The IDEAL mascot of the current GOP: THE HAGFISH!!!! Here's why:

[Nothing Without Hope]

Rats have quite a bit of intelligence and can make surprisingly good pets. Weasels have a certain elegance and they are warm-blooded mammals. Even lampreys are not totally horrible. I think a HAGFISH would be a better mascot for the greedy, slimy, bizarro-world GOP of today.

You should check them out - they are just about the most repulsive vertebrate animal I've ever read about. In fact, they are so primitive that they are not closely related to real fishes at all. They are alien compared even to lampreys. They are covered with amazing amounts of slime, and the way they eat the bodies of their dead and dying prey is gruesome and repellent. (They have no jaws, and you could say they really get into their work and tie themselves up in knots.) They are basically of not much use to anyone, so far as I can tell, except probably to some specific co-evolved parasites, to researchers in vertebrate evolution, to biochemists studying their amazing slime, and to Koreans, who eat them (after the slime has been removed).

They are MUCH worse than lampreys, it seems to me, and the slime and several other features make them ideal neocon mascots. They eat not only dead, rotting prey, but they attack helpless netted or hooked fish as well. Their voracious greed is legendary.

http://www.jyi.org/volumes/volume5/issue7/features/lee.html
(snip)

The natural foods of hagfish include worms and benthic infauna (creatures that live within seafloor sediments) or epifauna (creatures that live upon the sea floor), but hagfish are more infamous as voracious scavengers. Preferring the soft, inner flesh of dead and decaying marine life, hagfish can actually burrow into an organism's body and devour it from the inside out, resulting in the pulsating appearance of the dead body.

"Hagfish should be called ‘fish' with the knowledge that they are only distantly related to the world's fishes," says Dr. Steven Webster, senior marine biologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California and 24-year veteran of invertebrate zoology. According to Dr. Webster, hagfish are "an ancient group that branched off from the chordate line probably before the vertebrate column appeared in the tree of life." Webster appreciates hagfish for their evolutionary and taxonomic heritages. As members of the class Agnatha and order Cyclostomata, they are one of a handful of jawless fishes with odd sucker-shaped mouths. Agnathids such as lampreys and hagfish appear quite worm-like, but they are actually scaleless, chordate fish (embryologically related to vertebrates and others in the phylum Chordata). The hagfish at the Monterey Bay Aquarium reside in the "Mysteries of the Deep" exhibit, where they lie happily curled on the bottom next to a fake fish carcass.

Hagfish have yet another curious feature: They produce a viscous white slime. While lampreys do not have slime glands, hagfish have 75 to 100 glands from head to cloaca, with ducts that release thick globs of exudate when the hagfish is disturbed. Hagfish slime, being thick and sticky, is known to be extremely unfriendly to the touch and can appear shockingly suddenly. Moreover, seawater enhances the viscosity and thickness of the slime. It is said that when you have one bucket of angry hagfish, you will soon need another bucket for the overflowing slime.

(snip)

[NMMNG]

1. Amazingly accurate

I think we have a new GOP mascot!

[Nothing Without Hope]

2. I was thinking about posting it in GD, but decided it's more of a Loungie

kind of idea. Glad you agree with my thoughts about the appropriateness of this animal as the ideal neocon mascot.

[Robeson]

3. I was kinda thinking about this for the GOP....

...

[Nothing Without Hope]

4. Yes, I have to admit, that's an excellent candidate. We may have to have

a run-off!

In favor of the hagfish, there is sort of a tradition to have a live animal or manly human type as a mascot. In fact, almost all mascots are vertebrates. And the hagfish is a vertebrate...sort of.

I do like the viciousness, the greed, the preying on the defenseless, the toxic slime...

[acmejack]

5. Perfect!

[El Fuego]

6. Yes!!!!!

It's about time they stopped maligning the noble elephant.

[Hobarticus]

7. Agreed...for far too long, elephants have been maligned.

Elephants are far too cool to be associated with these bunch of bottom-feeders.

[no name no slogan]

8. I always thought a condom would be the best GOP mascot

Why?

1) It covers a bunch of pricks

2) It promotes inflation

3) It gives you a false sense of security while you're being screwed.

[XNASA]

9. I nominate the Starfish as another worthy candidate.

No heart, no eyes and no brain, yet....they are overzealous patriots. I mean, they look like stars for chissakes.

[peekaloo]

10. Excellent. Yet I nominate the lowly Tumble Turd as the Freeper mascot.

:D

[Nothing Without Hope]

11. Kick - I don't know why we didn't think of this sooner. They don't deserve

an elephant.

[Nothing Without Hope]

12. DUer FizzFuzz clued me in to these AMAZING HAGFISH FACTS:

Including that some ...inventive marine biology students came up with a successful HAGFISH SLIME SCONE recipe. And you know those fancy "eelskin" billfolds? Well....

Here's a must-see web page, with many wondrous hagfish links and portraits:
http://idiocentrism.com/squib.hagfish2.htm
Title of the page: "Oregon's Gross New Economy"



Caption: It is hard to capture the dramatic qualities of the hagfish in a simple sketch

And here is the hagfish slime scone recipe - with my thanks to FizzFuzz because it would NEVER have occurred to me to look for such a thing:

http://oceanlink.island.net/oinfo/hagfish/hagfishathome.html
Hagfish at Home

Being the curious and ... interesting... students that we are, we began to ponder the potential uses of this incredible substance. One of the uses that we came up with was using the slime as an egg substitute in baking, as the composition of the slime is mainly protein and water.

To test this theory, we decided to try a cooking experiment comparing scones made with ordinary chicken eggs to scones made with hagfish slime.

To start, we prepared a basic scone mix and created two separate portions with everything included except the eggs and slime. Then, we mixed the hagfish slime (about one egg's worth) into one of the portions of the scone mix, using our hands, and we did the same with the egg and the other portion of scone mix. The egg and the slime did not have enough moisture on their own, so we added some water to each of the mixtures. We rolled both portions into balls measuring about 3.5 cm in diameter, slightly less than the size of the palms of our hands. We placed them on an ungreased pan and put them in the oven at 400 degrees Fahrenheit (200 degrees Celsius) for about ten minutes, then we checked on them. They weren't done, so we left them in for another 2.5 minutes, at which point they were finished. Of the two people immediately asked which scone was made with which, they each correctly guessed which ones were made with slime. We theorized that this could be attributed to the fact that the hagfish scones were kneaded more and had more water in them. We also offered a scone to Mike, a Marine Station employee, and he decided that "it was great" and that "it was not icky at all." He also mentioned that he "could feel the slime pumping through his veins" and that he felt "rejuvenated". Personally, none of us could taste a negative difference, and in fact we agreed that the ones made with hagfish slime tasted better!!

By the way, you know those expensive "eelskin" billfolds? They're made of hagfish skin. Maybe this is not the flawlessly perfect GOP mascot after all: they do have some use to sufficiently imaginative humans. They can be eaten (most notably by Koreans), they can be turned into billfolds, and their slime can be used to bake scones.

Couldn't say that about Tom Delay or Bill Frist...

[Nothing Without Hope]

13. Doesn't that hagfish face look like a typical neocon - the SOUL, not the

skin? Like "The Portrait of Dorian Gray," they look like businessmen in their expensive suits but inside they are slimy, voracious, bottom-feeding monsters.

[skygazer]

14. That is an insult to the Hagfish n/t

[Nothing Without Hope]

15. Though no animal from the natural world can equal the neocons' awfulness,

I do think that the hagfish is a good mascot. Can you imagine? They generate so much slime that they have to tie themselves in knots to push it off.

And of all the things for them to be made into, it seems appropriate that a GOP mascot be made into something intended to hold money - those "eelskin" billfolds.