…of mine believes Democrats should respond to right-wing race baiting ads.

…to talk about it, but its air-cuarter subsidiary services the CIA’s secret prison system.

…a brief lexicon of the Bush era’s new, redefined, and degraded words.

…tried to appeaal to the sleaze-talk radio audience with a promotional tie-in to Sean Hannity, it’s now trying to appease progressives. A new TV commercial tries to extend Chevy’s “all-American” brand image by featuring images of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Nixon’s resignation, 9/11, and Katrina; all done to an original jingle performed by John Mellencamp (who, when he was more popular, publicly scoffed at oldies-rock stars selling their songs for commercials).

The current Congressional-page sex scandal, and the popular reactions to it, remind me of Tippi Hedren’s climactic tirade in Marnie: “I certainly am decent. Of course I’m a cheat, and a liar and a thief, but I am decent.”

Like Hedren’s character, the right-wing sleaze machine’s goons and power-whores had convinced a large number of people, including themselves, that the only standard of decency was adherence to a draconian standard of sexual discipline. With that in place, all other sins, high crimes and misdemeanors were all fine-n’-dandy, from simple lying and graft to murder, torture, the launching of a bloody, needless war and the trashing of the Constitution.

As “Shamanic” writes at Shakespeare’s Sister, conservative voters “have narrowed the categories of actual [moral] failure to just one: sexual impropriety. You can lie to them about budgets, wars, murder, mayhem, and any other thing and they will find it in themselves to forgive you on election day; but if you lie to them about sex, especially if you’re gay, your fate is sealed. There is no redemption to sexual impropriety.

“This narrowing of sin to just one thing is not an advantage for conservativism. It allows all manner of sin and shenanigan to be ignored. It is a willful moral blindness that gives the bulk of believers cover. They can say ‘I am not an adulterer. I am not a pedophile. I do not buy pornography. I am good.’ This is such a limited view of goodness that it is merely a form of vanity, nothing more.”

Thus, it’s only natural that six years of political, social, economic, and ethical de-evolution, greeted with gleeful smirks and exhortive shouts from the right’s official media/religious cheerleaders, would finally reach the boiling point of public awareness with the discovery that one Congressman had been hitting on boys, and that his higher-ups had covered up for him.

So now we get Time discussing “The End of a Revolution:” “Every revolution begins with the power of an idea and ends when clinging to power is the only idea left.”

Time still won’t say that power always was the neocons’ only idea.

To this gang, ethics always was a slogan and nothing more. Morality was simply a ruse for engendering a passive-aggressively obedient electorate. Family values, personal responsibility, small government, “protecting marriage,” and, yes, even homeland security–all were sham cover stories for the gang’s real agenda, furthering the concentration of wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands.

…(can you even imagine he used to be on SportsCenter?) expounds again, this time on why it is indeed possible to criticize Bush without being a terrorist sympathizer.

…to remind us all that the “unsavory advances of a pathetic Forida congressman” are still not nearly as important as “a cancer in the White House that is attacking the very foundations of the nation.”

…a detailed history of American revolutionary thought, particularly the idea that “political institutions always devolve into tyranny,” and ties it all into the current GOP-led trashing of the Constitution.

…from a company that’s been brimming with dumb ideas of late: “GM Hires Fox News Mouthpiece Sean Hannity As Spokesman.”

…the endgame in Iraq is upon us, and withdrawal’s inevitable. The politicians and the media just don’t know it yet.

…about this being five years since you know what. Except this:

• I’ve only found a couple of reviews of the apparently silly, allegedly far-right-biased ABC 9/11 TV movie. As cheap publicity stunts go, the hype over the movie’s writer-embellished Clinton bashing seems to have brought more attention than the piece-O-tripe deserved.
• The right-wing sleaze machine still doesn’t want you to realize several things about the attack. Foremost among them: Al-Qeida has no interest whatsoever in overthrowing the United States government or imposing a strict Islamic regime on the U.S. citizenry. They’d like to install such regimes in Iraq, Somalia, the “Stans,” and Turkey; and they’d like Israel to disappear.
• The hijackers came not from Iraq but from “friendly” Saudi Arabia. You know, that country where the official religious poilce harass insufficiently-covered women, where a corrupt monarchy rules everything, and whose said monarchy’s big pals with Bush’s oil-piz pals.
• The real threats to the U.S. Constitution, U.S. democracy, and the U.S. way of life are internal, and they can all be traced to the right-wing sleaze machine. This is acknowledged by just about everybody who’s not directly or indirectly employed by the sleaze machine.
• As Nov. 2006 nears, and with it the potential end to total one-party control of the federal government, the sleaze machine will only get sleazier. Because fear-‘n-smear is all they know how to do anymore.
• But what if more of us stood up to the fear-mongering, not just in politics but in our daily lives and in the economy (too many of us, including many of us in the media biz, live in fear of being left behind by an increasingly inequitable economy, and thus become willing slaves to anything that will allow us a toehold into the “haves”).That’s the premise of Arianna Huffington’s newest book/web site, Becoming Fearless. Unfortunately, the site’s shackled by adherence to self-help publishing industry rules, including the rule that such material must be by/for/about women only.

  And what drives these media-biz rules? Strict commercialism, which at its bottom line is just another form of fear.

…in the ol’ “blogosphere” this morning: The courageous triumph of Lamont.

No, not that Lamont.

Not that one either.

And not even this one. (Though the Lamont everyone’s talking about might share this other Lamont’s ability to know what evil lurks in the hears of unreconstructed Reagan Democrats.)

Nope, we’re all talkin’ about Natty Ned Lamont, cable-TV exec and freshly minted Demo U.S. Senate nominee from the tiny but historic state of Connecticut (home of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, ESPN, World Wrestling Entertainment, and Yale University, and the largely forgotten birth state of George W. Bush). There, voters defied the “national” (NYC/DC) media pundits and the near-Right op-ed columnists, and chose Lamont instead of incumbent Sen. Joseph Lieberman.

You may remember Lieberman. He was Gore’s running mate in the ’00 Presidential race. He ran for President in 2004, in the process winning the endorsement of the Seattle Times prior to the Wash. state caucuses–but dropped out of the race two days later, before the caucuses actually occurred.

Since then, he’d been vilified by progressive Net-writers, who’ve described him with such terms as “the Republicans’ favorite Democrat.” He’s enthusiastically supported the Iraq invasion, the USA Patriot Act, and most of the rest of the destructive Bush platform.

Lieberman showed his stance on party loyalty during his concession speech last night, in which he vowed to run in the general election as an independent.

As you might expect, the atmosphere at the local Drinking Liberally meetup was especially raucous, puncuated with cries of “We Won!” It was just a primary, not a general election; but it was a strategic victory for the “Netroots” (online political organizing).

The real test, of course, comes this November, when the bloggers and the Netwoots activists will help try to win Demo control of the House and Senate. One guy at the previous week’s Drinking Liberally said he thought it’d be better from a long-haul strategy POV if the Dems only win the House this year. He said that would provide a base for Dems to stop the worst GOP legislation while preparing to storm the White House in ’08.

I disagree.

Every day, this nation slides further away from democracy and toward corporate/theocratic dictatorship. The ol’ ship-O-state’s course must be reversed, and as soon as possible. If we wait to change course, the ship might not turn in time to avoid the figurative reefs of socio-economic disaster.

…Kenneth Lay to kick around anymore.

…three-days-after-Canada-Day day, my apologies for not having written anything for this site in the past week. I could say I’ve been busy, but that would be a mere excuse. I’ve had spare moments away from the search for Vanishing Seattle pix. But I’ve wasted those odd hours and half-hours in such meaningless pursuits as settling old debts, figuring out how to get to the Renton Fry’s Electronics store by Metro bus (the solution: Route #110, a minivan commuter route from the Renton Transit Center), and watching odd YouTube.com contributions (such as “The Worst Looney Tunes Ever,” five pathetic shorts made in 2003 by Simpsons/Family Guy writers).

NOW THEN, TO THE DAY’S TOPIC: Yes, it’s possible to still love your country, even when it repeatedly does stupid, stupid, STUPID things.

Indeed, that’s the only real kind of love there is.

The shut-up-and-obey submission preached by today’s right wing isn’t love. It’s more like the misguided pseudo-love battered spouses sometimes express toward their abusers.

There was a time, within my lifetime if not yours, when conservative fringies were defiantly distrustful of authority figures, particularly if those authority figures represented “big government.” Would that were still the case. Those same fringies were often racist, sexist, and anti-intellectual as hell, but they at least refused to be anyone’s stooge. We could use a little more of that “don’t tread on me” attitude around these days.

…that, lefty snipings to the contrary, the current Administration is actually quite competent, at enacting policies Lakoff detests.