I'm going to miss the rotten bastard

It seems all our favorite enemies are leaving us. George Bush and Dick Cheney are off enjoying freedom, Alberto Gonzalez is begging for spare change on some street corner, and now James Dobson is exiting the scene, no doubt preparing his bunker for the coming socialist apocalypse that the gays probably caused.

The Associated Press has learned that James Dobson has resigned as chairman of the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family.

Jim Daly, president and chief executive officer of the Colorado Springs, Colo.-based ministry, said Friday that Dobson will continue to host the organization's flagship radio program and speak out on moral issues.

The departure of the 72-year-old Dobson as board chairman is part of a succession plan. He founded the group in 1977.

As Steve Benen put it:

Few modern figures on the political scene hate quite as many people, with quite as much intensity, as James Dobson. Gays, minority faiths, the First Amendment, Girl Scouts, SpongeBob Squarepants ... if you don't think, act, or believe as Dobson does, you're an enemy.

A man who could observe any event and immediately channel it into some conspiracy about how gays/papists/Muslims/liberal/lizard people/women had somehow caused the event to cause pain to the baby Jesus or we to blame for the event having angered the Lord with their gayness/Roman popery/jihadery/America hating/cold blooded forked toungeness/hoo-hahs. The man was the Babe Ruth of far right, religious based hate, how will they ever replace him? What will we do without him telling us how to live, think and act lest God hit us with a flaming climate change monitoring satellite?

Dobson, Falwell, Ralph Reed, soon Robertson. The religious right is in need of successors, here's hoping for a long fruitless search.