Social conservatives, the kind of folks who love killing and imprisoning other Americans while saving microscopic blobs of protoplasm in the name of Jesus, don’t have the heft they used to. But there’s enough true-believing fanatics around that the GOP clownshow had to pander to the fascist wing of the god party, sans Mormons and teh Gay of course.

Grifter Newt Gingrich, sensing a big payday thanks to his lackluster clusterfucked cohorts, seemed to best encapsulate the brutality and duplicity of the born-again political nexus. Proving the old axiom “if you mix religion and politics you get … politics” the serial adulterer and Gold medal flip-flopper struck the tone so beloved by those who hate, right down to the martyr pose:

(TPM) — If look at history from the mid-1960s, we’ve gone from a request for toleration to an imposition of intolerance. We’ve gone from a request to understand others to a determination to close down those who hold traditional values.
I think that we need to be very aggressive and very direct. The degree to which the left is prepared to impose intolerance and to drive out of existence traditional religion is a mortal threat to our civilization and deserves to be taken head on and described as what it is which the use of government to repress the American people against their own values.

I suppose if we ignore the civil rights movement, the struggle of equality for women, strides in making public spaces accessible to the handicapped, the draft, and gay rights, and concentrate instead on the “rights” of bigots to legislate and express their affection for beating and lynching people they don’t like, then yes, Newt may be right. America is just not nearly as tolerant as she was in the good old days Newt pines for. The water liberty cannons blasting marchers have given way to less tolerant mace and tasers, but there was a time, pure and innocent in Newt’s youth, before “the left” sided with the repressed and disenfranchised and stood up against enormous social inertia backed by mountains of money and hired thugs, that any privileged white guy could work his way from third base to home while slapping office girl butts and cracking race jokes in the break room.

It turns out those nasty Occupy protestors are goin against Jesus, and the clownshow dutifully fired off more red-meat cues in that direction than Pavlov had bells. To hear these nutballs tell it to the faithful they fleece, Jesus was a big flat tax advocate and a tireless proponent of corporate personhood. Newt could probably make money writing a 24th book claiming, if you look closely at da Vinci’s masterpiece, the Savior was clearly pounding the last table demanding an end to health insurance programs and food for crippled children and homeless former factory workers. If Bachmann doesn’t beat him to it with a Koch brother grant.

Strike a pose: Newt lays out for his modern-day Shroud, hands wide at his sides, almost too perfect really. And this is a man who know his Jesus, why the Son of Man has forgiven Newt for all manner of sins, just ask the man. Gingrich has the morality loophole in Christian theology wired. Every time he lies or cheats, and gets caught, he simply talks quite sincerely and convincingly about the unconditional love of Jesus Christ and God’s everlasting forgiveness. Viola, Newt is cleansed, pronounced pure at the spiritual level, ready to go out and sin and cheat and sincerely lie some more. Sincerity, that’s the hardest part, once Newt got that down the rest was easy.

Somehow this seems fitting: