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Now is the time of year we begin to reflect on the year past, on the absurdities and insanities of the Republican Party, the tea party and the Religious Right, three groups united by a common hatred of humanity.

There really is very little difference between them. The Republican “establishment” is more openly corporatist, the tea party pretends to be champions of the people while suckling at the corporatist teat, and the Religious Right has infested the other two groups so thoroughly that you cannot tell where one ends and the other begins.

And they all agree that the secularist Enlightenment ideals that went into creating the U.S. Constitution have got to go while pretending they are defending the Constitution. Even though the Founding Fathers bequeathed us the First Amendment, which rules that this country can have no state religion, all three above-named groups insist that because the First Amendment was meant to protect only Christianity, Christianity is somehow that state religion we’re not allowed to have.

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Look at Pastor John Hagee’s Christmas sermon, where he insisted, to thunderous applause, that America was “founded on Christian principles according to the word of God (nowhere is either to be found in the Constitution) and that if you can’t get down with that, “Planes are leaving every hour on the hour–get on one!”

With Liberty and justice for all…except everyone who isn’t like them. They want to put Bibles in schools but not actually read the damn things, and they want us to recite the Pledge of Allegiance but not actually listen to the damn thing…they want to ignore what the Constitution says and pretend it is just a verbatim recitation of their favorite cherry-picked passages out of the Old Testament.

You wonder sometimes how they perceive themselves, or if they have any self-awareness at all.

If Erik Rush is any example, then no, they don’t. Rush was apparently imbued by the spirit of Christmas to ask,

When are we going to stop pretending that the individual representing himself as Barack Hussein Obama and currently holding the office of president of the United States is anything other than a foreign-backed, Marxist operative and Islamist whose objectives include the effective destruction of America as we know it?

Well…for one thing, we elected him – TWICE. You know, according to the U.S. Constitution you pretend to be defending.

So if you stop “pretending” he is your president, the problem is yours, and oh what a problem it is.

And according to the Associated Press, the war on Christmas has come to…Israel. Yep, “those damn Jews have rejected Christ again, can you believe it?”

A Christian lawmaker wanted to put a Christmas Tree (apparently he hasn’t read the Old Testament prohibitions against Pagan trees) in the parliament building. The request was rejected we are told for no reasons having to do with religion (um, right), and the Christian response was right out of the Religious Right’s playbook:

Hanna Swaid, a Christian opposition lawmaker from Israel’s Arab minority, said a Christmas tree would promote multiculturalism and freedom of religion.

Yes, endorsing Christianity promotes multiculturalism and freedom of religion. You can easily imagine that an Islamic display would not have received this enthusiastic Christian endorsement of multiculturalism and freedom of religion.

Meanwhile, Pope Francis, who actually embraces Jesus’ teachings, is accused of being a Marxist.

Yet the these three American groups have convinced themselves and at least half the country that they are Christians, when nothing could be further from the truth.

Apparently, being Christian pretty much boils down these days to hating gay people. That’s it. That’s why Jesus showed up in a manger one morning. And yes, Jesus died so Phil Robertson can hate on gay people.

Don’t bother looking in the Bible for it. They don’t bother looking, so why should you? Just trust them, it’s true.

According to Janet Porter and Rick Scarborough, Phil Robertson is like the Chinese protester standing in front of the Chinese tank (except without the risk of bodily harm), “an atrocity,” “an attack on religious liberty” and an effort to “shut down Christians.”

Wait for it: Faith itself is at risk of “being declared unlawful.”

No, folks, they can’t hear themselves.

Because a corporation exercises its right to respond to its employee’s behavior, Christianity itself is about to become illegal?

I’d say these people have gone ’round the bend never to be seen again but that bus left a long time ago. What we’re left with are the echoes of a collective trauma (let’s call it “2008”) that snapped whatever tenuous connection these people ever had with reality.

So I could do what others have done and put out a “Top Ten List” for 2013, but 2013 isn’t over yet and there are dozens of right wingers out there just waiting for their chance to out-stupid all the others before Midnight, December 31. So let’s just hold out for the inevitable last minute, cringe-worthy declarations of collective madness.

They’re coming. You know they are.