How much lower are y’all going to sink?

I ask only so that the rest of us both know what to expect and can guage when you’ve finally hit rock bottom.  More importantly, we’d like to know when to start taking you seriously again as a political party.  Because right now, with the loudest voices of your party shouting about death panels on the radio or calling the President of the United States a liar during a joint session of Congress, the only ones rallying around your causes are Glenn Beck, the birther crowd and Boss Limbaugh. And while I know those folks make a lot of noise, what you need to realize is that theirs is a sound and fury significant of nothing.

For years, your party has played the fear card, and we’ve come to expect as much. But now, those regularly playing that card aren’t doing so with a full deck.  And the hand being dealt is one filled with jokers such as John Boehner, who never met a lie he wouldn’t echo, and Indiana’s Mike Pence, who said of Van Jones — without his tongue planted in his cheek or any indication that he understood the irony of his words — that “his extremist views and coarse rhetoric have no place in… the public debate.”

This from a party in which members still routinely trot out the repeatedly-disproven claim that President Obama is not an American citizen. Who blasted Obama’s speaking to school children as an attempt at indoctrination before hearing what he had to say, and accused him of changing the message after realizing it was the equivalent of a pep rally. Worse, Republicans are failing basic math.  Again and again, they talk about how they represent “the majority of Americans”, failing to recognize that if those words were true, they wouldn’t have lost the White House and their majority in Congress.

I get what’s going on with Republicans. Really, I do.  They’re scared.  When people who are used to being in charge lose their position of power practically over night — and worse, when the person who takes it away is not “one of them” — it’s downright terrifying.  And when people become afraid, they act out.

They lie to make themselves look better.

They use scare tactics in the hope that others will come running to them for protection from the Big Bad that is threatening to destroy their way of life.

And they get desperate, which is what’s happening now.  The party doesn’t necessarily want to be associated with the Sarah Palin’s and Joe The Plumber’s of the world, but without them, there’s not a lot left.  Rather than become more moderate and thus regain some of the many members of the party who’ve drifted away, they acknowledge that the squeaky wheel does, in fact, gets the grease — which, in this case, is media attention in general and Fox News Channel coverage in particular — and embrace a “go big or go home” approach.

But come on, kids.  This has gone on long enough.  I’d like to make a suggestion: Why not float a balloon that isn’t filled with laughing gas?  Find a moderate Republican you can send out there to make speeches and see if maybe, just maybe, the public responds to someone who doesn’t respond to everything with shouts of, “You say I’m crazy? I got your crazy!”  Who knows? Maybe, just maybe, you can find a way to get back into the game before there’s nobody left willing to shell out money to see you play.

But if not, if you guys want to keep heading down the self-destructive path on which you’ve been traveling since January, never fear… we Democrats will be more than happy to pinch hit for as long as necessary.

Maybe it was inevitable that someone out there would plot revenge against the United States for having created The Weather Girls and stuck their megapopular tune “So Many Men (So Little Time)” deep into the psyche of anyone who heard it.

But it was, of course, the Canadians — those same sneaky folks who gave us Pamela Anderson, Anne Murray and even Peter North, a porn star whose legendary endowment has left many an American man feeling inferior — who found a way to turn that same weather from whence the literally-larger-than-life singers got their name against us.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present the folks at Raindrops, a seemingly innocuous umbrella maker out of Toronto who just happen to market a line of rain gear which succinctly — if not politely — offer up the typical reaction to a rainy day.

Of course, the real version doesn’t blur out the word. And while it’s an amusing sentiment, it also could result in some adults having to explain why the grouchy man stomping through the puddles has a very bad word on his umbrella. “Because they were all out of the nice Miss Piggy one you have,” I can just imagine a frazzled mom replying.

So that’s how it’s to be, Canada? We allow a group of animated, foul-mouthed children from South Park, Colorado to sing an off-color tune about you in an R-rated movie intended for adults (and send into the world the gayly melodic tunes of two plump women) and you retaliate with obscene raingear?

Well, we didn’t want to break out the big guns, but you have forced our hand. Do not say you weren’t warned.

That’s right, she’s all yours now. No take backs!