Apparently, settling on the price is everything.

This is a rant. If we were Mr. Olbermann, we'd call it A Special Comment.

Here we are, only half way through the year, and Anaconda has come out with a manifesto that- even allowing for his view that all that counts is publicity- must surely retire the trophy for Sheer Over-the-Top Asshattery:

Lindsey Graham Doesn’t Get It

By fitsnews • on April 28, 2009

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There’s a growing notion that fiscal conservatives are somehow to blame for the collapse of the Republican Party - that we have created a “small tent” that is pushing voters away.

Funny, we thought people of all genders, colors and sexual orientations liked personal freedom and being able to keep more of their money - at least that’s what several civil rights movements and “the money we could be saving with Geico” told us.

Yet in spite of those fundamental truths, another myth is beginning to form - and certain Republicans are helping form it.

Their latest opportunity to propagate the fiction? The decision of Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter to bolt from the GOP.

From The Politico:

Two leading Republicans say Sen. Arlen Specter’s decision to become a Democrat highlights the hostility moderates feel from an increasingly conservative GOP.

“You haven’t certainly heard warm encouraging words about how [the GOP] views moderates,” said Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe, one of the few remaining moderate Republicans in the Senate.

Snowe said the party’s message has been, “Either you’re with us or you’re against us.”

Her frustration was shared by Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.), who slammed right-wing interest groups for pushing moderates out of the party.

Specter switched parties Tuesday after a recent poll showed him badly losing a Pennsylvania Republican primary next year to Club for Growth founder Pat Toomey. Toomey’s staunchly fiscally conservative political action committee backs only those Republicans who support a low-tax, limited-government agenda and comes down hard on those who break with party orthodoxy.

“I don’t want to be a member of the Club for Growth,” said Graham. “I want to be a member of a vibrant national Republican party that can attract people from all corners of the country — and we can govern the country from a center-right perspective.”

“As Republicans, we got a problem,” he said.

Are you effing kidding us? The party of George Bush, Trent Lott and Ted Stevens was the most flamingly liberal (fiscally speaking, anyway) in American history - until their excesses ushered in the era of the smooth-talking commies.

Seriously, Democrats are only in power today because Republicans spent too much money- and in the process were shown to be hypocritical, lying, corrupt and out-of-touch with the people they should have been hooking up with real tax cuts, not Dubya’s laughable excuse for them.

The fact that the party is 99% comprised of crotchety old white men obviously doesn’t help matters, but most people still vote according to pocketbook, not pigmentation.

In fact, when exit polls were parsed from the first round of GOP bloodletting three years ago, Republicans were shown to have been beaten because they were the big spenders. In fact, one poll in Ohio showed that a majority of young voters identified Republicans as “the party of big government.”

And what of last year’s electoral debacle?

Well, the last time we checked, Obama won (and carried Democrats across the country with him) because his otherwise generic vision of change was accompanied by a “middle class tax cut” - a variation of Nathan Bedford Forrest’s classic cavalry maxim “get there firtsus with the mostus.”

What we mean is that Obama told a majority of voters he was going to give them money - and make somebody else pay for it.

Republicans had no answer to that because, for whatever reason, they were unwilling to promote truly conservative fiscal policy that would have given every American a sizable tax cut.

Why didn’t they do that? We’ll never know. Obama could have been easily outflanked on pocketbook issues - but Republicans apparently couldn’t stomach giving up their entitlement culture.

And what of the oft-repeated mandate for “change?”

Well, “change”could have been fixing Social Security, privatizing health care, ending welfare and enacting school choice nationwide.

It also could have been implementing a federal spending cap and coming up with a plan to get rid of our crippling national debt.

It could have been sweeping ethics reform that would truly - once and for all - clean up the culture of DC corruption.

But Republicans had no appetite for any of that … and so the Democrats emerged as the only party offering something different, even if the promises of “change” turned out to be vastly different than what anyone ever imagined.

Oh, and Lindsey, the GOP could have stood up for all of those things while pursuing pro-black, pro-gay and pro-female positions.

Like we said, last time we checked - everybody likes getting more of their money back.

This from the same Anaconda who called being gay a birth defect and declared the only legal protection gays need is coverage under the Americans With Disabilities Act. In fact, more than once.Who claims to have opposed the SC ban on marriage equality with no links to document it (flop the salami out on the table, Willie). Who came up with blather like this:

For the most part, Lindsay and Sam managed to sidestep the raw edges of homosexuality, maintaining a degree of mildness where before there has been none.

Or this: Like some gay ass, fiery prehistoric peacock rising from glorified charcoal, our online polls are back, people.

Who declined to watch Pushing Daisies cause he's not gay.

Who let this bit of authentic conservative gibberish issue from the imaginary friend he keeps in his thumb, Mande:

From Republicans’ hysterical need to “define marriage” to their Draconian “War Against Drugs,” the right thinks it exists to make sure we don’t mess up – lest the Almighty punish us or something. (Which: didn’t Jesus already die for our sins anyway, essentially presenting a free pass to sin it up?)

Anyway, it’s this “social conservatism” that is so emblematic of the Republican Party’s departure from its conservative roots.

The conservative mantra once was “small government;” now it’s “tradition.” Instead of upholding their own tradition of small government, Republicans have, in a wily bait-and-switch, made tradition itself the basis for their party’s existence. The word is but a concept without the heft of conservative tradition itself – a tradition grounded in the recognition that autonomy is paramount. Conservative tradition dictates that a person must have the right to get high or be gay and invoke God’s wrath; Republican “tradition” requires that government shield us from such risk.

For all the Republican chatter about “tradition,” the party sure does have a blast shedding Daddy garb and dressing up like Mommy to play house with Americans. Republicans may, in fact, play Mommy better than Mommy herself – holding our hands but also swatting them away from harm.

Who, when he really wants to slam somebody, accuses them of blowing other men. Sometimes more than once a day.

Who called Boy Fogle's South Carolina Is So Gay Expose' bad, not because it was homophobic trash, but because it was bad for the state and because FITS News didn't break it, but in another post praised McLovin' for breaking it?

And there's pages more.

But to claim that gays should flock to a party that continues distilling itself into the finest essence of what gets its incredibly dwindling base pissed off minute to minute because- they want to save money on taxes? When most gay couples make less than straight married ones? When they can't inherit each other's property tax-free as straight couples can? When the death of the better earning half of a gay couple results in an average 25% reduction in Social Security income a straight surviving spouse doesn't have to suck up? When the death of the legally married, retired former congressman Gerry Studds resulted in his surviving spouse being denied the congressional pension closeted gay congressman Stewart McKinney was able to leave his nominal wife? When legally married gay couples aren't counted in the Census? When they can't file joint tax returns? When wanting so badly to serve in the military and go risk getting killed in our various wars is sufficiently unpatriotic to warrant peremptory, and dishonorable, discharge, even as the US's dwindling number of allies includes a number of nations whose armed services allow openly gay members, and we have discharged scores of Arabic translators for being gay when it's hard to see how gayness affects linguistic skills (cue the lesbian joke, Will)? When you can't have a relationship with a foreign national when straight people can marry right away and start their overseas-born spouse on the path to citizenship?

We could go on at some length: there's a couple of thousand other state and federal rights contingent on marriage. Civil unions have not worked: insurers, for example, have routinely denied coverage because a civil union is not a marriage. In any event, nothing is allowed in SC, and for the likes of Anaconda to wrap himself in the Gay Pride flag is just fucking utterly ridiculous.

But it makes perfect sense, given his view of the world, that Sic Willie would expect gay couples to flock to the Republican Party- a party he half the time says he himself isn't a member of- over money.