Liveblogging, sort of. It's Friday morning, and I'm at the "Different Tones and Wider Nets" panel. It's the panel discussing swearing on teh internets.

One) OK, for starters, who the hell scheduled a panel on swearing at nine in the morning? I mean, Jesus H. Mittens, at least let folks get a few drinks in first. Nine in the morning is for panels on fiscal responsibility, or closure rules in the Senate or something.

B) I am trying not to be personally offended by the fact that they scheduled a panel on swearing, but didn't invite me. My feelings are assuaged by the presence of the Rude Pundit, who can swear enough for all of us.

Roman Numeral III) No, seriously, it's nine in the morning. I'm a blogger from Caleefornia. I do less before nine in the morning than... um... leading a horse to water... with clam sauce... I forget where I'm going with this. It's nine in the morning.

My own thoughts on the actual issue -- swearing, that is, not clam sauce -- are not terribly complex. Good political or writing requires setting a tone, and more than that requires expressing thoughts not just logically, but with an emotional foundation or premise in addition to the factual one. A good writer speaks to their audience in the language required for the topic at hand, and has any number of voices; informative, angry, despairing, ridiculous, etc., etc. If you talk about America torturing people, it nearly requires the use of the word fuck. It seems insulting to pretend to talk about such a thing with pretenses of civility; we are unambiguously not civilized, if such things are subject to honest debate in our nation, and couching vile thoughts with flowery premises is, well, insulting. I long ago decided that uncivilized, vulgar ideas on the right should not be granted the airs of faux-civility; it was my decision, and mine alone. If we are going to argue over whether we should behave like animals, then we should at least remove our ties while we're doing it.

Why don't you hear more vulgarity on television? Simply put, because there are children in the room -- while blogs are niche products intended for adults (or at least, for people adult enough to grasp the sometimes-horrific issues discussed, regardless of their age) -- television and other "mainstream" sources are more publicly available, less self selecting, and therefore have far more constraints, in order to still be acceptable to parents with children present, or nuns passing through airport terminals, or just normal, everyday people who don't want to be barraged with that sort of thing throughout the course of their day.

Behind the scenes, many of these same reporters and politicians swear fabulously; they are constrained by their audiences. Our audiences are self-selecting; our constraints are fewer.

I have much more to say on this, but it's nine in the morning. I can't remember it right now. Maybe later.

The convention has started. There are apparently around two thousand attendees, this year. Outside at midday, parked at the curb of a small, entirely nondescript park across from the convention center, Howard Dean is speaking. He is a powerful speaker, in any format -- a true master of the motivational and optimistic. He has attracted a crowd of perhaps two or three hundred.

These conventions are always odd things, for me. Conventions breed optimism, a feeling which I continually distrust. Conventions smell of organization, which for the blogosphere is a notion so foreign that I have spent the first day of each of the last three conventions doing little but marveling that the feat was actually accomplished.

I have spent the idle hours of the last three days pondering the overall narrative of this year's convention. not the overt narrative -- the theme, as chosen by the event organizers -- but the inner narrative, the internal, introverted one that is different for every participant, and that remains only half-formed under the best of circumstances. Those are the more interesting narratives to me, and the ones I tend to dwell on.

The first year, the most obvious narrative (both overt and internal) was we exist. Simple, to the point; all these people who write online are, indeed, real activists, and the influence they seek to have can be measured and expressed in the real world, not merely anonymous musings. The narrative of the second year (again, both the public and the private one) was that we are powerful. The convention hosted a conversation with all the Democratic candidates for the Presidency; Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Dodd and the others; they came, and presented themselves to the netroots just as they would to any other influential Democratic constituency. And it was, to be honest, not even surprising. The blogs have indeed become substantial shapers of political narrative. It is no longer unusual to see the thoughts of bloggers expressed in quotes and interviews throughout the wider press.

Still, this is the first year in which my inner narrative has clashed so substantially with the outer one. This year, the overarching feeling (at least now, before the first sessions have started, and before anyone has contemplated fully the wide spread of things currently before us) is one of optimism, the expectations high for the coming November. It would seem next to impossible for the Democrats to do anything but gain seats in the Senate; the House, too, seems hardly in danger. Expectations are that, regardless of the closeless of individual national polls, the presidential race is Obama's to lose, and he would have to eat a puppy to have much danger of losing. The inner narrative, though, the personal one through which I cannot help but view the rest of the convention, coloring everything slightly duller than it should be, is one of impatience, and a slight frustration, and even, perhaps, a hint of desperation. If the narrative of the first two years was that of our mere existence, and our ability to shape events, this narrative is just as primitive: towards what end?

The feeling is slightly abrasive... a sliver in a finger, a twisted joint; something naggingly just not quite right, something that will not quite go away but has nothing to do with anything else.

It seems evident, at this point, that there will be no comeuppance as a result of the excesses of the Bush administration. There will be investigations; they will investigate. There will be subpoenas; they will simply be refused. There will be conclusions reached; they will stop just short of the laying of actual blame, or of prosecuting anything discovered to be a crime. We will eventually know three-quarters of the truth, and that will be deemed good enough.

We know misrepresentations were made that led us, apparently inexorably, into war. In the end, we are as a nation (public, press, and government) not particularly interested in hearing the particulars of how or why; the truth is that we were aching for a good war, and the rationale was an afterthought not just for the Bush administration, but for most of their audience.

We know the rule of law itself was politicized, made into an apparatus of partisan advantage, a weapon for the ruling party to use against opponents. We know who did it, and we know it was not just unethical, but illegal. But to push it farther than that would require taking the last step -- from investigation, to prosecution -- and that step seems illusory, at best. In a blasphemic irony, it would require the most partisan of political appointees to agree to enforce the law against themselves; either that, or an act of Congress. Not an Act of Congress, but an act, small 'a', an explicit act to force movement where none exists.

We know we now conducting surveillance against Americans that, a few short years ago, was unequivocally illegal. It was acts by the abusive, paranoid Nixon that inspired the strict narrowing of such powers three decades ago; in response to the intentionally illegal acts of the current President, we instead have changed the law to better suit him.

We know we have tortured the innocent.

That last one seems worth singling out. We know that it has happened, for a fact, and we see muddy tracks leading to and from the White House, giant footprints that even a bumbling cartoon dog could easily follow, but which the rest of us will, it seems, simply not. We know, indeed, which government officials played which parts in determining which laws were and were not relevant, and in determining that in fact absolutely none were, whether American laws or international conventions or merely the most obvious of moralities. We are in a war unlike any other, after all.

The net result of all of this, it seems, will be the status quo. The best we can hope for is that perhaps we will stop torturing; upon anything even approaching that, we will be expected to celebrate it as a victory, since even "stop torturing potentially innocent humans" is at this point a controversial premise. We will perhaps stop politicizing fragments of government that should never have been politicized, and the result will be to dilute the existing corruption, letting the poisoned buffoonery and incompetent hackery slowly work its way through the system for the next decade. Perhaps we shall stop abusing the very foundations of science and government, the premise that facts dictate conclusions, and not the other way around. If we are successful, if all goes well in November, that is. All we can reasonably hope for is that incompetence is diminished, and criminal acts are reduced, and more facts will out. Hoping for anything more is, at best, foolish.

There will be reconciliation, and reconciliation will be defined by the conservative punditry as letting bygones be bygones -- anything but that will be unacceptable and partisan, in itself. There will be things to do, and budgets to pass, and laws to create, and the Democratic party will assert that accomplishing those acts is far more important than confrontation over past acts. The Blue Dogs will assert that their own particular brand of electorally premised cowardice is in fact the most noble path; they alone will squash anything deemed too confrontational, or too controversial.

Why seek revenge for torture, where "revenge" as defined as allowing the law to be followed as it would be in any lesser case, and seeking prosecution of the guilty? Why determine if past domestic espionage crossed the line from legal to illegal, if a Democrat is then given the reins to that power?

We could have ten political conventions, or twenty, and the end result would be the same. We are the fools, the idealists. We know full well that there are two sets of laws, one for the powerful and one for the citizenry, and yet we take the asinine position that perhaps that should not be the case. We know full well that the Democrats have not shaken the complacency that first led them into the wilderness, and we know full well that the last eight years of history has taught absolutely nothing to anyone, but merely occurred in a vacuum divorced from their past advice, and assertions, and position papers.

I think we are supposed to celebrate our prospects, right about now, but it seems empty. Most people saw the revision of FISA as a secondary issue; myself, I saw it as nothing less than symbol of new Democratic government. Most people have been reduced to laughing at the unending stream of sternly worded letters, from the Congress to members of the administration, whether in the White House, the Department of Justice, other agencies, or retired from the administration altogether; for myself, it seems not even worth satirization. We are locked in a cycle of sternly enforced futility, and told we are preposterous if we expect anything more. The elections of 2006, while a victory of a scope that can honestly, accurately be described as historic, accomplished little but to partially staunch the bleeding.

I am waiting for a convention speaker to address that, and make an optimistic future again sound credible. After eight years of -- let us be blunt -- a stupid press, and celebrations of the petty, and continually orchestrated fury at notions of progress, or noble government, or even mere crude accountability, and above all an administration that seems to absolutely revel in its own ideologically motivated, carefully nurtured governmental incompetence, I am hoping for a speaker that can address that, and make it seem like anything else will happen but the predictable. A little optimism would be welcome. Foolish, perhaps, but welcome. This has been an exhausting two years, and I would be happy to be lied to for a little while, if only someone could do it convincingly.

Still, there is only a little time for such things. For the rest of it, work has to be done. Obama could lose; Democrats could bungle; events could change. Opportunities for disaster abound, and even the smallest steps forward will require astonishing amounts of work. Forget purely electoral concerns, policy issues cannot wait until then. The economy is in the tank, and requires attention. We are still in Iraq, and the only thing the Surge accomplished is to kick urgently needed conversations down the road, while the dying continues.

The hotel lobby here a subdued pumpkin orange; not a direct match for the colors of Daily Kos, but perhaps the closest you could come without risking a shootout with the enforcement agencies of interior design. It is mere coincidence. It does have free internet access, though, which makes it a popular gathering place.

Across town, conservatives are apparently having their own small convention. The theme is "protecting our prosperity", or some such, and prosperity is so great that the organizers have arranged free bus rides to transport potential attendees from around Texas, so those attendees do not have to pay their own way. They are there to talk about how successful conservatism is, and how horrible liberals are, and revel in their own assured convictions of how the world works. And there is absolutely no possibility that any of it will change.

Yesterday, Congress held hearings about the approval and endorsement, within the White House, of the torture of detainees in United States custody. The response by White House officials was to show up (for once), but to spend the entire hearing laughing in the faces of the questioners via meaningless, unresponsive answers, petty parsing of words, and in one case by -- no kidding -- the witness responding to a question by reading a passage from a book about himself.

Faced with this level of obstruction, there seems only one path available to the Congress: we must pass a bill retroactively making everything they did legal, and change the law so that torture is legal going forward.

That way the reputation of the White House won't be harmed, and these people won't be unduly burdened by these questions in the future, and this whole "a Republican administration drew up plans for torturing innocent human beings to find out what they know" business will be put to rest so that it can't be used against the Democrats in upcoming elections.

That sounds like a reasonable compromise, don't you think?

Oh, and I'm sure somebody needs a tax cut. Maybe people who advocate torture should get 20% off at Macy's.

The Politico, via Greenwald:

In an interview with Politico on Monday, Hoyer called the FISA legislation a "significant victory" for the Democratic Party -- one that neutralized an issue Republicans might have been able to use against Democrats in November while still, in his view, protecting the civil liberties of American citizens.

Call me old fashioned, but I'm suspicious about anything "protects" the civil liberties of American citizens by acknowledging that those civil liberties were being violated -- then declaring amnesty for those acts. Or by protecting those civil liberties by granting that they can be taken from you using secret evidence, presented secretly, banning review, explicitly banning judicial leeway to determine whether laws were violated, or civil liberties infringed upon, or to determine anything at all but whether the administration said it was OK to do the thing in question. Oh -- and that evidence is to be presented by the same people who broke the law in the first place, of course.

Yeah, that sounds pretty robust, all right. I feel better already.

It's not even that Steny Hoyer is merely bullshitting on this one, it appears that he and many other Democrats -- Rockefeller, the Blue Dog administration apologists, and others -- just really, really don't give a damn. It's been clear from the outset of this latest push that Hoyer, Rockefeller and others were going to ram corporate immunity through regardless of the consequences, and find a way to make the rest of the Bush administration's ongoing actions legal as well. It's also been clear that Speaker Pelosi wasn't going to do squat about it, and new party leader Obama wasn't going to do squat about it, and if history is any guide the next step is going to be the world's shortest filibuster as the few sensible voices on this we have left, Dodd and Feingold, receive absolutely no substantive support from the wide phalanx of Democrats who are terribly, terribly concerned about the notion of making the illegal legal and sweeping everything under the "Bush can do whatever he wants" magic toupee, but not concerned enough to do anything but issuing a concerned statement and voting for the damn thing anyway.

You know, so the issue of whether or not the President of the United States told a bunch of companies to break the law on his say-so can be "neutralized" before the November elections. God forbid the Democrats have to be saddled with that.

This is precisely the problem with Democratic "strategy" over the last ten years -- it relies on capitulation as defining theme. Democrats are called weak, and to a large extent that is absolutely true: the Democrats may have an agenda, but whatever it is is subsumed under the banner of "well, sure, but I suppose doing the exact opposite couldn't hurt. We wouldn't want to be seen as obstructionist."

And so even when laws are broken, the response is to issue a do-over and pretend the whole thing is now fine. Congress can subpoena people 'til the cows come home -- they won't actually enforce any of them. The Democrats can rail against the illegal activities of the administration on a daily basis -- but in the end, they'll apparently offer blanket fracking immunity as the "compromise" for maybe-please-if-you-could-please-follow-the-law-this-time-please "new" legislation. In fact, we can't even be that bold -- we have to rewrite the law to make the illegal thing legal going forward, too.

And still, people like Hoyer, and Pelosi, and Emanuel, and yes, even Obama (I don't care if he's the presidential nominee or not, if he issues statements that presume his constituents are fools) paint this complete, multi-tiered collapse as something noble, and necessary, and (for the love of pete) hard-won. That is perhaps the greatest insult: the Democrats have adopted the very Republican position of presuming that if they just pretend that something is true, people will believe them.

The result? In addition to effectively nullifying all possibility of we poor fools in the public ever being allowed to know whether we were among those that were illegally surveilled, we are now poised to legalize the longtime Holy Grail of Bush administration domestic espionage -- secret warrantless data collection on a massive scale. The premise is that data gathered electronically, as opposed to other means, is immune from Fourth Amendment protections merely by virtue of it being electronic. I am not sure what laws of physics mandate this difference, but there it is -- paper, protected; the same information in an electronic stream, not protected. Ironically, if the internet really was a series of tubes, our representatives would be able to suss out the issues of prying open every single message in a certain pipe just to see if one or two might be interesting. Once you get electricity involved, though -- forget it. You'll never get the Steny Hoyers of the world to grasp that.

Here is the simplest possible way to put it, however crude it may be: one notable difference between a democracy and a police state is that in a democracy, your government cannot spy on you unless they suspect you are committing a crime. In a police state, they simply monitor you "preemptively", then decide whether you've committed a crime.

I'm not sure why I ever expected United States Congressmen to be able to grasp the difference; naiveté on my part, I suppose. And I do not think we are devolving into a police state, but if we place political advantage (the November elections!) over accountability, we are perhaps something less than a democracy.

Killing the whole bill and starting over, yet again, would be a fine thing. Personally, I would settle for the rather obvious notion of removing the asinine immunity for past crimes from the bill. I am well used to the Bush administration, the Republican Congress, and now the Democratic Congress being completely incapable of policing itself or respecting protected American rights (after all, we've entertained the notion that the President of the United States can actually strip the citizenship of an American from them, merely on his own say-so), but without the immunity protections, we poor saps in the public would still have some mechanism, however meager, for finding out how extensive past illegal activity has been and forcing, if necessary, the Constitutional implications to be addressed.

I don't expect even that to happen. If there is one thing the Democratic House and Senate has done expertly, the last few years, it is the expert abandonment of principles whenever they are faced with threats by the administration or the Republicans. Such is the scene for the "reform" of FISA. It was instituted as response to the abusive acts of Watergate; now that another President has been found violating those protections, the response by our current Democrats is to immunize the involved parties, and to make the violations legal going forward. And we're supposed to applaud it all as a tough compromise with the lawbreakers.

Clearly, a true profile in courage.

Of all the things I despise about the Bush administration, the one I will forever loathe most is how they made morality a minority position. It was the standard operating procedure of the Bush years that ethics was considered quaint, that pride in government was considered hopelessly idealistic, and that morality was the stuff of starry eyed fools.

I could believe that the United States would be reduced to torture; we have tarnished our history with more and with less, over the last two centuries, and it would be naive to presume it had ended, say, with the internment of Japanese Americans, or with the officially sanctioned witch hunts of the paranoid and rigorously manipulative McCarthy era. But I would have found it harder to imagine, even eight years ago, that human torture would be considered the more noble choice than refraining from it, or that those that opposed it would be met with such mockery, or such flag-waving revulsion.

The concept, after all, is simple: one should not torture potentially innocent people. Forget the more unambiguous version, one should not torture anyone -- we are not even halfway there. We can base the premise simply on the notion that one should not torture innocent people to find out whether they "know" something, and you would still find that central element of morality, of basic human principle, of Christianity or any other religion you can name, to be, in America, in 2008, a controversial statement likely to get you condemned as a fool or worse. If you are opposed to the torture of the innocent, you will face the wrath of fat, hateful radio blowhards. You will face condescending, patronizing, entirely amoral lectures on newly discovered legality of the acts from administration lawyers speaking from the editorial pages of our newspapers. You will be told that what you consider torture, what every other society including our own has considered torture up until this very moment of time, is not in fact torture, and that you have affection for terrorists if you think otherwise.

This is the legacy of the Bush administration, and likely the one that will stick long past the other violations of law or ethics. We have glorified brutality, and demonized compassion, and sought to make pariahs out of any that object. And, as a society, we have accepted these premises, and adapted them into our culture, and made them American.

It is always foolish to presume that one era is better or worse than another. America, like any other country, meets fearful times with fearful actions. Brutality justifies brutality; an external threat trumps internal freedom; fear begets simple-minded belligerence from whatever portion of the government or population happens to be simple-minded. It has been the same in every era of conflict. Surely, if previous wars required the systematic purging of Asians from the American landscape, or required careful monitoring of the perceived loyalties of entire industries, a few stray innocents kept without trial or recourse, abused to break their spirit, declared without protection of any treaty or government, hidden from the Red Cross to prevent evidence of their abuse from being known, a few killed... we are supposed to be grateful, for that. It is, after previous wars, moderation.

In all of this, however, the more unambiguously moral the position, the more despised it is. I will remember the Bush administration not for any bold speeches, but for an unending sequence of snide, guttural croaks in front of podiums, in which the latest blasphemy against mankind or God is uttered with perfect assurance, or with a dismissive sneer, or with ominous opines on the motivations of those that think differently.

There were those that considered "preemptive" war an abomination; they were considered naive, and dismissed as artifacts of an earlier time with shamefully rigid thinking. There were those that thought bombing the cities of Iraq, regardless of the viciousness and corruption of their leader, under the confused banner of maybe al Qaeda or something was too high a price for an uninvolved civilian population to pay, regardless of the actions of that leader. An opinion like that was taken as evidence of secret sympathies for that leader.

There were those that thought the Geneva Conventions should apply; they were dismissed as rubes. There were those who thought those that were turned in to United States forces as terrorists should have, at some point, a trial: the larger voice howled of the danger of giving any voice to those people, whether innocent or not.

There were those that thought that, even casting aside evidence that torture does not work, even casting aside laws against it, even casting aside the impossibility of separating guilty from innocent in front of the teeth of a barking dog or using water and a rag, torture is immoral; for speaking such thoughts, the speakers become hated.

At the same time, we were lectured on the will of God from those that see hurricanes as divine judgement against tolerance; we were told that intolerance is the moral position. We were told that if there is even "a one percent" chance that someone is a terrorist, granting them doubt or mercy was a fool's game.

We were told, in short, that calculated brutality was a requirement of government. In the end, the greatest condemnation of the Bush administration is not that they believe that, but that they have almost managed to get us to believe it.

If it were merely the war on terrorism, that would be something different, though not necessarily better, but in every aspect of governance we continually have been told that the ethical position is the stupid, foolish one, or that being offended at corruption is the childish position. No news outlets demanded answers, when the Justice Department was staffed with those loyal to party, not country; it was considered expected. The outing of a CIA agent as payback was politics as normal; the urgings to prosecutors to prosecute Americans differently according to party affiliation was for a long while presumed merely one of the perks of power. The task of rebuilding Iraq was considered secondary to staffing it with die-hard conservatives, even if they had not even the slightest bit of expertise towards the job. Scientific reports by the government were either quashed or the findings changed in order to fit The Approved Version Of Reality; it barely resulted in whimpers. Forget the difficult or controversial decisions, even the most basic ones were reduced to simple equations of party advantage and ideological loyalty.

Myself? I do not believe it is anything unusual. And if I did, I would not say so, lest I be branded an idealist, someone incapable of understanding the intricacies of how a fine structural web of corruptions and misrepresentations and outright vicious cruelty is a required element of good governance. I know these corruptions are good, because the editorial pages and airwaves are filled with people telling me they are good, or at least nothing to worry about; I can only presume that they have an expertise I do not, because they are in ink, and on the screen, and you and I are not. Our opinions are too controversial. We are against the torture of innocents, and that is enough to disqualify us from being serious about the fate of our nation. We believe illegal acts should be investigated and punished, and that makes us too naive to be proper guardians of discourse. We once thought even a president was required to follow the law; we have been disabused of that notion not only by the President, but by Congress as well.

Surely, we do not understand the intricacies of these things.

So, why have activists spent so much effort opposing retroactive corporate immunity as part of new FISA legislation, when there are so many other things in the world to be outraged about? Why do so many people care so much about a mere technical issue such as whether such-and-such is legal or illegal?

I can count three reasons.

1. It goes to the heart of illegal actions by this administration. The Bush administration has broken law after law, and been enmeshed in scandal after scandal, and been met with no substantive actions. There are investigations that never end; there are stern letters that are never answered; there are subpoenas that are simply ignored. So to respond to a clearly illegal act by, of all possible things, writing legislation that offers retroactive immunity for those acts, maintains the secrecy of those acts, and declares that the Bush administration itself will be responsible for the future integrity of those acts -- it is patently asinine. It is an insult. It demonstrates a complete lack of regard for the law, and for the very responsibilities of each branch of government. In this, it is symbolic of the entire current Congress, which has proved itself all but nonfunctional when it comes to checking abuses by the executive branch -- or even by their own branch.

2. It is a Constitutional question, and of a sort that the administration has fought long and hard to cripple. Among the more basic premises of the Bill of Rights is the notion of probable cause; your government may not conduct searches or seizures without a warrant, and the judicial branch shall judge the merit of those warrants. But the Bush administration wishes simply nullify that entire concept, if those searches are electronic in nature. It takes no imagination at all to observe that once one type of widespread, warrantless, causeless electronic search is deemed to be outside of 4th Amendment protections, an entire series of other electronic searches will follow. That is, after all, the entire reason the Bush administration pursued these searches illegally, rather than attempting to change FISA law in advance; they have every intention of creating a precedent for future searches, and they now have been given exactly that.

3. It was easy. I mean, Jesus H. Christmas, it has been the easiest thing in the world -- all they had to do was not do it. It's not freakin' rocket science -- but thanks to the efforts of a number of Democrats, not just Rockefeller and Hoyer but people like Reid and Pelosi, they just couldn't not put immunity in. We were never told why it was so all-fired important -- they would never grace us with any non-childish, non-condescending, non-flagrantly-insulting explanation. But instead of just not passing bills granting immunity, we had Reid treating Dodd more shabbily than he ever treated any Republican, and Hoyer apparently going around Pelosi, and all manner of prodding and dealing by Democrats to get immunity for these acts. It is baffling, and the only rationale available seems to be the most cynical one -- it is merely doing the bidding of companies that provide substantive campaign contributions. No other explanation would seem to suffice.

So those are the reasons. Because of all the issues we've faced, in the last few years, this one was an absolute no-brainer, the one thing that the Democrats, no matter how stunningly incompetent, humiliatingly ineffective or bafflingly capitulating they may be, could manage to win simply by sitting on their damn hands. But no; it took serious work to lose on this one. Serious, burning-the-midnight-oil work to manage to quite so cravenly negate their own oversight duties.

And that is why this will not be forgotten anytime soon. A caucus willing to go to these lengths to satisfy the illegalities of the Bush administration is not one that can easily be defended. It is understandable that it would take a great deal of courage to enforce Congressional subpoenas. We can understand that voting against funding for the war could be risky, if we were to presume that Bush would simply keep the troops in the Iraqi desert to rot regardless of funding.

But this one? This petty, stinking issue of granting retroactive immunity to companies that violated the law, such that they need not even say how they violated the law, or when they violated the law, or how often, or against who, and the whole thing started before 9/11 so it is clear that terrorism wasn't even a prime factor for doing it -- that whole mess is now absolved, no lawsuits, no discovery, no evidence allowed to be presented?

No, that one is indefensible. It is indefensible because it requires not just passive acceptance of a corrupt administration performing illegal acts, but legislators actively condoning those acts with the stroke of a pen. The Democrats are determined to set themselves as partners in committing crimes, then absolving them; there should be nothing but contempt for such acts.

We'll include Barack Obama in the mix of politicians that apparently think all you who were following the FISA debates are as dumb as day-old pill bugs, and it's depressing as hell to have to do so. He may be the Democratic nominee, but he can still write a milquetoast, self-congratulatory justification for choosing the easy way out with the best of them.

You know, I don't mind politicians not agreeing with me much of the time. Or most of the time. And at this point, I'm more than used to various parts of our Constitution being considered strictly optional, and being given away like beads at Mardi Gras.

But it does grate, immeasurably, when they feed us bull and tell us it's candy. I had hoped that, given the length of time it took Obama to come up with a statement, they were going to come up with something substantive. Instead, it appears they were using that time to come up with an assortment of logic-insulting bunk.

[...] Under this compromise legislation, an important tool in the fight against terrorism will continue, but the President's illegal program of warrantless surveillance will be over.

No. It will not be "over", it will just be made retroactively legal so that it can continue. I suppose technically the "illegal" part of it will be over, so it isn't technically the baldfaced lie it sounds like -- so kudos for bending the language like Beckham, but that's not really what most people would consider that phrase to mean.

It restores FISA and existing criminal wiretap statutes as the exclusive means to conduct surveillance – making it clear that the President cannot circumvent the law and disregard the civil liberties of the American people. It also firmly re-establishes basic judicial oversight over all domestic surveillance in the future.

No, it really doesn't. Because FISA never went away -- it doesn't need "restoring". FISA is FISA. It was FISA, it is FISA. The only reason FISA would need "restoring" is if we are all willing to accept that it had been invalidated entirely by the president's actions -- that the president was not only able to simply break the law, but managed to erase it from the books entirely on his own say-so.

That's absurd. That's asinine. A law does not need "restoring" when it is violated, it needs enforcing. And given that the Democrats have latched onto a piece of legislation designed explicitly to prevent that from ever happening in any meaningful way, there is nothing to be the slightest bit proud of. It is complete acceptance of an illegal program, dressed up as hard-fought victory, and by God the Democrats responsible for it and voting for it, Obama included, naturally presume that if they type up some lovely-sounding bullcrap about it, they'll be able to pretend it is something other than strategically planned and executed cowardice in the face of lawbreaking.

It does, however, grant retroactive immunity, and I will work in the Senate to remove this provision so that we can seek full accountability for past offenses. But this compromise guarantees a thorough review by the Inspectors General of our national security agencies to determine what took place in the past, and ensures that there will be accountability going forward. By demanding oversight and accountability, a grassroots movement of Americans has helped yield a bill that is far better than the Protect America Act.

It is not all that I would want. But given the legitimate threats we face, providing effective intelligence collection tools with appropriate safeguards is too important to delay. [...]

The glowing embrace of the right-wing and administration logic used to foist corporate immunity to lawbreaking upon us: President Bush is so terribly put upon that he cannot possibly follow existing law in conducting espionage against American citizens, and nobody should expect him to, so we must urgently change the law.

But FISA was not expiring. FISA was not falling into a legislative black hole. It continued to exist, as the exclusive means for electronic surveillance of the American people, and all it required was a warrant, and all the warrant required was probable cause. That's it. That's what this entire, months-long parade of panic, bluster and torn hair has been about, that it was just too damn difficult for the administration to be asked to show two sentences of probable cause to a judge in a secret hearing before collecting whatever electronic information about you, your neighbors, your family, your friends, everyone in your town, everyone in your social organizations, everyone in every restaurant you've ever been to, etc., etc., etc. they wanted to collect.

And if you object to it, then even Barack Obama will hold the threat of imminent Terror over your head as justification for why we should ignore past violations of Constitutional rights and declare a massive, flag-waving, star-spangled do over that simply declares there's no more problem.

Oh, but don't worry. The Bush administration is charged with coming up with a "thorough review" of what the Bush administration did, in order to tell us all about whether or not they did anything wrong. Yes, let's all stand in awe that, after all that has happened the last seven years, there are still entire collections of Democrats who think that having the administration investigate itself will solve the problem. I'm not sure whether to laugh, to cry, or to simply throw my hands up at the whole thing.

I'm not sure which frightens me more, the thought that the people leading my nation could be so damn gullible, or the thought that they aren't -- but they're counting on us to be. If the Democrats are going to be so fired up about demanding that they be allowed cave on basic protections, lest the Republicans treat them cruelly in future elections, they could at least have the decency to not insult our intelligence while they're doing it.

That is my primary objection, here. Democrats: if you're going to cave, just cave. Don't draft up flagrantly insulting talking points that pretend you've gotten something in return -- you haven't. You haven't gotten squat, except for the knowledge that the illegal is now legal, that past illegalities will be swept under the rug, and that future illegalities will be met with no action more substantive than a few harshly worded reports.

We all know how much money the telecommunications companies spent "lobbying" you for this legislation; fine. So just come out and say it -- you can't piss off corporate contributors that are that important, so the Fourth Amendment can go suck eggs. We all know you don't have any confidence you can both stand up for the rule of law and get reelected in the face of conservative demands that our laws be considered obsolete in the face of our own pants-wetting fear; fine. So just say that, and quit painting us as rubes who won't know any better if you shove a few noble-sounding sentences our way.

It's beyond insulting.

Comments yesterday from Nancy Pelosi, via reporter Karen Tumulty at Time:

[I]t makes progress in the right direction. But these bills depend on the commitment to the Constitution of the President of the United States and of his Justice Department. So while some may have some complaints about this, that, or the other about the bill, it is about the enforcement, it is about the implementation of the law where our constitutional rights are protected.  

But I'm pleased that in Title I, there is enhancement over the existing FISA law.  Reaffirmation, I guess that's the word I'd looking for.  A reaffirmation that FISA and Title III of the Criminal Code are the authorities under which Americans can be collected upon.

Of course, it is about "enforcement" if you determine that "enforcement" of the law means "blanket immunity for anyone who breaks it." The bill directs the courts to dismiss all lawsuits against the telecommunications companies if the Bush administration directs them to, based on evidence which is required to remain secret but which may be as meager as an assertion that the company was told by the President that he had the authority to demand of them whatever-it-is-they-did. Which is also secret.

That's a hell of a compromise, don't you think? Can't you just smell the "enforcement" of basic Constitutional rights, there? Certainly worth a little self-congratulation from the Speaker of the House for standing up for us. Because at heart, Nancy Pelosi thinks you're too stupid to figure out the difference between "enforcement" and "amnesty".

But what's even better is that, in the span of two statements, Pelosi says that this bill is dependent on the President of the United States following the law... and praises the law for sternly "reaffirming" the law he already broke. Well, hell, you should feel confident now. And if he breaks the law again, of course -- no problem. Because we'll just pass another law making it retroactively legal again, and call that a great victory too.

Today, Pelosi stated:

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi of California disputed that, saying FISA would from now on be the authority for the government to conduct electronic surveillance.

"There is no inherent authority of the president to do whatever he wants. This is a democracy, not a monarchy," she said.

But of course, FISA was already the authority under which the government conducted electronic surveillance. It's fine and grand to "reaffirm" that, but if you're "reaffirming" it in one breath and immunizing all violations in the next, you'd have to really think your constituents were stone-cold stupid to count that a victory.

Pelosi's right about one thing, though. This is a democracy, not a monarchy. In a monarchy, the king would just violate the law at will, and nobody would say a word. In a democracy, the President gets to violate the law at will, and we'll jump through months of hoops to change the law so that he retroactively didn't violate it. You'd have to be stupid not to see the difference.

Statement from Rahm Emanuel yesterday, lauding the FISA "agreement":

The FISA legislation we will consider gives our intelligence community the tools it needs and the public the civil liberty protections it deserves. In addition, it rejects calls for automatic immunity for private sector companies. While this bill isn’t perfect, the perfect should never be the enemy of the good. I applaud the Democrats and Republicans who reached this compromise and produced legislation that deserves support from both sides of the aisle.

Of course, Emanuel is correct: the bill doesn't give automatic immunity to the phone companies. It instead cleverly shifts the calls for immunity to the courts -- directing them to automatically grant that immunity to any company that was told by the President that what he was asking for was legal. And since we know the President went to the phone companies arguing that FISA-less, warrantless, anti-Constitutional domestic espionage was now legal because he said so, that's the end of that.

But hey, Rahm Emanuel thinks you're too stupid to understand that. Or perhaps he just doesn't care.

After all, Emanuel says these are the "civil liberty protections" you "deserve." If the President said it, that makes it legal, and if you don't like that new interpretation of your rights, hey -- you're just against "compromise." In this case, "compromise" means blanket immunity for everyone involved: they don't have to prove that what they were doing was legal -- because they can't, we know it violated the law -- they just have to prove that the President told them to do it anyway, and we'll just forget the whole thing. And let them keep doing it. And they don't actually have to come clean on the extent of what "it" was, or is.

According to Emanuel, that's all the protection you "deserve." All this violating-the-law nonsense is just water under the bridge, if your company has enough lobbyists.

I'm not sure what this new fascination with count-up clocks is, on the part of Republicans -- clocks that are meant to show when Barack Obama last visited one particular television program, or last visited Iraq, or refused to respond to McCain's demand for a series of townhall meetings. It reminds me of my daughter -- once she first learned to count, that's all she ever did. She counted everything. She counted how many seconds it took her to run from the kitchen to the living room and back... she counted how long it took her to put her books away... she counted how many peas were on her plate. She was obsessed with counting.

But given the current budget, Republicans still haven't learned to count. So that can't be it.

Of course, all the "clocks" they've come up with have been, and forgive me for finding this both intriguing and hysterical, demands that Obama pay attention to them. Fox News put up a clock demanding that Obama grace Fox News with an interview -- he did. That acquiescence is likely what led the RNC to the same idea, so now they're demanding both that Obama visit Iraq (with McCain! It's a field trip!) and that he allow McCain to tag along with him on his trips around the country, appearing on the same stage.

By all appearances, they're obsessed with trying to get Obama to grace them with his presence. McCain's constant invitations to appear with Obama have been a wee bit pathetic; I've never seen a campaign so insistent on making themselves the opening act for the other party's candidate.

At the rate they're going through them, they're going to run out of clocks, but I suppose since they're so concerned about what Obama does, we might as well return the favor and help them out. Here's some alternative clocks the RNC can run on their homepage:

Days Since McCain Dared Obama To Eat A Bug: 54

Days Since McCain Demanded New Policy Of '5 Do-Overs Per Debate': 12

Days Since McCain "Forgot" One Of His Previous Positions: 0.5

Days Since McCain Demanded Obama Get Off His Lawn: 3

Days Since McCain Mentioned He Was a POW In Vietnam: 0

Days Since McCain Mentioned He Doesn't Like To Use His POW Experience As Political Tool: 0

Days Since McCain Last Praised Bush Policy Of Refusing POW Status Or Any Other Legal Recourse To Detainees: 1

Days Since McCain Toured Iraqi Marketplace With 100+ Troops And Air Support, Declaring It Safe: 445

Days Since Last Iraqi Marketplace Bombing Killing More Than 50 People: 2

Days Since The Republican Party Had An Original Idea: 3,284

Days It Took My Browser To Fully Load That Goddamn Huge Blinky-Flashy-Scripty RNC.org Web Page: Dunno, probably about 3. I lost track. Seriously, guys, we're not all graced with fiber optic lines into our homes -- cut us a break here. Nice stuffed elephant, though.

The Los Angeles Times managed to track down and interview Rafid Ahmed Alwan, a.k.a. the infamous 'Curveball', purveyor of a remarkable series of stories on Iraq's supposed biological weapons capabilities. It was he that came up with the "mobile weapons labs" that Colin Powell showed cartoon drawings of at the United Nations, that Iraq was attempting to smuggle WMD's from England, and that a collection of corn sheds at Djerf al Nadaf were part of a secret biological weapons program. He now lives in Germany.

As it turns out, of course, he bullshitted the whole thing. In Iraq he was a con man, thief, embezzler and general crook who was fired from job after job.

He claimed, for example, that the son of his former boss, Basil Latif, secretly headed a vast weapons of mass destruction procurement and smuggling scheme from England. British investigators found, however, that Latif's son was a 16-year-old exchange student, not a criminal mastermind. [...]

"Rafid told five or 10 stories every day," Freah said in an interview. "I'd ask, 'Where have you been?' And he'd say, 'I had a problem with my car.' Or, 'My family was sick.' But I knew he was lying."

He had a gift for it and "was not embarrassed when caught in a lie," Freah said.

At the Djerf al Nadaf warehouse, laborers treated seeds from local farmers with fungicides to prevent mold and rot. But Alwan convinced his BND handlers that the site's corn-filled sheds were part of Iraq's secret germ weapons program. He worked there, he told them, until 1998, when an unreported biological accident occurred.

In fact, Alwan had been dismissed three years earlier, in 1995, after inflating expenses and faking receipts for tools, supplies and lamb for a party.

"I fired him," Freah said. "He was corrupt and he was found stealing."

Even his fellow Burger King employees in Germany knew him as a serial liar...

In early 2002, a year before the war, he told co-workers at the Burger King that he spied for Iraqi intelligence and would report any fellow Iraqi worker who criticized Hussein's regime.

They couldn't decide if he was dangerous or crazy.

"During breaks, he told stories about what a big man he was in Baghdad," said Hamza Hamad Rashid, who remembered an odd scene with the pudgy Alwan in his too-tight Burger King uniform praising Hussein in the home of der Whopper. "But he always lied. We never believed anything he said."

So his family, his friends, his co-workers and his employers, from Iraqi warehouses to German Burger Kings, all knew him to be a con man, crook and general nut. German officials warned the Americans not to use information provided by him, and weapons inspectors who investigated his claims before the war found them false.

But that still wasn't enough to keep his valued "information" out of the hands of the special intelligence gathering operations of Rumsfeld and Cheney, who then passed it to the press, or from Colin Powell's speech at the United Nations, or from George W. Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, or from any of the myriad other administration reports used to justify the war. Truly, the Iraq War was a perfect example of a group of con men getting together and deciding to believe each other's stories.

Coalition deaths in the Iraq War have recently topped 4,100. The number of Iraqi deaths are not known, and not counted.

You may place this in the you've got to freakin' be kidding me pile. From Tennessee:

Fred Hobbs, a state Democratic Party Executive Committee member representing part of Davis’ district, said he understands why [Tennessee Congressman Lincoln] Davis is not endorsing Obama and is "skeptical" of the Illinois senator himself.

"Maybe [it’s] the same reason I don’t want to — I don’t exactly approve of a lot of the things he stands for and I’m not sure we know enough about him," Hobbs said when asked why he thought Davis wasn’t endorsing Obama. "He’s got some bad connections, and he may be terrorist connected for all I can tell. It sounds kind of like he may be."

Dear Tennessee Democratic Party Executive Committee Member Fred Hobbs: please explain to America why you think Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee for the Presidency of the United States of America, might be "terrorist connected." For bonus points, Mr. Hobbs, what the hell -- see if you can do it without using the word negro. Go on, we'll wait.

No, I'm dead serious. You wouldn't presume Hillary Clinton was "terrorist connected." You wouldn't presume John Edwards, or John Kerry, or Al Gore or Joe Biden or Chris Dodd or, for that matter, John McCain was "terrorist connected." So what's different about Barack Obama?

Rather than spending the next five hundred words repeatedly insulting possible orchid rapist Fred Hobbs (hey, I don't know much about the guy, but he sounds like the kind of guy who'd deflower, er, flowers, so it'd be irresponsible not to look into it), I'll just bring you the response of the Tennessee Democratic Party itself, as also reported by the Nashville City Paper:

"The Tennessee Democratic Party is united behind our party’s nominee, Senator Barack Obama. Mr. Hobbs is obviously misinformed, and his statement highlights the perpetual efforts of the Republican Party, especially here in Tennessee, to turn internet smears and highly offensive gossip into their party’s message against Senator Barack Obama as we head into the General Election. Instead of debating the issues, the Tennessee Republican Party continues to rely upon slanderous and salacious tall tales. They are borrowing from the playbook first written by Richard Nixon and employed in the race against Congressman Harold Ford Jr. Tennesseans of every political persuasion are tired of these tactics."

No word on whether or not Hobbs will face, well, anything but a stern statement for his remarks. But I thought this was interesting. No, not interesting... what's the word I'm looking for? Oh, right. Laughable. A columnist at Chattanoogan.com says:

That’s where the delightful Mr. Hobbs comes in. He’s one of Rep. Davis’ closest party cronies and he was at his finest when he told the Nashville newspaper, "They reported on Fox News that (Obama) has associates who are connected to terrorism. It does throw a red flag up for me ....I certainly don’t think he’s a terrorist. I’ve just heard he has associates who might have those ties."

Well, there's a surprise. It was a smear born from the muck of Fox News all along... so a Democratic committee member then cites it as a "red flag"... so then Fox News turns around and reports the Democratic committee member saying it...

Proving just how important Barack Obama’s new rumor-busting Web site could be, a Tennessee Democratic Party member told a local newspaper that the presumptive nominee of his party "may be terrorist connected."

It's like the life cycle of a tapeworm, isn't it?

Fareed Zakaria, in Newsweek, has a bit about bipartisanship and how it would, you know, be nice to have it. Several things jump out, here...

During the 1980s, the United States tackled many of the problems it faced through bipartisan compromises. The government passed a massive tax reform, with Ronald Reagan and Democrat Dan Rostenkowski championing the bill. It revamped Social Security and passed immigration reform, as well as a series of trade deals—all with strong bipartisan support. These policies were crucial in setting the stage for two decades of strong economic growth. [...]

"With the end of the cold war, we saw a new, destructive kind of partisanship," says David Gergen, who has worked in Republican and Democratic White Houses. "And for much of the past decade, we've kicked the can down the road on our big problems." Some of this is because of the narrowcasting of American politics, a process in which the extreme ends of the spectrum have been magnified and the center gets lost.

Without getting into a discussion of the value of the Reagan years, the difference between then and more recent history, of course, is that Reagan had to compromise with Democrats to get anything at all done. And, in cases both good and bad, he did. The difference between then and "much of the past decade" is that "much of the past decade" has seen unilateral control of all branches of government by the same party. So if we've "kicked the can down the road" on our problems -- and I can't believe I'm honestly having to draw a freakin' map, here -- what honestly do you think that means?

And I also have to disagree on the premise that the extremes of the political spectrum have been magnified, losing the center; I think that is a fundamental misdiagnosis. I think one extreme of the political spectrum has been magnified. I'll grant you that both extremes have been magnified if you can look at Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, etc., etc., etc., and the entirety of Fox News and give me an even remotely equivalent number of hyperpartisan Democratic pundits on the airwaves. I'll wait. And no, Ward F---ing Churchill does not count.

If you're going to diagnose the problem, at least have the decency to do it based on the objective evidence. One party is reflected with disproportionate hyperpartisanship in the media. Not both. Even if you were to accept the canard that the entire news industry is secretly liberal merely through their own existence, being "secretly" for one party is a far stretch from overt hyperpartisanship for that party.

Part of it, Gergen argues, is generational. "I have a distinct memory that the World War II generation really put country ahead of party. That is simply not the case with the generation in power now."

These odes to a new bipartisanship always feel like a lot of squirming to avoid a rather fundamental point; when the Republicans controlled the House, the Senate, and the Presidency, they compromised on nothing. They didn't need to, so they didn't. This certainly could be obliquely what Gergen refers to, when he says "much of the past decade" and "the generation in power now." But golly gee, you'd be hard pressed to pry that meaning out of such a milquetoast, darn-both-parties piece of rhetoric.

Ironically, the American public seems to understand the point quite well; they've started voting Republicans out in droves. Nonetheless, the only place bipartisanship seems truly omnipresent is in punditry, where everyone wants it, everyone is sad it hasn't been happening, and you'll apparently be put in a box and dropped to the bottom of the sea if you dare mention, even in passing, that this new "tone in Washington" is in fact a product of the Republican "revolution".

You can't compare the militantly partisan (to the point of criminal) antics of a Tom DeLay to, say, a Tom Daschle. Doesn't freaking work. You can't look at the politicization of the Department of Justice by the Bush Administration and say "ah, well, either party would have done it." No, either party did not do it. That's sort of the reason it's a giant scandal (though you wouldn't have known it, from the initial press non-coverage.)

There seems to be a taboo against stating the obvious; the lack of bipartisanship was a conscious political decision by one party. Apparently bipartisanship in the press, though, means we're not allowed to analyze the objective history of the last decade, and only deplore the outcome in mealy-mouthed, tsking abstractions. On one side, we have Grover Norquist saying bipartisanship was just another word for date rape; we're never allowed to mention that. In the press, forcing supremely and monolithically partisan actions is praised as "playing hardball" -- nobody criticizes the partisanship when they're watching it happen, they only mutter about bipartisanship afterwards, and abstractly, and with no concrete examples (because the concrete examples would -- gasp -- not reflect equally badly on both parties.)

So here's a gentle admonition to the "centrist" press, figures like Zakaria and Gergen and countless others. Being a "centrist" is not equivalent to being an idiot. You're allowed to cast blame if blame needs to be cast, and it would help enormously to do so. If you are really interested in bipartisanship, it would have helped to mention it at any point in the last ten years when these things were actively going on.

Personally, though, I think the argument that we were less partisan in previous generations to be bunk. It is another edition of wistful Leave It To Beaverness, in which we forget all the bad things and wistfully wish for a time when everybody was drinking lemonade on their back porch and politics was civilized and the worst things anyone ever did were back-sass their elders and get stuck in giant soup bowls. There were crooks then, same as now; there were political machines, same as now; there were radical shifts of power as the American people figured out that maybe one party was considerably more to blame for things than some other party . Same as now.

Earlier this week, noted child-murdering dolphin rapist Tom DeLay voiced his concerns about his fellow conservatives to the Washington Times:

Two years after he resigned from the House, former Republican leader Tom DeLay says conservatives haven't bottomed out from their 2006 election losses, Democrats are "cleaning their clock," and it will take years before the Republican Party can compete with the operation Democrats have built.

"The conservatives refuse to accept that the left is cleaning their clock, and until you hit some bottom, wherever that is, to where it says, 'Well, maybe we ought to do something different,' little or nothing's going to change," [...] "I think it's going to take years to rebuild the party," he said.

The problem, you see, is all about how the Democrats have built this powerful political machine that the poor, lowly Republicans just can't compete with. They've gone from an unstoppable "permanent majority" featuring the likes of Tom DeLay to, well, an indicted Tom DeLay nursing his wounds and wondering where the bottom is.

I was going to write a bit of satire exploring how an indicted conservative Republican is using the pages of a newspaper which until recently featured the editorial voice of a racist and unapologetic supporter of the American Confederacy, and which is owned by an ex-felon anti-Christian Asian cult leader best known previously for his extravagant lifestyle, crime connections and mass wedding ceremonies, to tell anyone else in the universe how to rebuild their own reputations... but then I pulled a muscle or something.

Hmm...

OKLAHOMA CITY—Democratic Rep. Dan Boren of Oklahoma said Tuesday Barack Obama is "the most liberal senator" in Congress and he has no intention of endorsing him for the White House. [...]
Boren, a self-described centrist, is seeking a third term this year in a mostly rural district that stretches across eastern Oklahoma.

"We're much more conservative," Boren said of district. "I've got to reflect my district. No one means more to me than the people who elected me. I have to listen them." He called Obama "the most liberal senator in the U.S. Senate."

Boren still is going to vote for Obama, mind you, just not "endorse" him. Because, you know, Obama is "liberal", and that's just not an OK thing to be in the OK state.

It seems like a rather odd line for a Democrat to be taking -- clipped as it is from conservative talking points -- but I'll be honest. I can't get all that worked up about it. So, you know, whatever -- if he "votes for" Obama, but "endorses" an animated tick hiding in a Pokemon's brightly colored back fur, meh. I'm hoarding my disapprobation right now, in anticipation of Peak Outrage. Which will probably be sometime in 2009, for those of you who are following the outrage markets.

So here's my gentle question for Rep. Boren. Let's just suppose that he was right, and Obama really was "the most liberal senator" in the entire Democratic contingent -- a term magically conferred by conservatives on whatever figure wins the nomination, election after election, while hyper-mega-death-penalty-mocking-war-humping-salmon-punching-archconservative Republicans magically turn into "moderates", using those same conservatives' exact same terribly objective calculations for such things.

So let's just stipulate that someone might be "the most liberal" senator. My question for Rep. Boren, and for his Oklahoma constituents, is this: so what? So what if someone is a "liberal"?

What exactly are you afraid of?

What, will he start some wars? Will the economy go to hell? Will gasoline suddenly cost four bucks a gallon, so that getting from one end of town to the other starts to be something you have to plan for in your family budget? Oh, wait, no -- that's what conservatism has wrought. So what big, scary menace will "liberalism" rain down upon us all?

The horror of free public education? The apocalypse of affordable healthcare for families and the elderly? An energy policy that consists of something other than "hell, let's just sit on our asses and see what happens"? My God, maybe we'll have a foreign policy that doesn't revolve around sucking thousands of dollars out of your constituents' pockets, lighting all that money on fire, and using the pyre to make super-special Democracy Smores in the middle of the Iraqi desert?

What, are we afraid less American soldiers will die? That our trade deficit will be, if not reversed, at least addressed? Are Oklahomans all huddled in their closets, lest some of the now-legions of outsourced jobs start reappearing in their towns? What? What is it that is so absolutely alarming about the word "liberal" that you'd rather stomach having everything that's happened to America for the past decade continue, rather than being seen as someone who might secretly have tolerance for, shudder, that word?

Markos linked to this only briefly, in an open thread, but I think in order to absorb the true terror of liberalism, we must seek out those that fear our liberalism the most. The powerhouses of conservative thought who can really define, for us, what exactly it is conservatism is facing. If our fine Democratic representative Boren cannot explicitly define why liberal is supposed to be a bad word, let us go to the experts at Townhall.com, in this case one Mary Grabar, whose name I will not childishly compare to fellow cartoon elephant Babar because I'm trying to be helpful and understanding and all that other terribly earnest crap.

So perhaps by understanding conservative fears, we liberals can assuage those fears? Grabar:

An Obama presidency would signal the final salvo by the Left in the culture wars. Obama’s advance troops have already taken over our college campuses, have bound and gagged our conservative professors, have ravished our virgins, have pillaged our stores of wisdom, and have ensconced themselves in the thrones of power in deans’, presidents’ and department heads’ offices.
The victory cry is heard across the land in the cheers of Obama’s constituency on college campuses.

This has been going on under the very noses of the Republicans.

Ok... I was wrong. There's absolutely no way I can assuage those fears.

For starters -- and I will here too strive not to be too harsh on the poor creature that wrote such things -- they are the demented ravings of a buffoon. They would make the screechings of howler monkeys sound like enlightened discourse. They would make the graffiti on a bathroom stall look like the Gettysburg Address. We have met the enemy, and it is not us, but an imaginary sprite inside a delusional head, and it is called liberalism, and by God it does sound scary when you put it like that. Anything that can ravage your wisdom -- no, sorry, bound your daughters -- no, sorry again, pillage your... thrones... in the dean's office... um, where were we again? Suddenly it sounds like conservatives don't fear liberalism, but some post-Narnian villain. (The lion in that story? That was supposed to be Jesus, if Jesus had three-inch claws and powerful jaws capable of snapping a gazelle's neck like a toothpick. Now that's a Jesus we can all relate to!)

I think, in the end, perhaps the conservative fear of liberalism really is all about scary people ravishing their virgins. That is the only thing that comes up consistently in so-called conservative intellectual thought; the notion that someone, somewhere is just one dashing, hopelessly suave line from getting it on with your virgin daughter. Or son. For a long time, it was black people seeking to move into your neighborhoods and seduce your offspring. Then it was illegal immigrants -- yes, apparently all these people were swarming across our border because your virgin daughter was just that damn hot. Don't even get me started on the homosexuals -- they are all about corrupting your virgins. Except conservative Mark Foley, who was innocent. And conservative Larry Craig, who was twice as innocent. And conservative preacher Ted Haggard, who in his defense was mostly just in it for the drugs.

The problem, you see, is that since we can't be freaked out about ethnic people anymore, at least not in polite company, and you can't be all that freaked out about gay people now that we've figured out that most gay people are, you know, boring... so now it is simply the ephemeral liberals that are after your virgins.

I have often wondered how different groups of people can see the exact same thing but come to entirely different conclusions. I'm not talking about the "difference of opinion" things, or the "I disagree on a technicality" things, but the "I reject the very premise of your reality, and have built my own version down here in the dank basement of my own mind."

Let's take a look at how the Los Angeles Times covered the new Senate Intelligence Committee report on the claims made as part of selling the Iraq war, and compare it to how the editorial page of the Washington Post, by which I mean Fred Hiatt, sees the exact same report on pre-war intelligence claims.

Los Angeles Times:

In a long-delayed report, the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday rebuked President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for making prewar claims -- particularly that Iraq had close ties to Al Qaeda -- that were not supported by available intelligence.

The Washington Post, i.e. Fred Hiatt:

But statements regarding Iraq's support for terrorist groups other than al-Qaeda "were substantiated by intelligence information." Statements that Iraq provided safe haven for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and other terrorists with ties to al-Qaeda "were substantiated by the intelligence assessments," and statements regarding Iraq's contacts with al-Qaeda "were substantiated by intelligence information." The report is left to complain about "implications" and statements that "left the impression" that those contacts led to substantive Iraqi cooperation.

Los Angeles Times:

The report on the Bush administration's case for war, 170 pages long, reads like a catalog of erroneous claims. The document represents the most detailed assessment to date of whether those assertions were backed by classified intelligence reports available to senior officials at the time.

The report largely exonerates Bush administration officials for some of their prewar assertions, including claims that Baghdad had stockpiles of illegal chemical and biological weapons and was pursuing a nuclear bomb. Even though those claims were subsequently proved wildly inaccurate, the report notes, they were largely consistent with U.S. intelligence at the time.

But the report says the Bush administration veered away from its own intelligence community's conclusions in two key areas: Iraq's relationship with Al Qaeda and the difficulty of pacifying Iraq after a U.S. invasion.

Statements in dozens of prewar speeches and interviews created the impression that Baghdad and Al Qaeda had forged a partnership. But the report concludes that such assertions "were not substantiated by the intelligence" being shown to senior officials at the time. [...]

Bush officials strayed even further from the evidence in suggesting that Hussein was prepared to provide weapons of mass destruction to Al Qaeda terrorist groups -- a linchpin in the case for war.

The Washington Post, i.e. Fred Hiatt:

[T]he committee takes issue with Bush's statements about Saddam Hussein's intentions and what the future might have held. But was that really a question of misrepresenting intelligence, or was it a question of judgment that politicians are expected to make?

Los Angeles Times:

On post-war prospects, the report contrasts the rosy scenarios conjured by Cheney and others with more sober intelligence warnings that were being presented to senior officials.

Cheney's prediction that U.S. forces would "be greeted as liberators" was at odds with reports from the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, which warned nearly a year earlier that invading U.S. forces would face serious resistance from "the Baathists, the jihadists and Arab nationalists who oppose any U.S. occupation of Iraq."

The Washington Post, i.e. Fred "I Allegedly Run A Fucking Newspaper" Hiatt:

Why does it matter, at this late date?

Basically, there are two interpretations of the report. One conclusion is that Bush, Cheney, and other war proponents drastically stretched the true meaning of what intelligence they did have in order to make a case not borne out by that evidence. They took some true intelligence, and some known-to-be-untrustworthy intelligence, and some "intelligence" that consisted of nothing more than nonsense fabricated by the administration intended to heighten the perception of imminent massive threat, and presented it to the public, and Congress, and even the United Nations in an attempt to make the case for preemptive war against a secondary power with no connection to the actual terrorist attacks we were supposedly responding to.

The other interpretation, which Hiatt elucidates masterfully, is (1) Who Cares, It's Old News, and (2) Well, They Didn't Lie About Everything, So There, and (3) You'd Better Let Them Stretch Intelligence All They Want Next Time Too Or You'll Be Sorry Because The Terrorists Will Get You.

I've largely given up trying to make sense of things like this. The same report, using the same words in the same order, and yet the conclusion it reaches is absolutely 100% divergent from... itself... depending on whether or not you are a reporter or an editorialist, or a Democrat or a Republican. Forget the politics -- it is fascinating simply as scientific phenomenon.

But I thought long and hard about this, and I believe I have finally come up with the only possible explanation for the apparent dual interpretations of political reality that have plagued us, these last years.

Somewhere in the early 1990s, I hypothesize that an invisible rogue dwarf star zoomed through our solar system. It looked like Jesus, and it smelled like pizza, and it bent the fabric of spacetime as easily as a full grown bull moose snapping a twelve-inch sapling. It radiated quantum singularities down upon all the planets, including our own, and those singularities were attracted by the principles of string theory, or yarn theory, or corduroy pants theory or something into the heads of every sentient or even half-sentient being on the planet.

And with that, the universe was literally split into two halves, according to the quantum charge of the singularity that happened to land in your head. If you got one of the quantum singularities that smelled like pepperoni pizza, your consciousness was shuffled off into one dimension, and if you got one of the quantum singularities that smelled like anchovies, you were catapulted into another.

I call this theory the Theory Of Transdimensional Scattering Jesus Pizzoid Brain Singularities, and it makes every fucking bit as much sense as anything else we have been subjected to for the past twenty years.

In fact it makes more sense, in many ways. One could argue that one of the most prestigious newspapers in America was perennially dedicated to fabricating the actual meaning of political events -- or one could simply assume that it's not we humans that are divided, at least not by choice, but that we are nothing but the sad products of a dual reality in which nothing is what it seems, and everything is in fact two separate things. We could choose to believe that absolutely flat propagandizing about events, as a news editor, is something cherished enough that it will garner you absolutely no bad consequences, ever -- or we can simply recognize that there are two distinct realities on this planet, and nobody is really ever right, or really ever wrong. It's just a matter of which dimension you inhabit.

In one reality, we're winning The Holy Goddamn Hell out of the war. In the other we're just stuck there. In one reality, our economy is dismal; in the other, we're all pooping diamonds. In one reality laws are laws, in the other, laws are like Schrodinger's Cat -- it's only a law if the President isn't the room, and if he is there then the law ceases to be a law and simply evaporates into thin air, and you're not allowed to ever actually know if the President is in the room or not because that would change the outcome of the experiment -- I mean, of the law.

It's not a matter of perspective, or rational judgement, or a sifting of facts to determine where the truth may or may not lie. It's a matter of the laws of physics being bent by a star that looks like Jesus and smells like pizza and which rains dimensional shifts softly around our ears, and denying any of it only proves you are not in one reality, but the other. The two realities are Separate But Equal. In each reality, Truth drinks at one water fountain and Bullshit drinks at another, and it is perfectly reasonable because that is the way it has always been, at least since the celestial Jesus Pizza Star trundled by.

Why the hell not? Who cares? Why should anyone presume any differently? The most defining characteristic of political reality is that there is in fact no political reality -- only things shouted into a fog. You can make anything true merely by saying it, you can make anything begin or end or continue just by believing it, you can make anything a success or a failure or a bowl of twenty four carat gold-encrusted corn flakes, and all by merely knowing how to purse your lips and knit your eyebrows in a certain way.

What the hell do I know? I am, after all, nothing but white trash -- not properly pedigreed to judge reality. I simply do not have the family ties to be able to parse words on their own and have them mean one thing, instead of two or five or twenty. I am merely a basket in a corner -- I am meant to receive the ragged wisdom of the press, not to spill it out again.

I have received one type of singularity from the Transdimensional Pizzoid, and other people have received ones with a slightly different odor, and we should simply accept that never again will our two realities meet.

It is the only thing that makes any rational sense. The only other possible interpretations are that we are all as stupid as sin. It will never, ever make sense to me, in my dimension, how glibly and smirkingly people can treat the butchering of other people's kids.

Only a few short years ago, it was taken as a given that Hillary Clinton would be, in 2008, the Democratic nominee for President of the United States. It was presumed to be inevitable; we were deluged with assertions that she was the frontrunner long before any true campaigning started, before any votes were cast, before we knew who the full set of campaigners might be, and before we were given any more than the shallowest of notions of what campaign strategies, themes or issues might be practiced once we got anywhere near actual state-by-state campaigning.

This is standard practice, in elections. The frontrunner is presumed to be anyone with previous power or with name recognition. Not only is it a safe bet, but it is also something close to a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more known the name, the more coverage that person receives. The more coverage they receive, the more well known they are. The more power they have, the more they can tweak the political levers around them to their own advantage; the more those levers are tweaked, the more everything else falls into place.

There's nothing wrong with that process. One can imagine other possible processes -- fanciful worlds of pure meritocracy, where candy canes hang from trees and individuals are based solely on the quality of their ideas -- but in truth, if you want to judge who will be successful in an election, you'd be smart to chose from among those people who have already proven themselves successful in elections. If you want to judge who will be the most known, a year from now, pick the people who are most known now -- you won't be far off. If you want to judge who will best wield future power, look to those that hold current power. It is obvious.

I was fully set to rail against the injustice of it all, in other words, and to launch into a mild but sharp-edged tirade about the process by which the media confers frontrunner status on someone months and years before any actual campaigning is done, but it seems difficult to get worked up over. In politics, economics, literature and biology and cooking and sports and lighting yourself on fire to see what happens, past results may not be a guarantee of future success -- but it is a damn good indicator.

How, though, did Hillary Clinton go from presumptive frontrunner to a pummeled second choice? The most obvious answer: people started voting, instead of just talking about voting, and that right there is when things went off the rails. But could she have pulled it off? How close was she? Was it gaffes and botched strategy that landed her behind Obama, or was Obama simply an unstoppable force? Or were her presumptive chances simply that -- presumptive -- a fiction of media supporters who simply assumed the most well known figure was the inevitable one?

The answer is probably all of the above, and then some. The final results were, like those of all the other recent major American elections, absurdly close: there seems no question that a positive tweak or unintentional gaffe here or there by either candidate could easily have changed the outcome. But I do not think there were any things that could truly be called game-changing gaffes, and -- interestingly -- I can identify no substantive tweaks, either.

For such a close campaign, it was a plodding affair. From Super Tuesday to now, the ground simply did not change much. Yes, Clinton did better in some states, and Obama in others. But the reasons didn't change. The messages didn't change. The strategies didn't change. We saw two defining modes, in the Clinton campaign: Clinton ahead, in which case it maintained a facade of monolithic, do-nothing stasis, lest anything go wrong, and Clinton behind, in which case negative campaigning was called for, and plotted, and executed.

If the Obama campaign had a Plan B, we never saw it -- thrust comfortably in the lead after the first handful of states, there was no need for it. But if the Clinton campaign had a Plan B, it was a hastily constructed affair, and an insultingly premised one at that. The Clinton campaign was premised from the start on the notion that Clinton would win, and nobody else could. When Clinton started to not win, the same premise was repeated, but with hostility -- Clinton would win, damn it, because the rest of you are unelectable. We heard that Clinton was vetted, but no matter how much the other campaigns were vetted, it was not enough. We heard that Clinton was liked by this demographic or that one, and it was asserted that those demographics were the important ones, and the ones won by others were less important. We heard that caucuses were not a sufficient measure of electability, despite their actually doing electing. We heard that entire states were also-rans.

It was not a narrative, but a meta-narrative. She was electable because she was electable, and anything that disproved that theory was dismissed as an exception. It was the campaign equivalent of Intelligent Design.

It was, in short, a terrible, mind-bendingly awful strategy. That is not to say that there was not substance discussed, in the debates -- but the campaign was not about that substance. That is not to say that there were not good points to be made in "electability" -- but her spokesmen made them shabbily. In the end, it was not an argument that could convince.

But Clinton would never have been in such a position had she not fallen behind to begin with, and that is where I think the more damning mistakes of her campaign lie. If I could wrap all critique of the Clinton campaign up into a single sentence, it would be this: her campaign did not campaign.

In this, I think her early anointing by the media did her campaign a disservice. She campaigned as the frontrunner from the outset, and as a Democratic frontrunner at that, and the age-old Democratic mandate for running campaigns has been one of excruciating timidity. The goal of most recent high-profile elections, the Kerry campaign included, the Gore campaign included, and several dozen other campaigns besides, has not been to win, but to simply avoid losing.

Towards that end, no large issues are addressed with too much passion, and no stances are taken with too much vigor, and for the love of God nobody is made to feel the slightest bit uncomfortable. It is playing to the middle writ large, and in crayon, and with big block letters. The goal is to assemble the broadest coalition possible -- by saying nothing that could possibly offend anyone. The premise is to appeal to "independents", and "centrists", and most of all the "undecided", that group of people so uninterested in politics that they cannot fathom the difference between the parties, but who allegedly can be mobilized into action if only you do absolutely nothing that will get them the slightest bit worked up. It is a cynical, wretched excuse for leadership, but more to the point it provides absolutely no room for error: it is an all-defensive strategy. If your opponent is a block of wood, incapable of making any positive plays on their own, you may pull it off; but if your opponent scores any point, you are left unable to answer it.

Kerry was swiftboated, but unable to respond to the swiftboating because the response, itself, would supposedly extend the story and/or make people uncomfortable. His staff was willing to cede the entire ground rather than try to take any of it back and, in the process, possibly either make an error or an enemy. Clinton, like all other Democrats advised by the select group of advisers so inexplicably prominent in the last twenty years of Democratic campaigns, began in defensive, all-things-to-all-people mode from long before the campaign ever truly got underway, and stayed there until it was too late.

It showed in every early speech and appearance. Her pronouncements ranged from cautious to milquetoast. She spoke against the war -- but her rhetoric was muddy, and dull. She agreed Washington was the problem -- but would not distance herself from it. She had ample opportunity in the Senate to lead on any issue from Iraq to torture to corruption to administration propaganda to energy incompetence to you-name-it, and instead chose the easier path, receding into the background, lest any of those fights prove divisive. This was not Clinton campaigning, but a carefully plotted, painstakingly shallow image of Clinton. And it did not work, except when it was deviated from. When she showed a tear in New Hampshire, it was accidental, but it was so dramatic an unscripted moment that it worked strongly in her favor. When she attended the debates, by and large she did not just speak adequately, but passionately. We were left aching for unscripted moments, so commonplace were the scripted ones, with monolithic audiences and carefully plotted messaging.

A strategy of pure caution is taken as an absolute, non-negotiable necessity, for a Democratic frontrunner, and since Clinton was deemed a frontrunner from the first moment she declared her intentions, she never had a moment when she was not in this ultra-cautious mode. Perhaps there are politicians that can make such a thing work, but I cannot help but think the peril -- and to some extent, the inherent dishonesty -- of such a campaign leaves so little room for error that it succeeds only when your opponent is pursuing the exact same strategy, but more incompetently.

Mind you, Barack Obama was hardly the picture of rebellious, caution-to-the-wind nonconformity this campaign. He by and large took the same strategy as Clinton -- that of quiet resolve to make news for nothing too surprising, and do nothing too dramatic. Anyone seeking legislative drama from Senator Obama would, on most issues, be left waiting a long, long time: he, too, sought to fade into the background in the Senate.

But Obama had something Clinton didn't have, this campaign. He had a powerful persona, more powerful than Clinton's, possibly more powerful than Bill Clinton's, who until this year was considered the standard bearer for Democratic eloquence. And as a new figure on the national political scene, Obama's campaign was mindful to introduce the senator as a new figure.

Clinton didn't do that. The Obama campaign sought to introduce himself to the national audience, and sought to explain why he should get your vote; the Clinton campaign frequently seemed to expect it would get your vote, and work backward from there.

It was a perfect demonstration of the inherent danger of the typical Democratic hyper-cautious strategy. So long as nothing happens, it may work. But something happened -- in this case, a charismatic opponent that many voters found inspirational. By the time the Clinton campaign realized that they were indeed falling behind, there was no alternative strategy to pursue. Campaign surrogates went strongly negative; in some instances it worked, in some instances it did not. But the campaign itself shifted from presumptive frontrunner status -- extreme caution, and preemptive defense -- into a more urgent defense-via-attack mode in one fell swoop, with nothing between: the campaign was, in short, always playing defense. Whether in front or behind; whether stung on issues (Iraq, or lobbyists) or rhetoric (perceptibly co-opting Obama slogans).

There was perhaps one more reason why the Clinton campaign slid from presumptive inevitability, before the votes were cast, to a pitched battle and, eventually, a loss. It may have been the case that neither those in the press that conferred presumptive frontrunner status nor the Clinton campaign itself took into account that the decided frustration with politics, government and incumbency transferred in some small but nontrivial way onto Clinton herself.

Americans are very, very tired of the current administration, but for many Americans the rise of Bush has also tarnished the Clinton years in a perhaps unexpected way. It demonstrated that the successes of the Clinton presidency were transitory -- in some cases, astonishingly transitory. Even during the Clinton years, Democrats aside from Bill Clinton himself did dismally, as a party. The House and Senate were captured not just by Republicans, but by unapologetically hard-right conservatives intent on gutting the very notion of cooperative government. Once Bush came into office as well -- an event many Democrats blamed in some part on fatigue with the Clinton presidency -- Clinton-era gains were rolled back one after another. Environmental protections, deficit reduction, a vibrant economy, relative peace; there seemed to be nothing of those years that could not be almost immediately dismantled, and which was immediately dismantled, and with vigor.

It is difficult to parse how any of this could be the fault of Bill Clinton, but from a strictly emotional standpoint, it was draining for Democrats to watch. Democrats defended Clinton from a parade of largely manufactured scandals in the nineties, only to see true corruption go unpunished, and even be celebrated, in the Bush years. Democrats watched the media latch onto any petty triviality, no matter how small or how obviously planted, during the Clinton years; in the Bush years, even blatantly illegal acts were covered with barely half the same vigor. It was deeply frustrating; it was absurd; it was maddening.

So from a purely emotional standpoint having little to do with Hillary Clinton, it is not clear that casual Democratic voters -- not hyperpartisans, but the day-to-day citizens that make up ninety-nine percent of the party -- saw a return to the Clinton years as the unambiguously good thing that it was portrayed as. Yes, we could return to those years -- but what would come of it? The same stupid, conservative-fueled scandal journalism? The same modest, largely centrist policies, which would be dashed again the very next presidency?

It is not something that is the fault of Hillary Clinton, but nonetheless it may have dulled the expected enthusiasm for her campaign, and provided a very narrow but much needed opening for someone to run as a "true" outsider, untainted by either the Clinton or Bush years. Barack Obama was a candidate nearly tailor-made for such an opening.

This day is devoted to a Daily Kos Symposium on this topic; the rest of the essays today will explore why Clinton lost, or why Obama won, and what could possibly have been done about it to change that outcome. The goal is to critique; to find whatever lessons can be learned from the campaign, so that future campaigns don't do that. To parse how she was treated; how her strategists served her (or did not); the effect of running against Obama, etc. The hope is to parse any available lessons of this primary season while they are still fresh.

This primary season featured, after all, a classic contest: the irresistible force of Barack Obama against the immovable object that was Hillary Clinton. By any stretch, that would have been a barnstormer of a primary, but coupled with the historic nature of the year, a year in which a black American and a woman not only competed for the presidency against the white men that have held exclusive keys to the office since the nation was first founded, but competed for the first time on essentially equal ground, the first in which race and gender, while remaining issues, were relegated to fringe issues as opposed to all-defining, unambiguously disqualifying characteristics -- now that is the stuff of history.

Looking back, we should remember that, because that will be what will end up in the history books. Obama could have lost. Clinton could have won. McCain may yet still win. But they were all judged, if not entirely on their merits, at least as much on their merits as any politicians are, in today's environment. Martin Luther King Jr. said he had a dream, and was killed for it, but in the end equality is an unstoppable force. All that is required is that people desire it, and the rest, though it may take generations, or be slowed, or momentarily dammed, will happen.

John McCain continues his radical, mavericky non-departure from George W. Bush. As you may have heard, his top economic advisor is Phil Gramm, Texas ex-senator and current vice chairman of financial services megafirm UBS. He was recently in trouble for his involvement in lobbying for UBS while UBS was undertaking huge risks in the subprime mortgage markets -- risks that have now caused massive losses for the firm -- but it's gotten much worse for him, and for UBS.

Newsweek:

NEWSWEEK has learned that UBS is also currently the focus of congressional and Justice Department investigations into schemes that allegedly enabled wealthy Americans to evade income taxes by stashing their money in overseas havens, according to several law-enforcement and banking officials in both the United States and Europe, who all asked for anonymity when discussing ongoing investigations. In April, UBS withdrew Gramm's lobbying registration, but one of his former congressional aides, John Savercool, is still registered to lobby legislators for UBS on numerous issues, including a bill cosponsored by Sen. Barack Obama that would crack down on foreign tax havens. "UBS is treating these investigations with the utmost seriousness and has committed substantial resources to cooperate," a UBS spokesman told NEWSWEEK, adding that Gramm was deregistered as a lobbyist because he spends less than 20 percent of his time on such activity. Hazelbaker said the McCain campaign "will not comment on the details ... of ongoing investigations and legal charges not yet proved in court."

I suppose I shouldn't find this funny, since it deals with whether an Enron-connected, trickle-down, deregulation-obsessed Republican ex-senator known for his screw-the-poor mentality had a hand in a scheme to help rich Americans illegally evade taxes.

But I'm sorry, I find it hilarious anyway, in a we're-all-hopelessly-screwed sort of way. Never mind the presidency -- John McCain's campaign hasn't even made it to his own convention yet and already they're having to trot out the "can't comment on an ongoing investigation" line because one of his top advisors finds himself in potential legal hot water.

Between his constant flip-flops between his rhetoric and his actual actions, his steady support for not just the Iraq War, but the mechanisms by which that war was sold to the public, his stream of advisors having to leave under troubling circumstances, and now his needing to distance himself from advisors involved in criminal investigations, I'm wondering if we're going to see the entire Bush administration legacy redone in miniature in the McCain campaign between now and November. Bushism, but with the sped-up lifespan of an overcaffeinated fruit fly.