My Pet Conspiracy Theories
The Stanford-Yale Oreo, or the Texas Graduate: Dubya and Condi: fuckin’. They know they’ll never get caught because there’s a media and political smokescreen around their private lives, and nobody really goes snooping for Republican sexual antics (case in point - you think a senior Dem senator being picked up for toilet sex would have stayed off the news for three or four months?), but it appeals perfectly to them both, and in both cases it might just be a sort of Pareto-optimal peccadillo.
Bush is the kind of right-wing evangelical jackass for whom the only esctasy is the self-destructive esctasy of a lapsed puritan, the only thrill the thrill of pushing one’s personal debasement to the limit; he had the pleasure and shame wires crossed a long time ago, and between cheating on his wife and sleeping with a black subordinate, it’s difficult to imagine the good-ol’-boy finding any more shame-driven eroticism without being gay or into crack whores. For Condi’s part, we find a reasonably intelligent and attractive woman with an extremely scant sexual history, but the documented partners are all big, strong guys, and fairly socially powerful as well - NFL players, suits, that kind of thing. The impression I get is an extremely powerful, dominant personality who is primarily submissive when it comes to sex - and besides Dick Cheney (who despises her), the President is the only man in America who could dominate her.
If they aren’t fucking now they have in the past, and if they haven’t it’s probably been from conscious effort and for the worse. And the Condi-Georgie-Laura triangle it forms is a perfect example of the relatively tame but personally horrifying sex lives the Republicans are famous for - the Democratic frontrunners in this race, after all, are respectively a couple with more genuine chemistry and mutual respect than have ever been in the Oval Office and a couple who, while by all indications sexually estranged, value each other enough as thinkers and as people that the idea of ending their personal partnership is unthinkable. (Rather like Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, although roughly reversed in relative intelligence, family influence, and convictions.) By contrast, Palin and her husband both think of her as a baby factory and the less said about McCain’s horrifying relationship history the better.
The Big State Pepperpot, or The Yellow Rose of Alaska: Sarah Palin: Ron Paul in a clever disguise. You might think the children would be a dead giveaway, but he is an obstetrician.
Cee Bee Yoosta Bee or Spitball, Snowball - Same Difference: The Republican Party grooms strategic Yoostabees from the ranks of Blue Dogs for political gain and has been doing so regularly since at least 1994. It’s Lieberman now, and while it wound up being Zell Miller in 2004 I strongly suspect that it was supposed to be James Traficant.
Mighty Morphine Bowery Dangers or Why Cindy, What Big Eyes You Have: The main purpose of the war on drugs is to criminalize any kind of relief from the grind of everyday life, ignoring as it does any drugs readily available to people outside of that grind. Wackily far-out, I know, but it’s so crazy it just might work.