GOP is a joke in your town

So Focus on (Exploiting) the Family (FOF) has decided to yank the video in which followers are urge to pray for rain "of Biblical proportions" to fall on Denver's Invesco Field when Barack Obama accepts the Democratic presidential nomination. Here's the video if you missed it:

Well, the guy who produced the video, Stuart Shepard, director of digital media for FOF, now says he was just kidding around, and FOF echoes the sentiment:

Stuart Shepard, director of digital media at Focus Action, the political arm of Focus on the Family, said the video he wrote and starred in was meant to be "mildly humorous."

But complaints from about a dozen Focus members convinced the organization to pull the video, said Tom Minnery, Focus Action vice president of public policy.

"If people took it seriously, we regret it," Minnery said Monday.

[...]

The video's point, Shepard said, is that in his view Obama has not clearly stated his stances on abortion and gay marriage, important themes within the Christian right.

"I'm still pro life, and I'm still in favor of marriage as being between one man and one woman," Shepard said in the video. "And I would like the next president who will select justices for the next Supreme Court to agree."

As for his praying for a deluge: "It's called hyperbole," Shepard said Monday. "It is meant to be humorous."

Yeah, funny as a crutch, Rich -- I mean, Stu. What really happened was you released the video and, when it was roundly and appropriately castigated as ridiculous and hateful, you tried the old Republican ploy of claiming, "It was just a joke!"

There have been an inordinate number of examples of this, when Republicans act like they were "only kidding" and if you didn't get the joke, well, you're just hypersensitive. Who can forget these classic comedy routines?

• Huggy Bear's hilarious ape rape joke:
  
  

  In an appearance before the National League of Cities and Towns in Washington D.C., McCain supposedly asked the crowd if they had heard "the one about the woman who is attacked on the street by a gorilla, beaten senseless, raped repeatedly and left to die?"
  
  The punch line: "When she finally regains consciousness and tries to speak, her doctor leans over to hear her sigh contently and to feebly ask, "Where is that marvelous ape?"
  
  [...]
  
  The Huffington Post reached out to the original reporter in that story, Norma Coile (who after talking to multiple sources months after it was told wrote about the response to the rape joke in the [Tucson] Citizen) to find out if she thought it was true.
  
  "I'm not sure exactly what the wording was of the joke, but something was said. Some joke involving a rape and ape was said. Enough women repeated it to me at the time and the McCain campaign had a non-denial denial," said [reporter Norma] Coile, now with the Arizona Daily Star. "It came after his 'Seizure World' joke, in which he referred to the [retirement community] Leisure World as Seizure World... I just think it reinforced this idea that John McCain is humor-challenged. Whatever his qualities, he seems to have a tin ear for how these jokes will go over."

• Huggy's dig at Chelsea Clinton: "Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno." Yes, there's that "roguish" sense of humor again ...
  


• The knee-slapper riff on Native Americans by then-U.S. Sen. Bob Bennet (R-Utah), who referred to Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell (R-Colo.) in a hearing thusly: “Aside from doing a rain dance and making it rain, we’ll assign that to Senator Campbell, I’m not sure what you can do.”


• Then-presidential candidate Mike Huckabee at the NRA conference: "After hearing a noise backstage, Huckabee strayed from his prepared remarks and said, 'That was Barack Obama, he just tripped off a chair, he’s getting ready to speak. Somebody aimed a gun at him and he dove for the floor.' "


• Registered Republican and Oklahoma State University student government candidate Christ Best's riotously funny views on women: "Women's rights? What rights do women need ... Why should we let an inferior sex have their own special right? ... All I can think that women have given to this world are hate, injustice, prejudice and inequality toward hard-working, smart, white males."

There are plenty more, as a simple Google search will reveal.

I would like to think that it's just because a Republican's "sense of humor" is vastly different from my own. I mean, I don't consider myself especially funny or an expert on comedy, but come the fuck on -- what exactly is humorous about rape, racism, and threatening people?

Basically, what I think is that Republicans generally think their brand of "humor" is funny to other Republicans, because it portrays the hate and divisiveness that are the hallmarks of the modern GOP. And whenever they say something that they actually mean, but it's taken badly by normal, non-hateful people, their stock response is that it was "just a joke."

Actually, Republicans, like the Purple Heart band-aids in 2004 and Fox News' piss-poor attempt to imitate The Daily Show, your "jokes" are not funny. In fact, it's like the graffito I once read on the wall of the bathroom at the Republican National Committee's headquarters: "Why are you looking up here? The joke is in your hand!"

Oh, lighten up, GOP -- I'm only kidding! Get it?!

UPDATE (9:27 am 8/13/08): Crooks & Liars has more, including this excellent point: "Um, Tom [Minnery]? People took it seriously because Focus took it seriously."

UPDATE (10:44 pm 8/13/08): I'm sure that many of these people were just kidding. Disgusting.