Stepping around the cockroaches

Normally Ned takes about as much interest in the drivel, banalities, and sanctimonious hypocrisy pouring out of the mouths of the GOP presidential candidates as he would in a dead mosquito, but two items have awakened him from his summer-perfect-weather stupor. The first, is the purported "reading list" announced by his lickspittles to slathering news scribes, of GOP presidential candidate "Rick" Perry: some Christianist twaddle that purports to exhort cultists to pray to Jesus to make Americans "wake up" from a socialist hell. The fact that Jesus was the first socialist apparently does not trouble them in the least. Of course, Perry, this Spiritual Being, is about as spiritual as Richard the Third, posing on his balcony with a couple of priests and a bible, as evidenced by his reported insider real-estate deals that have made him a millionaire while governor of Texas.
The second is the idiotic remarks made by that Paragon of Intellect, Michele Bachmann, who opined that the earthquake and hurricane are "wake-up calls from God", and then announced that she had been (hee-hee!) kidding.
This country was founded on a great experiment as described by Jefferson: educate the people and then trust them with their own governance--it had never been tried before. Unfortunately, what we have at present is a populace that is contemptuous of education and liberal learning, and that apparently believes that one can "believe in" climate change or evolution in much the same way that one can "believe" that there is or is not a place called New York City.
It is becoming harder and harder to step around the cockroaches, isn't it?

First Contempt Citation of 2011!

Newly-honored Q A Wagstaff, now O.B.E. as well as FRS, suggests CongressThing Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota for the first Contempt Citation of 2011. She has apparently disclosed the reason she became a Republican was because of inflammatory and offensive language against the "Founding Fathers" in Gore Vidal's novel Burr (a novel Ned's friends will recall being a work of fiction).
Ned anticipates 2011 with barely disclosed glee and hopes the elitist and most selective concept of the Contempt Citation is not debased due to the abnormally high number of potentially qualified nominees.