"I would like to nominate Miss California as the new face of the marriage movement," NOM head Maggie Gallagher recently said. A wonderful idea, she'll fit right in with the rest of the GOP leadership!


Drug-addled Demagogues

Rush Limbaugh is the leader of the popular entertainment wing of the new conservative tabloid leadership. We all know he's a thrice-married former junkie, but he's mostly a harmless, unlikable slimeball, these days. A rich unlikable slimeball who is currently working as hard as anyone to destroy the Republican party for a generation, but he finished his worst work twenty years ago, when he invented the Fox model of radicalizing the cantankerous old white men who make up the natural audience for conservative media. His audience is still huge, but they're a minority now.

It's hard to tell whether borderline case Glenn Beck actually knows what he's doing. His transition from standard-issue talk radio jerkoff to evangelical Bircher stoking violent rage was obviously a calculated decision that's reaping financial rewards, but one still gets the impression that he's too dumb to actually realize what he's playing with (like Charles Johnson but with an audience of millions, basically). He, of course, is a recovering alcoholic and probably worse who "found God."


The Tabloid Families

For a look at how well John McCain's pick for running mate turned out for the Republican party, just have a gander at Us Weekly's Levi Johnston tag page. In a different era, this sort of sordid family drama would not be playing out in the glossies. Of course, even in this era this sort of sordid family drama doesn't play out in the glossies if the family is halfway decent at managing the press.

But McCain's own family wasn't immune from hilarious tabloid coverage during the election.


The Plain Morons

For some reason, supposedly smart conservatives think most "regular Americans" are unlikable idiots, and so they prop up unlikable idiots as party spokespeople.


Like Joe the Plumber! He, like all regular blue-collar guys, is a lazy moron who is oddly obsessed with a fantasy about Barack Obama hating Israel. His name is not Joe and he is not a plumber. He is proudly misinformed and works as a perfect representative of what rich conservatives think of the working classes.

And now, there is Carrie Prejean. She is a beauty pageant loser who coined the term "opposite marriage." Conservatives apparently decided everyone was infringing on her First Amendment Rights when they roundly mocked her for being inarticulate and dumb in addition to bigoted. Now anti-gay activist Maggie Gallagher basically wants to adopt her and Tony Perkins' Family Research Council is praising her "fortitude." Go ahead, anoint Miss California your new traditional family values mascot! Because Americans have a great deal of respect for the intellect and opinions of losing beauty pageant contestants