Republicans' Moron Wing Steps Up and Takes Over

The days are lengthening, the 2012 political season is getting underway, and the Moron Wing of the Republican Party is really revving it up.

Sarah Palin, undisputed Queen but by no means only courtier of the Moron Wing, dressed up in black leather and straddled a big, throbbing phallic symbol to the delight of swarming paparazzi in Washington, D.C. Sunday. Palin's vaunted and rabidly anticipated appearance at the Rolling Thunder rally, where bikers wrap themselves in American flags and proclaim their affinity for soldiers, veterans and, especially, POW/MIAs, drew the hysterical media response Palin, with sagging book sales, and Fox News had fervently hoped for.

Meanwhile, Michele Bachmann (R-MN) was seething somewhere. She had planned to make a big speech Thursday night at a GOP dinner in Iowa, possibly to announce her 2012 Presidential run, when Palin jumped up Thursday afternoon to tell everyone she was going to be wearing a tight black leather costume and straddling a throbbing phallic symbol over the weekend, causing all the TV cameras and photographers to run en masse from Bachmann's podium to Palin's.

Bachmann put a good face on it and said she'd been planning to tell everyone whether she would run in early June, but she ended up cancelling her Thursday speech anyway.

Palin's Shameless Self-Promotion Tour 2012 buses will roll through the Northeast next week, as Palin hawks her books, TV shows, and videos. It was not known whether or when Palin would be appearing nude, although the possibility of a wardrobe malfunction has always loomed.

Not to be outdone, GOP Presidential hopefuls have been scouring the nation for Moronic things to say and do in an effort to court the party's Really Stupid faction.

Most notably, former Senator Rick Santorum recently told everyone John McCain didn't know anything about torture. Santorum had been going on about how US forces had succeeded in tracking down and killing Osama bin Laden only because the Bush Administration tortured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. This wasn't exactly Santorum's fault entirely, because the GOP's official position is that US forces succeeded in tracking down and killing Osama bin Laden only because the Bush Administration tortured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Never mind that, apparently, it took years for anyone to read the KSM torture session notes for the part that said "bin Laden's hiding out at 123 Big Compound Way, Abbottabad, Pakistan."

Senator John McCain (R-AZ), who has always had a bug up his sleeve over torture just because he'd spent years shoved into stress positions at the Hanoi Hilton, had taken issue with the ridiculous notion that KSM blurted out bin Laden's whereabouts under the waterboard, stating there was no record of any such thing. When radio host Hugh Hewitt challenged Santorum's assertions and reminded him of McCain's stance, Santorum replied, "He doesn't understand how enhanced interrogation works."

Santorum probably meant McCain didn't understand how the torture machines themselves actually worked, seeing how McCain was usually too busy screaming in agony to notice which buttons and levers his torturers where manipulating. Nonetheless, there was a big brouhaha over Santorum's Moronic statement.

McCain, who can afford to be generous just on the $2,718,774 oil companies have given him over the years, said, "I think Rick realizes he made a mistake here."

"He should look at the record," McCain said of Santorum. "Not only did we not get good information (from torturing KSM), but we got bad information." McCain has recounted how he himself routinely lied to his torturers just to make them stop torturing him.

McCain did not immediately explain whether he thought campaigning was a form of torture.

Santorum, while not admitting he'd made any sort of mistake, said he respected McCain for his service. However, in a bid to placate the Really Stupid faction, Santorum made the Moronic statement, "I disagree with Senator McCain's view that the enhanced interrogation techniques used on a select few...detainees were unsuccessful, not do I believe they amounted to torture."

Mitch Daniels, who last Sunday announced he wasn't running for President, said if he had run, he would have won. To show the Morons he hadn't been cowed by them, when ABC's This Week asked whether Daniels thought he could have beaten Obama, he said, "Yes, I think so," then backtracked a bit and said, "I mean, no one can know."

But as Moronic as Palin, Bachmann, Santorum and Daniels might be, it was House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) who was insisting on making the most Moronic statements of all.

For days since a massive tornado ripped through Joplin, Missouri, Cantor has been insisting that any disaster relief to tornado-ravaged towns and cities must be offset by cuts elsewhere. Sunday, he told CBS' Face the Nation, "...Families don't have unlimited money, and really, neither does the federal government."

As Cantor is committed to slashing taxes on the very rich by another 10%, by "offsets" he means slashing even more from vital services like education and health care every American depends on.

Seeing how Missouri already gets about $1.40 from the federal government for every $1 the state raises in federal taxes, it seems like the Show Me state is already causing painful offsets in places like California, which gets something like $.78 for every dollar it sends Washington. Cantor would certainly like to see California and New York ($.79 per dollar) and New Jersey ($.61 per dollar) and other Blue states saddled with more offsets so money can be poured into rebuilding Missouri, Alabama ($1.66 per dollar), Mississippi ($2.02 per dollar) and other weather-battered Red States.

Actually, when you parse his words that way, Cantor seems less Moronic and more just another mainstream Republican scheming to destroy America the old-fashioned way: More tax cuts for the ultra-rich, paid for with more service cuts for everyone else.