PalinPorn

Google "slatternly innuendo." Go ahead. I'll wait.

I'm proud to say that particular linguistic delight is of my very own coinage. I used it to describe an email from the far-right website NewsMax headed "Ann Coulter Gone Wild," taking off from the late-night mail-order videos of college girls taking their tops off: "Open it," I wrote in a New Republic cover story on conservative culture, "and there stands Ann in a come-hither, skin-tight dress on the cover of her latest book — the one where she (courageously) accuses September 11 widows of being 'witches' and 'harpies.'"

My argument in that piece is now fairly well familiar: that with the only real substance uniting conservatives being the mock-defiant will to bug liberals, the symbol and substance of conservative political activism becomes ritual displays of liberal-bugging. These rituals, as I noted, can be virginal: "In some Christian right communities, a new kind of prom has sprung up, not for high school seniors but for prepubescent girls. They dress up in party dresses and take their fathers as dates. After the fox trot, the daughter reads to her father from a card: 'With confidence in His power to strengthen me, I make a promise this day to God, my family, myself, my future spouse, and my future children; to remain sexually pure until the day I give myself as a wedding gift to my spouse." The father responds: 'I, (daughter's name)'s father, choose before God to cover my daughter as her authority and protection in the area of purity.'"

Or they can be slutty (see Coulter, Ann, above. The starkness of the contradiction doesn't matter. Or rather, is possibly the entire point. Forming their own esoteric political culture that baffles people outside it has become the decadent core of the conservative movement in its dotage. That's the logic of a political tendency in decline: as it becomes smaller, it becomes purer; as it becomes purer, it becomes smaller; so on and so forth until you're celebrating the esoteric as an end in itself, as a token of the fantasized immortality of the very thing that is dying before your eyes.

And so the Republican Party readies to split clean in half. On the one side will be the Obama Republicans: the ones who actually care about figuring out a modus vivendi with the new governing realities in the nation. On the other: the Palincrats, who'll simply whine and obstruct the national conversation.

Fortunately for the party of sanity, the Palincrats are winning: how else to describe the lusty spirit with which the candidates for RNC chair are competing for another to pronounce the most loudly that they're the most pure?

And speaking of "lusty," how else to describe this booming market for products like a, yes, "Hot Sarah Palin Calendar"?

She's a whore, she's Mother Mary—she's both, with a shotgun to boot. And the more the rest of the universe find all this simply bizarre, the more ritualistically the Palincrats will keep plastering the walls of our national debate with her chirpy visage.

Hot Sara Palin porn. I say: long may it prosper.

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future