AS BAD AS the “homeland security” anti-freedom assault has been, it keeps getting worse.

OUR SELF-PROCLAIMED “champion of freedom” wants to never see or hear anyone who might disagree with him.

IMAGINE: Some pundits are actually calling Bush-bashing an irrational act of hatred. Silly pundits…

VOTE FOR YOUR FAVORITE anti-Bush commercial. Just don’t complain that your vote wasn’t counted.

FROM A NATION that still has at least a semi-free press, comes a huge CBC investigation into all those 9/11 conspiracy theories. What the Canadian TV team was able to confirm as facts is a tiny piece of the theory pie, but even that’s full of scary stuff about the Bushes, the bin Ladens, the small-town cameraderie of the global oil-political elite, and geopolitical strategems that totally backfire.

…but here high atop MISC World HQ we’re sitting high-N-dry, watching the rain and flooding footage on cable, avoiding anything to do with the World Series, and pondering what kind of age we live in that finds both Rush Limbaugh and Courtney Love popping the same drugs.

…I privately predicted the hubris-addicted Republicans would attempt anything to keep themselves and their corporate owners in power; including the lowest abuses of the Nixon era and even worse. Now, it seems to have begun, with an out-of-town tryout in Philadelphia.

HERE’S A QUICK GUIDE to one of the most-used conservative-media attack schticks.

…the Iraq War is already lost.

BRITISHER WILL HUTTON writes in The Nation about The American Prosperity Myth: “At home and abroad, America’s overconfident conservatives have led the nation into a cul-de-sac.”

…recently posted a fake news piece about a “Creation Science Fair.” According to some of the emails I’ve received about it, many readers imagined this was an actual event. I guess the lesson is the site’s authors must have had some real “intelligent design” going on.

YOU MIGHT’VE READ a little op-ed piece in the tiny P-I-edited section of the local Sunday paper, in which one Renana Brooks, billed as a “clinical psychologist,” claimed George W. Bush isn’t really a verbal stumbler but a master communicator of fear, dependency, and “empty language.”

On the site of her Sommet Institute for the Study of Power and Persuasion, Brooks goes on to condemn Bush further. She claims he’s “the hero in his own fairy tale fantasies that are passed off as a vision for the rest of the country.” She even compares his rhetorical stance with “the communication structure of an abusive personality”:

“The hallmark of the abusive personality is the need to cast itself as the savior though personalization, creating a dependency dynamic. In order to present himself as the only man for the job, Bush uses personalization to contrast his positive ‘optimistic personality with the difficult times at hand. Bush openly identifies himself as the only person capable of producing positive outcomes, even when the actions required are vaguely understood. Contrast Bush’s signature line in his speech to Congress ,’I will not falter, I will not tire, I will not fail..’ with Kennedy’s signature line “ask not what your country can do for you, ask rather what you can do for your country.”

And she accuses him of deliberately “governing by crisis,” to keep people despondent and dependent:

“Bush uses crisis ‘empty language” statements to place himself in a “one up” position vis a vis the American people. [He may have learned this both as a younger brother in a home driven by as domineering mother and an absent father, and honed it as a response to the pressures of needing to succeed in a world where he felt that it was necessary to build a persona that avoided difficult truths in relationships with more driven people than himself.] Whatever its ultimate root, Bush has become a master at using empty language to succeed.

“Even his many malapropisms may be explained as areas where empty language is being used to grapple with uncomfortable or unknown subjects, and that these malapropisms disappear as Bush grows more familiar and powerful in the subjects.

“This relentless pessimism coupled with repeated depictions of himself in a positive light by means of empty language is suggestive of the dynamics that occur in spousal abuse. There the abuser copes with underlying feelings of helplessness or anxiety and maintains dominance and control by consistently describing his partner as deficient and inadequate with no hope of improving. In cases of spousal abuse the more that the abused spouse is criticized the more she ‘appreciates’ her spouse even while disagreeing within.

“This may explain why the President’s poll ratings remain high despite the fact that people express disagreement with specific policies.”

For once, somebody’s finally put linguistic “deconstruction” analysis to a useful purpose. Now, if enough people would listen, so’s we can get started on the biz of re-constructing democracy.

ROBERT SCHEER believes Bush can be impeachable if he can be proven to have known Iraq didn’t have weapons-O-mass-destrux. That begs the question of whether the Dems would even have the guts to do such a thing.

…a certain right-wing opinion site (and we usually don’t), a few prominent religious-right leaders feel the Bush regime still is’t repressive enough, and might threaten to either form a breakaway party in ’04 or simply give less than enthusiastic support to Republican candidates.

Comment #1: Any divisive rift that might break the Sleaze Machine’s stranglehold would be welcomed from this corner.

Comment #2: It wouldn’t, however, be the complete collapse of American demagoguery for which I’ve longed.

…the Bush no-taxes-for-zillionaires plan as “Blatant Flimflam.”