Republican Humor Has No Soul

Monday evening, when Buck McKeon didn't show up for the CA-25 candidates' forum in Santa Clarita, Lee Rogers referred to his as a white elephant and then corrected himself to call him an "invisible elephant." But Buck isn't a glutton who's driven his weight into the stratosphere and no one was offended. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is a glutton-- he acknowledged recently that he's morbidly obese because he can't control his appetite-- so Jimmy Kimmel was asked to cool it on the fat Christie jokes (including referring to him as "the elephant in the room") at the White House Correspondents Dinner. “I weigh too much because I eat too much,” Christie said after his hospitalization this summer, “and I eat some bad things, too.” He weighs in at about 340 pounds, more than 100 pounds beyond obese. So someone in the White House protocol office asked Kimmel to take out the fat Christie jokes. He was also asked to not make fun of Rick Santorum's sexual dysfunctions.

According to Kimmel, he was told to scrap jokes that poked fun of Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum's sexuality and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's (R) weight.

"He was literally the elephant in the room," Kimmel joked of Christie.

Kimmel did make a few jokes about Christie’s weight. On Monday, the New Jersey governor said that while he didn't enjoy Kimmel's cracks, they were easier to handle because he was seated next to Modern Family star Sofia Vergara.

"When you have her next to you to console you, let me tell you, you don’t care what the heck Jimmy Kimmel is saying about you," Christie said.

Kimmel told CNN host Anderson Cooper that he ultimately opted against the jokes because members of the press might have felt afraid to laugh at them. He said he found the more childish jokes were the best received during his monologue. 

"The third-grade jokes seemed to get the best reaction of all of them," Kimmel said.

Making fun of Rick Santorum's gay problem is a tough one for a mainstream audience, mostly because Santorum is so gratingly creepy. And the GOP has such a hard time with the whole gay thing. Illinois up-and-comer Aaron Schock and tiny North Carolina crackpot Patrick McHenry barely even try to hide his residences inside the Republican closet, but it's something that can never be openly discussed around voters. The GOP's top out-of-the-closet homosexual, Ari Fleisher, freaked out that Romney was pressured by Republican fringe homophobes into firing his one and only openly gay advisor yesterday, Richard Grenell. Anti-gay Republicans had their panties all in a bunch.

Grenell, who sparked controversy with a series of tasteless tweets about women, was said to have been kept under wraps by the campaign ever since the appointment began creating controversy. But the Romney campaign has insisted that Grenell was not pushed from his post, and that Romney advisers tried to get him to stay on.

But all this raises a question: Why was Grenell completely absent from the public stage in the last few days, when his subject area-- foreign policy issues-- were front and center in the political conversation?

Ari Fleischer, a former Bush administration official and one of Grenell’s most vocal defenders, raised that question in a telephone interview moments ago.

“Why wasn’t Rick the spokesman in the last couple of days, when foreign policy was paramount? That’s the piece I don’t understand,” Fleischer said. “I don’t know why he wasn’t the spokesman on foreign policy for the last several days. It’s something that nobody understands.”

The question many are asking is whether Grenell’s departure demonstrates Romney’s weakness, his unwillingness to stand up to social conservatives. The Romney campaign insists he’d been asked to stay. But there’s the matter of Grenell’s low profile in recent days. It’s entirely possible it had nothing to do with conservative pressure over Grenell. But it seems like more will be coming out about this before long.

Ann Romney may insist her hubby is a wild and crazy guy, but he's also showing himself not just to be a complete stiff but to be a contenigal liar and an abysmally weak excuse for a leader.

Monday night Letterman got a lot of laughs with a Top 10 List about how Romney begins conversations with teens:

10. “How’s puberty going?”

9. “Where do you summer?”

8. “Do you fellows play sportball?”

7. “Nice shirt-- You know, my friend owns the Gap”

6. “You teens are just the right height”

5. “Check out my sick Windsor knot”

4. “Would you like to see my dancing horse?”

3. “Raise the roof if your municipal bonds have reached maturity”

2. Just like this

1. “Didn’t I fire your father?”

Willard humor always hinges on laughing at Willard. In that way he is and always will be a Republican. Now Ron Paul... that's one Republican with a sense of humor: