This is filed under “Bob.” I don’t feel sorry for Sam Francis. I feel sorry for me.

When Sam and I would see each other, we both heaved a sigh of relief. We were usually in the middle of a bunch of right-wingers both of us had been patronizing, and we both had a permanent case of being “tired all over” from patronizing them.

We would begin with a set of insults to each other and proceed downhill from there. Neither of us would crack a smile:

“They let just ANYBODY in here, don’t they?”

“I thought the same thing when I saw you here.”

Translation: That is how one male tells another that he can say any damn thing he wants to to him. When my brother sees me for the first time after a long time apart, he says something like,

“You STILL don’t know how to comb your hair.”

It meant “I love you, man” long before that phrase became popular, and it means a lot more.

Right-wingers will never know how much constant patronizing they require. It is a measure of Sam’s dedication and my dedication that we did it all the time, without a hint about how tiresome it was.

Right-wingers are a mass of inferiority complexes. Sam and I had none of them. He had a PhD. We had both met the “intellectuals” right-wingers feel inferior to and beat the hell out of them. We thought the “intellectuals” you felt inferior to were a laugh riot. He and I had both WRITTEN the dictionary definitions right-wingers argue about as if they were Holy Writ.

Sam and I worked together on Capitol Hill. We had WRITTEN the laws right-wingers talk about.

We knew everybody was just people, and we were both loyal to our own people. Not only did we not feel obligated to explain that, we thought people who tried to get God Almighty or Ayn Rand or some Libertarian Book to explain why one should have common sense was a laugh riot.

Sam and I would go somewhere and get unapologetically drunk.

Sam had a totally dry wit that I will miss terribly. He would sit, look out into nowhere, and tell me, without cracking a smile:

“I just heard the latest declaration from God Almighty.”

I would laugh my ass off.

Sorry, I’m not supposed to say “ass” am I? It might not be patronizing enough for some Deeply Christian right-wingers.

Give me a break here. I miss Sam.

Sam and I thought your inferiority complexes were hilarious. You said, “Left-wingers say they protect the weak. Well, we go nuts about the Rights of the Unborn. See? We’re more for weak and helpless than leftists are.”

But Sam and I laughed our butts off when even THAT was not enough to satisfy your desperation to prove you were more concerned with the helpless than leftists were.

You started going nuts over the rights of a fertilized egg.

THAT would prove you were equal to the leftists! If leftists were worried about the Poor and Downtrodden, by God, you could obsess over a fertilized human egg.

That’d show ’em!

Sam is dead. He doesn’t have to make his living by patronizing you any more. So I am saying exactly what he would want me to.

Sam was from Chattanooga. He was an old Southerner with healthy instincts. He got an education that gave him a bunch of tools to work with. But it never occurred to him that he had to JUSTIFY the fact that he was a white man with healthy loyalties and healthy attitudes.

We both thought it was HILARIOUS to watch you desperately trying to prove that intellectuals were not superior to you because you had a Book, too. You needed to quote the Bible or Ayn Rand or some Libertarian book to justify the most common sense, healthy attitudes.

You had to have some preacher scream at you to justify your Defiance of Authority.

Sam and I had been there. We worked together on Capitol Hill. We WROTE those laws you quote. We took part in approving those judges you quote like the Voice of God. We had not the slightest respect for any of that crap.

Our theme was, “Will these clowns ever stop groveling and stop quoting the Prophet Jeremiah and realize THEY are ‘We the People of the United States of America?’ ”

Good God, we got tired of you!

But we knew you were the only hope decency had. We knew you were the only hope common sense had. So we patronized you and patronized you and patronized you and patronized you, and on and on and on and on.

And we got SO tired of it.

So you see why it was such a relief when Sam and I saw each other.

Wherever he is, Sam is saying “Sic ’em, Whit!” so I’ll go on.

Sam gave up everything, so he had to depend on you to make a living.

As he told me more than once, “Yes, I’m an honest man. You see what happens to an honest man, Bob? He ends up having to associate with people like you.”

Sam got fired on his way up in a major job at The Washington Times because he wouldn’t shut up about race. So he managed to grub a living patronizing the various Voices of God at the Council of Conservative Citizens.

Lord, he would have liked to have talked about common sense and let that awesome intellect of his soar. But he had to satisfy the anti-evolution fad. He couldn’t go on Stormfront because of some Lord-knows-what controversy CCC had with it.

It had something to do with the fact that CCC represented the Voice of God or true anti-evolutionism or something.

Any preacher was allowed to humiliate Sam if he was to hold onto the tiny living you provided him.

And he STILL loved you. He would always end up saying, “They are the best people there are.”

He just wanted you to stop humiliating him. You never did.

Look at that picture of Sam below. That’s Sam. He is looking straight at you with what looks to the average conservative clown like a Serious Expression. But what I see is Sam thinking, “You are such an IDIOT, but you’re the best we’ve got. God help us.”

He’s about to crack a dry humor joke that would send me howling with laughter.

Lord, I miss Sam!