. .

It’s been fun Republican-watching at the Beauty Salon.  “They flip, they flop, they find every way they can to justify being selfish, stingy, hateful, and mean,” Juanita observes.

Now, there’s a new twist.

The rise of the Tea Party movement raises an interesting question about the place of religious faith in our political debate. For a long time, the Christian right has been in the driver’s seat in advancing conservatism. But the Tea Party is more Ayn Rand than the Bible. As one writer recently put it, the Christian side has taken a backseat to the movement’s libertarian impulses.

“Well,” Verdelia observes, “at least they’ll quit calling me anti-Christian and now simply call me anti-Ayn.”

“Honey,” Juanita says, “most of those folks never read Ayn Rand because they never took sophomore English.  They are just looking for some way to not be their brother’s keeper.  God didn’t work real well with that theory so they’re hitching their truck to a Russian bourgeois Hollywood hustler who had a six foot dollar sign made of flowers at her funeral.  Most people would get nauseous at that kind of turn-around! But, I suspect zombies don’t get nauseous.”

“Which would explain why they can sit through a whole Sarah Palin speech without upchucking,” Verdelia says.