GOP INTERVIEWER: Hello. Name?
OBAMA: Barack Obama.
GOP: It says on your resume here that your name is Barack HUSSEIN Obama.
OBAMA: I guess it is.
GOP: You were born in Hawaii?
OBAMA: Yes.
GOP: You don’t look Hawaiian.
OBAMA: What’s that supposed to mean?
GOP: Well, you don’t. What are your political leanings?
OBAMA: I’m not a Republican, but I don’t believe in partisan -
GOP: That’s an “X” against you, if I’ve ever heard one.
OBAMA: Okay.
GOP: Says here you’re President?
OBAMA: Yes.
GOP: Of America?
OBAMA: Yes.
GOP: South America? Like, Brazil or something?
OBAMA: No.
GOP: Central America?
OBAMA: The United States, sir. Of America.
GOP: No fuckin’ way.
OBAMA: Why do you say that?
GOP: Because, you know, you’re not, uh, how should I say this?
OBAMA: Because I’m not Hawaiian?
GOP: Yes. Good save.
OBAMA: Mmm-hmm.
GOP: Says here under “professional achievements” that you won a Nobel fuckin’ Peace Prize? Now why the Hell would you put THAT in?
OBAMA: Um, because it’s a major achievement, especially considering what the image of our country has been like among the international community for the past eight years.
GOP: You mean YOUR country, Brazil?
OBAMA: No.
GOP: Well, I don’t know what the Hell you’re talkin’ about, then.
OBAMA [gets up]: Thank you for being a complete jackass, Glenn.
GOP: That’s Mr. Beck to you.

FIN.

(Apologies if you’ve seen this before.)

Your humble scribe has repeatedly kicked the GOP in the shins over the past few months. Not just because it’s fun to finally kick ‘em when they’re down, but to check for any kind of reflexive knee-jerk reaction. And why not? Knee-jerk reactionary rhetoric was once their stock in trade, but lately seems to have lost all its potency and flavor. Now it’s a matter of checking for a pulse.

While it is certainly too early to prognosticate the results of the 2010 elections more than a year before they happen, it is equally certain that the GOP’s current state of affairs doesn’t bode well for a breakthrough any time in the immediate future.

Many of you are familiar with Thomas Frank’s masterpiece, What’s the Matter with Kansas? What you may not know is that Frank commissioned several dynamite chapters from yours truly that have been lost.  Until now.  I present to you, the lost chapters from What’s Really the Matter with Kansas?

If you have 6 minutes and 30 seconds free today, watch this amazing clip of recovered evangelical Christian Frank Schaeffer go off on the radical right wing fundamentalist Christian movement.

Then ask yourself whether we really have anything even remotely close to a “liberal media” in this country, and why you’re almost certainly seeing an argument like this for the first time on an obscure blog.

Dear Reactionary Right:

If you are reading this letter, then you are almost certainly one of those people who yelled at his Senator, or brought an AR-15 to his Congressional representative’s health care town hall, or shook with rage when someone you voted for tried to explain to you what the “public option” really entails over the past couple of months.

The way you behaved this summer was downright ironic. I want you to know that it is okay if you don’t know what “ironic” means. Unlike your representatives in Congress, I’m going to be honest with you.

We Americans are not particularly noted for our civility and decorum. As travelers abroad we are considered loud and rude.

We respect “straight shooters” in conversation and don’t much care for those who “beat around the bush.”   (Read the sexual politics into that sentence as you wish.)

But we still try to pay some lip service to the idea of just being polite if only for the sake of our mothers.

Some of you may be aware of the ongoing debate over health care reform in the U.S., the only industrialized democracy on the planet that doesn’t guarantee its citizens access to affordable medical treatment.