I will not reduce myself to referring to the woman who screamed at the cashier for 20 minutes as rationally challenged or socially maladjusted or temporarily reality averse when what she was and what everybody on line saw her being was totally fucking crazy. My sensitivity toward people with genuine psychological issues will not make me tell that Birther that he’s insufficiently respectful toward evidence when I want to tell him that he is out of his bloody mind.

I have seen finger-wagging to the contrary a few times in the last day, including once from a woman Who Expressed how “Deeply disappointed” she was that somebody would use such language to describe a wildly abusive customer screaming at a teenager behind a fast food counter. Apparently what we are supposed to do when describing a situation like that is concoct a multi -syllabic hyphenate parsing the precise nature of the major malfunction.

You are not depriving me of crazy, stupid, maniacal, moronic, idiotic, dumb, wacky, lunatic, nuts, or any other profoundly useful words that come in so handy when I am forced to describe the bad behavior we see around us everyday. They are essential parts of my toolbox and you cannot have them. At a certain point you are simply sabotaging our ability to Communicate. And if you think less of me for drawing the line here, if this makes me a horrible person, or a relic of the last century, or any of the other bad things that make the Wranglers of our language sad, then so be it. At least people understand my sentences!

He’s not in the governing business, he’s in the outrage business.

But it was while I was looking at this that I finally twigged to where I’d seen Louis Gohmert before.

Louis Gohmert is the old prospector in the 1950s horror movie who sees some strange pulsating object in the middle of the shattered meteor and jumps into the crater to poke at it with a stick.

Isn’t he? Really? Just look at him! Of course he is!

He’s EXACTLY who would have gotten cast in that part!

Inspired by this, and the premise that by age fifty people have the faces they deserve, I started casting old movies with others of his ilk.

Ted Cruz is the unpleasant guy who gets invited to your dinner party because he lives on the block but is the first to go out and get himself a battering ram when the radio says that the Soviet missiles are coming and your family has the only bomb shelter.

Of course he is. Just look at him.

Bill O’Reilly is the high school gym teacher who gets exposed as a bully and an embezzler of school funds by the two outcast kids in the last five minutes of the movie.

Of course he is. Just look at him.

Michele Bachmann is the elementary school teacher who came out of the glowing cave slightly different, never blinking, and only the ten-year-old protagonist understands that she now has a cabbage sticking out of her neck and is being controlled by an alien intelligence that can’t quite duplicate human responses.

Bryan Fischer is, of course, the alien in the shiny silver jumpsuit sitting at the Goodwill-foraged wooden desk, who tells his underlings that the Supreme Leader has just come up with a new plan for the annihilation of all humanity.

Rush Limbaugh is the big fat guy in the little boy blue sailor outfit who thinks he’s six years old and keeps pestering Lou Costello.

Rand Paul is the fellow in the shimmery diaphanous robe who greets the Terran explorers with, “Here on my world, we have eliminated all emotion. I am Extor.”

John Boehner is the ambassador being delivered to his new post by the ENTERPRISE, who keeps showing up on the bridge to complain just because Kirk won’t abandon the crewmembers whose shuttlecraft got stuck inside the trans-dimensional space anomaly; he wants that shuttlecraft abandoned now, because he’s so anxious to take up his new position on Regulus VII.

Man, I could play this game all day.