Tuesday:

They took Mrs. Bloomingberger today. I was washing a rack of dishes and could see through the kitchen window as the Support the Troops Police marched up to her apartment, bashed down the door and dragged the poor old gal away. They said she didn’t support The Troops enough.

I thought she supported The Troops just fine. You know, baked them cookies, sent them pen-pal letters—the weekly minimum amount of supporting The Troops, as required by law. Of course, Mrs. Bloomingberger wished she could support The Troops even more. She just loved those boys. But she was an elderly widow and couldn’t get around the house like she used to. Baking cookies was a job in and of itself these days, especially when you bake them from scratch.

Not that any of this mattered to the Support the Troops Police. They deemed it “insufficient” that she only supported The Troops the minimum amount as required by law. So a new law was drafted to expedite her arrest. It was called the Patriot Act XIII and it mandated that all citizens were legally required to do more for The Troops than was the weekly minimum legal requirement and that they could monitor your emails and phone calls to make sure you were complying.

Perhaps you’ve heard about the recent feud between President Bush and his conservative Republican base over immigration reform. The president was pushing a semi-amnesty bill, but he couldn’t get his base to support it. They hated amnesty so much that they took to their various soap boxes and warned the public against it.

Well, you know how this gang operates. To rally opposition against the bill, they painted a nightmarish post-amnesty future in which the country is overrun by diminutive brown men who use an army of giant carnivore worms to enslave the white race. This made the president very angry. He was irate about all the fear-mongering his former pundit-pals were slinging about, so he swung back, saying they were using “empty political rhetoric to frighten our fellow citizens.” He even went so far as to suggest they were unpatriotic because “they do not want what’s right for America.”

Perhaps you’ve heard about the looming split between Christian conservatives and the Republican Party. The rift pretty much started back in May when Dr. James Dobson, chairman of Focus on the Family, wrote that if Rudy Giuliani wins the Republican nomination, that he would consider abandoning support of the party.

Last month, Dobson got together with a large group of Christian conservative leaders called the Council for National Policy, who also acknowledged they’d consider bailing on the Republicans should Rudy, or any of the other conservatively challenged candidates on the ballot, receive the party’s nod.

Then, at the Values Voter's Summit, they came to—shocker—the same conclusion: Republicans are off the path to God’s glory, and if they don’t return soon, they’ll lose our support.

I heard it again—that phrase, that phrase, that awful phrase that I hate so much. It was spoken on The O’Reilly Factor. The panel was discussing Iraq in their typical fair and maliced manner, when one of them uttered the unutterable: He said the war in Iraq is necessary because we are “spreading democracy” in the region.
Spreading democracy?

I remember the first time I heard those words. It was during President Bush’s 2005 inaugural address: “It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture…. We’re spreading democracy.”