…an unelected second president.” For all I normally agre with McDermott and disagree with Cheney, this just ain’t so. In 2000 and 2004, only one name appeared on ballots alongside that of Bush, and it wasn’t Colin Powell.

…about Bush and the whole leaking/lying/covering-up scandal: He might not have known all the details about everything his close aides (Cheney, Rove, Libby, DeLay, Frist, et al.) have done. He might not have wanted to know; he might have wanted a degree of what was known in the Nixon years as “plausible deniability.”

But he was a sharp political operative, and he chose to place these men around him because they were also sharp political operatives. He may have told them all to do whatever it took to sell the Iraq war and to wreak retribution on anyone who impeded that drive. He might then have left Cheney, Rove, Libby, and co. to carry out his directives in their own ways.

He should have known what to expect from that point on, since all three branches of the federal government are now completely run by people who think the only thing Nixon did wrong was get caught.

Yes, this presidency is “imploding,” to use Carl Bernstein’s word. But there are differences between the old Watergate scandal collection and this new batch, a “Watergate 2.0” if you will.

The original Watergate mess was focused on a re-election campaign that employed a vast series of illegal “dirty tricks” to influence and crush the opposition. This scandal isn’t about anything as relatively minor as an election campaign. It’s about the governance of this country, and the ruling cabal’s relentlessness in starting that stupid, stupid war.

The right-wing sleaze machine is so vast and so well-funded that Watergate 2.0, at this point, is only a chink in its armor. When the whole system begins to break down and collapse, which will probably occur as the scandal inevitably spreads, bad things will happen, and not just to the people whom you might think deserve it.

…the NY Times is now charging for online access to its op-ed columnists.

So instead, let’s link to other qualified, distinguished Bush-beraters; such as Robert Perry’s comparison of the White House press corps to “the enabling family of a drug addict insisting nothing is wrong.”

Or ex-Clinton aide Robert Reich’s claim that the Bush gang’s success at running a perrmanent-offense political machine is the very reason for its utter failure at running a government.

I’ve been trying to find something to say about the horrible disaster along the Gulf Coast. The commentators I regularly link to from here (the NY Times op-edders, the Huffington Post, TomPaine.com, Information Clearing House, et al.) have doen a far better job than I could hope to provide of explaining and rationalizing this unexplainable, irrational series of events.

Take, for example, TomPaine.com’s E.J. Graff:

“Ours has shown itself to be a government willing to turn its back on the most basic of American moral values: banding together to take care of each other in ways that no one of us can do alone. Yes, it’s a commandment central to the Abrahamic traditions, embedded deeply in Deuteronomy’s and the prophets’ injunctions to care for poor, the needy, the widows and orphans, in Jesus’s tale of the Good Samaritan, or in Islam’s mandatory charitable contributions to the poor. But it’s also a moral commandment for any American–any human being–with a heart.”

That says, more elequantly than I ever could, the gaping hole in our government, in our society at large, that allowed the holes in the levees to happen.

This, friends, is when the previously muddled differences between “family values” and the real right-wing agenda have become nakedly obvious. The ignored calls to prevent the flood, and the botched response to it, have tragically revealed the total arrogance, power-lust, and moral bankruptcy of the Republican regime. All three branches of the federal government, and a number of U.S. state houses, are now under the rusting iron grip of demagogues, grafters, and snake oil salespeople, people who believe the only true roles of government are to reward huge campaign contributors and to start wars.

It’s also shown the inherent strength of the American people. Thousands have moved to help where the Feds didn’t or couldn’t. Don’t listen to square-bashing radical leftists: The vast majority of Americans (including the vast majority of conservative Americans) do have souls, do believe in taking care of one another.

We can rebuild New Orleans, Biloxi, and Mobile. We can rebuild the national social infrastructure as well.

The right-wing sleaze machine has only been able to seize and hold power because of cultural forces it could exploit. I’m talking about the emptying of the middle class, the mainstream media’s obsession with only reaching “upscale” readers/listeners, the tech economy’s indifference toward the old ecnomy’s working class, the emptying out of middle-class wages to enable the hyperinflation of executive salaries, and all the other big and little trends that have helped to make the rich richer and the poor ignored.

Who, among organized political niches, can re-steer the ship of state?

Not the Libertarians, I say. The disaster has proven a need for the services only govrenments can provide.

Not the conservative Democrats of the Democratic Leadership Council, whose Lite Right policies have proven successful at raising corporate campaign donations but disastrous at winning elections–or at accomplishing anything effectual after they do win.

Not the far left, either; despite its predictions having been proved correct about that other quagmire that is the Iraqi occupation. Perhaps sometime later, I’ll list all the reasons why I believe radicalism has become just a different kind of conservatism.

No, this country needs what’s always worked for it. It needs a progressive populist coalition of salt-of-the-earth conservatives, unreconstructed liberals, working folks, unemployed folks, all the genders and races, and everybody else who gives a damn about getting things done for the people.

…has a concise, scathing summary of the right wing’s persistent drive to turn the U.S. into a third-world country.

…the proverbial question: If a thousand right-wing radio hosts are in a forest and nobody hears them, do they make a sound (or just a lot of wind)?

The new Supreme Court nominee is a career “partisan hack.”

…deftly describes the right-wing “noise machine” as characterized by a “ferocity that is only surpassed by its nihilism.”

…(presumably his real name) offers a simple, handy comparison of overreported Clinton scandals vs. underreported Bush scandals.

…has listed all the ’80s and early ’90s films for which George W. Bush was a co-investor. They turn out to include Return to Oz, The Color of Money, Ruthless People, Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Good Morning Vietnam, Ernest Goes to Camp, Outrageous Fortune, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Tin Men, Three Men and a Baby, Blaze, The Little Mermaid, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, Pretty Woman, Beauty and the Beast, and Spaced Invaders.

…the next Supreme Court nominee will probably be a hard-right extremist, but that in any event “we are not doomed.”

…comes up with a different explanation why America’s political/corporate bosses wanted an Iraq war. Essentially, Pitt digs out the early-’70s era allegation that the US is under the thumb of a “permanent war economy,” that certain powerful interests have a lot to maintain by starting and prolonging wars, and a lot to lose with peace.

Do I believe it? Only partly. From my perspective here in Jet City, it’s easy to see many BigCorps with heavy investments in the infrastructure of making and selling military stuff. (Who’d you rather buy stock in–a Boeing heavily exposed to the commercial airline piz, or a Lockheed that sells almost exclusively to the world’s air forces and armies?)

But there are also many sectors of the US economy that can get hurt in times of long, dragged-out military misadvantures. As the Pentagon sops up huger portions of both federal spending and federal borrowing, other industries that rely directly or indirectly on civilian government support (domestic transportation, construction, education) wither.

Of course, the current DC regime isn’t a generally pro-business, pro-economic-growth group. It’s a gang of grafters responsive only to those specific interest groups that have bought and paid for it. Thus, we have a health care system that makes the pill companies rich while ignoring the needs of employers (let alone citizens). GM, if you believe some sources, pays some $200 more per US-built car than per Canadian-built car just because Canada’s got a saner health care system.

Despite getting their hand-picked choice of a judge, the Repo Men’s attempt to throw out the gubernatorial election failed, at least in pre-appeal mode. As our ol’ pal George Howland reported, the GOPpers’ case kept getting shriller and less substantial as the trial went on. It was as if they expected the judge, and all the people of the state, to be just as gullible and manipulable as talk-radio audiences. Either that, or they ran their side of the trial solely to provide more yelling points for their radio goons, as a long-term PR strategy.

The first of the TV wingnuts has fallen. The erudite and formerly funny Dennis Miller, who morphed/whored himself into a Bill O’Reilly clone with a vocabulary, was axed by CNBC (along with the career celebrity-fluffer Tina Brown). Now maybe we can get a little less heat and a little more light with our warmed-over news analysis. Of course, that’s just my opinion, etc. etc.

Now we know why Spokane’s called “the lilac city.” The Spokesman-Review newspaper has forcibly outed Mayor Jim West, a onetime right-wingnut in the State Legislature, as a public homophobe but a closeted gay and, allegedly, as a long-ago child molestor. West denies the last part, but has admitted to having sex with men in the past.

It’d be sooooo easy to simply dis West as another dangeorus hypocrite, but I see something more poignant, more sad. Like most homosexuals in most of Euro/American society in most of modern history, West had to conceal his true self from the public world around him. As someone who chose the profession of politician representing conservative monied interests, he apparently felt he had to “double-closet” himself by outspokenly supporting the suppression of people such as himself.

One particularly ironic part: Spokane’s traditionally been an oasis of progressive-populist politics amid the reactionary-dominant deserts of eastern Washington and northern Idaho. It’s one of those places where gays gather to escape the bigoted attitudes once expressed in public by West. Last year, Spokane civic promoters floated the idea of creating a specific gay-nightlife district, expressly to create the lucrative urban image of a “creative hub.”

L’affaire West is a personal tragedy, irregardless of whether or not the boy-abuse part is true. I don’t go as far as the Seattle Times, which insists West resign. But I do believe he ought to pubilcly atone for his past public stances. He’s blundered himself (or rather, been shoved) into the opportunity of a lifetime. He can call, from deep inside the Republican Party’s street level, for an end to the GOP’s cynical hatemongering.