonated by a synthetic body double, you’d probably roll your eyes and go “he’s gone too far this time. That doesn’t even work as satire.” 

Well, maybe it doesn’t, but it’s actually true. In Oklahoma’s 3d District, Timothy Ray Murray, whose website [now taken down] describes him as a “human, born in Oklahoma,” got himself roundly shellacked in the primary by the incumbent, Rep Frank Lucas, with Murray taking a mere 5.2% of the vote to Lucas’ 82.8%. You’d think this would be a knockout blow to Murray’s campaign “to help bring House leadership back to traditional values.” But wait, Murray says, not so fast. “It is widely known,” Murray asserts in a press release addressed to “News Person”, that “Rep. Frank D. Lucas is no longer alive and has been displayed [sic] by a look alike.” Poor Frank met his end, it seems, on a “white stage” in Southern Ukraine, where he and “a few other Oklahoma and other States’ Congressional Members” were executed by hanging at the hands of (of course) The World Court. This rendered Lucas ineligible to serve on account of being, as noted above, dead.  

This is not the sort of thing a “traditional values” guy like Murray is going to take lying down. “I will NEVER,” he promises, “use Artificial Intelligence look alike [sic] to voice what The Representative’s Office is not doing nor own a robot look alike.” Well, I know I’m reassured. 

In truth, Timothy Ray Murray may have done a huge favor for the Raving Nutter Wing of the Republican Party (aka “the base”). Now that birtherism has been thoroughly discredited except in the heads of a few sad dead-enders and the grifters who prey on them, maybe the GOP can embrace “make the Democratic candidate prove she’s not a replicant” as their pet lunacy for the next couple of years. 

It can start, as such madness often does, on the Internet. A few well-placed posts on a few fringe cites claiming that, say, Hillary Clinton’s “fall in the shower” in December 2012 was actually fatal and that she’s been replaced by a vat-grown flesh-droid with the personalities of Saul Alinsky, Huey P. Newton, and Bill Ayers (preserved on floppy disk by Steve Jobs in 1995) downloaded into its blank consciousness. Gradually, the idea will percolate upwards to the slightly less nutty environs of the right-wing blogosphere, like National Review Online, where someone will observe “of course, Hillary Clinton could just dispel the rumors by providing a DNA sample.” 

After that, it’ll snowball. Fox News will soon be running show after show, with the usual endless parade of outrage-mongers looking into the camera with brows furrowed and demanding “Where’s the DNA?” 

Finally, Clinton will make the mistake of knuckling under and actually providing a sample. Then the blood, so to speak, will really be in the water. Overnight a few dozen self-appointed DNA experts will flood the Internet, insisting that the test is a fake, because, I don’t know, the streaks on the test card are the wrong shade of gray on their computer monitors or something. Nothing will do to prove Clinton’s humanity, the GOP will say, but full genome sequencing. “I’m not saying that Mrs. Clinton is really a replicant,” they’ll say piously, “but I’d like to see the sequencing of all of her chromosomal DNA as well as DNA contained in the mitochondria.” It won’t matter that that’s something that none of them will have never heard of before the brouhaha. Angry Tea Partiers (as if there are any other kind) will show up at Town Hall meetings with an American flag in one hand and a bag of disreputable looking goo in the other, raging at insufficiently crazy public officials:  "I have a DNA sample here that says I’m human! Why are you people ignoring the chromosomal DNA!?” before they drown out the response by singing “God Bless America.” Finally, Clinton will grit her teeth and undergo the procedure—the results of which will also be denounced as fake by “DNA experts” who failed high school chemistry. And the beat will go on…

Too crazy, you say? Could never happen, you say? I would have said that about birtherism, until it described pretty much the same arc I’ve laid out above. If there’s one thing researching this column has taught me, it’s that there is literally no theory too outlandish for wingnuts and their captive media to promote from fringe to mainstream and no evidence that they’ll accept to refute it. It could happen here…

Dusty Rhoades lives, writes, and practices law in Carthage. 

Suppose They Had a Revolution and Nobody Came

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

Those wild and wacky wingnuts are at it again!

What are those zany scamps up to this time? Why, trying to overthrow the government, of course! Unfortunately for them (and hilariously for citizens of the non-crackpot variety), the government didn’t seem to notice.

It happened (or more accurately, didn’t happen) last weekend, at an event called Operation American Spring, OAS for short. OAS was the “brainchild” of a former U.S. Army colonel named Harry Riley. On his website, Riley laid out his plan to “restore the Constitution.” In fine military fashion, Riley broke the op down into three “phases.”

1: OAS would “field millions, as many as 10 million, patriots” who would assemble on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., “spiritually/ Constitutionally armed” to replace the “current government.”

2: One million of the 10 million (Riley later told Alan Colmes that the count could go as high as 30 million) would remain on-site “as long as it takes to see Obama, Biden, Reid, McConnell, Boehner, Pelosi, and Attorney General Holder removed from office.”

3: “Those with the principles of a West, Cruz, Dr. Ben Carson, Lee, DeMint, Paul, Gov. Walker, Sessions, Gowdy, Jordan, should comprise a tribunal and assume positions of authority to convene investigations, recommend appropriate charges against politicians and government employees to the new U.S. attorney general appointed by the new president.”

Yes, there’s nothing that says “restoring the Constitution” like a minority of disgruntled voters overthrowing a freely elected government because they didn’t like the election result, then establishing an unelected tribunal to arrest and punish those they designate as political undesirables. Reign of Terror, anyone?

The coup wouldn’t be easy, Riley warned.

“It will be painful,” he said, “and some people may die because the government will not be nonviolent; some of us will end up in a cell, and some may be injured.”

A fellow named Terry Trussell, who identified himself as OAS’s “chief of staff,” told the “Patriot Nation” radio show that “if things got bigger,” the administration could “pull in drones,” but confidently predicted that “when the government destroys the capital just to get rid of us, I think it’s going to work to their discredit.”

Well, yeah, I guess that would be true. If, that is, the basic premise of the statement weren’t bat-spit crazy.

So the big day, May 16, rolled around, and — well, not much happened. From the live feed that the OAS people thoughtfully set up on the Internet, it looked like about 200 people showed up. It was kind of hard to tell, because for a long time, the camera was apparently lying on its side.

What could be seen in the feed, and in various photos posted from the event, was small knots of people (mostly older, almost exclusively white) milling around aimlessly, shouting a lot, and most definitely not being slaughtered by Obama’s Killer Drones.

“It’s a very dismal turnout,” 61-year-old Jackie Milton, the head of Texans for Operation American Spring, glumly told The Washington Times. One “patriot” was even more poignant; he stood in front of the camera and screamed “Where you AT?” over and over.

It is true that, in advance of the coming of the OAS wavelet, the president and Mr. Biden actually did flee the White House — all the way to a local Shake Shack, where they had a nice lunch and talked to reporters about raising the minimum wage. From the pictures, a lot more people showed up at that event than at the Mall.

Faced with this kind of embarrassment, some OAS supporters took to Twitter, with a variety of excuses for the poor turnout that were so lame that #Americanspringexcuses became a trending topic all its own.

30 million "patriots" descend on DC disguised as empty chairs! Clint Eastwood was proud! #OperationAmericanSpring pic.twitter.com/PbTxMUbCIB
— KHARY PENEBAKER (@kharyp) May 17, 2014

Some posted photos of massive crowds on the Mall, only to have others note from a cursory examination of the signs and clothing that the pictures were from civil rights marches from 40 years ago.

My personal favorite was the often-repeated “well, a lot of these patriots have jobs.” Possibly, but here’s a thought: When the horrible tyranny under which you claim to suffer isn’t enough to make you ask for a personal day to overthrow the government, then maybe the tyranny isn’t so horrible after all.

Another right wing attempt to overturn the election has failed, because, despite the drama-queen ranting of the worshippers of “West, Cruz, Dr. Ben Carson,” etc., normal people look around and, for the most part, see things as getting better. They may not be completely happy, but unlike the deluded misfits of OAS, they’re not unhappy to the point of treason.

Sluice Tundra, Private Eye In: The Bubble People

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I stood in the window of my office, looking down on a street that was as dark as my mood and as empty as my bank account. From somewhere far off, I heard the sound of a lonely saxophone. I felt a rush of melancholy before I realized it was my ringtone.

I fumbled the cheap cellphone out of my pocket. “Sluice Tundra, private eye,” I said.

“Mr. Tundra?” a female voice said.

“That’s what my mom calls me,” I replied.

The woman sounded confused. “She calls you ‘Mr. Tundra?’”

“We’re not a close family,” I said. “What can I do for you?”

“Oh, Mr. Tundra, please come quickly,” she said.

“What seems to be the matter, Miss …”

“Winger,” she said. “And it’s ‘Mrs.’ It’s about my husband. But I can’t talk about it over the phone.” She gave me an address in a neighborhood that was so upscale that even the trash collectors wore Dolce & Gabbana.

When I got there, she was waiting at the door, dressed in a low-cut dress that was as flimsy as the rationale for restrictive voter ID laws. She led me into a luxurious living room.

The guy seated on the couch looked to be in his early 60s. He was a big man, with a disgruntled expression on a red face that looked as though it had never been gruntled. But that wasn’t the strangest thing about him.

“Mrs. Winger,” I said, “does your husband have some sort of immune disorder?” She just shook her head, so I added, “Then maybe you can explain why he’s inside a bubble.”

“I don’t know!” she cried. “It started last summer. And it’s getting worse.”

“I think you’ve got the wrong guy, sister,” I said. “I’m a private eye, not a doctor. I’m not sure what I can do to help.”

“I talked to several doctors. They don’t know what’s wrong. I just need to know who did this to him.”

I tapped on the bubble. It was hard, like plastic. I leaned over. “Can you hear me in there?” I shouted. It was then I spotted the “Romney 2012” pin on his lapel. I had a feeling I knew what this was about. “Mr. Winger,” I yelled. “You know that Romney lost, right?”

“Yeah,” he replied, his face getting even redder. “But only because the takers outnumber the makers! Obama voters just want people to give them stuff!”

“How do you feel about the liberals opposing the president’s proposed intervention in Syria?”

“What opposition? The left are a bunch of hypocrites for being silent about it! Those dirty leftists won’t say anything bad about Obama! Ever!”

“Hmmm,” I said. I turned to his wife. “What does your husband watch on TV?”

“Why, Fox News, of course,” she replied. “Like everyone else. We have it on all the time.”

“And does he listen to the radio?”

“Only conservative talk radio,” she said proudly, adding, “like everyone else.”

I straightened up. “Mrs. Winger, your husband is trapped in the Conservative Bubble. He only watches or listens to things that confirm what he already believes, even if those beliefs have squat-all to do with reality. Like this idea that leftists aren’t speaking up against war in Syria. A lot of them are. Michael Moore, Juan Cole, Markos Moulitsas …”

“Who?”

“See, that’s a sign of being a Bubble Person,” I said. “You complain a lot about what ‘leftists’ say or do, but you really don’t know of any. If you did, you’d know that there’s a lot of arguing on the left about Syria, and a lot of the people arguing oppose intervention.”

“Well, why aren’t the liberal media reporting that, then?” she demanded. “And why are Barack Obama and John Kerry for war in Syria?”

“Maybe because the media aren’t really liberal,” I said. “They never saw a Middle East war they didn’t cheerlead. At least until it goes bad, which it usually does. As for Secretary Kerry and President Obama? On their most ‘leftist’ day, they’re moderates. But you won’t hear that inside the Fox News/talk radio bubble.”

“Well,” she said, her own face beginning to take on the same red shade as her husband’s. “I can see you’re just another one of those people who’ve drunk the Obama Kool-Aid.” As she spoke, the air around her began to shimmer. She was developing a bubble of her own.

“Sorry, lady,” I said. “You asked who did this to him? He did. And now you’re doing it to yourself. There’s nothing I can do for you. I’ll send you a bill for my time.”

I left, headed back to the mean streets, knowing I had as much chance of getting paid as a North Carolina teacher has of getting a pay raise. Some people you just can’t reach.

Don't Leave Me This Way, Michele!

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I’m in mourning.

Seriously, I’m digging around in my sock drawer for the black armband I wore when Sarah Palin quit the governorship of Alaska after only half a term, because, you know, she found out that governing is really haaaaard, and people are meeeeean to you sometimes.

This time, the female Republican who’s broken my heart is Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-Crazytown), who announced this past week that she’s not going to run again for the seat that God himself told her to use as a springboard to the Presidency (Fickle fellow, this God of hers. If my deity was this changeable, we might wake up some day to find that water ran uphill and that Nickelback isn’t a terrible band).

For a guy like me whose sometime profession is mocking the easily mockable, the loss of the Congresswoman with the Charlie Manson eyes is a crushing blow. So I feel like I have to address her directly.

Michele, ma belle, how could you do this to me? Don’t all the good times mean anything to you? Like the time you noted the “interesting coincidence” that swine flu broke out under two Democratic Presidents—Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama? And the way you got that totally wrong, since the first swine flu epidemic broke out under Republican Gerald Ford?

Remember the time you delivered the so-called “Tea Party Response” after the Republican response to the State of the Union address—and did the whole thing staring blankly off camera, as if you couldn’t look us in the eyes? Of course, it turned out, you were looking at a special live feed camera only the Teabaggers could see—which was also the camera with the teleprompter? Only you could create that level of hilarious irony, Michele.

I remember the time when you were the Republican Party’s latest ABR (Anyone But Romney). That was before you crashed and burned your own Presidential campaign by claiming that the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine created “dangerous consequences,” including mental retardation, because some unnamed woman outside a campaign rally told you it had.  I remember the times when you called upon your followers to be “armed and dangerous” to stop a cap-and trade bill and to “slit their wrists” to stop health care reform.

 I’d looked forward to a long and happy future making fun of you. And now you’ve gone and thrown all that away. It’s gone, all gone.

Why Michele, why? Why you got to do me like that?

Is it because of the investigations into illegal use ofcampaign funds (fueled by disgruntled staffers who you apparently didn’t pay)? Is it because your Democratic opponent has been making steady early gains in the polls against you, in a district you won by less than 5000 votes last time? Did the Republican leadership get to you? Did they whisper in your ear that “oh, the evil liberals will be pouring money in to defeat Your Right Wing Awesomeness, do this for the Good Of the Party” and tempt you with what every wingnut likes better than almost anything—playing the martyr?

Or maybe you think there’s a big payout in being a professional right winger on Fox News like Mike Huckabee, or as the head of some right wing “think tank” like Jim DeMint. Because as much as the wingnuts love to play the martyr, they like paying the martyr almost as much. I get that. I mean, you can’t live just off the farm subsidies and Medicaid provider payments you rail against even as your family benefits from them.

Well, whatever your motivation, we still have some time together, before you leave the Congressional stage. So, Michele, I’m begging you, baby, do this one thing for me. Make this your last hurrah. You’ve got nothing to lose. Whatever inhibitions you might have had, cast them aside and go full bat-spit right wing crazy.

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones recently claimed that the government had “weather machines” that President Obama used to cause the Oklahoma tornadoes. Honey, you can do better than that standing on your head. Claim that climate change is caused by Obama’s giant sun-reflecting orbital mirrors (funded by ACORN, of course, and administered by the IRS). Insist, on camera, that a woman outside a 7/11 in Duluth personally assured you that the new Playstation 4 and Xbox One have secret embedded mind-control software that compels users to blindly march into FEMA-controlled concentration camps and sign over all their property to gay illegal immigrants.  

Of course, these are just suggestions. I know you can bring the insanity like no one else, and give me column material on into 2014.

Do it, darlin’. Do it for me.