Even as natural disasters confront the US at every turn — this morning Hurricane Irene is bearing down on the Eastern Seaboard, where a lot of folks are still recovering from an near-unprecedented earthquake a couple of days ago — Republican budget cutters are still all for gutting disaster relief.

One asshole GOP senator was happy not to have a firearm because he’d apparently have to shoot Democrats: “Political correctness is B.S.,” Coburn said Thursday night, according to an Associated Press report from the Oklahoma City meeting. “Tell ’em to get over it. It was a joke and everybody laughed. That’s all I have to say about it.”

The GOP has become the party of the bat-shit crazy.

Not a one of the current GOP presidential candidates has a lick of sense — Michele Bachmann can’t tell the difference between Elvis being born or dying, and doesn’t seem to yet know the Soviet Union is far down in the dustbin of history; Rick Perry has been trying to back-track/distance himself from his own book, published just months ago, where he claimed everything from health care to toilet paper was unconstitutional; and Mitt Romney totally believes a corporation is a real person.
Even the GOP can’t stand the GOP.
According to Politico: The problem, in shorthand: To many conservative elites, Rick Perry is a dope, Michele Bachmann is a joke and Mitt Romney is a fraud.
US politics is an un-natural disaster long in the making.

Garrison Keillor, of the soothing, nostalgic voice of by-gone-days,  has penned a great piece on the demise of the fabled GOP and discovers that, yes, Republicans are bat-shit crazy.
Some money bits:

Something has gone seriously haywire with the Republican Party.
Once, it was the party of pragmatic Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed spectacles who decried profligacy and waste, were devoted to their communities and supported the sort of prosperity that raises all ships.
…
In the years between Nixon and Newt Gingrich, the party migrated southward down the Twisting Trail of Rhetoric and sneered at the idea of public service and became the Scourge of Liberalism, the Great Crusade Against the Sixties, the Death Star of Government, a gang of pirates that diverted and fascinated the media by their sheer chutzpah, such as the misty-eyed flag-waving of Ronald Reagan who, while George McGovern flew bombers in World War II, took a pass and made training films in Long Beach.
The Nixon moderate vanished like the passenger pigeon, purged by a legion of angry white men who rose to power on pure punk politics.
“Bipartisanship is another term of date rape,” says Grover Norquist, the Sid Vicious of the GOP.
“I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”
The boy has Oedipal problems and government is his daddy.
The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk.
Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we’re deaf, dumb and dangerous.
…
The Union is what needs defending this year.
Government of Enron and by Halliburton and for the Southern Baptists is not the same as what Lincoln spoke of.
This gang of Pithecanthropus Republicanii has humbugged us to death on terrorism and tax cuts for the comfy and school prayer and flag burning and claimed the right to know what books we read and to dump their sewage upstream from the town and clear-cut the forests and gut the IRS and mark up the constitution on behalf of intolerance and promote the corporate takeover of the public airwaves and to hell with anybody who opposes them.

A good read — one can almost hear that voice of sanity describing insanity.
Yet Keillor penned the above in August 2004.
Even way-worse.