Republicans Jump the Shark:
Here's the thing every good bar brawler knows: when your opponent is down, you don't retreat to the nearest corner. That's for boxers, in the ring, where allegedly "rules" govern behavior. Fuck that. You're a fuckin' sleaze in a bar, and when you get into that inevitable bare knuckle free-for-all, you better be in it for the blood, or it's gonna be your blood that's seeping into the cement under the faux wood floor. So you never back off until that blood is shed, until the motherfucker is unconscious or dead or running home to lick his wounds like a pussy cat after a fucking.

'Cause if you just walk away when you think you've given some asshole a whoopin', then sure as you're standing there, that son of a bitch is gonna get up off the floor and blow your brains out or shiv you in the ribs. No, no, you need to be willing to take that obliterated wad of fuck and prop him against the bar and kick in his face and chest until he's coughin' blood, gaggin' on his own demise, until an ambulance comes to scrape his sorry ass off the bar floor. And you know what? If who you've beaten down is an asshole bully who got in your face and pinched your girlfriend's ass and threatened to fuck her in front of you because the asshole bully didn't think you'd do anything, then the crowd will cheer on your pummeling of the asshole.

President Bush and the Republicans in Congress are on the floor now, having been the asshole bullies for so, so long. They finally overreached with the Terri Schiavo nightmare, thinking that if they passed the "feed-the-Schiavo" bill, they'd be lauded for their compassion and promotion of the "culture of life," a phrase so useless in describing anything that it's brilliant in its emptiness, much like the President himself. Instead, they're imploding.

Let's take the long look here: the whole issue has pushed daddy-killer Tom DeLay into the national consciousness so that when Fox "news" spends a brief second between Michael Jackson and "whatever shall we do with Terri's corpse" coverage to actually talk about something that matters, like DeLay's ethics troubles, viewers will think, "DeLay? Isn't he that skeevy redneck who demanded that Schiavo be kept alive?"

It has pretty much wrecked the further political aspirations of Jeb Bush (who had one of the great "hominah, hominah" moments in news history when he babbled that there was nothing else he could do) and Bill "I Can Diagnose Your Neurological Ailments With My Super Psychic Heart Doctor Powers" Frist.

And it's flushed Bush's poll numbers into the pre-9/11 shitter. Bush knows that this is a fuck-up of major proportions. His approval rating has plunged as more and more people realize they were suckered in by words like "compassion" and "security." Bush is lame-ducking himself faster than it takes, say, a woman in a vegetative state to die.

Karl Rove knows that Republicans are taking the blame for this one, at this point, that he's finally, at long last, alienated the moderate portion of the party and that much threatening, whipping, and sodomizing will be required to get them back in line. But you reap what you sow, motherfuckers, and the Republicans created this Golem. Since Reagan (when Randall Terry first reared his hateful head), they've been pandering to the fundamentalists, getting them to think they had more and more power without, as so many have pointed out, delivering much more than a prayer and a little bit of rhetoric to them. Remember: Churchy wanna get paid. At some point when you pledge the promised land and holy days to people, they're gonna want a down payment. The Republicans lost control of their monster and that big bastard's gonna go on a rampage.

The money part of this is the way the nutzoids outside the hospice and around the country are demanding that the opportunistic, decadent fuckers in Congress prove their loyalty to the cause of "life" (or, better put, "Christ") is more than lip service. C'mon, motherfuckers, you fuckin' subpoenaed Terri Schiavo. Now, do you have the balls to enforce it? Of course not. Of course not. That would require that the Republicans (and the bushel of enabling Democrats in the House) actually have "beliefs" and "principles."

There's other issues where the demands of the wacko right are beginning to appall the majority of Americans, like the Michigan bill that would allow doctors to deny care to homosexuals.

But of course the delicate question is how the Democrats use the glazed eyes of Terri Schiavo against the Republicans. And, as with most matters political, the Rude Pundit has the ready, easy solution: it's all about the inference of language. If a Democrat is up against a Schiavo Republican (and, good, wise, vaguely left pundits everywhere should start calling the wacked-out, ultra-Christian Republicans by this nom de guerre), don't bring out Schiavo's corpse. Instead, just say that you support the government staying out of "the most intimate decisions a person" (or "family") "can make." Or some such shit. You see what that does? It evokes Schiavo without saying her name and, frankly, it also covers things like abortion rights, gay rights, and more. If the Schiavo Republican wants to question you about it, then you have free rein to bring up Schiavo. Despite the cries to the contrary that the Schiavo matter will go away, rest assured: by 2006, the Republican party will have either been eaten by its most rabid members or be silent on Schiavo to the point of suffocation.

So let's be optimistic here for a moment: the Republicans are spitting blood on the bar floor. If you wanna be a pussy Democrat, you pick your opponent up and say, "Let's be friends" and buy him a beer. But if you know anything about Republicans and the political game, that fucker's gonna smash that bottle of Bud over your head. The better way to play it? Sit on his chest and pound his head on the floor until he's drowning in his own vomit.