So, you’re the demagogic leader of a national campaign protesting a local zoning decision, and somebody slashes a cabbie for worshiping the wrong deity. Do you…

(a) Keep yer piehole shut.

(b) Issue a brief statement proclaiming your peaceful intentions and condemning all violence.

(c) Accuse your opponents of staging the hit.

If you answered (c), welcome to Stinque, Pam Geller! Thanks for dropping by!

And if you’re unfamiliar with Ms. Geller, you should be: She’s the Orly Taitz of anti-muslim bigotry. Her website Atlas Shrugs is Ground Zero of the Not-Mosque protest. But unlike Orly, nobody is laughing Pam out of the room. Yet:

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGhnuHx2NNc

Yesterday, in an important policy speech, House Minority Leader John Boehn—

Oh, fuck it. Really: Fuck. It. It doesn’t matter. We can no longer care. Not when we’re haunted by visions of Sheryll at every turn, imploring us with her searching brown eyes to throw away our worldly concerns and just dance, dance, dammit! Dance like there’s still a future where you, and I, and fucking little dogs who don’t understand that we’re working can flourish in a world without creepy orange-faced undertakers insisting that we take them seriously when they can’t even do basic math.

A world filled with hope, and dreams, and… Blue shag carpets. But without the spikes. Because they rip our clothes off. And then Sheryll punishes us.

Here at Stinque World Domination Headquarters, our editorial team enjoys lively debates late into the evening over which of the Grave Issues Facing Our Republic deserves the prestigious recognition of leading off our publishing day. After a shortlist of finalists is chosen, we send our loyal pack of free-range feral interns off into the vast reaches of cyberspace for extensive research into each topic, gathering the evidence that our award-winning shadowy cabal needs to determine which story is fit to survive the dawn, and which instead will be fed into our anonymous chain-email operation for eventual inclusion at Snopes.com. Then, and only then, does our Obscenely Wealthy Publisher’s nephew finally sit down to compose the golden prose that will run over his uncle’s signature.

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Our guest columnist this morning is Sherwood Anderson.

In the bed the writer had a dream that was not a dream. As he grew somewhat sleepy but was still conscious, figures began to appear before his eyes. He imagined the young indescribable thing within himself was driving a long procession of figures before his eyes.

You see the interest in all this lies in the figures that went before the eyes of the writer. They were all grotesques. All of the men and women the writer had ever known had become grotesques.

The grotesques were not all horrible. Some were amusing, some almost beautiful, and one, a woman all drawn out of shape, hurt the old man by her grotesqueness. When she passed he made a noise like a small dog whimpering. Had you come into the room you might have supposed the old man had unpleasant dreams or perhaps indigestion.

For an hour the procession of grotesques passed before the eyes of the old man, and then, although it was a painful thing to do, he crept out of bed and began to write. Some one of the grotesques had made a deep impression on his mind and he wanted to describe it.

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We almost mentioned Howard Dean’s take yesterday on the Not Ground Zero Not Mosque. We ultimately didn’t, because we found more pressing amusements to attend to. Then, having closed the posting day with Christopher Walken performing the Lady Gaga songbook, we sat down to the Keith Olbermann Dinnertime Rant Hour.

And, well, lost it.

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You would think, almost two years since John McCain Released the Krakpot upon Our Fair Nation, we would cease to be amazed distressed disgusted amused by the proclamations of America’s Quitter. We’re not worried about her — worried, that is, that she has a polar bear’s chance on a globally warmed ice floe of regaining official power — but Talibunny’s ability to steer the national discourse into new depths of ugliness remains unparalleled.

Yes, Pam Geller gets credit for lighting a fire under the Not-Ground Zero Not-Mosque, and Newt did his best to raise the temperature. But it took Sarah Palin to fan the flames into unrelenting bigotry.

And now, it appears, she was only getting started:

SarahPalinUSA Dr.Laura:don’t retreat…reload! (Steps aside bc her 1st Amend.rights ceased 2exist thx 2activists trying 2silence“isn’t American,not fair”)

SarahPalinUSA Dr.Laura=even more powerful & effective w/out the shackles, so watch out Constitutional obstructionists. And b thankful 4 her voice,America!

Those two tweets showed up in quick succession Wednesday night. If you’re unfamiliar with the backstory, we’ll get to it in a moment.

But here’s the executive summary: Sarah Palin is applauding the insulting use of “nigger” by a White person to a Black person in polite conversation.

Not just applauding — encouraging.

And no, we’re not being satirically hyperbolic. If only.

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As we’ve whined in the past, it can be difficult to criticize The President of These United States — not because The President of These United States is above criticism, but because the issues where he merits criticism tend to be complicated, and we don’t want to spend our evenings blockquoting yards of Glenn Greenwald.

It’s not like The Former President of These United States, where you could just point and laugh. Or cry. Or scream. Or fling feces.

Nor is it like the Obama Administration deporting a record number of illegal immigrants (sorry, “undocumented” just doesn’t work for us), which, while certainly worth a good cry/scream/fling, is just too broad for us to deal with.

But every so often we stumble across an easily encapsulated story that represents what nags at us:

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