Religious fanatics.

From today's Boston Globe:

In the four years after Michael Schiavo won the right to remove his wife's feeding tube, the state's social welfare agency methodically investigated 89 complaints of abuse, but never found that he or anybody else harmed Terri Schiavo, records released late yesterday indicate.

To the contrary, the state Department of Children & Families, or DCF, repeatedly concluded that Michael Schiavo ensured that his wife's physical and medical needs were met, provided proper therapy for her, and had no control over her money. They also found no evidence he beat or strangled her, as his critics have charged.

I tell you this much: Michael Schiavo is a much bigger person than I am, because I'd be flinging libel suits left, right, and center. Randall Terry's lawyers would never have had so many billable hours in all their lives. Meanwhile, Howard Dean says you're goddamn skippy you'll be hearing Terry Schiavo's name in upcoming elections.

"This is going to be an issue in 2006, and it's going to be an issue in 2008," Dean told about 200 people at a gay rights group's breakfast in West Hollywood, "because we're going to have an ad with a picture of Tom DeLay saying, 'Do you want this guy to decide whether you die or not? Or is that going to be up to your loved ones?' "

Dean, a practicing physician until he became governor of Vermont in 1991, added: "The issue is: Are we going to live in a theocracy where the highest powers tell us what to do? Or are we going to be allowed to consult our own high powers when we make very difficult decisions?"

This is exactly right. I've watched twenty-five years of Republicans saying Democrats are traitors, anti-Christian, yadda yadda yadda. Now it's our turn. The GOP is the party of religious fanatics that want to allow Pat Robertson and James Dobson to control your life. This argument also carries the advantage of being functionally true. They have made it clear that they will dance like monkeys on strings for those modern-day Cotton Mathers, and even some folks on the right have started to notice it.

While the Schiavo case was winding down to its inevitable resolution, I read ridiculous op-eds like this stunningly crappy analysis from Richard Cohen, suggesting that the Democrats were the big losers in the entire affair. Not a chance. Democrats decided this was in no way a matter for the federal government and, in a maneuver that clearly sailed way the hell over Cohen's head, stayed out of it. Imagine that. There's a word for that: principled. There's also a strategy there, commonly known as don't get in your opponent's way when they are busy cutting their own wrists.

Frist's cozying up to our homegrown Savanarolas is going to be a big, stinky albatross around his neck when he pursues the presidency in 2008. The record since 2000 shows that the GOP talk on smaller government is just that: talk. "In terms of real domestic discretionary outlays, which are most easily controlled, the biggest spender in the past 40 years is George W. Bush, with expenditure racing ahead 8.2% annually [...] No. 2 on the list is Gerald Ford, at 8%. No. 3 is Richard Nixon." Now they have revealed that the rhetoric about personal freedom is nothing more than rhetoric. And that leaves what for honest Republicans? Habitual distaste for the Democratic Party, I suppose, which is certainly a powerful enough force, but probably not enough to maintain their 2% advantage shown in 2004.

What's that you say? Robertson/Falwell/Dobson don't represent the whole GOP? Oh, gee, I think I've heard that argument dismissed somewhere else previously. Except I never saw the fricking Senate Minority Leader appearing on television with Ward Churchill. You lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas, people. These aren't peripheral people who occasionally vote for your party. This is your base that you have carefully cultivated and shamelessly pandered to for decades. They aren't yours, they are you. Too late to disavow them now.