This week — as every week — all the Republican candidates talked about was who was toughest in the war on terror. While the country’s most populous state literally burned. The Democrats, as usual, said nothing, because they didn’t want to offend fire.

The Republicans, including the scaremonger in chief, sell themselves as protectors of our safety. But since they’re all, except for McCain, armchair warriors, they’re only comfortable protecting us from fears they made up. Like the way Iran is itching for a war with the United States now. Ahmadinejad is pure evil! Terror has a new name, and it’s nearly unpronounceable.

At the Republican debate this week, Mike Huckabee said, “Islamofascism is the greatest threat we ever faced.” Really? More than the Nazis? And the Russians? And the Redcoats?

In his latest ad, Mitt Romney warns eerily that Muslim jihadists want to establish an Islamic caliphate covering the whole world, including America.

And I thought the people scared of gays and Mexicans were paranoid. Islamic terrorists taking over America? They can barely get across the monkey bars. Our defense budget is $600 billion a year, they’re using guns they took off a dead Soviet in 1981 — I think we can hold Charleston.

We’re the most powerful nation on earth with the largest economy and the best military, and we’re made to act the fool by a few thousand cave dwellers who still put out their video on VHS.

And that’s because over the last seven years, because of the incompetence that goes by the name George Bush, we’ve become the most insecure, paranoid superpower ever. We don’t think we can get anything right anymore. We can’t take care of our own citizens after a hurricane, or plan for our wars, or maintain our infrastructure, and our celebrity rehab facilities obviously aren’t working at all.

Some people looked at this fire and saw not a dangerous phenomenon brought on by man’s activities and requiring a scientific solution, but a cleansing catharsis sent by God to punish liberals. Even though it mostly burned Orange County.

As a species, we’re failing at survival trick No. 1: Prioritize the threats. Environmental catastrophe will visit all of us in the coming decades, in one way or another, and when it does I hope someone like … oh, I don’t know, Lou Dobbs, says to himself, “Hmm, maybe if I was going to spend my whole career obsessing about one issue — it should have been global warming. The skin just fell off my face, and it turns out that really wasn’t the fault of a Mexican.”

A reporter in Iowa asked Obama why he doesn’t wear the pin and Obama explained that, to him, wearing the pin had come to seem like a “substitute for true patriotism.” Bravo, Senator. And then, in yet another shining example of why the media is part of the problem, ABC’s Claire Shipman said, “TMI, too much information — all he had to say was, ‘Don’t judge me by what I wear, move on.’ He played into the idea that he’s not ready for prime time.”

What, schoolgirl? “Too much information?” What is she, 12? This is typical press hypocrisy — they say they want somebody who doesn’t give pat political answers, but when they get one, they call him a loser. They say they don’t like safe robots like Hillary, but they create conditions where only that species can survive. And they give cover to people like Sean Hannity, who reported on “no pin” gate and then had to call a doctor because his fake outrage hard-on lasted longer than 72 hours.

Of course, the Republicans are the party of Mark Foley and the Rev. Ted Haggard and Larry Craig and countless other closeted homosexuals, so their fixation on jewelry is understandable, but still … the flag is just a symbol. You’re getting pissy about a brooch, you drama queens, one that was probably made in China. It’s probably leaking poison lead on you right now.

At least that would be some sacrifice, because let’s be honest: this generation doesn’t do real sacrifice or even pay for our own wars. That’s what grandkids are for! No, we do flag pins and bumper stickers. And not even bumper stickers. Bumper magnets. Because stickers are tough to get off, and we may change our mind about never forgetting.

When I see the little flag right here, the first thing I think is, you voted for, and still like, George Bush, the man who has gotten more troops unnecessarily killed and maimed by failing to plan for their mission, by pushing their units to the breaking point, by letting his corporate enablers like Halliburton, Bechtel and Blackwater rape and pillage not just the Iraqis, but our own army.

Can you imagine how apoplectic the flag-pin people would be if these same transgressions against the military were being made by Bill Clinton? Oh, who am I kidding? They’d still be obsessing about the blow job.

As usual, we’ve been sucked into a phony controversy about who said what and how it hurt George W. Bush’s feelings. Because when you hurt George W. Bush you hurt America’s feelings, and when you hurt America’s feelings, you hurt the troops. And when that happens, Tinkerbell’s light goes out and she dies.

The Republican outrage machine is always invoking secret rules that liberals didn’t know they broke. And apparently when you get to be president, they give you an employee’s handbook titled “So You’re Leader of the Free World — Now What?” It tells you about the nuclear codes, where your parking space is, and to not talk smack about other presidents. But I was up all night on Wikipedia doing an exhaustive study of former presidents, and while other presidents have sucked in their own individual ways, Bush is like a smorgasbord of suck. He combines the corruption of Warren G. Harding, the abuse of power of Richard Nixon and the warmongering of James K. Polk.

I mean, who would you rank lower than George W. Bush? Nixon got in trouble for illegally wiretapping Democratic headquarters; Bush is illegally wiretapping the entire country. Nixon opened up relations with the Chinese; Bush let them poison your dog. Herbert Hoover sat on his ass through four years of calamity, but he was an actual engineer. If someone told him about global warming, he would have understood it before the penguins caught on fire. Ulysses Grant was a miserable drunk, but at least he didn’t trade booze for Jesus and embolden the snake handlers — he did the honorable thing and stayed a miserable drunk. Grant let his cronies loot the republic, but he won his civil war.

For some inexplicable reason Republicans have taken to comparing Bush to Harry Truman — a comparison that would make sense only if Harry Truman had A) started World War II and B) lost World War II. Harding sucked, but he once said, “I am not fit for this office and never should have been here.” So at least he knew he sucked. He never walked offstage like Bush does after one of his embarrassing press conferences with a look on his face like, “Nailed it.” Bush still acts like every failure is just a friend he hasn’t met yet.

Now, is it possible for a future president to perform as badly as Bush has? I suppose, theoretically, if we elect someone totally off the wall, like R. Kelly, or the reanimated corpse of Ted Williams, or Rudy Giuliani … But let’s be honest, we would have been better off over the past six years if the Oval Office had been occupied by an orangutan with a Magic 8-Ball. And that’s why it’s so depressing that when the right-wing noise machine pretended to get upset at what Jimmy Carter said, he did what Democrats always do and backed down. He said his remarks were careless and misrepresented and the sun was in his eyes and his hearing aid went out and he was molested by a clergyman.

They confronted him, and he took it all back. Which is what Democrats do. Why couldn’t he have just said, “No, I meant what I said. And speaking as the first citizen of Habitat for Humanity, let me take out my toolbox and build you a house where we can meet and you can blow me.” If a Democrat who’s out of office and 100 years old can’t speak out, what chance do we have for the ones who are in office? Like the ones who are in Congress now who, emboldened by widespread public approval of their plan to bring the troops home … this week abandoned that plan. You see, you don’t get to become the worst president ever without a little help from the other side.

Except for one thing: We’re not first. America isn’t ranked anywhere near first in anything except military might and snotty billionaires. The country that is ranked No. 1 in healthcare, for example, is France. The World Health Organization ranks America at 37 in the world — not two, or five — 37, in between Costa Rica and Slovenia, which are both years away from discovering dentistry.

Yet an American politician could not survive if he or she uttered the simple, true statement, “France has a better healthcare system than us, and we should steal it.” Because here, simply dismissing an idea as French passes for an argument. John Kerry? Can’t vote for him — he looks French. Yeah, as opposed to the other guy, who just looked stupid.

I know, if God had wanted us to learn from the Enlightenment, he wouldn’t have given us Sean Hannity.

And I’m not saying France is better than America. Because I assume you’ve already figured that out by now. I don’t want to be French, I just want to take what’s best from the French. Stealing, for your own self-interest — Republicans should love this idea. Taking what’s best from the French: You know who else did that? The Founding Fathers. Hate to sink your toy boat, Fox News, but the Founding Fathers, the ones you say you revere, were children of the French Enlightenment, and fans of it, and they turned it into a musical called the Constitution of the United States. And they did a helluva job, so good it has been said that it was written by geniuses so it could be run by idiots. But the current administration is putting that to the test. The Founding Fathers were erudite, well-read, European-thinking aristocrats — they would have had nothing in common with, and no use for, an ill-read xenophobic bumpkin like George W. Bush.

The American ideas of individuality, religious tolerance and freedom of speech came directly out of the French Enlightenment — but, shhh, don’t tell Alabama. Voltaire wrote “men are born equal” before Jefferson was wise enough to steal it.

Countries are like people — they tend to get smarter as they get older. Noted military genius Donald Rumsfeld famously dismissed France as part of Old Europe, but the French are … what’s the word I’m looking for? Oh yeah, “mature.” We think they’re rude and snobby, but maybe that’s because they’re talking to us.

For example, France just had an election, and people over there approach an election differently. They vote. Eighty-five percent turned out. The only thing 85 percent of Americans ever voted on was Sanjaya.

Maybe the high turnout has something to do with the fact that the French candidates are never asked where they stand on evolution, prayer in school, abortion, stem cell research or gay marriage. And if the candidate knows about a character in a book other than Jesus, it’s not a drawback. There is no Pierre Six-pack who can be fooled by childish wedge issues. And the electorate doesn’t vote for the guy they want to have a croissant with. Nor do they care about the candidate’s private lives: In the current race, Ségolène Royal has four kids but never bothered to get married. And she’s a socialist. In America, if a Democrat even thinks you’re calling him a liberal he immediately grabs an orange vest and a rifle and heads into the woods to kill something.

The conservative candidate is married, but he and his wife live apart and lead separate lives. They aren’t asked about it in the media, and the people are OK with it, for the same reason the people are OK with nude beaches: because they’re not a nation of 6-year-olds who scream and giggle if they see pee-pee parts. They have weird ideas about privacy. They think it should be private. In France, everyone has a mistress. Even mistresses have mistresses. To not have a lady on the side says to the voters, “I’m no good at multitasking.”

France has its faults — the country has high unemployment, a nasty immigrant problem and all that ridiculous accordion music. But its healthcare is the best, it’s not dependent on Mideast oil, it has the lowest poverty rate and the lowest income-inequality rate among industrialized nations, and it’s the greenest, with the lowest carbon dumping and the lowest electricity bill.

France has 20,000 miles of railroads that work. We have the trolley at the mall that takes you from Pottery Barn to the Gap. It has bullet trains. We have bullets. France has public intellectuals. We have Dr. Phil. And France invented sex during the day, the ménage &agrave trois, lingerie and the tongue.

And the French are not fat. Can’t we just admit we could learn something from them?

I don’t get it: In other fields — outside of government — elite is a good thing, like an elite fighting force. Tiger Woods is an elite golfer. If I need brain surgery, I’d like an elite doctor. But in politics, elite is bad — the elite aren’t down-to-earth and accessible like you and me and President Shit-for-Brains. But when the anti-elite crowd demonizes the elite, what they’re actually doing is embracing incompetence. Now, I know what you’re thinking: That doesn’t sound like our president — ignoring intelligence.

You know how whenever there’s a major Bush administration scandal it always traces back to some incompetent political hack appointment and you think to yourself, “Where are they getting these screw-ups from?” Well, now we know: from Pat Robertson. I wish I were kidding, but I’m not. Take Monica Goodling, who before she resigned last week because of the U.S. attorneys scandal, was the third most powerful official in the Justice Department of the United States. Thirty-three, and though she had never even worked as a prosecutor, she was tasked with overseeing the job performance of all 95 U.S. attorneys. How do you get to be such a top dog at 33? By acing Harvard, or winning scholarship prizes? No, Goodling did her undergraduate work at Messiah College — home of the “Fighting Christies,” who wait-listed me, the bastards — and then went on to attend Pat Robertson’s law school.

I’m not kidding, Pat Robertson, the man who said gay people at DisneyWorld would cause “earthquakes, tornadoes, and possibly a meteor,” has a law school. It’s called Regent. Regent University School of Law, and it shares a campus with Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network studios. It’s the first time ever that a TV network spun off a law school. And that’s all America needs — more Christians and more lawyers. You see, years ago Pat became concerned that our legal system was coddling criminals, forgiving them instead of meting out that Old Testament “eye for an eye” justice Jesus Christ never shuts up about. So Pat did what any red-blooded, Hindu-hating, gay-baiting, glue-sniffing Christian would do: He started his own law school. And what kid wouldn’t want to attend? It’s three years and you only have to read one book. The school says its mission is to create an army of evangelical lawyers, integrating the Bible and public policy, and producing graduates that provide “Christian leadership to change the world.” Presumably from round back to flat.

U.S. News and World Report, which does the definitive ranking of colleges, lists Regent as a tier-four school, which is the lowest score it gives. It’s not a hard school to get into. You have to renounce Satan and draw a pirate on a matchbook. This is for the people who couldn’t get into the University of Phoenix.

But there’s more! As there inevitably is with the Bush administration. Turns out she’s not the only one. Since 2001, 150 graduates of Regent University have been hired by the Bush administration. And people wonder why things are so screwed up. Hell, we probably invaded Iraq because one of these clowns read the map wrong. Forget religion for a second, we’re talking about a top Justice Department official who went to a college founded by a TV host. Would you send your daughter to Maury Povich University? And if you did, would you expect her to get a job at the White House? I’d be surprised if she got a job on the “Maury” show. And then it hit me: This is why Bush scandals never catch on with the public — they’re all evangelicals of course, and nobody is having sex.

So there you have it: It turns out that the Justice Department is entirely staffed with Jesus freaks from a televangelist diploma mill in Virginia Beach. Most of them young women with very little knowledge of the law, but a very strong sense of doing what they’re told. Like the Manson family, but with cleaner hair. In 200 years we’ve gone from “We the people” to “Up with people.” From the best and brightest to dumb and dumber. And, come on, America is a big, well-known, first-rate country, and when we’re looking for people to help run it, we should aim higher than the girl who answers the phone at the fake abortion clinic. It’s not just that this president has surrounded himself with a Texas echo chamber of war criminals and religious fanatics. It’s that they’re sooooo mediocre. This is America. We should be getting robbed and fucked over by the best.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., asked at a hearing, “Should we be concerned with the experience level of the people who are making these highly significant decisions?” But in the Bush administration experience doesn’t matter. All that matters is loyalty to Bush and Jesus, in that order. And where better to find people dumb enough to believe in George W. Bush than Pat Robertson’s law school. The problem here in America isn’t that the country is being run by elites. It’s that it’s being run by a bunch of hayseeds. And by the way, the lawyer Monica Goodling just hired to keep her ass out of jail went to a real law school.