Daft & Dafter

The long drawn-out battle to become the Republican Party's nominee in this November's presidential election (which the satirical Daily Show justifiably calls "Indecision 2012") has the would-be candidates falling over themselves to appear more conservative than their rivals. And the race has certainly provided plenty of grist for the comedy mill.

By now, most of the whackier wannabe presidential nominees have dropped out: After leading the media on a seemingly endless self-aggrandising campaign, including a reality show and an extended tour across the States in a coach emblazoned with the text of the American constitution, will-she-won't-she former Alaskan governor and failed 2008 vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin decided not to the throw her hat in the ring after all.

Pizza magnate Herman Cain, who didn't know China had had nuclear weapons for half a century and justified his lack of foreign-policy knowledge by referring to "Uzbeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan" (sic!), was finally tripped up by his serial philandering. The spookily wide-eyed Michelle Bachman, the darling of the right, whose bizarre statements included demanding the closure of America's non-existent embassy in Teheran, also dropped out early. While Texas Governor Rick Perry, who proudly announced that his state had executed hundreds more prisoners than any other, couldn't remember the three government agencies he wanted to shut down, when asked about them during a debate. Perry's meltdown, broadcast live on national TV, was the kiss of death for his presidential aspirations.

Although he's trailing far, far behind the now presumptive candidate, Mitt Romney, the one crazy still in the running is perpetual also-ran Newt Gingrich, who has vowed to have a manned American colony on the moon by the end of his first term in the White House.

In their desperate attempt to woo supporters of the so-called "Tea Party", a radical though in part artificially engineered movement that has dragged American politics to the right for the last three years or so, Republicans have been making more and more controversial claims that would leave most Europeans incredulous.

You needn't even bother entering politics in the US unless you can prove you are avowedly religious. Now global warming is being disparaged as unproven. Evolution is increasingly dismissed as "just a theory". Environmental protection is decried as government interference that kills jobs in the US. Gun legislation, taxation, motorcycle helmet laws and even the right to healthcare are being routinely opposed, scaled back or abolished completely in the name of "personal liberty".

But the most bizarre trend of all, at least in my view, is the renewed effort to undo "Roe vs Wade", the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalising abortion. In an effort to undermine this landmark ruling, pro-life conservatives are going to ever greater lengths to claim that this should be considered murder. And even Rick Santorum, the candidate who withdrew from the GOP race only this week, asserted that women should give birth to the children of their rapists, saying that they should "make the best of a bad situation" and "accept God's gift".

Proponents of the "personhood" debate, which revolves about the point from which a person rather than a blob of cells is being terminated, have long advocated that life - and therefore personhood - begins at the point where an egg and a sperm merge. Not to be outdone, the Arizona legislature has now passed a bill defining pregnancy as starting .... wait for it ... two weeks before conception!

Meanwhile, a last-minute amendment to a "personhood" bill tabled in Oklahoma this week (which admittedly ended up getting the entire law thrown out) would have made it illegal to deposit sperm anywhere other than in a woman's vagina.

Forget the potential for convictions for such heinous crimes as masturbation, oral and anal sex. Had it passed, this law would have forbidden all forms of artificial insemination, thus inadvertently undermining the very thing it was supposed to support: the production of American babies.