Republicans treat President Obama as if he were a substitute and they are just waiting for the real deal to come back in the room. That would be a white Republican male.

For all I know, Keith Olberman might still be doing his special extended commentary on the You Lie Guy, but I had to get to bed. I have not checked this morning to see if he is still going strong with his fulminating filibuster on stupidity, but he could be. There’s plenty of what a southern friend of mine calls “stupid out loud” for Keith to chronicle. It is much easier to talk about stupid guys than complex ideas.

So while we are at it, my favorite guy was not South Carolina’s Joe “A protégé of Strom Thurmond” Wilson. I could not get enough of the guy with the handmade “What Bill?” sign in his lap. Was he a holdover from the Clinton healthcare speech sixteen years earlier and the “What Bill?” indicated he still did not understand the importance of healthcare reform? Sometimes he acted as if the sign had dropped in his lap from the balcony. Or he was covering a wine spill from dinner. Or it was some Cialis misfiring.

While others in his pod of pathetics were sternly holding up their white flags, he seemed ambivalent about hoisting his own placard. He pointed to the signage in his lap, “Look at this thing. It wasn’t my idea.” That whole Republican side of the aisle looked like a bunch of troublemakers I had in a 7th grade study hall that reportedly balked at doing the stand-up, sit-down quad-strengthening exercises for a substitute gym teacher.

Republicans treat President Obama as if he were a substitute and they are just waiting for the real deal to come back in the room. That would be a white Republican male. Their desperate efforts to delegitimate an elected president (not to be confused with their efforts to legitimate a selected president) remind me of their panicked response to the terror attacks on September eleventh, eight years ago. For many of them, it was their first experience being attacked. Unlike women, poor people, and people of color who know being attacked as a pre-existing condition, the white guys freaked. Their world order was rocked. They panicked, put the country in lockdown and retaliated against the wrong country.

Once again their worldview is being rocked - demographically, racially, economically, politically – and the Birthers, Deathers and Everything in Betweeners are not behaving well at all. I would suggest detention, but after Guantanamo, it has bad connotations.