From The New Yorker,

Libby has a lot to live up to as a conservative author of erotic fiction. As an article in SPY magazine pointed out in 1988, from Safire ([She] finally came to him in the bed and shouted “Arragghrrorwr!” in his ear, bit his neck, plunged her head between his legs and devoured him”) to Buckley (“rather do this with you than play cards”) to Liddy (” Li froze, her lips still enclosing Randy’s glans …”) to Ehrlichman (˜It felt like a little tongue”) to O’Reilly (“Okay, Shannon Michaels, off with those pants”), extracurricular creative writing has long been an outlet for ideas that might not fly at, say, the National Prayer Breakfast. In one of Lynne Cheney’s books, a Republican vice-president dies of a heart attack while having sex with his mistress.

Not that there’s anything wrong with CONSENTING ADULTS having kinky, freaky sex. Or writing really bad stories about it. But let’s leave the beasties out of it, eh? I have a hard time believing an animal can give legal consent. Apparently these criteria are too restrictive for Scooter’s fantasies:

At age ten the madam put the child in a cage with a bear trained to couple with young girls so the girls would be frigid and not fall in love with their patrons. They fed her through the bars and aroused the bear with a stick when it seemed to lose interest.

I’m no prude, but that’s just ill. If it is indeed something that was practiced in Japan at the time (hard to believe), Scooter’s decision to write about it in an “Erotic Novel” says something really creepy about Scooter’s sensibilities.

Last week Randi Rhodes was reading excerpts from Scooter’s book and playing clips of O’Falafel reading his own Porn Novel which includes a scene where a crack dealer has sex with two 15 year olds. Randi mentioned how all this reminded her of the Abu Ghraib torture porn. These are fundamentally sick people. And as Randi’s mom once told her, “if they tell you who they are, believe them”.

What was that Social Darwinism proverb that says “the rich are better than us”? According to the Doctrine of Personal Responsibility, the Rich and Powerful have achieved prominence because their superior morality enabled them to make good choices in life and avoid the pitfalls of immoral behavior that the Rabble so readily falls into.

How does that square with reality? It doesn’t.

By their actions (lying, stealing, murdering innocent people, taking drugs, engaging in sexual harassment, writing creepy Porn Novels) the Conservatives currently in power have shown that their morality is by far inferior to that of the Working Class.

So why do they get to have all the good stuff? Rather than moral superiority, reality shows that the only prerequisite to being Rich and Powerful is to do whatever it takes to get Money and Power. Anything goes. The only crime is getting caught.

Social Darwinism and the Doctrine of Personal Responsibility are nothing but simple ideologies designed to get the Rabble to accept their place in society and in the economy. These ideologies are pervasive in US popular culture, but once they are broken down, uncomfortable questions emerge:

Still think the Super-Rich deserve their tax breaks? Still think the Office of the President is inherently deserving of respect? Still think “professional” pundits should be taken seriously because they get paid for what they do?