Jon Stewart asks Santorum what friggin planet he lives on

"This guy is an idiot!"

Over the past few weeks we have seen more than enough instances from Republican audiences showcasing their ugly side. Applauding 232 executions, applauding letting people die who have no insurance and of course this latest one, booing a US Combat soldier in Iraq.

The defense is that it is just a few bad apples. BULLSHIT. It is what the Republican Base is. It is what American Christianity has become. It is the central ideology of the Libertarian Party. What is FEW are those who cannot hold it back in public – as Governor Rick Perry has said – who have no heart.

I jotted down an experiment about this some 15 years ago.

Idealism is not dead in America. It has only changed from a time when people actually thought (I know this is hard to believe) that the point was to make the world a better place to live for everyone. Only one word has changed, to make the world a better place to live for me.

Over the years I have prided myself in trying to get the big picture down to the least words. Regarding conservatism, I went from reducing their basic ideology from I suppose I can understand the callous selfish disregard, it’s the pride in it that passes me by, to just four words: “ I – me – my – mine”.

I have recently succeeded in reducing it down to only one word thanks to the help of a bottle of Jim Beam disappearing down the throat of a conservative friend of mine. Seeing him in his cups I began. “What about the Blacks? What about the gays? What about the poor? What about the unemployed? What about the ill? What about the homeless?” Not surprisingly, I received the same slobbering gleeful shout of an answer to each question: “FKEM!” And there you have it, the entire conservative ideology defined in just one word.