Huff-Post: GOP Is a Dying Stalinist Tyrant, Mad With Syphilis?

The easiest stereotype of a Huffington Post article is a raging screed against conservatives written by a gasbag celebrity. Take Steven Weber, the former star of the sitcom Wings. His funeral for the Republican Party is promoted on the Huff-Po homepage with these words:

The Republican Party is like a dying tyrant, mad with syphilis, ironically like that very Stalin they would accuse their enemies of associating with.

That's how they scream "read more." It's so stereotypical it makes you think that Arianna's hired some 20-year-old intern in the basement to write a sort of Mad Libs parody of....mad liberals. But Weber was only getting started. From Stalin, it continued:

How else to account for their desperation to resurrect the wraith of Joseph McCarthy; the hammy and baffling utterances from high level party officials like Boehner and McConnell; the blatant desire on their part to let the country fail out of sheer resentment; the wanton sedition of Conservative shit-stirrers ranging from the quasi Madame Defarge Michele Bachmann to the porcine, pill-popping porcine propagandist Rush Limbaugh?

It is an all out assault on reason, on progress, on truth. What is the difference between the Republican Party and, say, the Taliban? A rogue by any other name would smell as rank. Their frantic accusations all churned out in a futile effort to explain their current pariah status is as pathetic and draconian as stoning a woman in the street.

The hateful free association just flows. But is an apology coming? Was Weber too hot-headed? Right after the stoning-the-woman passage, he wrote: "I feel I must apologize for my own particularly febrile anger. It's unseemly and ugly."

I'll second that motion, but Weber isn't really apologizing. The vision is ugly, but true:

But finally, the enemy is clearly outlined. We can see it for what it is and what it always has been. It exists not in myth but in a reality which has plagued humanity for millennia: utter, hateful ignorance born from a fear of truth, indeed a fear of life itself; a mad and impotent pursuit of some long-forgotten ecstasy having spawned generations of paranoid power addicts who chase the past at the expense of the future, cloaking their real intentions in perfumed patriotism and the seductive swoon of religion.

If Weber keeps at it, he might be professional enough for a college newspaper. He began with a "dead genitals" paragraph:

So there it stands: a naked, pigeon-chested old man, random strands of white hair on its boney shoulders; its swollen-knuckled hands clasped over its dead genitals, looking at once forlorn and menacing, shivering with self-loathing and xenophobia, raging pathetically at its timely and appropriate defeat at the hands of Reason.

Ladies and gentlemen: The Republican Party.

Weber's last stab at TV stardom was the failed NBC drama Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip.