Remember the movie, "The Aristocrats"? If you haven't seen it, it's about a traditional joke that everybody in comedy seems to have heard since early in their show business careers. The basic joke is that a family goes into an agent's office and says, "You've just got to see our act."
They then launch into the most disgusting, perverse act imaginable, involving sex, body excretions and emissions, the kids, the family pet -- everything. They finish and ask the agent, "Well, whadda you think?" Looking for something to say, he asks, "And what do you call your act?"
"The Aristocrats!"
Not surprisingly, how you tell the joke says a lot about you. After all, telling it is an invitation to stretch your imagination and come up with the most disgusting 'act' you can possibly imagine; and if you're telling it to other comedians, there's an implicit challenge to come up with something the others have never heard before, preferably something worse than they've ever heard before. If you can surprise the old hands on the comedy circuit, it earns you some respect. If you can gross them out, even better.
The whole movie is different comedians telling their own, personal version of the joke.
Lately, it seems that since they got control of the White House and both houses of Congress, the Republicans have been doing the political equivalent of the aristocrats joke. They've made congenital liars press secretary. They've put fascists in charge of the Justice Department, and on the federal bench. They've put sadists in charge of secret prisons. And as Stephen Colbert pointed out last night, they've put octogenarian Ted Stevens in charge of the Senate Committee that oversees the internet, and a pedophile in charge of the program to protect children on the internet.
Can all this possibly be accidental? I doubt it. I think they're doing it to see just how outrageous they can get away with. So the new joke is, "You put a vampire in charge of the blood bank, made a necrophilic the coroner, and the guy who fucks dogs you made dogcatcher? What do you call yourselves?"
"THE REPUBLICANS!"