Verily I say unto thee: There's no better way to express the love and saving grace of Jesus Christ and the God who sent Him than to hire Sarah Palin to use baptism as a metaphor for torturing "jihadis" before a cheering crowd of nuts at a National Rifle Association rally.

Via Andrew Sullivan—who I often disagree with, but whose convictions against torture and for the Lord are sincere—here is literally the dumbest, most frustrating, most hypocritically blasphemous 79 seconds you will spend today, watching a failed politician offer an arena of failed human beings a failed comparison in the service of a failed cause. (Update: My brilliant and on-the-ball colleague Gabrielle Bluestone caught this madness last night, but we're posting the video here now for maximum GRRR.)

Here is a partial transcript, which cannot fully convey to you all the surreal shrillness of Sarah Palin—who is now pretending to be Tina Fey pretending to be Sarah Palin—nor the crass excitement of the basically all-white, basically all-olds, and presumably heavily armed crowd:

Not all intolerant anti-freedom leftist liberals are hypocrites. [Pause.]

I'm kidding, yes they are!...

If I were in charge [long pause for applause], they would know that water boarding is how we baptize terrorists.

As Sully notes: "A Christian who can equate the sacrament of baptism with a barbaric form of torture is not a Christian, whatever self-righteous blather she emits." Nevertheless, it would be wonderful to see leaders of many churches weigh in on this godawful bloodthirsty perversion of their tenets. I'm not holding my breath.

Fuck dog whistles; Inner America has found a drug that rattles sexually harmonic oscillations up and down its hypothalamus. That drug is Palinite. Perhaps we should test gun-permit applicants for it.