Joking about Mitt Romney.

Incredibly bad jokes from David Letterman. His writers are on strike, right? Is that the problem? I couldn't watch that clip to the end, it was so bad, but it seems the only idea they had was that Romney is a blandly good-looking man.

(Why didn't his good looks help Romney more? Is there something about male beauty that disturbs us — some of us? Think of the reaction to Dan Quayle and to John Edwards. Some people seem to get almost angry at a man for being good looking. Is it some paranoid form of homophobia?)

Meanwhile, lots of bloggers are up in arms about this comic bit that aired on the Randi Rhodes show yesterday:

ANNOUNCER: "... If John McCain is the Republican Presidential nominee, it will destroy the Republican Party. We’re Romney supporters and we know. Cause, if you vote for John McCain, we’re going to go on a killing rampage. Hey, better dead then moderate.”

REPUBLICAN CHARACTER VOICE: "Look, I for one don’t want to die in a hail of gun fire from crazed Mitt Romney supporters, but it’s better then nominating a man who opposed the Bush tax cuts. Hell, John McCain spent years in a North Vietnamese prison. A prison? That doesn’t make him a hero. That makes him an ex-con.”

It goes on. You can read the whole transcript at the link and listen to it. It's not very funny, but I understand why it's supposed to be funny. Rush Limbaugh and others have been over-the-top these past few weeks exaggerating how terrible John McCain supposedly is. How do you parody something that already feels like a parody? The idea they went with — lamely — was that McCain's opponents would go completely insane, and the stereotypical thing completely insane people do is go on a killing rampage. The writers could have brainstormed a little longer and come up with something more creative, but this is what they cranked out.

Does it outrage you? I'm sure Randi's happy if it does, so why don't you join me in saying that this is just embarrassingly badly done comedy?