Sick bastards

This past weekend, an event called the Values Voters Summit was held in Washington DC. It's a kind of big-tent showcase for the fundamentalist far-right base of the Republican Party, sponsored by such leading conservative lights as the Family Research Council, the Heritage Foundation, and Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. Some of the featured speakers included Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Insane), Gary Bauer, Bill Bennett, the wildly fertile Duggar family, Newt Gingrich, Sean Hannity, anti-masturbation candidate and occasional dabbler in witchcraft Christine O'Donnell, Phyllis Schlafly, Mitt Romney, and of course, Sarah Palin. You can imagine the sort of demented gibberish that came from the podium over the weekend, and frankly, most of it was too mind-numbing to repeat in any detail. Newt Gingrich did his little song and dance about how Islam is coming to eat your children. Christine O'Donnell reprised the nonsense about "death panels." One fellow, a senior aide to Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), argued that all pornography is by nature homosexual, and therefore watching any form of pornography will make the viewer instantly gay. Gay people in general, a woman's right to choose and all things Obama took it in the chops, with plenty of birth certificate speculation to go around. So, yeah, it was pretty standard stuff, given the roster of speakers who made the scene. But at one point during the event, new ground was broken in truly astonishing fashion. One becomes accustomed to cruel, insensitive, hate-filled rhetoric from the kind of people who dwell in this particular region of politics, but when Mike Huckabee took the stage, a whole new standard was set.