…about the latest Republican closet-case scandal, that of Idaho Senator Larry Craig getting busted for lewd conduct in a Minneapolis airport men’s room: TBogg’s “Boys Will Be Boise.”

Today’s piece is long and goes all over the place. Consider yourselves warned.

Steven Brant is one of the many commentators who’ve noted the dangerous link between the Bushies’ I-can-do-any-goddamn-thing-I-want sense of privilege and the corporate-motivation side of new age create-your-own-reality philosophy, as particularly realized in the soon-to-end reign of Alberto Gonzales–a tenure which fellow pundit Greg Palast calls “Wrong and Illegal and Unethical.”

By Brant’s line of reasoning, the right-wing sleaze machine has spent the past seven years determined that it can get everything it wants just by believing in it really hard (and, of course, by hustling and dirty tricks and corruption and torture and favors etc.); but cruel reality is increasingly catching up with their fantasies.

I’m getting less sure about this interpretation.

First of all, the GOPpers have remained “successful” at their prime goals–to concentrate wealth upward, to swap favors with the insurance, drug, oil, and weapons industries (even at the expense of the economy as a whole), to turn the entire federal government (with the recent exception of Congress) into an operating subsidiary of the Republican campaign operation, to rig the election process by hook or by crook, to reward friends and punish enemies, to promote a more authoritarian society at home and imperial ventures abroad.

The administration’s simply failed at tasks to which its devotions are shallower–democracy, security, justice, public health, education, economic prosperity beyond the ruling class, and the whole basic spectrum of good-guy goals America used to claim to care about.

But that leads to another question. If us “reality based” progressives are gonna pooh-pooh the right’s positive-thinking shtick, how do we account for the right’s success at so many of its real goals–particularly the goal of persuading and keeping loyal dittohead voters?

This is where a few recent books come in.

The first is Drew Westen’s The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.

Westen (no relation to ABC News execs Av and David Westin, or to Westin Hotels) argues that the right’s policies may have had a near-totally negative impact on the body politic’s health, but its public messages have been cleverly crafted for optimal emotional impact. Those emotions could be sunny, or fearful, or bigoted, depending on the particular audience “buttons” needing to be pushed; but they were always effectively presented.

Us left-O-centers, in contrast, have had a lousy rep for left-brain, policy-wonk talk that resonates with nobody except ourselves; or for downer everything’s-hopeless cynicism; or for mealy-mouthed, middle-of-the-road wussiness.

To change this sorry state-O-affairs, Westen sez Dems have to show up with some emotionally compelling narratives of their own, and to fearlessly shout ’em out.

This notion coincides with the premise of Chip and Dan Heath’s new marketing guidebook, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.

The Heath brothers seldom mention politics in their book, save for lauding JFK’s “Man on the Moon” speech. Their main target is the business person looking for a way to connect with potential customers.

But their premise, if it works to sell shoes and burgers, would also work to sell policies and politicians.

That premise: Ideas that spread, that “hit” with audiences, all employ six key ingredients: “simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions, and stories,” in various amounts.

Let’s explore how these principles might work in a marketing drive whose “product” is progressive-Dem candidates for public office:

• 
  Simplicity: Have the wonky details of our plans available online and in print. But have clear, memorable goals and promises in front of them. Defuse the Mideast powder keg. Get our troops home safe n’ sound. Health care for all. Back to balanced budgets.
• 
  Unexpectedness: Voters and pundits may expect another play-it-safe, make-no-waves Dem campaign, vetted by consultants and triangulated for minimum offensiveness. Let’s pleasantly shock ’em with some real passion and guts.
• 
  Concreteness: A budget-deficit cut by X each year. A Medicare-like health card in every wallet. A proud homecoming for our sons n’ daughters from Iraq.
• 
  Credibility: Have the wonk-data ready. But also show the resolve to get these policies up and running.
• 
  Emotions: Where there was fear, there will be hope. Where there was hatred, there will be compassion. Where there was blind ambition, there will be cooperation. Where there was spoiled privilege, there will be responsibility.
• 
  Stories: Life’s been tough. Ordinary folks struggled to get by; while the few at the top kept acting greedier and stupider. A gang of thieves has ripped up the Constitution as well as the social fabric.But, together, we can turn it around. America can mean something again.

P.S.: Yesterday’s electronic town hall by progressive heroine and Congressional candidate Darcy Burner had a few technical glitches (the video stream went down a couple of times). But it was a fundraising smash. Burner raised over $100,000 from nearly 3,000 contributors before and during the event, which got great write-ups on the national political blogs.

The puppet ruler of a once-great nation is on the Eastside today, for a completely inside-the-bubble, zillionaires-only fundraising junket on behalf of Rep. Dave Reichert and the state Republican Party.

The good news: Reichert’s once and future election opponent, the courageous and totally on-the-bean Darcy Burner, is hosting an “online town hall” this same day, at 3 PM PDT. Be there.

Gay, piercing fan, cock ring wearer.

“Stillwell” reminds us that Karl Rove may be gone (for now), but plenty of other right-wing thugs are still around to do his work for him.

David Postman informs us that Seattle Times reports vocally cheered when Karl Rove’s resignation was announced on a newsroom TV.

Postman, defending traditional media “objectivity,” said they shouldn’t have done that.

Dan Savage replied that the departure of Bush’s favorite manipulative operative was something “worth cheering for.” Savage claims, “Maybe the reporters cheered because they, of all people, are in the best position to recognize Rove’s departure as a positive development for the nation—and for the ideal that all journalists everywhere honor the most: the truth.”

I’ve no problem with professional reports having minds, nor with them speaking their minds, even if it’s just amongst themselves.

As for the “Mayberry Machiavelli” himself, Rove was the dirty trickster who always got away with it, and now he’s away with getting away from DC. It’s not as if he had anything left to do for Bush, having played such a big hand in every ruination, disgrace, and failure of Worst-Preznit-Ever. Rove’s first love has always been the next election cycle, for which he’ll surely work as a string-puller for the GOP or one candidate. Expect the anti-Hillary mud to start slinging, and soon.

…(or rather, a streaming-content company working with AT&T’s sponsorship) deliberately censor Eddie Vedder leading an anti-Bush chant during a live Lollapalooza webcast?

And in a related question, are there really still Lollapalooza concerts?

Yes to both questions.

But the company insists the sound-silencing was a mistake done by an overzealous “content monitor” employee at the content contractor.

It couldn’t have happened at a better time for critics of the company now known as AT&T. (You’ll recall, won’t you, that today’s AT&T is really Southwestern Bell Corp., one of the “Baby Bell” spinoffs of the original AT&T, which recently acquired the name and other remnants of its former parent.)

The company’s online critics have chided it for cooperating with the Bushies’ warrentless wiretap schemes, and for advocating so-called “throttled” broadband services (in which Internet service providers such as itself could speed up or slow down consumers’ connections to specific Web sites), and for cooperating too closely with MPAA/RIAA file-sharing crackdowns.

It’s not as if AT&T were censoring a site it wasn’t directly sponsoring.

It’s not as if you couldn’t get the deleted words from other sources. (Pearl Jam has put up the whole unbleeped sequence on its own site.)

And it’s not as if you can’t find anti-Bush messages online from many other sources.

Still, it ain’t good PR for a company trying to prove its trustworthiness (whilst basking in its share of the iPhone hype).

On this day we commemorate baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, Chevrolet, and, oh yeah, the brave actions of our forefathers n’ foremothers lo those 23 decades ago. They didn’t get it all right, not right away (slaves, women not voting, etc.). But they got us started on the path toward equality under the law. They stood their ground against the greatest global military power of their day. They sought not just autonomy from the monarchy, but a better way to run a country. They fought to replace the rule of monarchs with the rule of law. They got out from under the thumb of a capricious, incompetent, power-mad ruler, a king named, well, you know.

Among other people, Keith Olbermann suggests we desperately now need to get out from under our current mad monarch’s thumb–not to overthrow our current system of governance but to renew and reclaim it, to take it back from the despotic elite who would destroy it from within. I can’t think of a better wish for this day.

If the Democratic Congressional leaders are too bureaucratic (i.e., chicken) to act toward Bush/Cheney’s immediate removal, we all will have to put out the ol’ screws of public opinion to get ’em movin’. If they still won’t, we’ll have to “route around” the blockage, as they say in Internet jargon.

By this I don’t mean overthrowing the whole US government. That wouldn’t succeed; and even if it did, something even more brutal might emerge.

No, our task is both more subtle and more obscure. We have to make the current federal executive occupants irrelevant even if they remain for the duration of their term.

• Worked the orthodontists’ convention. Long, tiring, dull, but at least I don’t have to look into strangers’ mouths all day.
• Found myself photographed in the current Seattle magazine, in a piece about the local Drinking Liberally meetups. (The pic’s on the mag’s Web site, and is one of the least dorky pics of me in a drinking situation in some time.)
• Felt indifferent about the end of Jerry Falwell, the mainstream media’s favorite pious bigot. As I do whenever a left-wing celeb of stature similar to Falwell’s dies, I asked myself just what Falwell had actually accomplished, beyond his media image.As a “televangelist” he was second-tier in viewership. His Moral Majority political organization never had the “millions” of dues-paying members that he claimed, and which too many liberals readily believed. As a religious-right mover-n’-shaker he was also somewhat less influential than he put himself up to be, compared to the likes of Ralph Reed and James Dobson.

  He did create one of the first big suburban megachurches, establishing a model that would be further developed by more mass-audience-acceptable successors around the country.

  And he successfully snookered the news media, and many of his ideological opponents, into believing that he, Falwell, personally led a mass groundswell of reactionary fervor out in the vast expanses beyond the U.S. media capitals. For nearly a quarter century, millions of non-right-wing Americans accepted this concept.

  Falwell was a man who made people believe.

…the link below, you’ll love Slate’s semi-comprehensive, “Illustrated Guide to Republican Scandals.”

…keeping track of all the DC corruption, graft, and assorted sleaze? Just consult the handy-dandy “Bush/Cheney Scandalist.”

…of this web-corner (well, most) should know that there are no depths of corruption to which the Bushbots will not stoop. Yet it still surprises when we learn, piece by piece, each depth to which they have stooped. Today’s lesson: The transformation of the Dept. of Justice’s voter-rights section into a branch of the right-wing goon squads.

…sets in, the remaining loyal Bushbots get more transparent about their real beliefs and goals. Today’s lesson: A Wall St. Journal oped proposing that the Constitution actually allows Presidents to assume dictatorial powers, and that Presidents should assume such powers when they see fit to do so.

The author of this particular piece is no mere talk-radio goon. Harvard prof Harvey Mansfield, as profiled by Glenn Greenwald, is one of Leo Strauss’s U. of Chicago ideologues, an outspoken misogynist and homophobe, and a fawning admirer of Machiavelli. He articulately wraps his arguments in the fanciest of rhetorical flourishes. He creates structured arguments that follow from their initial premises, with all the skill of a great debater.

He is also full of shit.

Greenwald claims Mansfield’s particular slickly-packaged shit accurately expresses what the Bush machine really believes. I’m not so sure. To ascribe Mansfield’s forensic cleverness to the likes of Cheney and Rove, let alone the Chimp himself, is to imply that they (or their inner circle) are capable of logical processing at a sufficient level.

More likely, the central Bushbots have simply acted on lizard-brain tyrannical pasison. This leaves it to the peripheral Bushbots such as Mansfield to invent a reasoning behind the power-madness; just as the Soviets’ old “ministers of ideology” invented reasoning behind the Stalinists’ power-madness.

Daniel Eran writes today about the long-in-the-works failings of Microsoft. But he could also be writing about the national political scene:

“The weakness of power not only cultivates poor strategic direction, but also tends to focus attention on covering up mistakes in the media rather than solving the actual problems. This just makes things worse, particularly when that subterfuge is later exposed.Interestingly, part of the downfall of monopolies comes from the delayed discipline of reality checks offered by the media, which tends to cheer on the gratuitous sloth of former glories long after any celebration is deserved.

Counter-intuitively, the media is just not very good at pointing out that the emperor has no clothes; once enough children point it out for them however, the embarrassment becomes a great story and the press begins beating up the same celebrated darlings they once revered as untouchable.”

…the fanatics revert to old patterns. Today’s lesson: the “experts” who’ve dusted off the ol’ Vietnam-era “domino theory” and applied it to Iraq.