This year’s Republican Presidential Candidates are, to put it mildly, distasteful. As if ‘traditional’ conservative values isn’t off-putting enough, these folks have scooped up the most alienated, marginalized and narrow-minded citizens on our social continuum.

Pandering to these extremists has candidates clustering on the brink of disaster by preaching blatant racism, divisive regionalism, isolationism, and generalized war mongering. All this makes me long for the days of George H whose big campaign slogan was “watch my lips, no new taxes” or the days of George W who garbled the English language (“We cannot let terrorists hold this nation hostile or hold our allies hostile”) and could never seem to get ‘nuclear’ right.

For the first time, in my admittedly long life, the campaign trail is crowded with people competing for the title of:  most outrageous, most offensive, most morally repugnant, most immature, most regressive, most extreme, most insulting and most uninformed. Although each candidate is unique, their collective rhetoric is stuffed with hatred disguised as religious fervor, generalized rejection of anyone who’s different and astounding illogicality. These candidates jump to conclusions, render pronouncements unsupported by rational thought, confuse feelings for facts and lack anything resembling a moral compass.

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You say you oppose abortion even in cases of rape, incest and even if the mother’s life is in danger. You say you are being compassionate and religiously pure. You think you are being good and faithful followers of God’s law because you value human life …but you’re wrong about that. You are in fact making a value judgement. You are determining that the life of a fetus the size of a cashew nut is more valuable than that of the mother, a mother who may be a 14 year old child or an impoverished mother of 4. In any event without fully seeing, perceiving or evaluating each of those situations you are making uninformed decisions that have the power to destroy the lives of thousands of women and those who love them.

Have you Right to Lifers ever paused to think about the act of rape? It’s ugly. It’s a horrible act that one human being inflicts on another. What would it be like to be raped, wounded, traumatized, terrified, injured, beaten, or bloodied by your parent, uncle, brother, or a stranger?

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Reflecting on the Republican debate, I was astonished to realize how all those ‘right to life’ candidates care about ‘the value of human life’. “All life matters!” they declared! “I value life, even the life of unborn fetuses!” and so forth.

Isn’t it great that there are so many humane, caring candidates?

But, hang on a second, let me get something clear:

Do you care about the fetus just when it’s a fetus or throughout its life?

Is there a point in time when you ‘life lovers’ cease to care about those ‘valuable lives’ you’re insisting be born?

Do you care about them after they are born, abandoned and scooped up by under-funded foster care programs or after they are taken home to an impoverished, unloving home where they weren’t welcomed in the first place? Do you care if they scream from hunger or die from Failure to Thrive?

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Although political pundits sorely miss W with his idiotic misstatements like, “Those who enter this country illegally, are breaking the law!” we can rest assured that should Sarah Palin seek public office she will step into that void and provide us with endless hilariousness. Most recently Bill Maher quoted or misquoted her as saying “…my heart goes out to all those people in Ebola.” Well personally I’m glad she’s so sympathetic but it would be better if she knew exactly what, where and to whom her sympathies were being directed! Perhaps she would benefit from a geography lesson that pointed out Angola is not the same as Ebola, one is a country the other a deadly virus. Duh! We can all breathe a sigh of relief that she is not looking for a job with the World Health Organization or the Center for Communicable Diseases, the world has enough trouble without adding her to the mix! And did she really brag that she can kill her dinner before she cooks it?  Let’s imagine this. There she is wearing her latest $2500 Versace creation, slaving over her recently shot goose (or wolf as the case may be) preparing a little Sunday dinner. And perhaps while her goose is cooking, she saunters into her bedroom and peeks out her window at Russia, just to check on how things are going over there, with that Ukrainian problem. And then, she gets this brilliant idea. Why doesn’t she give Putin a call, them being practically neighbors, she’ll invite him over for dinner. He’ll hop on his MasterCraft x46 and zoom right over. To make political capital from her efforts she’ll call the press to take pictures of the little peace conference about to take place at her dining room table. She’ll even ask him to bring along some of his Pro-Russian Ukrainians. They’re his neighbors, so they’re practically her neighbors too. Hell, they could bring along those hungry folks from Ebola too (they’re somewhere south of Ukraine according to her map)!

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