by Greg Beato

No one can electrify a routine backwoods flesh-presser with a jolt of vintage Rickles pizzazz like genial monkey-shiner George Allen. Give Dick Cheney a beer and a fancy Italian shotgun and he makes the Three Stooges look as stiff as John Ashcroft in a coven of naked Druids. Unfortunately, the superb comic chops of the GOP's funniest white collar comedians are nowhere to be seen in "America Weakly", a satirical tabloid newspaper the RNC recently published to show potential voters what life will be like under the dark, checks-and-balances cabal of Nancy Pelosi and friends.

"A Democrat Congress would weaken our economy and weaken our ability fight an aggressive War on Terror," clarified perpetually on-point straight-man Ken Mehlman in a press release announcing the publication's raison d'etre. "America Weakly takes on a very serious subject matter in a lighthearted way."

The Republicans are no strangers to fake news, of course. Remember last year's heavily scripted town-hall sitcom, "Everybody Loves Social Security"? Or the fiscally irresponsible No Pundit Left Behind Act of 2005, which paid Armstrong Williams $240,000 to tout the Bush Administration on his syndicated TV show even though volunteer patriot Jeff Gannon was giving out freebies in Talon News?

This time around, the RNC is practicing transparency, and a la The Onion, leavening their phony journalism with humor. At least theoretically. Alas, while Mehlman and his underlings gamely draft "fictional news stories of a fictitious future," locating jokes in "America Weakly" is like searching for ricin-tinged needles in the Syrian Desert: We're pretty sure you have to be either Rick Santorum or Sean Hannity to actually spot one.

Here, for example, is a typical set-up and punchline:

House leaders have promised hearings on a wide array of issues, including scaling back interrogation techniques used against accused terrorists. "These harsh methods to force them to talk is not what we should be about," one Democrat staff source said. "Whatever happened to good old-fashioned interrogation methods that we've used for years against common criminals, like good cop/bad cop?"

Hey, if someone can translate this stuff into Urdu, maybe Matt Lauer will lay off President Bush for a while. Surely there are no Geneva Convention rules against softly bludgeoning enemy combatants with GOP talking points that have been weaponized in the RNC's secret chem labs with a super-malignant strain of Ken Mehlman's eye-glazing light-heartedness.

In the horoscope section under "Aquarius," the Weakly's ground troops take a potshot at the Democrat dream of universal healthcare and accidentally frag their own commanders. "Feeling ill?" the horoscope inquires. "No worries, the government bureaucrats will make all of your difficult medical decisions for you!" Ah, yes, things are so much more efficient now when only Bill Frist is allowed to make drive-by diagnoses, and all the other members of Congress selflessly shelve their personal beliefs to honor the culture of life-support.

That hipster irony and the RNC go together like Hezbollah and the Israel Border Guard is no great surprise. What is slightly astonishing is that the RNC even bothered to produce the publication in the first place. Unless it's just the latest clandestine kickback program for moonlighting GOP pundits -- "America Weakly" sports no bylines and no masthead -- what's the point? George Kauffman said that satire is what closes on Saturday night and last week's Emmys proved it: even in a race where the electorate was made up of media elitists, Barry Manilow wiped the mats with Stephen Colbert. So how much influence does wink-wink, smarty-pants humor really have on the public at large? History, alas, is written by Geraldo Rivera.

And clearly the GOP should just git 'er done with them what brung 'em -- appealing to the angry enfranchised with attack ads, whisper campaigns, push-polling family-values robots, and special amendments to protect heterosexual Americans from the War on Marital Terror. When the Mighty Wurlitzer is cranking out majestic triple concertos of fear, rancor, and tax relief, there's no need for a laugh track. Archetypal RNC campaign thug Lee Atwater must be spinning in his grave to see Ken Mehlman trying to smirk his way out of a mid-term massacre. Comedy, after all, is the province of losers. If a second issue of America Weakly hits the streets, you can bet plenty of Republican incumbents will be chuckling all the way to the private sector come November.

Greg Beato (gbeato@soundbitten.com) writes for Reason, Las Vegas Weekly, and many other publications.