Christ, the battle over Intelligent Design is really heating up. In Tennessee last week an existential high school student, jarred by the revelation that evolution could not adequately account for his being, abruptly converted to nihilism and shot three administrators at close range. When Assistant Principal Ken Bruce died as a result of his wounds, papal ass-muncher Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) suddenly renounced his conviction that Creationism is a “legitimate scientific theory that should be taught in the classroom.” With a federal court set to rule in a case involving the Dover, Pennsylvania school district, Santorum casually shrugged, “Science leads you where it leads you,” which was straight to the curb for the eight board members voted out of office for trying to replace science with unsubstantiated biblical lore.

The Senator’s insouciance, however, was not shared by a churlish Pat Robertson who clenched his fists, stomped his feet and threatened to turn Dover’s citizens into pillars of salt. He warned, “If there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God, you just rejected him from your city.” The next day, Bill O’Reilly collapsed in a tantrum when San Francisco voters outlawed handguns and banned military recruiters from high school and college campuses. Instead of invoking the Almighty directly, O’Reilly beseeched His bearded zealots to destroy the city by the bay: “If Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we’re not going to do anything about it. We’re going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead.” Curiously, Denver’s legalization of Marijuana engendered no such Right-Wing vitriol. Maybe Republicans were too busy loading their video iPods with pornography and episodes of Beavis and Butthead to take offense.

Or perhaps they were still smarting from gubernatorial defeats in New Jersey, Virginia and (by proxy) California. The election results, especially in the East, were at first construed to reflect President Bush’s rapidly declining popularity. Exit polls in the Garden State, however, revealed something else altogether. A tight race became a blowout for Democrat Jon Corzine after his opponent ran an attack ad featuring the palpably embittered ex-Mrs. Corzine. “[He] let his family down,” she bitched, “and he’ll probably let New Jersey down, too.” One voter in Patterson summed it up this way: “I usually don’t vote, but when I saw her on TV my blood began to boil. Reminds me of my ex; if that loudmouthed cunt had only kept her mouth shut and her legs spread I might have kept her around.”

Whatever the animus, when poll numbers slip below the Mendoza line, the White House reflexively hauls out its tired, two-pronged response of tarring its detractors and scaring the crap out everyone else. On Veteran’s Day, Mr. WMD railed that, “It is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how [the] war began.” The impotence of recent terror alerts in New York and Baltimore, however, forced the administration to alter its scare tactics: Though we are no longer cowed by graven imagery (mushroom clouds, duct tape), we might succumb to pedantry. Hence, terrorist activity is no longer simply that. As the President cautioned, “Some call this evil Islamic radicalism; others, militant jihadism; still others, Islamo-fascism.”

Big words notwithstanding, Sen. John McCain (R-Hanoi Hilton) is lobbying to curtail the torture of terror suspects. Prisoner abuses, he argues, “inevitably become public and when they do they threaten our moral standing and expose… our own troops who might someday be held captive.” This would explain Sen. Bill Frist’s (R-TN) reaction to a Washington Post story describing CIA torture chambers or “black sites” operating in Eastern Europe. Frist declared: “Such an egregious disclosure could have long-term and far-reaching damaging and dangerous consequences.” Our despicable behavior, in other words, degrades us only when we get caught.

Among all the scandals permeating Washington, this legacy of prisoner abuse has the best chance of becoming a torpedo. Karl Rove simply can’t get his hands around it and the administration’s moving parts are uncharacteristically out of sync. When the President, who seems to have missed the Abu Ghraib photo essay, insisted, “We do not do torture,” Dick Cheney’s standing request to exempt the CIA from rules of interrogation seemed, well, quaint. But there is a silver lining. The Iraqi security apparatus’ seamless adaptation of our nefarious methods may well be the first indication that their inchoate government is ready to stand on its own.

A secret bunker was uncovered beneath Baghdad where 173 prisoners were reportedly tortured. “We were beaten with cables, hoses and wooden sticks, and electrocuted all the time,” swore a tormented inmate. Undersecretary for Security Maj. Gen. Hussein Kamal lent credibility when he recalled, “I saw signs of physical abuse by brutal beating, one or two detainees were paralyzed and some had skin peeling off various parts of their bodies.” These allegations didn’t sit well with the American Embassy –“mistreatment will not be tolerated” — and prompted Interior Minister Bayan Jabor to issue a swift rebuttal: “Claims we used things to carve people’s limbs are absurd.” Dismissing the charges as “inaccurate,” Jabor countered, “There were only five, or at most, seven, who showed signs of having been beaten.”

Donald “Stuff Happens” Rumsfeld simply could not resist the opportunity to weigh in after two detainees claimed that in 2003, they were put in a cage with a lion. “It seems quite farfetched,” he scoffed. And it does…until you read the following passage from Scooter Libby’s 1996 novel, The Apprentice:

At age ten the madam put the child in a cage with a bear trained to couple with young girls so the girls would be frigid and not fall in love with their patrons. They fed her through the bars and aroused the bear with a stick when it seemed to lose interest.

When it comes to our ham fisted response to terrorism, it’s a safe bet that no one will lose interest anytime soon.