…a handy list of 10 steps toward a fascist nation; while “Gareth” ties Wolf’s list in with the recent organized disruption in Boston of a theatrical monologue by our ex-local pal Mike Daisey.

We no longer have to deal with cloying, unfunny religious-right sermons from a comic-strip caveman whose very name means Christ hasn’t been born yet. But, the defenders will say we should remember Hart’s earlier work, back when he was still funny and creative. I would say that even then, his work was often slipshod and formulaic. Hart’s ’60s-’70s peak came during a low point in the comic-strip scene, as newspaper editors slashed space and promoted the most banal forms of graphic entertainment. Hart was a hack who happened to be in the right place at the right time, and who was occasionally capable of rising to, if not heights, at least medium-heights of whimsy.

…named Naill Ferguson, writing in Vanity Fair, claims the “American empire” is in inevitable decline, with Europe already further along the road to oblivion. He cites many of the usual cultural-conservative whinge targets–sexual libertinism, pop-culture dumbness, immigrants, cultural diversity, a lack of intellectual and fiscal discipline, kids who don’t respect their elders, disinterest in religious authority, and particularly diminished military capacity in the form of fewer foot soldiers who receive inferior training and, yeah, discipline.

Ferguson compares today’s western powers to ancient Rome. Like that decadent and overstretched power, he thinks we’re on a path of converging historical forces heading straight for a decline-n’-fall.

Ferguson doesn’t ask whether empires are, by and of themselves, a good thing to have, and whether ceasing to be an empire is, by and of itself, a bad thing to be.

I will ask.

And my answers, as you might expect: No and no.

As we all should have learned in recent years, military conquest/occupation is a crude, wasteful, and usually futile way to spread influence.

As we all should have learned from the Soviet debacle, militarist/authoritarian culture is a lousy way to foster democracy, self-reliance, artistic achievement, material prosperity, or social health. It doesn’t even do that reliable a job of keeping its own elites in power.

A post-imperial America, a post-imperial world, is worth promoting/defending. And you can’t effectively promote or defend such a world by imperial means.

…has proposed the impeachment of VP Cheney. The publication: GQ.

Author Marybeth Hamilton claims blues music, from its first appearance on 78 rpm records, has always been a vehicle for white intellectuals and curators to fantasize about the supposed primeval “authenticity” of ethnic folks. And it has continued to be so, on to the recent fad for Paul Simonized “world” music and the thug stereotypes deliberately perpetuated by gangsta rap.

WELL-DUH DEPT. #2: The TV show 24 is produced and written by pro-war Republicans. Who else would so lovingly depict torture as an act of heroism?

“Bush Proposes Steep Cut to PBS Funding”

…you’d seen it all, Bush-authoritarian-hubris-wise, here comes a “directive” putting domestic regulatory agencies under the thumbs of White House-appointed “advisers,” who’ll ensure nothing is ever enacted that would ever inconvenience a big campaign contributor.

…the highly appropriate question, whether anything Bush has ever done I/R/T Iraq has ever not been a total disaster.

…Turns out the whole Iraq misadventure may have really been about the oil. At least, that’s a conclusion one might be tempted to make after reading about the proposed sweetheart deal that would allocate windfall profits to the big oil companies while giving ’em vast control over the future of that country’s oil industry.

…quite a passionate pro-impeachment speech.

…that the “religious right” is oxymoronic by nature, because neoconservative philosophy is inherently anti-Christian.

…carefully dissects the fatal contradictions of today’s political dichotomy in “Liberalism is the True Conservatism.”

It’s two days after The Day America Came Back. There’s still much, much to say.

The tactics of the right wing sleaze machine have been repudiated thoroughly and completely. For good? We’ll see. The only place fear-n’-smear worked was against Harold Ford in Tennessee. (And that might have worked in part because Ford was a DLC near-right candidate, who offered few substantial differences from the incumbent beside his personality and his party affiliation.)

Some pundits are pondering whether the “Netroots” really played a decisive role. Yeah, the bloggers’ #1 national poster boy, Ned Lamont, and their #1 local poster girl, Darcy Burner, lost. But many other blogger-beloved candidates won–including the two who flipped the Senate, John Tester and Jim Webb.

And the original Netroots candidate, Howard Dean, used his current post as DNC chair to implement his 50 State Strategy, running viable campaigns in almost every jurisdiction. This is different from the Dems’ old strategy of holding on to the coasts and vying for a limited number of “swing” districts elsewhere.

More importantly, it was the culture, the aesethetic of Internet Nation, that supplanted and whupped the GOPpers’ centralized, top-down campaign structure.

As I’ve been saying all this time, the Repubs’ incessant moralistic posturing has belied the only four things they really believe in: power, money, more power, and more money. The neocon schtick has been to further the concentration of wealth and influence within a small privileged elite, and to impose a culture of passive-aggressive obedience upon the rest of us.

Karl Rove’s Republican Party has become increasingly extremist, yes. But so has a lot of the national fabric this past quarter century.

From “X-treme” sports to ultra-violent video games, from gaudy condos to McMansions, from superstores to megachurches, from downsizing and outsourcing to vanishing pensions and unaffordable health care, from stock-price obsessions and celebrity CEOs to wage-slashing and union-busting, from gruesome gangsta rap (produced, we must remember, for mostly white audiences) to “gonzo” porn videos, from talk-radio goons to cable “news” goons, to the puerile tragedy that is Iraq, so much of the U.S. has steadily gotten bigger, bolder, louder, dumber, more manipulative, and more brutal.

So, when the Repubs were in trouble this election, they could think of nothing to do except get even more brutal; thus again proving Santayana’s oft-quoted remark about a fanatic being “one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim.”

But, just as the Democrats in the 1980s and 1990s didn’t realize we weren’t in the old media universe of three networks and two news magazines anymore, the Republicans in 2006 didn’t realize we weren’t in the more recent media universe of the gilded right and the gelded left anymore. No longer could they get away with every abuse of power and expect a pacified mainstream media to underplay it.

Now we’ve got blogs. We’ve got YouTube. We’ve got cell-phone cameras and chat rooms email lists and text messaging and DVD screening parties and .pdf files and podcasts and meetups.

We’ve got the world’s fastest, most potent “rapid response machine.” Any local attack ad or fraudulant voter-suppression scheme can become a matter of national public knowledge within minutes.

We’ve got a publicity, fundraising, and get-out-the-vote apparatus that doesn’t rely on an insular DC party bureaucracy, with its corporate obligations and its poll-tested non-messages.

The neocons thrived on control, on ignorance, on fear, on darkness.

The progressives thrive on people power, on knowledge, on hope, on light.

This is more than an “off-year” election.

This is the day after the day after the end of the X-Treme Age. It’s the second day of the Interactive Age.

Postscript: Is there room for a Republican Party in the Interactive Age? Yes. But they’ll have to change. They’ll have to really be loving Christians, instead of pious hypocrites. They’ll have to really care about the needs of their rural and exurban voting base, instead of keeping it in line through “lizard brain” appeals to bigotry. They’ll have to learn to become human beings again, and to treat other human beings with common dignity and respect.

…to be reading this who doesn’t know what to do on Tuesday, here’s a handy checklist of Republican scandals and failures.

…when right wingnuts take a SciFi Channel show too seriously? What happens when the show changes its storyline, muddying its once-supposedly-clear political metaphors?