Touched by a convicted felon’s rendition of Lionel Richie’s “Hello,” judges Paula Abdul and Randy Jackson gave the man a reduced sentence.

Kit Bond, the Missouri Senator who I believe was recently played by Abigail Breslin in Patricia Rozema’s An American Girl movie, gave a rousing speech in Cape Girardeau today urging voters to support John “At Least I Don’t Plaster on the Makeup Like a Trollop, You C*nt” McCain. His greatest quote:

“Just this past week, we saw what Barack Obama said about judges. He said, ‘I’m tired of these judges who want to follow what the Founding Fathers said and the Constitution. I want judges who have a heart, have an empathy for the teenage mom, the minority, the gay, the disabled. We want them to show empathy. We want them to show compassion.'”

Oh no, not empathy and compassion! That’s just plain un-American!

Have the Republicans lost whatever was left of the very small piece of a brain they’ve been sharing for the last 40 years? Next they’ll be saying, “Just yesterday, we learned that Barack Obama, in his disdain for our Founding Fathers, wants to use the Constitution as toilet paper and appoint Paula Abdul and Randy Jackson to the Supreme Court.” (Then they’ll have a 527 fund commercials pointing out that Abdul is Jewish, which makes her an abortion-loving, gay rights championing liberal, and that Jackson is obviously tied to terrorism via his connection to the arena rock band Journey. At the end of this commercial, just for good measure, a disembodied female voice will yell something denying the existence of God.)

Looking beyond the most absurd and glaring lies contained in Bond’s warning — that Obama, who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, is scornful of our Founding Fathers and the Constitution — you can’t help but wonder why Republicans are doing such a terrible job of fear-mongering this year. They once did it so effortlessly, with such great élan, yelling things like “You’re all going to die if you don’t vote for us!” and now they’re circling the drain as they try with some despair to resuscitate the smattering of social issues that Karl Rove was able to gleefully, and successfully, exploit in the not-so-distant (though it seems like a hundred years ago) past.

Kit Bond, like Pat Buchanan, believes that after eight years of suffering under President Bush, Americans are still afraid of and hostile toward concepts like empathy and equality. In almost any other election, that kind of patently Republican strategy of doing everything you can to appeal to the lowest common denominator might work. But right now people are scared about the economy, they’re sick of turning on their local news each night to see another story about a 20-year-old soldier their kids went to school with returning home from Iraq dead or limbless, and the last thing they’re worried about is whether judges are being mean enough to the disabled.

This party’s lack of perspective is never anything less than astounding. And from a personal standpoint, don’t people like Bond and Buchanan and Michele Bachmann ever get tired of being such fuckheads? Oh, and by the way, what was with Bond’s use of “the gay” in Cape Girardeau? Is “the gay” like “The One” in The Matrix — and if so, who is our Neo? Is it Ellen? Ellen would have no reason to stand before a judge. Her dancing might get annoying sometimes but it isn’t against the law.