If you’re like me, you remember one of the silliest and most vapid bits of wingnut anti-Obama tomfoolery from 2009. It was engaged in by people who were not fools named Tom, merely fools, but that’s another story. Enough beating about the bush: it was the right’s obsession with all the so-called “tsars” appointed in various areas by President Obama.  I prefer the British spelling to the Americanized czar because it’s closer to the cryillic. I don’t want to offend any dudes named Cyril out there. End of deeply silly linguistic discussion.

Most Gopers beat the drums about the so-called tsarist plague, it was almost as if Rasputin brought his filthy beard and BO-plenty cassock into the White House when the Obamas moved in. Not that most wingnuts know exactly who or what a tsar was. They just know it’s furrin; therefore bad to the bone.

Our old pal Senator Walnuts was among those baying at the moon, demanding no mo tsars in 2009.That was then, this is now:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on Sunday called for President Obama to nominate an Ebola “czar” to coordinate the administration’s response to the deadly virus.

“I’d like to know who’s in charge,” McCain said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

The senator’s appearance followed news from Dallas early Sunday that a second Ebola patient had been identified – a healthcare worker who treated Thomas Eric Duncan, the first U.S. Ebola patient, who died last week.

McCain said his constituents in Arizona are “not comforted” and “need more reassurance.”

In the past, McCain had been critical of Obama’s use of so-called “czars” to name lead officials on particular matters. In 2009, McCain tweeted that Obama had “more czars than the Romanovs — who ruled Russia for 3 centuries.”

Not only did Walnuts reverse himself and call for an Ebola tsar, he did so in his happy place: on a Sunday show. I’m glad to know that this fake “crisis” is more important than having someone in charge of, say, saving the American automobile industry with a so-called car tsar. Hmm, I wonder if the Prez asked Ric Ocasek or Elliot Easton to take that job. They were just what we needed.

When the President did appoint an Ebola co-ordinator, former Gore and Biden aide, Ron Klain, the Republicans attacked the pick. How could they attack someone who was played by Kevin Fucking Spacey in the HBO movie, Recount? Next thing you know, they’ll attack Ed Harris who played McCain in the HBO movie, Game Change. The WaPo’s Dana Milbank pointed out the absurdity of this sitch on the Tweeter Tube:

Ron Klain begins work as czar by asking Florida Supreme Court to invalidate all three Ebola cases found in U.S.

— Dana Milbank (@Milbank) October 20, 2014

Back to the post title. I have long disliked the term tsar, so when C Ray Nagin appointed Ed Blakely to be NOLA’s unrecovery co-ordinator, I proposed that he be called the Katrina Kaiser. My idea was brilliant: it’s alliterative and K is the funniest letter in the alphabet. My suggestion fell on deaf ears and Blakely was called the Katrina tsar.

Here’s my helpful suggestion to Republicans: use the term KAISER, so you won’t be called out and ridiculed for suddenly favoring TSARS. I am not usually in the business of helping GOPers, but I have a dog in this hunt and it’s one in a silly pointed Kraut helmet. Think about it, y’all. It’s a win-win sitch for me: they either take my sage advice or ignore it and I can mock them for doing so.

Finally, this bit of tomfoolery was inspired, not by Tom and Jerry or Tom Seaver, but by Rachel Maddow. Rachel has a habit of using the phrase “common wisdom” instead of the more, uh, common, “conventional wisdom.” This used to drive me nuts until I finally realized that she’s like me with tsar and kaiser: she prefers common to conventional and is trying to drive the term in that direction. That puts me in good company, at least I hope so. I can’t sing like Paul Rodgers, so I can’t be Bad Company…

Btw, I refuse to capitalize tsar or kaiser because I think royalty is stupid. Hell, the Greeks had a German king, what kind of sense did that make? It did mean that Greece had good beer earlier than some other countries, but otherwise it’s dumber than the Maine school board who gave a teacher 21 days off because they’d been in Dallas. I swear I am not making this up, I heard about it from my boy Lex. I guess they read too much Stephen King.

You say tsar, I say kaiser. Let’s call the whole thing off. Instead of Gershwin, I’ll play the earworm I caught at the end of a particularly punny passage in this post: