Family Values from the Mouth of Lunacy

"A good tree can't produce evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree produce good fruit."
- Matthew 7:18

The market kept gaining ground last week. Even the pig-headed preachers were feeling full of themselves, and there was talk on Kudlow and Cramer about the execution and filleting of wild animals for fun and profit. Gas prices retreated a bit, insurance rates kept soaring, and reports of GOP debauchery and duplicity are coming to the surface in the shadow of its most recent New York Coronation along with some homosexual revelations about the wonderfully androgynous boy-wonder himself, Representative David Dreier.

It was another bad week for the Jesus and values crowd. They had already been smacked down once by Frank Rich in The New York Times by pointing out the hypocrisy of red state viewership rates for racy television programming - and now they were going to get smaked yet again, with new revelations about misleading accounts of Pat Tillman's death in Afghanistan, which now contradicts earlier military press releases found to be deliberately distorted and incomplete.

In a telephone interview with The Washington Post, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) said: "I think it would have been helpful to have at least their suspicions known" before he elevated the former NFL star to the status of sainthood. Even more, he added, "the family deserved some kind of heads-up that there would be questions."

During several weeks of memorials and commemorations that followed Tillman's death, commanders at his 75th Ranger Regiment and their superiors hid the truth about friendly fire from Tillman's brother Kevin, who had fought with Pat in the same platoon, but was not involved in the firing incident and did not know the cause of his brother's death. Commanders also withheld the facts from Tillman's widow, his parents, national politicians and the public, according to records and interviews with sources involved in the case.

Short of manslaughter, the most common charge leveled in fratricide is dereliction of duty, or what the military code calls "culpable inefficiency" in the performance of duty, according to military law specialists. This violation is defined in the Pentagon's official Manual for Courts-Martial as "inefficiency for which there is no reasonable or just excuse."

Whatever the cause of death, McCain said, "you may have at least a subconscious desire here to portray the situation in the best light, which may not have been totally justified."

Needless to say, things are not all wine and roses for the Rethugs. Let's face the facts, and then the hypocrisy: Dubya's campaign, a sleazy collection of preachers, lawyers, moralists and crackerjack punishment whackos, had spent the better part of 2004 criss-crossing the country with tales of alleged Democratic atheism and rumors of hedonists committing criminal sodomy with same-sex partners in places like Tupelo and Salt Lake City. The idea was to establish the opposition as some kind of deviant political party that endorsed such heinous things as burning the Bible, relentless violence and child molesting - but in the end there was no concensus on any of these charges, except the high price of call girls willing to do anything in New York City.

“At a bowling party for [closeted] California Congressman David Dreier… a blonde in a fishnet body stocking hung from the ceiling on a turquoise scarf, twirling and contorting,” an observer noted. “Two nights later, at a honky-tonk salute to Texas Congressman Joe Barton, chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce … a little girl rode an electric bucking bull in an inflatable farm pen, and 20-foot black cowboy boots decorated in purple and gold stood over the room.”

Such contributions pay off in the end: In 1999 Barton pushed a bill to deregulate the entire $220-billion U.S. electrical industry, laying the groundwork and leading to widescale energy piracy leading to the 2001 California energy crisis.

There is only written and spoken evidence at this point, but two reporters thus far have handed over their story to - none other than - Hustler publisher Larry Flynt, charging that the fundamentalist zealots who descended upon New York last August were treacherous mutants worse than Hugh Hefner or the Marquis de Sade, and had spent much of their investigative efforts stalking public urinals and downtown bukkake clinics. Only blabbering and unsubstantiated delusional ramblings could be gathered from the herd of pimps, preachers, crooked security details and flesh merchants.

The final story by the Flynt Publishing people will apparently be an important guide to everything ever documented or photographed in the history of the sex business - tons of pull out color photos, thousands of adulturers and copies of the mailing lists, forums and blogs of every gutter kink, crime, and twisted perversion since Caligula and the Kama Sutra. The new coffee table book, due out in time for the Christmas season, is already guaranteed to peak at number one on Amazon.

"It will rake in more units sold than Kitty Kelly's The Family," said one online sales analyst. "If I was the father of a hot looking little woman when the GOP comes to town, I chain her down in the closet and shave off her hair and break her fingers into a pile of rubble so she couldn't get ten feet from driving into town. The last time one of these conventions came to the city I was a night editor of a major newspaper when Reagan was the king, and it cost me my first wife who was turned into a dirty little freak by conservative sex fiends. She finally found herself a preacher in Oklahoma, and they started their own live sex and sermon shows over the internet."

I know, it's a hard pill to swallow - especially for you folks in the red states. Many of you think the GOP (Good Old Pleasure) convention is all about family values, country music, Jesus in a coal mine, square dancing and near-beer and Tucker Carlson bow ties and glorious renditions of Reaganomics gone supercharged. But it's also the party of hardline capitalism and guns for all and military spending and big oil and repressed sexuality - no matter the flavor - and trips down misogyny lane while driving the Viagra pace car for the Dixieland 500. Take any 10,000 GOP boys and put them in a room with Kinsey and you'll soon find a bucketload of deep-seated anxieties and the most extensive gay-porn collections on the planet. Cut these guys loose amongst their own kind in the wild brush of a big city like New York, and it's like putting a pedophile priest in a schoolyard.

Buy a ticket, take the ride.