ESWN is following this story diligently. I see it as a real tragedy. Everytime I think of it I get sick: ten years in prison for giving a foreign reporter what most likely was merely a Party document on what Chinese newsmen can and can’t say. It’s crazy.

I love South Park and watch it religiously. What I enjoy most is their equal oppotunity mentality — they will go after anything and everything, no matter how sacred, be it the pope, Terri Schiavo, Jesus Christ, idiot liberal loudmouths, gays, God and NRA gun nuts. No one is safe. Some say they are libertarians, I say they are more anarchists. And they’re hilarious, making fun of our very most sacred cows in a manner the Simpsons (which I also love) could never do.

Now, thanks to Brian C. Anderson’s book South Park Conservatives (published by Regenery, of course), the neo-con crowd is trying to usurp South Park as its own and claim that Matt and Trey cater to them and see things as they do. We neo-cons are, they tell us proudly, South Park Conservatives, taking liberals to task for their hypocrtitical tongue wagging and effette Michael Moore-style activism.

There’s grounds for neo-cons to say this: the show has been famously merciless to liberal gas bags like Susan Sarandon and Alec Baldwin and Sean Penn. But since Parker and Stone are anarchists and go after all sides with an equal ferocity, the theory of the “South Park Conservatives” falls on its face and implodes. Media watcher Frank Rich provides the proof.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the publication of “South Park Conservatives”: Emboldened by the supposed “moral values” landslide on Election Day, the faith-based right became the new left. Just as Mr. Anderson’s book reached stores in early April, Mr. Parker and Mr. Stone, true to their butt-out libertarianism, aimed their fire at self-righteous, big-government conservatives who have become every bit as high-handed and meddlesome as any Prius-pushing movie star.

Such is this role reversal that the same TV show celebrated by Mr. Anderson and his cohort as the leading edge of a potential conservative victory in the culture wars now looks like a harbinger of an anti-conservative backlash instead.

In the March 30 episode, Kenny, a kid whose periodic death is a “South Park” ritual, lands in a hospital in a “persistent vegetative state” and is fed through a tube. The last page of his living will is missing. Demonstrators and media hordes descend. Though heavenly angels decree that “God intended Kenny to die” rather than be “kept alive artificially,” they are thwarted by Satan, whose demonic aide advises him to “do what we always do – use the Republicans.”

Soon demagogic Republican politicians are spewing sound bites (“Removing the feeding tube is murder”) scripted in Hell. But as in the Schiavo case, they don’t prevail. Kenny is allowed to die in peace once his missing final wish is found: “If I should ever be in a vegetative state and kept alive on life support, please for the love of God don’t ever show me in that condition on national television.”

Well, it was a fun theory whole it lasted. But it was a stupid theory, too. Anyone who knows the show knows it was only a matter of time before far-right caricatures like James Dobson and Bill Frist came under fire. They don’t care if it’s a liberal or conservative target. If it’s blatantly idiotic, they’re going to go after it. The Terri Schiavo fiasco was perfect fodder for them, and as the Evangelicals continue to insist on teaching Intelligent Design and banning books by gays, the show will tear them apart. It thrives on lunacy performed in the public square, be it Sean Penn pontificating on Iraq or Tom Delay calling for revenge on “activist judges.”

Read the article; Rich is in great form, and it’s mercilessly funny.