Ayatollah Dubya Issues a Fatwa and Cable TV News Becomes Al-Jahzeera

"The dissident does not operate in the realm of genuine power at all. He is not seeking power. He has no desire for office and does not gather votes. He does not attempt to charm the public, he offers nothing and promises nothing. He can offer, if anything, only his own skin -- and he offers it solely because he has no other way of affirming the truth he stands for. His actions simply articulate his dignity as a citizen, regardless of the cost."
- Vaclav Havel

"I would warn Orlando that you're right in the way of some serious hurricanes and I don't think I'd be waving those [Gay Pride] flags in God's face if I were you."
- Pat Robertson, The 700 Club television program, August 6, 1998

The Texas Stranglers - our child preznut, Dubya, and "Bugman" Tom Delay - along with Senator "Doktor Mengele" Frist went off the deep end this week, but nobody seems to know what this all means ... not just yet, anyways. The whole and sordid notion of a "culture of life" was lost, once again, in a staggeringly vast Skinner Box of rabid dumbness and bitterly placed innuendo that apparently represents nothing at all and were put together at the cost of interrupting Sunday afternoon brunch for a host of politcally needy Congressmen who were denied the golden opportunity to wine and dine only Washington's best cash and carry flesh ... never mind that in the rest of the civilized world this weekly endeavor is widely regarded as the world's second oldest profession.

The religious right base, a sleazy collection of defrocked and delusional priests, constitutional attorneys, slimy moralists and crackerjack punishment addicts, have spent the better part of four years roaming about people's bedrooms and hijacking the Rethug party to examine almost everyone for alleged sex crimes and un-Godly thoughts in places like Miami and Columbus and deep into the East Los Angeles barrio.

The calculated quid pro quo was to trade away social freedoms for theocratic jurisdiction, while establishing a pattern of some kind of bond between starving the beast known as the federal budget and erecting a series of smoke screens to tangle the scent - but there was never any firm agreement on anything but the high cost of inserting a feeding tube when the clock on billable hours runs twenty-four hours a day.

There was even more hollow muttering and vicious slander and endless paranoid moaning that arrived via the media pimps, crooked preachers, dirty cops and crud merchants. Freaks with bad teeth and even worse breath and skin conditions were pounding the desks of CNN and MSNBC and FOX and staggered aimlessly into the legions of security guards protecting Terry Schiavo - our pundit patron saint of the Million Dollar Baby gone insane - from receiving a non-court-ordered glass of water or Wheat Thin. There was a sense of ignorance turning into madness followed by anger amongst the medical profession for allowing Bill Frist to take the Hypocratic Oath.

Both The New York Times and The Washington Post jumped knee deep into the issue with front page analysis into the life and times of America's worst and most baffling social lightning rod since John Wayne Bobbitt had his manhood tossed on the side of the road, as the rest of the nation continues on its collision course with doom, despair and duncehood.

The final obituary by the media wonks held hostage by this age of irrational fanaticism will clearly be an expansive roadmap on everything ever transcribed or analyzed within the breadth of the DSM IV - The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - starting with anxiety conditions, a wide and general level of manic-depressive psychosis and a massive collective dip into every kink, disturbance and perversion since Freud took his first hit of cocaine and dreamt of trains and tunnels and fruits and vegetables contorted into sexual organs. Our last slip into a theocracy of the banal, due sometime in July when the Chinese hold a fire sale on our federal debt and Dubya goes fishing in Lynchburg for a Supreme Court Justice, will be the end of what we once knew as the American Century.

The reaction to our demise will be almost predictable and the rundown to the end will be less intelligent and probably more violent than the French Revolution on Mark McGwire's secret stash of anabolic steroids. There will be widespread looting and tenured professors being led out in the square by the short hairs for a lengthy stoning by evangelical whackjobs - and soon enough even the moderates will start pissing their pants and pushing shopping carts filled with cardboard and copper pipes and empty bottles and cans to convince the extremists that they are more insane than intellectually malleable. John Ashcroft will be yanked out of retirement and appointed a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court - even if nobody drops dead from natural causes or a scheduled plane crash in the Rockies. The hottest rumor of the day features a persistent rumor between the Big House and Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who is known to be suffering from an advanced stage of senility or trench foot or cancer of the testicles. Many of our nation's best genetic scientists and most profitable pornographers expect to be rounded up by the Homeland Security Department on the night that Ashcroft packs his church organ and moves up into the high court with all the pomp and circumstance of General MacArthur taking back the Philippines.

So while a new CBS poll shows that 82 percent of the respondents want Dubya and our first Evangelical Congress to stay out of the Saint Schiavo case - and the rest of the world wonders why America seems more enraptured than appreciative of the freedom it chooses to enforce around the globe - Brother Jeb seems more Pontius Pilate than Governor of Florida as Good Friday turns into a good night and the usual suspects start preening their feathers for the fallout once Our Lady of the Worthless Feeding Tube passes away, while Operation Rescue's Randall Terry pulls a Lee Harvey Oswald and starts attacking the County Coroner's meat wagon with a high-powered rifle aimed from the odd vantage point of a church steeple.

There is no absolute concensus about how this will play out for 2006 - and, ultimately, 2008, when all the cards get played once and for all - but the heavy hitters are already taking bets and gathering names for the draw ... and there are operatives working overtime tonight who get paid large because they are smart about politics and elections, and they are not advising anyone of note to place their hard-earned cash on either Doktor Frist or John McCain once the nuts are dropped into the vise for the glare of a media primary excursion that seems more Miss Teen USA through Blood-of-Christ-colored sunglasses than a slash and burn deathmarch toward the GOP's prudish refusal to face facts.

They are not stampeding down to the window to bet on Brother Jeb or Pat Robertson, either, for that matter. But Jeb is kaput already, unless Terry Schiavo sprouts angel wings in Pinellas Park and gives birth to the second coming, and Robertson is just another one of those fanatic high-stakes multi-millionaire televangelists who have descended upon this political age in the name of Jesus H. Christ because a good buck can be made by passing the ignorance plate. But Robertson has some good things working in his favor, and in the world of big-time politics, early victories are key indicators and are often won at the margins, so it seems more a factor of what your opponent isn't than what you stand for, at least during the primary phase ... and once the train leaves the track and the pundits start kissing the pet rock known as the front-runner, the clock cannot be turned back. A lot can change between now and 2008, and three years is a lifetime in politics, but given the current state of theocratic mania brewing where alcohol and ammunition can still be purchased in the same corner store, Robertson looks about as dead-lock as any candidate does in present form. He sounds more like a wealthy uncle than a freakish religious deviant with avarice in his soul. So if Doktor Frist is a fire-breathing speed bump and John McCain remains a stupifying gasbag of biblical proportions, Boss Reverend looks pretty appealing to the prayer tent wingnuts at this moment - or at least like the certifiable theocratic fly in the ointment, until the Rethug powers-that-be can latch onto something less conflicted. Robertston may never make it to the Big House, but truly he feels that God speaks to him and to us through him, and he will not be easy to beat as long as they still can tack up little white crosses on plywood churches.

He is a fortunate man who has not lost the petty urge to ram christianity down our throats, and that counts for a lot in game of politics these days. Dubya has always managed to pull out the great victory with a little help from his thuggish operatives in the field, but he is not really a spiritual fellow, and when all is said and done he will be chased out of Washingon like some mad poison swine gone giddy on greed. The Chimperor will be lucky to get out alive ...

Boss Reverend won't face the same fate. He's a man of God, or so he says, and he has a vast television empire - uncontrolled by the idea of fairness in media or equal time - along with his own reporters who will swear that God speaks to him almost nightly ... even though they are on the payroll. Robertson can pull apart the numbers and polls better than Karl Rove, uses the Good Book as his Karen Hughes, and he knows how to raise campaign finances because he does it on a daily basis, while spouting recommendations ranging from the stoning of UFO enthusiasts because demons can appear as slanty-eyed, funny-looking creatures and blaming Muslims for slavery in the US and calling AIDS the "hammer and gun" of the homosexual movement. "We have enough votes to run the country," he once opened at a Washington for Jesus rally. "And when the people say, 'We've had enough,' we are going to take over."

To the uninformed spectator, this political clash will be an incredible struggle between David Hasselhoff cast as Jesus and Osama Bin Laden in the form of Democratic Party, but in reality, the fate of a once great nation will rest on a blindspot that no one can quite yet see. Robertson will set up shop near his CBN headquarters in Virginia Beach, which will then become known as the "altar of the free world," and even though he will do his due dilligence with the botox shots and facial peels, Boss Reverend will say that Jesus has given him that jaw-droppingly attractive sepia glow because he's running for president and many will ring the call center with a love offering.

"If Christian people work together," Boss Reverend once penned in his self-titled Pat Robertson's Perspective in 1992. "They can succeed during this decade in winning back control of the institutions that have been taken from them over the past 70 years. Expect confrontations that will be not only unpleasant but at times physically bloody ... This decade will not be for the faint of heart, but the resolute. Institutions will be plunged into wrenching change. We will be living through one of the most tumultuous periods of human history."

"When it is over, I am convinced God's people will emerge victorious."

And now back to Joe Scarborough for another breaking story on the Saint Schiavo vigil - "she still isn't dead!" - and perhaps another gratuitous Nazi death camp comparison brought to you by the people of Enzyte, Cialus and Levitra.

Amen.