Digby was talking about how it’s a shame that our Congressbeings have 1000 times more crusading fire for baseball steroid hearings than for little things like poverty and war and crimes of state. She also noticed that apparently defending Roger Clemens is now a Republican cause, and wondered how that squared with the whole zero-tolerance thing:

Since when are Republicans the big softies toward people accused of drug use?

And then I realized that it’s because steroids aren’t a drug used for pleasure, which we know is a big no-no. They are drugs used solely to give users an edge that others don’t have. Of course they are protective of a big, white Texas boy using steroids to win by any means necessary. It’s a fundamental conservative value!

I don’t know anything about Clemens’s case, but that last part is dead right. We’re Big and Strong and we have a massive appetite—that’s how you can tell we’re the good guys. Just don’t mention our tiny balls.

Forty years ago Fritz Leiber wrote a great science fiction satire, A Specter Is Haunting Texas, where a neoconservative/neo-Confederate regime in Texas has conquered the rest of North and Central America. It’s kind of a plantation system ruled by the usual aristocrats, but of course they have to think of themselves as good ol’ boys so there’s a lot of cowboy posing. And to literalize their self-image they use growth hormones, so the Anglo ruling class is made up of musclebound giants; that makes them all chronically sick too, but that’s a small price to pay for the sake of their Way of Life. (To make sure their Mexican slaves are correspondingly dwarfish, they just use the low-tech method of having all the servant doors be four feet high.)

I can’t remember if Leiber predicted the Hummer too, but I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s a hard book to find now, but check it out if you can—it’s closer to the current mess than Brave New World, and funnier too.