Hyperbolic or hypergolic?

I’m starting to think that the best way to treat the Republican motor mouths is to give them a platform and enough rope to hang themselves with.  I was disgusted when the Washington Post hired Ben Domenech the perpetrator of the new Washington Post conservative blog, Red America, but perhaps the attention now being focused on the man’s apparent plagiarism and massive lack of basic decency will have the cleansing effect of sunlight on a vampire.

Among the allegations of iniquity published in Editor and Publisher yesterday, was his calling Coretta Scott King a Communist the day after her funeral.  Being a communist by the lights of the New Right simply means that you give a damn about people outside your immediate circle of friends (or coven if you prefer) and thus the McCarthy gambit is the kind of accusation they use as a default.

In an attempt to grovel just enough to save a bit of face and perhaps to distract us from the vague sulfurous smell his writing exudes, Domenech issued a coy mea culpa in his nasty little blog that is so encrusted with qualifications as to continue to damn her with faint praise while pretending to have had some other message than plain, ordinary Republican nastiness.

It was only “hyperbole in the context of a larger debate about President Bush's political priorities” Quoth the lizard, following that with his thanks to “the Liberal side”  saying “ I'm happy that no one's engaged in any ridiculous hyperbole, unfounded accusations or unintentionally hilarious name-calling. We can all agree that such things lower the quality of debate on the Internet, play to the worst side of our knee-jerk partisan nature and have no place in the modern public square.”  Sadly there is no way to observe the straightness of his face when he writes, or perhaps I should better say excretes such things – which is only a bit of hyperbole in the larger context of calling him a dirtbag.