Sometimes I think that there is a secret cabal of gay communist saboteurs currently infiltrating the GOP High Command. Just think about it. First you had the unfortunate double meaning behind “teabagging”, then the National Organization for Marriage chose the acronym 2M4M for its anti-gay marriage campaign (hint: M4M is used by gay men in internet chat rooms to solicit man-on-man action).

Now, it appears that the saboteurs have convinced the Dear Leaders of the GOP to run with accusing Obama of turning the U.S. into a “Banana Republic”.

Yep, you guessed it, this has all kinds of Stoopid written all over it. Here’s Steve Benen:

[T]hese Republican lawmakers and officials are all using the same coordinated phrase, but they don’t seem to know what a “Banana Republic” is.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of a “Banana Republic” is an unaccountable chief executive who ignores the rule of law when it suits his/her purposes. The ruling junta in a “Banana Republic” eschews accountability, commits heinous acts in secret, tolerates widespread corruption, and generally embraces a totalitarian attitude in which the leader can break laws whenever he/she feels it’s justified to protect the state.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Rove, McCain, Bond, Hannity, Beck, et al are so caught up in their partisan rage, they’ve failed to realize they have the story backwards. They’re so far gone, they’re so blinded by their rigid ideology, they have no idea that they’re projecting. It’s genuinely pathetic.

Matt Yglesias expands on Benen’s point:

I think there’s something weirder about the specific decision to use this term, and about Karl Rove’s specific comparison of Barack Obama’s America to “a Latin American country run by colonels in mirrored sunglasses.” I mean, since when are Americans conservatives against Latin American countries being run by colonels in mirrored sunglasses?

[T]o the end of defeating [leftist Latin American leaders], American conservatives have a long history of backing America-friendly military dictators. Just a few years ago the Bush administration backed a coup against Chavez. The Somoza regime that Ortega overthrew in the late 1970s had been backed for years by the United State. Many American conservatives were so in love with Argentina’s military dictatorship that they were inclined to support it even against Saint Margaret Thatcher.

Back to basics, the origin of the term is that a “banana republic” is a Latin American despotism being propped up by the United States government at the behest of US-owned fruit exporters. It’s a specifically left-wing form of derision for the sort of historical abuses of American power in the Western Hemisphere that conservatives can’t even bring themselves to acknowledge.