Franklin Graham: Today's sermon against Obama

AS I CONTINUE TO collect the fragments from today's heated political spectacle, hysterical right-wing males continue to dominate the narrative of my potential next book that will be called "He said what?!?"

On MSNBC's "Morning Joe" show, crusading evangelist Franklin Graham would not flatly acknowledge that President Obama was a Christian. (Why am I writing this in 2012?) Graham said he doesn't know whether Obama has "accepted Jesus Christ" while adding something about Obama's Muslim father. As the startled panelists on the show stirred in disbelief, Graham said he was concerned that the president was more interested in looking after the welfare of Muslims than "Christians who are being murdered in Muslim countries." Subtle, huh?

Graham, the hyper-son of Billy Graham, has often spewed his religious doctrine but there was something well off the page in this morning's interview. He said he did know that Santorum was a Christian but wondered about Mitt Romney's Mormon faith as a downer. Still, whether it's Graham or Santorum and the other defenders of the faith, apocalyptic religious conservatism has taken control of portentous words and deeds.

Meanwhile, having failed in their efforts to poke around in America's bedrooms, the panting outriders in state legislatures are now focussing on something much more more specific: vaginal exploration.

In Virginia, for example, where vaginas commonly abound, the lawmakers - some of whom, it would be fair to assume, can testify to the efficacy of Viagra - are ready to declare victory over women's rights to privacy. As a companion to pending "personhood" anti-abortion legislation, the legislature is showing off its empowered masculinity. It is poised to pass an ultrasound law that mandates an often painful transvaginal probe before any abortion.

Yesterday a thousand protestors lined up in studied silence at the statehouse to express their dissent as the lawmakers headed to their sanctified offices inside.

I have a better idea to get these vaginal meddlers' undivided attention. It is Aristophanes' comedy, Lysistrata, in which the young Athenian woman assembled others from across Greece to deny their husbands sexual pleasure until their guys ended the Peloponnesian wars. Man, Viagra or no Viagra, it worked!

In today's religio-patriarchal climate, women need only to issue a warning that if you don't stop messing around with my body, you can sleep in another room. Then let nature take its course.

Yes, Virginia, there are no Newt and Rick

HAS THE WINNOWING process begun for two of the Republican Supernovas seeking the presidency? The word from Virginia would lead you to think so. Both Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry have failed to file enough signatures to qualify them for the state's March 6 primary ballot.

That will deny each of them a chance to compete in an important delegate state (where Professor Gingrich was ahead in the polls before he flubbed the qualifying petitions.) We now await his version that election laws, like child labor laws, are stupid.

Is it possible that Mitt Romney, a man for all reasons, will win the GOP nomination by default? (I can't believe I just wrote that!) But with these dismal choices, in the party of the blind, the one-eyed man could be King.

Ken Cuccinelli: some folks are more equal than others

That's Ken Cuccinelli in the photo. He is the attorney general of Virginia. He says strange things for a lawyer. He says, for example, that the Constitution doesn't protect gays. He says the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause doesn't apply. He says, "Frankly, the category of sexual orientation would never have been contemplated by the people who wrote and voted for and passed the 14th Amendment." It's also rumored that he understands the law. That's Ken Cuccinelli, a darling of the political right. He says a lot of strange things. I've tried to keep this message as simple as possible.

Red, dead meat for the national pundits

ALL OF THAT rattling you may have heard today was merely the clicking of bones from the knee-jerk reactions of the national pundits speculating on what REALLY happened in yesterday's elections. The consensus that made the talk shows and some of the august paragraphs of the New York Times was that the loss of two Democratic governors should be of great concern to President Obama for the 2010 November election. When I last looked, that fateful event was still a year away and what I've learned as a long-time political groupie is that there is nothing to confirm anything that might happen, good or bad, a full 12 months down the road. If you want further evidence of the fickleness of politics, while the New Jersey voters were kicking out the Democratic governor, 58 percent were telling the pollsters that they approved of Barack Obama.

Such split personalities occur often in, say, West Virginia, a poor state that depends on a lot of federal help to survive, now votes for a Republican president every four years to support a party that tends to deny the very social programs that help prop up the Mountain State. Go figure.

Less mentioned when the knees started jerking with the early results from Virginia and New Jersey was the Democratic victory in New York's the 23rd congressional district of New York, which had been a Republican stronghold. It happened after the original Republican candidate decided to withdraw under a furious onslaught from the party's ferocious right-wingers, including Sarah Palin, who showed up to support a "more conservative candidate." Is there a moral to this story? Not sure, other than to record the fact that Palin & Co.'s bark in this instance was a lot worse than the bite. Maybe Palin should take the advice of the late ex-senator from Illinois, Everett Dirksen, who dismissed a disturbing question from someone by shrugging: "Why don't you just hush?"