I watched Real Time with Bill Maher last night. Chris Rock was bizarre (there’s a news flash); Paul Hackett was cool, funny, and had Bill speechless for moments at a time; Asa Hutchinson was the administration’s cardboard cutout mouthpiece; and Phyllis Schlafly, via video hook-up from St. Louis, was the night’s finest testimony to the embaler’s art. (You should have seen the look on her face when Bill Maher brought up the fact that Mrs. Schlafly has a gay child, along with other prominent conservatives such as Dick Cheney and Alan Keyes. It would have curdled milk.) And then there was Kellyanne Conway, a conservative pollster and pundit who said that George W. Bush is the reborn Jesus H. Christ on a Schwinn bicycle. Ms. Conway is an attractive young lady with very blonde hair and a perky little voice who actually said “bullshit” at one point. (That’s what I like about HBO; a conservative pundit says “bullshit” and they move right along. On CNN it can get you involuntary leave.) Maher was not as sharp as he used to be — I guess being accused of treason by some congressman from Alabama will do that — and he let some real howlers get by without any comment.

What I want to know is what’s up with the conservative punditry corps? All of a sudden it seems that all the skinny blonde white women who are disappearing across America are showing up as Bush administration shills. It’s like they’re abducted from shopping malls and Greyhound stations in Albuquerque and then brainwashed (and bleached) to go on TV and sing the praises of Bush and Pilates. It’s like they want to clone Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham. (And can someone prove that they aren’t clones themselves?)

Maybe the GOP is trying to get hip, discarding their bow-tied preppies like Tucker Carlson and George F. Will and going for the Spike TV crowd. After all, if you can’t win people over with logic, you can always go for the sex.