Haley Barbour will not be running for the presidency of these here U-nited States of America. Seems he couldn’t find the requisite fire in the belly, and to be fair, it must’ve been quite the hunt.

“I shore thought it was in here some’eres,” said Barbour, sloshing through rancid puddles of barbecue, bourbon, fatback, moonshine, sowbelly, grits and nicotine-drenched jism from Big Tobacco. “Mebbe some nigra stole it.”

Goes to show you how much times have changed since I was a sprout. I remember when you couldn’t find a white guy who would give a black man a job. Now it seems you can’t find one with the balls to take one from him.

If rising gas prices are curtailing driving, as so many of the usually reliable sources are reporting, I sure haven’t seen it here in Bibleburg.

I drove the Subie north to Whole Paycheck yesterday and felt like a minnow caught up in a salmon run. Eighteen-wheelers, SUVs and pick-em-up trucks zooming by at 10 to 20 mph over the 65-mph limit, honking and swerving, tailgating and gesticulating. In short, just another day on the American highway.

But clearly, The People are suffering:

“We have an au pair from France, and she recently filled up our minivan and gave me a bill for $70,” said Melanie Janin, a mother of three from Bethesda. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’”

Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.

Well, well, well. There may be cause for hope in our benighted Republic after all.

Yesterday Bibleburg voters roundly rejected a so-called “Reform Team” slate full of tinfoil-beanie neotards, fuckwits and assclowns, among them Ed Birnham and Doug Bruce. The mayoral race between real estate pimp Steve Bach and pragmatic lefty businessman Richard Skorman was too close to call and will go to a runoff in May.

Said at-large council candidate Tim Leigh: “I think the citizens have spoken very loudly that they don’t want to go back 20 years.” Word. Y’all think this place is fucked up now, you should’ve seen it 20 years ago. Or 40. We had a John Birch Society bookstore downtown — right across Tejon from where Skorman’s Poor Richard’s complex is now, if memory serves — and in the late Seventies we enjoyed a Ku Klux Klan revival (the button-down David Duke version). Good times.

The news on the national scene is less reassuring, alas. The visionaries in the GOP are itching to shut down the nasty ol’ socialist gummint — however will they redistribute what remains of our wealth to their rich pals without a gummint to act as middleman? — and proposing a seriously unserious budget that Paul Krugman has called “a strange combination of cruelty and insanely wishful thinking.” Thanks to Steve Benen for the word.

• Late update: Also by way of Steve B. comes the word that if the feddle gummint shuts down, the troops won’t get paid. As he notes, it sort of gives new meaning to the phrase “all-volunteer force.”