I never thought I’d write this, but I think we’ve discovered a new level of stupid below the heretofore impenetrable Sarah Palin floor.

It’s not unlike the discovery of a previously unknown species of protohuman deep within a cave somewhere, revealing some new twist in the constantly expanding canon of human evolution. There is, in fact, a Republican of national prominence who makes Sarah Palin seem brighter and less contradictory by comparison. That’s not to say Palin has miraculously become smarter or better spoken, it’s just that the idiot curve is now redrawn in her favor.

Yes, Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi is arguably the new king of all Republican stupids. Palin must now relinquish her Twitter feed, her fork cork and her trident. For Haley Barbour has arrived.

What is it about Republican governors? They’re either appearing in interviews with a blood-soaked cletus geeking turkeys in the background, or they’re lying about hiking the Appalachian Trail, or they’re honoring the Confederate States of America while ignoring slavery, or they’re entertaining the treasonous option of state secession, or they’re bitching about government stimulus money one minute, then posing with giant stimulus checks the next minute.

And now there’s Haley Barbour, who said this week about the $20 billion escrow fund to compensate victims of the oil spill:

It bothers me to talk about causing an escrow to be made, uh, which will, which makes it less likely that they’ll make the income that they need to pay us.

Let’s ignore the Palin-ish phrase “causing an escrow fund to be made” and focus on the substance. Paraphrasing Jon Stewart’s analysis: Governor Barbour appears to be suggesting here that if BP sets aside $20 billion to be paid to victims of the oil spill, it won’t have enough money to… pay out to victims of the oil spill. In other words, Barbour is against compensating victims because he supports compensating victims.

Perhaps next time, Barbour should consult with his smarter sidekicks Roscoe and Enos before speaking about complicated topics like “causing an escrow fund.” (Jon Chait gets full credit for the Boss Hogg comparison.)

Of course, this isn’t the first and it surely won’t be last blast of stupid from Barbour during the ongoing oil spill disaster. He’s a study in colloquial southern language and exaggerated accents, a real life character from an unproduced Coen Brothers movie, and it seems that whenever Barbour opens his mouth for something other than pie, stupid things gush out.

For many weeks, Barbour has been downplaying the toxicity and danger of the oil. Back in mid-May, Barbour said the oil spill will have “minimal impact,” rivaling Tony Hayward’s infamous remarks about how environmental damage will be “very, very modest.”

He’s also coined some of the finest “the oil is just like delicious food and therefore harmless” metaphors during the whole disaster.

Who can forget the classic description of the oil as “weathered, emulsified, caramel-colored mousse, like the food mousse.” Yum. The caramel colored food mousse. If you’re like me, you can’t wait to sample some delightful Gulf seafood that’s been marinating in the food mousse.

And the good news is, according to Barbour, “Once it gets to this stage, it’s not poisonous.” Oh boy!

Seriously, if that’s the case, I’d like to see Barbour strap on a pair of inflatable arm floaties and dive into a big old slick of the food mousse and flail around in it for a while. See if he can eat his way out. Maybe the Mississippi tourist bureau could videotape it for their next advertising campaign. You know, because the food mousse is both delicious and not poisonous.

Yet, at the same time, Barbour said, “But if a small animal got coated enough with it, it could smother it. But if you got enough toothpaste on you, you couldn’t breathe.” This made me wonder if Barbour has had one or two mishaps with a gigantic tube of toothpaste. “Dagnabbit! I’ve accidentally caused toothpaste to be made all over myself again! Can’t… breathe! Glug! Glug!” Aides rush into Barbour’s bathroom to find the governor coated from head to toe in toothpaste like a real life version of the Shmoo.

But, as with many Republicans carved from the George W. Bush cloth, the doofish behavior tends to overshadow Barbour’s more sinister underbelly.

According to Newsweek, Barbour is quite a fan of the Confederacy and all of its trimmins’:

The Republican governor of Mississippi keeps a large portrait of the University Greys, the Confederate rifle company that suffered 100 percent casualties at Gettysburg, on a wall not far from a Stars and Bars Confederate flag signed by Jefferson Davis.

When Governor Bob McDonnell of Virginia fumbled his way through “Confederate History Month,” Haley Barbour rushed to his defense, declaring that there was no need to mention slavery in the process. Everyone knows about slavery, Barbour reasoned, so why bother to mention it? Barbour, here, played up the debunked Lost Cause mythology — deemphasizing slavery as a means of ennobling the South’s instigation of the Civil War. Barbour said of the slavery controversy in Virginia, “It’s trying to make a big deal out of something doesn’t amount to diddly.”

Newsweek also reported:

Barbour was embarrassed by an aide’s nasty remarks about “coons” at campaign rallies. But in reprimanding the aide, he only made things worse. As The New York Times recounted it, Barbour warned the aide that if he “persisted in racist remarks, he would be reincarnated as a watermelon and placed at the mercy of blacks.”

Right. Everyone knows you don’t speak the truth out loud. You keep your racist remarks to yourself. However, Confederate flags signed by Jefferson Davis are fine and dandy. And if you’re Haley Barbour, it’s also okay to appear at a Blackhawk fundraiser hosted by the Council of Conservative Citizens, a paleoconservative white nationalist organization that, among other things, proudly advances the positions of the old Confederacy.

It gets better. Barbour was also the founder of Barbour Griffith & Rogers, a DC lobbying firm with significant connections to the tobacco industry. When Barbour left the company to help run the George W. Bush campaign in 2000, the firm signed a deal with R.J. Reynolds worth more than $17,000 a month. Nothing like being steeped in lobbying and cancer money on top of everything else.

And Haley Barbour is looking like a frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 2012. I ask you, though: Who better to represent the Republican Party against the first African-American presidential incumbent in the entire history of civilization? Here we have an overweight, southern-fried, tobacco-funded, lobbyist superfan of the Confederacy with a history of racially questionable ideas and connections who can barely string together a comprehensible sentence. What better way to put a face and voice to the increasingly regional, homogenized, sophophobic GOP than to nominate Haley Barbour for president.

Keep going, Republicans. You’re doing great!

01) Being gay is not natural. Real Americans always reject unnatural things like eyeglasses, polyester, and air conditioning.

02) Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.

03) Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.

04) Straight marriage has been around a long time and hasn’t changed at all like many of the principles on which this great country was founded; women are still property, blacks still can’t marry whites, and divorce is still illegal.

05) Straight marriage will be less meaningful if gay marriage were allowed; the sanctity of marriages like Britney Spears’ 55-hour just-for-fun marriage would be destroyed.

06) Straight marriages are valid because they produce children. Gay couples, infertile couples, and old people shouldn’t be allowed to marry because our orphanages aren’t full yet, and the world needs more children.

07) Obviously gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.

08) Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That’s why we have only one religion in America.

09) Children can never succeed without a male and a female role model at home. That’s why we as a society expressly forbid single parents to raise children.

10) Gay marriage will change the foundation of society; we could never adapt to new social norms. Just like we haven’t adapted to cars, the service-sector economy, or longer life spans.

They did an episode on vampires on the latest MonsterQuest and I figured it’s yet another one of those crazy things that on the one hand is superstitious and on the other, you’ve got nutballs who seriously think they are vampires.

One thing that the show does reasonably well is give background on the subject matter and they spend nearly half the show examining the history of vampirism, both in history and popular media and it becomes clear that the modern concept of a vampire is almost entirely a cinematic and literary invention.  The real world, although certainly much darker than the vampire on screen, isn’t nearly so supernatural.

Count Vlad Tepes, also referred to as “Dracul” or “Son of the Dragon” was the origin for the name Dracula.  He was a bloodthirsty warlord in 15th century Wallachia.  While he certainly did murder thousands of Turks by impaling them, there’s no evidence whatsoever that he ever drank blood.  Today, he’s considered a national hero for almost singlehandedly repelling the Turk invasion of Romania.

Then there’s Elizabeth Bathory, a Hungarian countess in the 16th century who may well be the most prolific serial killer of all time.  She was eventually accused of killing more than 600 young girls so she could bathe in their blood and although she was accused of often biting her victims, there is no evidence that she ever drank their blood.  She was given house arrest and locked in a room in her castle for the rest of her days.

Finally, we have the case of Mercy Brown, the supposed American vampire who died of tuberculosis in 1892.  When other members of her family became ill with the wasting disease, her body was exhumed, the heart burned and the ashes given to her brother Edwin to drink.  It didn’t stop his death, also of tuberculosis, later that same year.

None of these cases were actual vampirism, they were superstition built on top of historical events, crafted by Bram Stoker into a literary creation with his novel Dracula.  The modern view of the vampire owes more to writers like Stoker and Ann Rice, as well as films like Dracula and Nosferatu, than anything remotely historical.

That doesn’t stop anyone from pretending they really are a vampire though.  The modern-day equivalent go by a lot of different names.  Overall, many of them consider themselves to be part of a larger community called the Otherkin.  This can include vampires, werewolves, angels, pretty much anything that is not entirely human.  The one thing they all have in common is they’re all entirely nuts.

A fixation on being a “vampire” is simply the sign of an unhealthy view of one’s own humanity and a desire to be better than those around you.  Some so-called vampires will deny that, of course, they’ll claim that they have a medical condition that requires them to ingest blood.  Unfortunately, medical science doesn’t support their claims.  Even for real diseases like Porphyria, which at one time were actually treated by drinking a small amount of blood, today they are handled by injectable medicines.  In every case where supposed vampires have claimed they have a physical need to drink blood, science has proven conclusively that the need is psychological, not medical.

MonsterQuest tried to actually measure and quantify the two forms of modern vampire.  They tested the blood of the butt-ugly lady who said she had to drink blood and found that her blood was completely normal and absolutely human.  Then they tested the psycho… um, psychic vampire and found out that there was no signs of energy transference or anything else out of the ordinary.  I could have told you that.  The people who think they are vampires, like those who think they are werewolves, etc. are all out of their gourds.

Yet the same people who try to tell you that vampires just have a medical condition are the ones who will start talking about the “vampire community” and the “hierarchy among vampires”.  I’m sorry, but cancer patients don’t pretend to have a community and a hierarchy and you certainly don’t have cancer patients running around looking like they were in a latex factory that exploded.  I can’t say I’ve ever encountered nightclubs for cancer patients where they all gather to undergo chemotherapy, can you?

The real problem is that these so-called vampires are just delusional losers with a blood fetish, but for those who are true believers, for those who are really insane and often dangerously so, they pose a threat to the rest of us.  Whether you’re talking about well-known cases like Rod Ferrell, who murdered his girlfriend’s parents in 1998 because he thought he was a 500-year old vampire named Vesago, and Susan Walsh, who vanished and is presumed dead in 1996 while researching vampire cults, or lesser-known cases like the 17-year old in Wales who killed his 90-year old neighbor and drank her blood so he could become immortal, or Manuela Ruda and her husband who killed a 33-year old man in Germany so they could drink his blood.  According to Ruda, “We drank blood from living people. I had fangs from animals implanted in my mouth to bite better with. We learned which veins to bite so it wasn’t an artery we drank from. Later I filed down my teeth to razor sharpness.  “We slept on graves. One time we dug a grave and slept in that to feel how it was. For the last 21/2 years I have had Satan in my soul.”

These people are just sick.

In the end, MonsterQuest is a pseudo-science show, not in the sense that they show spurious science, but that they try hard to be a science show but never really manage it.  To paraphrase their tagline, “MonsterQuest searches for, yet never actually manages to find any, answers.”  For all of their obvious hard work on screen, they come away from every single episode with empty hands.  They never actually find anything, they never actually verify anything and they never answer any of the questions they propose to answer at the beginning.  I guess it’s a good job if you can get it, getting a blank check to travel the world and never having to actually show anything for it.  Good job, History Channel.