I've got an old Merriam-Webster paperback dictionary on my desk that I've had since college. Yes I know it doesn't have all the swift new tech-words that modern versions have, and I do use my online dictionary plenty, but I love to just sit here at my desk where I wrote so many books through the years, reach out with my left hand, and grab up that little dictionary, which is still good for all those old-fashioned words.

Like: "FARSIGHTED," which it describes as "able to see distant things more clearly than near."

And it offers up some synonyms, like, "JUDICIOUS," "WISE," and "SHREWD."

So, being the word-lover that I am, I looked those words up, too.

Being "Judicious" means "exercising sound judgment"--and uses such synonyms as "SENSIBLE," and "WISE."

If you look up "SHREWD," you get these synonyms by way of definition, "KEEN," and "ASTUTE."

The word "WISE" pretty much sums it all up, with the same definition as "FARSIGHTED"--"having or showing good sense or good judgment."

Like my battered old pocket dictionary, my Roget's Thesaurus from college (and yes, I do use the online one many times), has the cover torn off and many pages dog-eared, some of them with little book-tabs jutting out, from words I used so much in my writing that I wanted to find a fresh way of expressing them (such is the lot of a thriller-writer--how many words for "fear" can you come up with?)--but it has a synonym for "FARSIGHTED" that I love:

"EAGLE-EYED."

Now, technically speaking, from an opthalmological standpoint, if you are "farsighted," you actually have trouble seeing things up close and need glasses to correct that problem.

But from an ideological point of view, if you are farsighted, then there is nothing wrong with your vision.  You are, in fact, a visionary.

This is because you can see things that might take place years or even decades down the road that most other people simply can't see.  And when you know, in your heart and in your psychic soul, that these things either WILL happen or SHOULD happen, and there is something you can do to shape that future rather than being bullied by it, and you are a person of talent and brains and principle, then you will do everything in your power to make it so.

And, of course, the whole rest of the world will think you are crazy--or worse.  Some may think you are evil.  (These are the people who are completely blind about the future and so fear it.)  They feel threatened and start looking for ways to stop you.

Some people will believe in you from an idealistic standpoint, and then, when you get into a position of power, they expect you to simply MAKE IT HAPPEN, and when the future begins taking place in incremental steps rather than big sweeping gestures like a wizard might cause with a wave of his magic wand--they might turn on you and call you a disappointment--or worse--a traitor to the cause.

But if you are TRULY farsighted and TRULY a visionary, you ignore those who call you crazy and you ignore those who call you evil and you even ignore those who say you betrayed the dream because things are not happening fast enough or in grand enough ways, because you are not looking at short-term consequences of your actions--you are FARSIGHTED, you are EAGLE-EYED, and therefore, you see far far down the road into a place that is only misty and blurry to the rest of us NEARSIGHTED beings.

I've just finished reading a landmark book on the first year of Barack Obama's presidency: THE PROMISE: President Obama, Year One.

It's an absorbing and fascinating close-up-and-personal analysis of Obama's first year in office and covers every single aspect of that year, from the economic crash that confronted his team even before they took office, to the health care chaos, to the overhaul of Afghanistan policy and the outreach to the world's Muslims, to financial, education, and energy reform, to the media wars.  The book's author, Jonathan Alter, a political columnist for Newsweek, was given unprecedented access to the West Wing and to Obama himself--with one caveat that he found immensely frustrating--he could not write about the nuts and bolts of the administration's struggles in Newsweek while he was writing the book; he had to wait until the book's publication.  But Alter, a Chicago native, had known Obama since his time as a state senator and had interviewed him many times since, so the White House was opened up to him.  Alter shadowed everyone there, from White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, on down, from the months after the election--before they took office--until the book's publication this past May.

The picture that emerged was one far different from the one that plays out nightly on cable TV--both right and left--and in the news magazines and newspapers.

This is because those of us in the blogosphere and cable-news echo chamber that makes up the D.C. hothouse, are gasping in the heat and humidity because all we can see in our myopic way is the here-and-now of what takes place in that hothouse.  We get all worked up about each days' news cycle and the immediate reaction of those venues to political events or even the repercussions of legislation that makes its way to passage. 

We hang on poll numbers and punditry and react to each one as if it is the be-all and end-all of events, and even find fault with the president for the fact that he doesn't seem to be breaking a sweat  in the hothouse heat while the rest of us wringing out our sopping clothes.

Doesn't he NOTICE what's going on?  Doesn't he CARE?

Well, yes, of course he does--but he doesn't see these things from the same distorted fish-eye lens that we all do.  He's seeing waay past the hothouse glass...out into the meadows and down the road and through the woods--all the way into the future.  He is seeing much further than the rest of us, and he's seeing it differently.

Alter talks about how the Vulcan Mr. Spock often played a game called "Three-D Chess," on Star Trek, and describes the president's thought processes in this way:

"On many nights he pushed aside the briefing papers and stopped focusing on the immediate issues in front of him.  He'd write on his desktop computer (or sometimes by hand) about things 'down the pike,' as he put it, that he wanted his people to think about.  Marty Nesbitt (the president's close friend) said the president saw politics as a sequential puzzle. 'He's always thinking, 'If I do this then this could happen--or that could happen.'  It's all in terms of cause and effect--like a Rubik's cube.'  Anticipating events kept him from feeling swamped by them...'Before everyone else, he's already calculated the relative probability of several different outcomes, so when one of them happens--even though it may be a surprise to others--he's never really surprised.'"

Of all the facts crammed into this book, there is one that stood out for me in bold-faced, backlit type, and that was this one, a direct quote Obama gave the book's author in an interview that concentrated on health care reform:

"'We knew that it would be all-consuming--in the midst of having to deal with this enormous economic crises and two wars--and it would take a lot out of us,' he said later.

"At a minimum, he predicted, it would cost him ten to fifteen points in popularity before passage.  And if it failed, he was in deep political trouble.  'I remember telling Nancy Pelosi that moving forward on this could end up being so costly for me politically that it would affect my chances if I were to run for reelection,' the president said.  But he told Pelosi that if they didn't get this done now, 'It was not going to be done.'

"So Obama decided early to bet his domestic presidency on health care." (emphasis mine)

Think about that for a minute.  We just had eight years of a presidency where Bush's closest political advisor, with his own office just off the Oval Office, had determined that there was going to be a "permanent Republican majority."  To that end, he and the Bush administration politicized EVERYTHING, from the Justice Dept (where largely bogus cases were prosecuted that could throw local elections to the Republican) to the Pentagon (where the decision was made that, should Bush invade Iraq, it would help him get reelected because he would then be "a war president.")

After all, who can forget the glorious "golden hour" moment of George W. Bush in his Hollywood-tight flight suit strutting past the "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED" banner draped by the White House across an accomodating aircraft carrier--tailor-made for campaign ads? (Pay no attention to those "thugs" in the white pickups barreling down on the troops and setting IEDs in the road by night.) Or those (cue the swelling music) magnificent Hollywood-ready war heroes who bravely fought off the enemy--Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch? (Pay no attention to those troops who are saying that's NOT what happened, because that messes up the campaign ad-ready war narrative we're shaping for our war president.)

Everything, EVERYTHING, was calculated to prop up the administration. Hacks who were loyal to Bush, no matter how puny their qualifications, were put in charge of everything from FEMA to the creation of a new government in Iraq. Rove held meetings (illegally), in federal departments, explaining how to use grant money and other plums in districts that would help throw elections to Republicans, regardless of need in the country.

Consequently, a great American city was drowned in FEMA inefficiency, while Iraq was plunged into chaos, corruption, crime, and civil war while Bush administration gadflies partied in the Green Zone.

Enter Barack Obama.

When he set his sights on health care reform, NO ONE in his administration thought it was a good idea (counting his closest advisors). Even those who grudgingly agreed that something needed to be done, wanted it done in tiny incremental steps that could be passed through Congress relatively easily.  They wanted to concentrate mostly on the economy.

But Obama had maintained from the beginning that for the LONG-TERM health of the economy, there was no way to fix the worst of the problems facing this country WITHOUT tackling health care reform, because the costs were skyrocketing to atmospheric levels, and at this rate, with no reform, the nation's economy was going to collapse at some point in the future--a future OBAMA could see but very few of his closest advisors--not to MENTION his critics--could.

And he RISKED HIS PRESIDENCY on it.

He has said on several occasions that even if health care reform winds up costing him a second term, it will be worth it, because of the good it will do for the country in the long term.

He knew, as the "sausage making" process dragged on, that many of the reforms would not even take place until after the next presidential election, so that he would not likely get credit for changes that would wind up benefitting virtually everybody in the country eventually.

I've never heard of that kind of political courage before.  Not anywhere.  I've been following politics closely since LBJ was president, and I never saw a president who did not spend his entire first term looking for ways to ensure a second term.

But, to Obama, it was far more important that the good be done--for the welfare of the nation--than it was for him to rack up political points.

As Alter put it:

"If Obama had been as weak and overly conciliatory as some of his liberal critics believed, he would have decided during the transition, or after the Inauguration, or in the spring, or in the dog days of August, to hold off on major health care reform until later in his term.  Delaying the bill would have been perfectly consistent with his campaign promise; which was merely to sign legislation by the end of his first four years.  Once he made up his mind...The reality was something that aides didn't much like to discuss: the president was moving ahead alone." (emphasis mine)

This, my friends, is the true definition of LEADERSHIP.

All through the book are examples of Obama's leadership--what, as Alter points out--the military refers to as "the habit of command."

For example, in National Security Council meetings:

"Where Clinton would saunter in to National Security Council meetings and sit in the middle of the table in the Situation Room, listening to the NSC advisor call on various subject experts, Obama would purposefully stride in and run the meeting from the head of the table.  It was if he had consciously decided to inhabit the role of leader.  To do so, he had to project not just great confidence, but enough knowledge of the nuances of national security issues to justify that confidence in a room full of smart and experienced advisors.  In that, he unquestionably succeeded."

On his decision-making process:

"The time from thought to action is very short, said (Denis) McDonough, a deputy national security advisor.  'He reads something and says, 'I want to change that,' and, 'I want a plan for this.'  He would sometimes deliberate for days, weeks, or even in the case of Afghanistan, months, but contrary to the jibes of Dick Cheney, there was nothing 'dithering' about it.  Obama would process a series of questions, facts, and insights that built on one another methodically.  Penny Pritzker was struck by his capacity not just to absorb information but to use what he learned later.  It was a subtle trait; unless you knew he was a good listener it might seem as if he wasn't registering what you were saying...'Within a very short period of time, you see action.'"

Speaking of Afghanistan, during the process of deliberation, after Gen. McChrystal had mouthed off the first time in protest of the president's policies, according to Alter:

"Obama and his senior staff believed this had Mullen's and Petraeus's fingerprints all over it.  They were using McChrystal to jam the president, box him in, manipulate him, game him--use whatever verb you like.  The president had not yet decided on a policy and didn't appreciate the military sounding in public as if he had."

As Alter points out, it's almost common now for the Pentagon to roust out young, Democratic presidents who do not have military experience--they'd been doing it since the days of John F. Kennedy.  But this was one commander-in-chief they hadn't reckoned on.  For one thing, he considered Bush's complete deference to his generals to be an abdication of responsibility, but he also knew that to completely overrule them would weaken his effectiveness and hurt morale of the troops in the field. Instead, he decided to take command:

"It was important to remind the brass who was in charge.  Inside the National Security Council, advisors considered what happened next historic, a presidential dressing-down unlike any in the United States in more than half a century.  The commander-in-chief now undertook the most direct assertion of presidential authority over the U.S. military since President Truman fired General MacArthur in 1951.

"In the first week of October Gates and Mullen were summoned to the Oval Office, where the president told them that he was 'exceedingly unhappy' with the Pentagon's conduct.  He said the leaks and positioning in advance of a decision were 'disrespectful of the process' and 'damaging to the men and women in uniform and to the country.'  In a cold fury Obama said he wanted to know 'here and now' if the Pentagon would be on board with any presidential decision and could faithfully implement it.

"'This was a cold and bracing meeting,' said an official in the room.  Lyndon Johnson had never talked to General William Westmoreland that way, or George H.W. Bush to General Norman Schwarzkopf.  Presidents Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton had all been played by the Pentagon at various points but hadn't fought back as directly.  Now Obama was sending an unmistakable message: Don't toy with me.  Just because he was young, new, a Democrat, and had never been in uniform didn't mean he was going to get backed into a corner."

This sense of authority and command, of setting goals in spite of political consequences and taking action to see it through--even over the objections of his advisors--not to mention his savvy and cunning to work behind the scenes and garner votes for key legislation in spite of the most polarized and obstructionist Congress since Reconstruction--(thanks to more modern filibuster rules that enable a minority to basically shut down government over the smallest of issues, as Newt Gingrich did to President Clinton in the nineties)--has enabled President Obama to accomplish an unprecedented flood of major legislation in his first year in office and to fulfill literally hundreds of campaign promises he had made, according to the Pulitzer Prize-winning database, PolitiFact.com, put out by the St. Petersburg Times. 

Of those promises, PolitiFact rates 25 as "major," and credits Obama has having fulfilled, by the end of his first year alone, 20 of them.  (Major financial regulatory reform came just a few months later.)

In a major and lengthy article in the September Vanity Fair by Todd Purdum, called, "Washington, We Have a Problem," Purdum discusses the strange disconnect between the sweeping accomplishments of a strong new president, and the public perception of him and his presidency.  Conservatives fear he has done too much and wants to institute socialism and some kind of bizarre tyranny over the country; liberals think he has not done enough and--far from being socialist--believe he has sold out to corporate and military interests and betrayed his--and their--ideals, and that furthermore, he is weak and unwilling to fight for them.

Neither perception is anywhere NEAR the truth, and the problem with that most likely lies in the conundrum of being farsighted and yet having to deal with a nearsighted populace.  Purdum describes it this way:

"The pace of the modern presidency--or, rather, the pace of modern life, as amplified by the media and by the impatience of the public for action of any kind--has the perverse effect of making the most measured of politicians seem out of sync, and the most visionary policies seem incremental and thus unsatisfying. By definition, it will take years for the result of changes in the nation's health-care system, or its energy policies or education policies--or anything else of note--to be fully in place, much less fully understood, much less proven effective. Anyone who risks taking on the toughest problems automatically risks being seen as not having done enough about them to get any credit by the time the next news cycle, or election cycle, rolls around. It's a conundrum that vexes any president: there's no short-term gain for long-term wisdom."
 
[...]

"Durable achievement demands a long time horizon--something that the country as a whole seems to have lost. We can't wait for the carrots to grow--we keep pulling them up to see how they're doing. Thus, deeply complex problems, from illegal immigration to the BP oil spill--problems that by definition have no quick or easy solution, despite their obvious urgency--become easy emblems of presumptive failure, whatever the president may actually be doing to address them."

[...]

"It's Obama's conviction--you hear this from the most senior White House aides again and again, because it reflects the thinking at the top--that by keeping his head down and doing his job he can also pursue a different strategy, one that doesn't aim to win the day or the week but that looks toward victory in the long run. "You can do your job well," as Axelrod puts it. "You can bring the troops home from Iraq, and you can move forward on things that will strengthen the economy, and you can hope that over time people say, 'He had a vision that made sense, and he didn't play by the crazy rules of that game.'" In this view it doesn't matter so much whether polls show the public hated the stimulus plan. What matters is that it saved jobs and helped get the economy going again. It doesn't matter so much that the public is skeptical about health-care reform. What matters is that people start getting access to better options.

"Obama has suffered for his patience, but he has profited from it, too, and whatever you think of his policies, his conduct of the presidency may be an object lesson in how to elude the loonier aspects of our age. From the day he declared his candidacy, the press--and, by extension, much of the Washington insider culture--has underestimated him, and that trend has continued in office."


In this blogpost I've explored the definition of leadership and how President Obama has shown it time and again in ways that might not necessarily break through to his critics--much less the general public.  There is a startling statistic in Alter's book that blew my political-junkie mind, I can tell you:

Those who regularly watch Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, PBS, Comedy Central, or CNBC or listen to NPR amount to ONLY TEN PERCENT OF THE ELECTORATE WHO VOTE IN GENERAL ELECTIONS.

10%.  That's everybody COMBINED.

If you want numbers, that boils down to 12 to 15 million serious news consumers--compared to 110 million voters.

So that leaves it up to those of us who are seriously committed, particularly to this president and his administration and the things they are and have been fighting for, to educate ourselves to the truth about this man who was elected by 53 million people.  He is a visionary, and he is unruffled by the ups and downs of daily poll numbers and the media circus as he concentrates on accomplishing as much as he possibly can in however much time is allotted to him.

In my next blogpost I'm going to examine some of the more controversial legislative accomplishments, such as health care and financial reform, from the point of view of what was actually going on inside the White House and Congress--not what has been speculated.  I'm also going to get into the media whirlwind faced by this president (which no other president in history has ever had to confront, thanks to the rapid 24-7 development of the Internet as well as cable news--Fox News didn't even exist when Bill Clinton was president, for example, and during the Bush years, it acted as a megaphone and cheerleader for his every fart, which, as we know, is exactly opposite of what Obama must deal with).

And I'll discuss the image that has so provoked commentary--that he is somehow unemotional or uncaring or unresponsive to the public's needs.

I'll provide some interesting statistics that I had not seen before, that say more than anything else what is true and what is not.  Because we are facing a mid-term election that carries grave consequences for those of us who would be deeply disturbed to see a Speaker John Boehner or Majority Leader Mitch McConnell--not to mention the far-reaching results should more Republican governors take office and thus control the all-important redistricting, which could hand Republicans even more seats.

I know many liberals have been disappointed in the president.  Some are angry.  But we all need to focus on one thing, and one thing only right now: THIS IS OUR PRESIDENT.  THIS IS OUR TIME.

And unless we want to turn the clock back to the days when Republicans literally shut down the government in defiance of a Democratic president AND THEN IMPEACHED HIM--coming only one vote short of removing him from office--then we need to understand not only what the stakes are in November, but just what we've got to be thankful for.

Right here.  And right now.

We all know the climactic scene in the Wizard of Oz, when the "great and powerful Oz," belching out smoke and thunderous pronouncements on terrified Dorothy and her companions, the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow--is revealed by the little dog, Toto, when he pulls the curtain back to show a short little every day man, pulling levers and flipping switches and speaking into a megaphone--much to the chagrin of Dorothy and her crestfallen companions, who have traveled a great distance and endured many trials and tribulations in order to find the great and powerful Oz.

They realize that they have been hoodwinked. Bamboozled. You could even say, "snookered."

Even the faithful Munchkins had no idea that the great and powerful Oz was merely smoke and mirrors; illusion and magic.  All this time they had believed in his powerful pronouncements, but now what are they going to do?

Well, that's up to the Munchkins to decide.

Unless you've been living in some kind of Fox-news world, where your exposure to truth and factual content is greatly restricted or otherwise blatantly manipulated, or you don't watch the news at all, then you have heard the story of Shirley Sherrod, the USDA employee who became the latest victim of the Fox News/Roger Ailes/Andrew Breitbart Wizard of Oz smoke-and-mirrors scam.

In a speech before the NAACP last March, she told a story about how, 24 years before, while working for a nonprofit agency, she had a case in which a white farmer, who stood to lose his farm, needed her help.  She talked about how he "acted superior to me," and how she couldn't help thinking of all the black farmers who had lost their land, and because of that, she had a hard time sympathizing with the man.  She set him up with a white attorney, thinking "one of his own would take care of him," but she did not help him as much as she admits she could have.

Talk about perfect fodder for the Wizard!  This feeds right into the Fox News narrative--that not only is the NAACP racist just like the Tea Party, but that there is an ongoing pattern of racism in the Obama administration and you know WHY??

Because he's black, of course!  Everybody knows that when a black becomes president, the first thing he is going to do is "get reparations" for slavery and proceed to punish white folks for perceived slights he's had to endure in his life!  He's going to foster and tolerate a systematic racist philosophy in every branch of government that is designed to discriminate against whites!  AND, he's going to redistribute all our hard-earned money to those lazy, shiftless minorities who didn't work for it!

THEY JUST WANT TO ENSLAVE US!!!  It's all they've ever wanted to do ever since they got the vote, right?

So on his website, which I won't dignify with a link, the Fox News-feeder extraordinaire, Andrew Breitbart, who they love because they give him credit for bringing down ACORN with heavily edited, sliced-and-diced, cut-and-pasted videos so faulty that prosecutors studying them said there was no way any criminal activity could be proven because the tapes had been manipulated so egregiously--THAT Breitbart--he took that speech Sherrod had given back behind the curtain and he worked his magic on it, disappearing, for instance, the part where this all took place more than two decades ago, before she ever started working for the government.

Since Fox News gets all their big headlines from Breitbart, because he feeds their media narrative about the bigoted Obama administration, they jumped on it faster than a puppy on  a chew toy, and ran the video, making certain that their commentators were properly outraged, screaming that if this was typical of the racist policies within the Obama administration then she needed to be fired!  NOW!  And this needs to stop! NOW!

The Agriculture Secretary, Tom Vilsack, saw the video, as did mainstream reporters, who love the Fox News/Breitbart scandals because they make such good video and instant controversy, which drives ratings.  They raced to put up the video; Vilsack, who did not want to be tarred with the oil slick of racism in the USDA ranks, demanded that she be fired, and she was, immediately, RIGHT THEN, as she was driving down the road.  (They did tell her to pull over first.)

The White House says they were not involved in this decision; and that may be literally true, but they are also hyper-sensitive to these bogus charges because they know that the news media LOVES them and a story like that will dominate the news cycle for WEEKS.

Right now, they just got benefits passed for the unemployed after weeks of battles.  They just got a landmark piece of Wall Street reform legislation--a historic milestone not seen since the Great Depression--passed.  The BP oil gusher just got capped and the 24-hour news monsters quit running the damaging video of the oil clouding out of the pipe at thousands of gallons a day--images the president often had to share on-screen whenever he appeared on TV.

Did they REALLY want to spend the next TWO WEEKS debating whether or not a USDA employee was racist?  Did they REALLY want THAT to dominate the news coverage?

So, they caved.

Let's move right along, people.  Nothing to see here.

But there WAS something to see, and Toto--in the form of ONE vigilant network, CNN, decided to do what NOBODY ELSE EVEN THOUGHT ABOUT DOING:  They viewed the rest of the speech.

That's when the tragic truth came out. 

Yes, she withheld some of her best help from the white farm family.  AT FIRST.  But when she saw that the white attorney she took them to could not be bothered to help them; when she saw that they were indeed every bit as desperate as any black family she'd ever known, "I realized it was not a matter of BLACK or WHITE.  It was a matter of being POOR.  It was about the haves and the have-nots," she told her audience.

After that, she said, she worked hard to help the couple.

CNN took it a step further--again, doing what ACTUAL JOURNALISTS ARE SUPPOSED TO DO.

They interviewed the white couple in question.

And they said, on-camera, flat-out, that Ms. Sherrod had SAVED THEIR FARM; that they considered her a friend, and that she should not be fired but should get her job back.

FOLKS, I'M HERE TO TELL YOU, THIS IS A WATERSHED MOMENT FOR FOX NEWS AND THE MAINSTREAM NEWS MEDIA, AS WELL AS FOR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.

When Toto pulled back the curtain, he revealed a HUCKSTER, a FRAUD.

What Breitbart had done to this woman was a malicious lie.

There is no other way to describe it.  He set out to destroy her just to make a point, and he knew FULL WELL what he was doing when he sliced-and-diced, cut-and-pasted, and heavily edited her speech to make her appear racist.

But there is a deeper truth here.

This is hardly an isolated incident, but a clear PATTERN of how Fox "News" pushes a narrative onto the public in such a way that they demand the mainstream media pay attention, as Media Matters so skillfully points out::

"The New Black Panther story is in the middle stages of the Fox Cycle -- the process by which the false, ridiculous ramblings of right-wing bloggers and partisan media hacks can, with a generous assist from Fox News, make it to the front pages of the New York Times.

"Put simply, the Fox Cycle begins with the blogosphere. Conservative bloggers seize on a story and start twisting it and injecting falsehoods. Before long, Fox News catches on and, usually with Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity playing the lead role, devotes obscene amounts of coverage to the bogus story. The bloggers take Fox News' heavy coverage as validation of the story's veracity, and before long they join with the conservative network in carping that the rest of the media are ignoring it. Soon after, the rest of the media relent and start covering the story, at which point it becomes a mini-frenzy. Then the pundits chime in, crediting Fox News for giving the story legs and being ahead of the rest of media. Finally, long after the damage has been done and the media have largely moved on, the facts emerge and the story is confirmed to be junk.

"It's a cycle that's been repeated over and over in the past, with varying degrees of success. The ACORN videos, Obama's "relationship" with William Ayers, and the "Climategate" non-scandal managed to make it all the way through the cycle, inflicting irreparable and unjustified damage to the community organizing movement and the reputations of respected climate scientists, not to mention the President of the United States, who was at one point accused of "palling around with terrorists."

When President Obama first started standing up to Fox News and pointing out--rightly so--that they are not a serious news organization but rather a partisan political arm of the Right wing, he was attacked for it by the mainstream press, who stood up for and defended their Fox News colleagues.  Much was made of whether or not it was politically savvy for a sitting president to take on a news network.  Many pundits stated that it made him look petty and small.  Most said it would backfire on him.

So Fox was given a pass by the very people who should have known better--real journalists. 

But this.  This is different.  This is such an egregious case of personally attacking an innocent woman for the purpose of a political hatchet-job by doctoring video YET AGAIN--and the mainstream media was caught out this time, standing there like some Frankensteinian combination of the Cowardly Lion (no courage) and the Scarecrow (no brain)--gawking wide-eyed at the Great and Powerful Oz as he belched smoke and thunder.

Probably the densist denizen of that establishment is George Stephanopoulous, who still seems to think Breitbart deserves a "fair and balanced" interview alongside Eric Boehlert of Media Matters on Good Morning, America.

While Stephanopoulous sat weak and defenseless before him, Breitbart dominated the interview, spewing out his spin-bile, stating, flat-out, that Shirley Sherrod "doesn't matter," that he would not apologize for destroying her life because "it's not about her."  It was about, he insisted, the "racism in the NAACP."

Ahhh yes.  Fox News does like to go after anyone they perceive has having called them out on their lies.  It starts with heavily doctored videos and wide-eyed alarmist news reports about made-up crises, and it goes straight up the food chain to their hacks and hellstars--Hannity, O'Reilly, and Beck.

And as soon as the NAACP pointed out the obvious, that the Tea Party has racists in its ranks, which is obvious to anybody NOT WATCHING Fox news because, Fox News never shows the videos depicting the righteous rednecks spewing their hatred of a black president, undocumented aliens, or anyone NOT a white Anglo Saxon Protestant--then they became the Number One Enemy of Fox News, and from then on, it was their avowed purpose in life to dig up and find examples of racism in the ranks.

Because Stephanoupolous gave him free rein for virtually the entire four minutes, Breitbart dredged up every grievance the Right wing has about the perceived racist slights about them, insisting, for example, that there are "four videos, FOUR VIDEOS" (holding up four fingers)--to show that Rep. Lewis did not get spat upon or called the n-word during the health care reform vote as he was on his way through the Tea Party crowd.

And he insisted that the video of Ms. Sherrod "shows the audience applauding" (holding up his hands in front of Stephanopoulous's face and clapping for demonstrable effect) her racist remarks.

I won't get into Media Matters' calm pointing-out that the applause did not take place when she was making racist statements but later, when she was talking about overcoming her prejudices and helping the poor.

I want to talk about the applause.

This was a black audience.  An NAACP audience.  She was talking to "my people" as she called them.

AND I WANT TO MAKE SOMETHING PERFECTLY CLEAR TO PRIVILEGED WHITE SOFT-HANDED ASSHOLES LIKE ANDREW BRIETBART AND ALL HIS WHITE FRIENDS AT FOX NEWS, RIGHT HERE AND RIGHT NOW.

THERE IS A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN RACISM AND * PERSONAL EXPERIENCE.*

Repeated hidden camera investigations by such programs as 60 Minutes and Dateline have proven time and time again: If an equally qualified black and white person try to do such simple things as take a vacant apartment, apply for an available job, flag down a cab in an urban area after dark, drive through an affluent area late at night, or even go shopping in an upscale department store, THEY ARE TREATED DIFFERENTLY by the whites who hold the power over them.

Repeatedly, the white person is favored over the black, or the black is suspected of shoplifting or theft or of some other potential crime.

This is life for people of color.  It is the very reason their unemployment figures stand at double what they are for whites.

Oh yeah, I know all you people who watch Fox News like to think it's because they are LAZY AND SHIFTLESS but the truth is that THEIR DAY TO DAY REALITY IS DIFFERENT FROM OURS.

So when she said that "he was acting like he was superior to me," and audience members yelled out "Right!"--something the white folks down at Fox news find offensive--they were simply giving a black-church AMEN to a situation every single person sitting in that audience has EXPERIENCED.

THIS IS NOT RACISM. IT IS PERSONAL EXPERIENCE.

This whole ginned-up frenzy about racism in an administration overseen by a black president is crazy.  And it is, in itself, racist.

It's based on a deep-seated fear of empowered blacks and other minorities.  I've seen it myself in the backlash following major gains by the women's movement--any time you, as a minority, encroach on a white male power establishment, it scares the shit out of them and they will punish you.

But I digress.

HERE IS MY POINT.

The curtain has been pulled back to reveal the Fox News hysteri-cycle.  It has been shown NOT to be REAL JOURNALISM.

IT HAS BEEN SHOWN TO BE LIES, BASED ON LIES, USED AS PROPAGANDA TO PRESS A POLITICAL NARRATIVE.

Already, they are blaming the Obama administration for "believing" the video THEY THEMSELVES HYPED.

I'm not proud of this chapter in the Obama saga--and I make no excuses for the ridiculous treatment of a faithful employee, who, at the very LEAST, deserved a fair hearing before being asked to pull over on the side of the road and quit a job after decades of service.

But watch as Fox News dodges responsibility and accountability for their own lies.  Watch as they blame Obama for what THEY caused.

And furthermore, watch at the mainstream media, AT LAST, begins to wake up to the fact that THERE IS NO GREAT AND POWERFUL OZ.

That all this hysterical crap ranted and raved on Fox news is so much CRAP THEY MAKE UP.

In the final ten seconds of the interview, as Brietbart was holding up his four fingers about the "four videos" proving Representative Lewis a liar, Stephanopoulous asked Media Matters' Boehlert (who was waaay more quiet than I'd like to see), if he believed those videos were "accurate."

"NO!" he cried just before the commercial break.  "NOT ACCURATE."

You see, THIS is what Stephanopoulous SHOULD have said during the Brietbart lie-rade.  He should have interrupted and demanded, ''HOW ARE WE SUPPOSED TO TRUST ANY VIDEOS YOU OFFER AS EVIDENCE WHEN YOU HAVE BEEN PROVEN REPEATEDLY TO DOCTOR VIDEOS INTO VIRAL LIES?"

He didn't, though.

I'm not worried about it.  Other journalists will. 

This was a turning point for the Munchkins, now that the Great and Powerful Oz has been revealed to be a fraud.

The media outcry will not be where Fox News wants it to be--that Vilsack acted too quickly to fire her--and the NAACP to condemn her.  That will be a necessary sidebar.

It spotlight will be on how it is that NOBODY BOTHERED TO DO THEIR JOBS IN THE FIRST PLACE, WHICH IS FIND OUT THE TRUTH. AND THAT LIARS CANNOT BE TRUSTED.

Nobody, that is, but actual journalists.  Working at a real news network.

So maybe the next time Fox "News" hypes a super-breaking, hot story...the other networks will shrug, say, "It's only Fox," and go on about their business of gathering real news.

If I didn't already know about the Secret Life of the White-Wing Conservatives, I would believe the recent self-righteous outrage coming out of the Tea Party in response to the NAACP challenge that they call out the racists in their midst.

Oh! My gosh! They've been so upset!  WE'RE NOT RACIST!  WE ARE GOD-FEARING PATRIOTS MERELY WORKING FOR LOWER TAXES AND SMALLER GOVERNMENT.  YOU'RE THE RACIST!!!

The thing is, I'm sure that many of these people actually believe that.  It explains the self-righteous outrage.  Not ME!  I'M no racist!

They think that is true because, once upon a time years ago, they had a black maid they were really fond of.  Or, when they were in the military, they served alongside people of color and got along just fine. 

They don't, however, have any black or Hispanic friends right NOW, just, you know, FRIENDS.  People to hang out with, invite over to their homes, send e-mail jokes and inspirational prayer-chains and patriotic flag-waving links to. 

There may be black people who attend their Mega-Church--the one with the ampitheater that seats thousands--but they don't really know them all that well.  Still, they DO go to church with black people!  And there are Hispanics there, too, like the mayor, Ms. Rodriguez.  She seems very nice.  Her kids go to the same school as their kids, but that's about it.  Or they work with a black guy...what's his name?  The one over in Marketing...

Or, they've got a cousin with a black boyfriend, and he came to the last family reunion.  They didn't speak to him though.  Not deliberate!  Just busy with other people there, and the couple left early, is all.  Besides, he seemed kind of shy.  Sat off by himself.  Would have been weird to just walk up to him and start talking, right?

Yeah, right.

See, I was going to write the kind of blogpost I normally write, chock-full of links--Oh Lord there are so many links--to prove my points: one, two, three.  You could read for yourself the racist blogposts and see for yourself the videos of the rallies and peruse Sarah Palin's ghost-written Facebook screed scolding the NAACP for "divisive politics"--which is REALLY rich.

But I've changed my mind.  I'm just going to speak from the heart here, because I've done all those things before, and on this topic.

It's not the loud, public attention-getters that gives them away--it's their Secret Life.

I'm talking about the viral e-mails.

Unlike most progressives and liberals that I know, I live in an extremely conservative area, and just about everybody I know, including many members of my own family, are very conservative.

There's nothing wrong with that.  Conservatism has a long and distinguished history in our nation's tapestry, but unfortunately, its good name got hijacked by venal win-at-all-costs politicians and their paid hacks back during the Clinton years: Tom DeLay, Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove, and others on the far right, aided and abetted by Whores of Babylon like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, and others who perverted the conservative doctrine and twisted it into something ugly and unrecognizable, running off any and all liberal or moderate conservative voices in congress and the Senate as Republican in Name Only and forcing the survivors to go against their own principles if they wanted to stay in the Party--while, at the same time, recruiting and funding some of the most  unsuitable candidates for office imaginable, just because they were suitably crazy.  Their standard-bearer, George W. Bush, sold his soul to the devil of getting and keeping power, and proceeded to ransack the government and leave it a shambles, while provoking some of the most bitter, partisan hatreds we've seen in nearly a century.

Motivated by Clinton-hatred, egged on by warmongering faux-patriotic fever, good people who should have known better found themselves slipping down the slope--abandoning their own common-sense views and gradually embracing more and more extremist rhetoric as "truth," because by this time, they'd been brainwashed into believing the "liberal media" wasn't TELLING the truth and only the Cult of the Crazy could be trusted for this precious inside information.

Fox News came along with its 24/7 megaphone, and before you could say, "HOODWINK" or "BAMBOOZLE" the so-called mainstream media was defending them as a legitimate journalistic organization in spite of the fact that its own commentators were either blatantly running for office on the GOP ticket--and using the Fox platform to raise funds--or raising funds for their own Political Action Committees on Fox--or serving openly as lobbyists and advisors for GOP candidates and raising funds--something NO LEGITIMATE NEWS ORGANIZATION HAS EVER DONE.

(This doesn't even touch blatant conflict-of-interest situations in which on-air personalities hype fear and paranoia about the U.S. dollar and push people to invest in gold while, at the same time, advertising for gold investment companies, thus making themselves filthy rich off the terror they, themselves, have fanned, as Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly both routinely do.)

The explosion of the Internet and social-networking sites like Facebook provided an even more narrow forum for both sides of the debate, really, but studies have shown that liberals DO read a variety of news sources, but conservatives nearly always stick only to friendly sites that reinforce and validate the opinions they have already formed.  (I could provide a link to those studies but not today.)

Even when Glenn Beck himself cheerfully points out, as he did on the popular daytime program, "The View," that he is an ENTERTAINER and NOT a JOURNALIST, and even when he admitted--with no remorse--that HE NEVER FACT-CHECKS THE THINGS HE SAYS ON HIS PROGRAM--many right-wingers continue to cling to his program as "proof" of the convoluted theories he, himself, has been proposing.

And then along came a black president.

Barack Obama really did not want to run as the "first black president."  He wanted to be the president of--as he so eloquently pointed out at the Democratic convention speech of 2004, "not the Red States of America, not the Blue States of America--but the UNITED States of America!"

Nobody in the mainstream media or the right wing took him seriously for a very long time, until he started winning; and then, it looked as if he might actually WIN this thing and become President of the United States.

I'm not going to go into the public things we all already know about--the massive overkill on Jeremiah Wright and so forth.

It's the viral e-mails I want to talk about--the ones they send to EACH OTHER that don't make the evening news.

The first real, longtime, dear friend whom I loved that I cut out of my life because of these viral e-mails had been sending me one nasty hateful myth-driven viral e-mail after another that I tried to ignore, most of the time.

Then he sent me the caricature.

Barack Obama, drawn hideously out of proportion...with the big lips made so sadly famous in other racist caricatures from the Jim Crow days.

He sent me that e-mail knowing full well that I was a precinct chairman for the Obama for America campaign.  He knew I was a Democrat.  He knew I was a strong Obama supporter, working very hard for his nomination.

And yet, somehow, he seemed to think it was okay to send me that cartoon.

WHY?

What would have made an old friend--a cop I'd known for 20 years or more, who had helped me research at least one of my books, who I had long adored and with whom I had laughed so many times I can't count them--send me such a thing, knowing how I felt about the man?

I knew that, like many old-school cops, now retired, he had been prejudiced on the job--I'll be honest about that.  Many of his generation had been, and they had been terribly sexist, too.  I can't count the stupid sexist jokes he'd sent me through the years that I really didn't find all that funny but tolerated because I thought he was a good guy, overall.

But this cartoon, it was really, really MEAN.

And it revealed something so ugly, so hidden beneath the surface, about my friend that I knew I could no longer BE friends with him.

I told him the caricature was racist and bigoted and not to send me anything like that again.  When he sent me an angry diatribe in response, I deleted it without reply, removed him from my address book, and cut him out of my life for good.  I cannot be "friends" with someone whose soul has such a rottenness in it.

And you want to know the real irony?  This same guy was ALWAYS sending me the most syrupy, saccharine Jesus pictures and prayers and sentimental Sunday School stories.

He truly did not see the irony in it.  That a man calling himself a Christian could have such hate in his soul.

There have been more. 

Just a few weeks ago, there was the "joke."  Only, I didn't realize what it was.  The subject heading said, "It Had to Happen Eventually."

Open the e-mail.  Inside: A photo-shopped photograph of Joe Biden.  In cornrows.

HA HA HA HA!!!  Right???  Really funny.

I deleted it without comment.

But some of them, they don't dare send to ME, but they send to people who send them to me.  Like the one from a couple of weeks ago with the subject heading: "The First Tar-Balls Wash Up on Gulf Shores."

Open the e-mail.  A photo of Barack Obama, body-surfing.

HA HA HA HA!!!  Right???  Really funny.

Only it's not.

You know why?

Because I DO have friends of color, and the thing is, when you actually have people in your life who you love who are people of color, you don't find these kinds of things funny AT ALL because you know that they are HURTFUL. 

THEY HURT PEOPLE.  THEY HURT PEOPLE I CARE ABOUT.

It's more than just jokes, though.  When you point out that a joke is racist, the one who sent it seems truly baffled. 

Why, they just thought it was funny, that's all. Harmless.  You liberals get so upset about the silliest things.

But it's not just the jokes.

They send me other viral e-mails.  These e-mails accuse the president of the most horrific things.  And RIDICULOUS things--like the one where the president and first lady were supposedly on the White House lawn at a state ceremony, and yet when the flag passed by, they BOTH PUT THEIR LEFT HANDS OVER THEIR CHESTS!!!

"Explain this!" they demand, certain that it proves that the Obamas HATE THIS COUNTRY SO MUCH THAT THEY WOULD DELIBERATELY DISRESPECT IT BEFORE THE FLAG (and, apparently, also in front of the official White House photographer on the grounds of the White House at an official ceremony.)

Snopes.com:  The photo has been "flipped."  Check out the Marine in the background--all his ribbons are on the wrong side of his chest--this is proof that this picture has been photo-shopped, says Snopes.  (Check it out yourself.  I could provide the link, but not today.)

Again and again they send me things.  Again and again I check them out.  I can't tell you how many times the explanation is that a CONSERVATIVE BLOGGER WROTE THE PIECE AS SATIRE AND SOMEHOW IT GOT PICKED UP INTO THE BODY OF AN E-MAIL AND SENT ON ITS ROUNDS.

The fact that they believe--LITERALLY--something that The Onion might publish as a joke or Jon Stewart put on The Daily Show if it were about, say, George W. Bush or John Boehner, is not what I'm talking about, here.

What I'm talking about is that they BELIEVE IT AT ALL.

There is a segment of the population that is perfectly willing to believe the most horrible things about this president--and yes, they believed horrible things about the Clintons, too, I'll give you that--but there is a difference here and it's in the jokes.

It's in the caricatures.  The Obama-as-witch-doctor.  The Obama-as-Curious-George.  The Obama-as-Gorilla.  The Obama-With-the-Full-Lips.

When I try to refute the e-mail--especially when it maintains that Obama hates the troops, hates the military, wants veterans to pay for their own medical care or some other nonsense, I get one of two reactions:  Either they seize on some side issue that is basically unrelated to the subject at hand and start hammering me on that (one man, when we were arguing about health care reform, suddenly demanded that I explain "Obama's policy toward Palestinians!!!")  Or, they don't reply at all, which means that I have simply proven them wrong and they refuse to admit it.

I have a couple of conservative friends who will tell me the truth, and when I ask them, "Why do right-wingers, and Tea Partiers especially, hate Obama so much?"

I point out that, yes, we hated George W. Bush with a passion, especially when he lied this country into a war that cost 4,000 lives.  But WE NEVER SENT AROUND JOKES COMPARING LAURA BUSH TO A GORILLA.  We NEVER WENT ON TALK RADIO AND MADE FUN OF HIS CHILDREN.  In eight years, there was one conspiracy theory--the 9/11 plot--NOT A NEW ONE EVERY WEEK. 

In other words, we didn't have to make stuff up and we didn't send around these horrible viral e-mails to each other.  I was there.  I hated Bush because my family went to fight in a war I opposed. 

But in all that time, no liberal friend EVER sent me the kinds of things I've been sent about Barack Obama.

And my conservative friends, the ones who will admit the truth, say, "As much as I hate to admit this, and I really really hate to admit this, the truth is, it's race.  It has GOT to be race.  This is why I no longer listen to talk radio," they'll say, "or why I no longer visit so-and-so's website."

They can't take it anymore, these members of the Republican Party who find this latest development alarming.

You see, not all conservatives are racist.

And, I expect, not all Tea Partiers are racist either.  We all know they've got a few token blacks in their movement.

BUT.

IF YOU ARE NOT A RACIST, AND YOU KNOW GOOD AND DAMN WELL THAT RACISM EXISTS IN YOUR MOVEMENT, THEN WHY DON'T YOU STEP UP AND CALL IT OUT???

Instead, they rear up on their hind legs and claim that it's the BLACKS that are racist, not THEM.  They claim that the only people bringing those ugly signs WERE SENT THERE BY LIBERALS TO EMBARRASS THEM.  They claim that, to call them racist IS TO IMPUGN FREEDOM-LOVING PATRIOTS EVERYWHERE.

This is what they say publicly.

Privately?

They send around another Obama-tar-ball joke, only, they're careful not to send it to the liberals, because, hey, it's not "politically correct."

Is that what they're calling it, these days?

Me, I call it racism.

Because, the bottom line for all of you out there who have sent me those jokes: WOULD YOU SEND THEM TO A BLACK FRIEND or MEMBER OF THE FAMILY (by marriage, obviously)?

If not, why not?  Do you fear that person might be OFFENDED by that funny joke?

Oh?  And why is THAT?

Of course, this might be a difficult exercise if you don't actually HAVE any black or Hispanic friends--not acquaintances, mind you, but people you really, genuinely, care about.  People whose feelings you would never want to hurt.

And, if you don't have friends like that who happen to be black or brown or even gay...why is THAT?

Go ahead.  Think about it a while.  I can wait.

We give the President more work than a man can do, more responsibility than a man should take, more pressure than a man can bear. We abuse him often and rarely praise him. We wear him out, use him up, eat him up. And with all this, Americans have a love for the President that goes beyond loyalty or party nationality; he is ours, and we exercise the right to destroy him. 

--[John Steinbeck, America and Americans (1946), p. 46]


Over the past month or so, since the terrible catastrophe in the Gulf, when I found myself unable to write because of the profound depression that settled over me--the grief over the loss of sea life and the death of a way of life for so many who live and make their living on that body of water--and as I fretted over how this was impacting the president and whether or not he was acting or reacting in the "right" way, I began to think about leadership; what makes a good leader, and what we, as a nation, expect of our leaders, and how, over the past decade, our concept of leadership got so perverted and twisted out of shape by flim-flam men and media fakery.

The loudest voices have, of course, been screaming for our president to make a grand, emotional, sweeping gesture down on the Gulf, and those voices, we all know, have not all been conservative Republicans:

"The president of the United States could've come down here, he could've been involved with the families of these 11 people" who died on the offshore rig, (James) Carville said. "He could've demanded a plan in anticipation of this."

"It just looks like he's not involved in this," an angry Carville said on "GMA." "Man, you got to get down here and take control of this, put somebody in charge of this thing and get this moving. We're about to die down here."

Of course, like most other media spokespersons that I have watched in the past weeks, Carville's memory was highly selective.  It seems he--and they--forgot completely that President Obama DID, actually, visit the Gulf once before, back on May 2, when he went to Venice, Louisiana , and said, among other things:

They gave me a sense of how this spill is moving.  It is now about nine miles off the coast of southeastern Louisiana.  And by the way, we had the Governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, as well as parish presidents who were taking part in this meeting, because we want to emphasize the importance of coordinating between local, state, and federal officials throughout this process.

Now, I think the American people are now aware, certainly the folks down in the Gulf are aware, that we're dealing with a massive and potentially unprecedented environmental disaster.  The oil that is still leaking from the well could seriously damage the economy and the environment of our Gulf states and it could extend for a long time.  It could jeopardize the livelihoods of thousands of Americans who call this place home. 

And that's why the federal government has launched and coordinated an all-hands-on-deck, relentless response to this crisis from Day One.  After the explosion on the drilling rig, it began with an aggressive search-and-rescue effort to evacuate 115 people, including three badly injured.  And my thoughts and prayers go out to the family of the 11 workers who have not yet -- who have not been found. 

When the drill unit sank on Thursday, we immediately and intensely investigated by remotely operated vehicles the entire 5,000 feet of pipe that's on the floor of the ocean.  In that process, three leaks were identified, the most recent coming just last Wednesday evening.  As Admiral Allen and Secretary Napolitano have made clear, we've made preparations from day one to stage equipment for a worse-case scenario.  We immediately set up command center operations here in the Gulf and coordinated with all state and local governments.  And the third breach was discovered on Wednesday.    


But that's okay, James.  I assume you were too busy with your T.V. appearances to take note.  Carville's  been so busy, in fact, that he may not realize that his angry diatribes against his own president are now being used in Republican fund-raising e-mails, which I'm sure was the idea of his wife, Republican strategist Mary Matalin, who stood beside him during one interview.

Another thing Carville might not have noticed during his busy Bash-Obama tour is that the president had Adm. Thad Allen of the Coast Guard--you know, the guy who's in charge of the entire recovery mission and who is in closest contact with BP--call James Carville to see if he could alleviate any of his worries and fears, but the call went to voice mail and, so far, Carville hasn't called him back.

Apparently, he's busier than Adm. Allen right now.

So, since the Ragin' Cagun is so hysterically outraged at the terrible horrible no good job our president is doing at assuming leadership of this crises, I assumed that he was equally horrified at the job President Bush had done following Hurricane Katrina, so I spent no small amount of time this morning looking up various configurations of "James Carville, " "President George W. Bush," "Hurricane Katrina," "August, 2005," "September, 2005," and so forth on Google.  I went through 10 or 12 pages, and the only time James Carville's name popped up with those references, they ALWAYS included a reference to 2010 and Barack Obama, so apparently, he had very little to say on-air or publicly in criticism of George W. Bush in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. 

My Google-search revealed that Carville moved to New Orleans following Katrina, so maybe not living down there had something to do with it, I don't know.  But apparently he was not on all the talk shows and news programs railing against President Bush at the time because if he was I could not find it, although, if you Google references to "James Carville, "Obama," and "BP," you can find page after page of references to Carville's rants.

I guess he likes to reserve his hottest vitriol for former opponents of the Clintons.

But, in all fairness to Carville, he's not the only Democrat going after Obama for what they perceive to be his lack of leadership these days.    Bob Herbert ripped him a new one in this morning's New York Times:

With all due respect to the president, who is a very smart man, how is it possible for anyone with any reasonable awareness of the nonstop carnage that has accompanied the entire history of giant corporations to believe that the oil companies, which are among the most rapacious players on the planet, somehow "had their act together" with regard to worst-case scenarios.

These are not Little Lord Fauntleroys who can be trusted to abide by some fanciful honor system. These are greedy merchant armies drilling blindly at depths a mile and more beneath the seas while at the same time doing all they can to stifle the government oversight that is necessary to protect human lives and preserve the integrity of the environment.

President Obama knows that. He knows -- or should know -- that the biggest, most powerful companies do not have the best interests of the American people in mind when they are closing in on the kinds of profits that ancient kingdoms could only envy. BP's profits are counted in the billions annually. They are like stacks and stacks of gold glittering beneath a brilliant sun. You don't want to know what people will do for that kind of money.

Ooooo-kay.  Evil robber barons.  Can't be trusted.  Got it.  Soooo...what's the president supposed to do?  Well, apparently, according to Herbert, he can't trust the government, either:

When is the United States going to get its act together? Will we learn anything from this disaster or will we simply express our collective dismay, ignore the inevitable commission reports (no one pays attention to study commissions), and bury our heads back in the oily sand?

President Obama said on Thursday that his administration was "moving quickly on steps to ensure that a catastrophe like this never happens again." Well, he can't ensure anything of the kind. And, in fact, his corporate-friendly policy of opening up new regions for offshore drilling (that policy is only temporarily halted) will all but guarantee future disastrous spills.

The U.S. will never get its act together until we develop the courage and the will to crack down hard on these giant corporations. They need to be tamed, closely monitored and regulated, and constrained in ways that no longer allow them to trample the best interests of the American people.

In an ideal world, I would absolutely, wholeheartedly agree with Mr. Herbert, no question about that.  But this is a world in which half of our congress and Senate is held by a party who wants nothing more than to shut the president DOWN, and by a party of his own sprinkled with conservative sympathizers who are pro-gun, pro-life-pro-business, anti-regulation--well, you get my drift.

In the Real World, I'm afraid, Mr. Herbert, Mr. Obama has to GOVERN.  And he has to do it with a recalcitrant, reluctant, obstinate congress who fights him every time he opens his mouth on every single little solitary thing.  In other words, the man is doing the best he can with what he's got to work with, and it is far from perfect.

And yeah, he's made mistakes in the SIXTEEN MONTHS he's been in office.

But I digress.  We were talking critics of leadership.  Here's another one from the left, Charles Blow , also from that liberal rag, the New York Times.

There are many things at which the president is extraordinarily gifted. Emoting isn't one of them.

Thursday, in the opening remarks of his press conference, the president said: "Every day I see this leak continue I am angry and frustrated."

I wasn't feeling it.

At the end of the piece, he even gets kinda personal with the president:

Mr. President, I know that you have a self-professed aversion to appearing angry, but in this case you have every right to be angry and to openly empathize with the anger of others. Otherwise, by running from one label, you risk earning another -- incompetent. You feel me? 

Of course, I have read many, many things from conservatives who have derided Obama for being "detached," too "cool and unemotional," too "remote," too "unfeeling," not to mention the fact that everybody seems to think that he's, basically, not been doing anything--including Carville, although I would like to make the point that this is, basically, NOT TRUE:

Fox & Friends guest hosts falsely suggested that there was a "lack of cleanup going on" in the Gulf Coast oil spill and falsely suggested Louisiana's barrier plan had been ignored. In fact, cleanup of the oil spill has been ongoing for more than a month, and the Army Corps of Engineers responded to the barrier plan -- the effectiveness of which is being questioned -- and raised concerns that it would push oil into the Mississippi.

Be that as it may, it seems that we the people seem to think that what is needed at a time like this is for a great moving display of--well, here, let's let the stirring words speak for themselves. 

They were spoken just after another terrible national disaster had occurred, by another president, and afterward, all the pundits and talking-heads and op-ed writers on both sides of the aisle felt that this president had shown great leadership, and his poll numbers went up, and everybody felt greatly comforted and encouraged and hopeful.  It was a wonderful moment and a beautiful speech.  Here is part of it.  I want you to feel as inspired as I did, and then, afterward, I'll explain where and when so you can read the whole thing for yourself:

We are the heirs of men and women who lived through those first terrible winters at Jamestown and Plymouth, who rebuilt Chicago after a great fire, and San Francisco after a great earthquake, who reclaimed the prairie from the dust bowl of the 1930s.

Every time, the people of this land have come back from fire, flood, and storm to build anew -- and to build better than what we had before. Americans have never left our destiny to the whims of nature, and we will not start now.

These trials have also reminded us that we are often stronger than we know with the help of grace and one another. They remind us of a hope beyond all pain and death -- a God who welcomes the lost to a house not made with hands.

And they remind us that we are tied together in this life, in this nation and that the despair of any touches us all.

I know that when you sit on the steps of a porch where a home once stood or sleep on a cot in a crowded shelter, it is hard to imagine a bright future. But that future will come.

That's beautiful, isn't it?  And it wasn't just beautiful words, either.  The speech was chock-full of information of concrete things that were going to be done for the survivors of this catastrophe, help that was on the way, recovery and rebuilding that had already begun, federal money and help that had been mobilized.

It was just the kind of LEADERSHIP that we have come to EXPECT from our presidents, and boy WE GOT IT, on that day, SEPTEMBER 15, 2005, IN JACKSON SQUARE, NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA.

That's right.  President George W. Bush and his crew came in, set  up generators, lit up the square--residents said later they were the only lights in the entire area, and that when the president left, they took the lights--and the generators--with them.

All right, okay, he gave a speech, he talked about things he was putting before Congress.

So...what happened at the State of the Union address, FIVE MONTHS later?

In the president's State of the Union speech last year, delivered just five months after the disaster, the devastation merited only 156 words out of more than 5,400.

Say WHAT?

That's right.  He had already turned his attention away from the Gulf and moved on to other things.  In other words, you bet he knew how to make the big bold dramatic "leadership" gesture.  NOBODY  knew how to do it better with the exception of Ronald Reagan.  Just like nobody knew how to pose himself in front of "the troops" and act as if he loved them, then send them into battle with shoddy equipment and crappy weapons and insufficient troops in an open-ended mission in an endless war.  But hey, he sure loved the troops because the camera loved him in front of them, right?

But I digress.  What was Bush saying about New Orleans at the State of the Union in January of 2007?

Crickets:

New Orleans is still a mess and the pace of recovery across the Gulf Coast from Hurricane Katrina's strike remains achingly slow after 17 months. But none of this captured President Bush's attention on the year's biggest night for showcasing policy priorities...

On Tuesday night...Katrina received not a single mention.

"At this time I almost broke my TV, knocked it off the stand," Chris Davis, told CBS News chief investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian. Davis, a Vietnam veteran, is one of the displaced residents from New Orleans now living near Baton Rouge, La.

"People were already feeling forgotten. I think this may potentially reinforce that," Toni Bankston, a mental health caseworker, told CBS News.


It is true that President Obama can give wonderful, stirring speeches that can inspire and motivate, but it is also true that he can roll up his sleeves and work like a pack mule when there is a crises at hand, and the fact of the matter is that the White House has been submerged in this thing from the beginning, without the flowery words or television cameras.

What happened with Bush was that he and his handlers knew from Day One when he started running for office and decided to buy himself that Reaganesque "ranch" that if you just propped him up in a stirring location (think "Mission Impossible") that the sound-bite savages would drool all over it for a full 24-hour news cycle and they would own it, they would not have to have any substance behind it.

So when, for example, he announced this "vision" to put men on Mars, it sounded fantastic!  Wonderful!  Visionary!  And there were great sound-bites to it, too!  But the TRUTH is that he gave NASA NO money to meet that goal, and they've been scrambling to find it in-house, which is one reason their space program was in such disarray when Obama took office.

As we say in Texas, Bush's entire presidency was "all hat and no cattle."  (Just like his fake ranch.)

But we got spoiled to it and now we expect it of our new president.  We get disappointed in him when he doesn't come swaggering out with that weepy break in his voice and that tear in his eye that Bush used to get, or that big bear-hug that Clinton used to have, and we think that somehow he's just not doing his job.

But if you would really, truly like some real, true perspective--historical, ethical, philosophical, and practical, on what leadership means, I strongly suggest you read the following essay, "Gleaves Whitney on Leadership."

Now, don't be frightened.  Yes, it is dense, and yes, it is long.  But this is a holiday weekend, and it is conversational in tone, broken into easy-to-read segments, and fascinating.  Most of his historical comparisons are recent--Bill Clinton, Franklin Roosevelt, JFK, Reagan, and so forth.  If you get to a paragraph that seems boring--some go back to ancient Greece--skip over it but don't quit--I urge you to scroll on down because it gets better and better as it goes on, delving into the qualities that mark a true leader, and why.

One thing that interested me, for example, was on the concept of CHANGE.  A true leader, he says, sees visionary, dramatic change, and he sees it far into the future--not just until the next election.  Those who insist upon just incremental, easy-to-absorb steps LEADING to change, he says, are MANAGERS, not LEADERS.

Ultimately, I found that President Barack Obama possessed almost all of the qualities of a true leader listed in this article.  The one area where I thought he and his team fell down sometimes was in their ability to ANTICIPATE how their policies would be accepted or received by most people, but in all the other areas, which is truly extraordinary, I saw this president excel.

At the end of the piece, Mr. Whitney discusses how the savagery of the 24-hour news cycle and the Internet make a practice of tearing down leaders before they can even find their footing--and that is where I found the quote that ledes this piece.

But at the very end, he simply reproduces Rudyard Kipling's marvelous poem, "If," that says, in part:

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise; 

[...]

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man {substitute leader} my son!


Corny, to some extent, yes, but still applicable today, particularly in the light of leadership.

I'm not saying everything the president has done has been right--he's not saying that either.  There are days, as I joked to a friend, that I've felt as if we've had our "first lover's quarrel," meaning, though I've approved of most everything else he's done since taking office, I've been upset over his handling of this.

(Mr. Greaves even talks about how we "fall in love" with our leaders, in the sense of a sort of friendship, using an aide to Teddy Roosevelt as a wonderful example.)

That said, I do think that one thing about this administration you can trust--and one of the qualities of true leadership mentioned in the essay linked to above (and most definitely NOT present in the last administration)--is its adaptability. 

In other words, when they are making a mistake, they course-correct.

And one more thing.

THEY KEEP THEIR PROMISES.

According to PolitiFact, a nonpartisan website that has been tracking President Obama since he took office, he made something like 500 campaign promises.  So they've been watching to see if he's kept any of them. And so far, the record is pretty damn impressive.  I'm having trouble picking up that link so here it is like this:

ttp://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/

In the first 16 months the man has been in office, he's kept 113 promises, and a whopping 253 are in the works.

He has "compromised" but gotten somewhere, at any rate, on 34 more.

That makes 400 promises that have either already been kept or are on the way to being kept in one form or another

He has only broken 19.

And that's just in the first 16 months, while working with only half a congress, while the other half has made it their mission in life to obstruct and shut down--if not outright impeach--him.

(It's a fascinating website, and describes each one as it is fulfilled; a fun place to visit for Obama supporters.)

So, he says he's doing all he can to find out how this horror occurred and gather the best minds on the planet to fix it and clean up what's out there as best we can, and help the people along the Gulf shore who make their living off the water, then based on his record so far, I'd say we can believe him, even if he doesn't stand out in front of a bunch of bright lights, tear up, and deliver a stirring speech.

In the meantime, consider this, all you naysayers like James Carville who are so intent on dumping on the President:

WHAT'S THE ALTERNATIVE?

Do you really want to see him defeated in 2012 and somebody like, oh, Mitt Romney or, God forbid, Sarah Palin get into the White House in his place?

Do you HONESTLY think THEY would do a BETTER JOB?

If so, then just keep on bitchin.'

It's one thing to keep the man accountable.  Yes, we should all hold him accountable--and he'd be the first to say so.

But the man needs us to have his back, too.  And right now, he's getting savaged from the right AND the left, and when the right is using hacks from the left to fund-raise, you know you are in trouble, man.

Do your homework--not just on the mess that's out there, but on what the White House has really been doing. 

People on the scene--not just academics called up by cable-news producers who've been nowhere near the site--say the best minds in the world have been hard at it from the beginning:

As someone from the oil industry wrote in to Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo :

At BP's West Houston complex, there's a command center filled with personnel from around the industry working with BP engineers. Several drill ships are in place. Tons of workboats are on site. There are 5 or more ROVs roaming the wellhead monitoring and cleaning things up. They're already bumping into each other because they normally work solo while tied to a ship by a mile long umbilical cable. They don't need more ROVs down there adding to the traffic. All these efforts are reported heavily in the Houston Chronicle and nola.com, but doesn't seem to get much for national coverage. If you only monitor the national coverage, you'd think BP is going it alone while we all sit by, but the reality is this is an industry-wide effort because we all know what's at stake. On having Obama "do more," WTF is he supposed to do? Everybody seems to be calling for more fire in his belly and scary, threatening speeches. What does that accomplish? It's like people want him to do a dramatic speech like post-9/11 about bringing the criminals to justice. It does nothing to actually plug the damn well.


I've seen many of the same "experts" come on various programs with the same half-baked ideas, and the anchors don't know but to take them seriously, and those ideas made it into the president's news conference, forcing him to respond to them patiently, carefully, explaining why--even though they may have worked on one kind of oil spill 30 years ago in one kind of body of water using one kind of technique, they would not work HERE.


Politics is perception, they say, and the perception right now is that President Obama isn't doing very well at taking leadership of this crises.  He has made some mis-steps, true.  But I think that it might be helpful if those of us in his own party would, once in a while, cut him some slack, give him the benefit of the doubt.

At the news conference, he pointed out that he grew up in Hawaii where, he said, "The ocean is sacred," and he hesitated just for a moment.  In that moment, I saw everything I needed to see in his eyes.  He does not like to choke up on-camera, but for him, that was an emotional moment.  To him, the ocean IS sacred.

Everybody else pointed out the story about his little girl, Malia, asking if he'd "plugged the hole yet" as his "human" moment, but for me, it was that one right there.  The ocean is sacred and he knows what it means to grow up on or near the sea and to love it.  He is doing everything he can.

And trust me.  I have no doubt that if he'd come out with some big speech, they'd have been crawling all over him, crying that he was "politicizing the tragedy."

People on the right HATE this man and want to destroy him.  They do not want to run him out of office.  They want to destroy him.  Even now they're ginning up some crazy impeachment scheme after spending more than a year chasing after bogus claims that he wasn't qualified to BE president because he wasn't born here.

I, for one, consider him to be one of the greatest leaders of his generation, and I believe that in spite of everything he will go down in history as a great president, IF, we, as a party, do not contribute to that destruction.

Carville, do you feel me?

Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said: "one can't believe impossible things."

"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

(Through the Looking Glass, Chapter 5)  from the website: "Lenny's Alice in Wonderland Quotes":


Recently, a series of back-and-forths I had with conservative friends and family in various forums, either e-mail or social network comment sections, left me profoundly depressed, and not just depressed, but positively mystified, because each "debate," if that is what you want to call it, for lack of a better word, followed the same, eerie pattern:

First, they would accuse me of being a "far-left liberal," and all that entailed, right off the bat, hand's down, whether they knew me well or not.  If they were family--and some were--they knew full well that I voted as a registered Independent for many years and had, in fact, cast votes for Ronald Reagan (twice) and George H.W. Bush (once), and that I was from a military family whose son had fought in a war (twice) and who supported the president's Afghanistan policy--NONE of which endears me WITH the "far-left liberal" community.

None of that mattered.

I was still "far-left liberal."

Second, they would accuse me of being "close-minded" and "unwilling to consider other viewpoints."

Why?

Well, because I wouldn't watch Bill O'Reilly or Glenn Beck.

Again, and again.  And again.  AND AGAIN I listed for them eight or ten CONSERVATIVE news columnists that I read DAILY, from George Will to David Brooks to Kathleen Parker to Russ Douthat to Peggy Noonan to Michael Gerson and on and on--but it was as if there was some kind of psychic BLANK SPACE in that portion of the comment or the e-mail.

They would come back and say things like, "You should watch Glenn Beck because he really makes sense."

And I'd say, "So did John Nash, the brilliant mathematician who was portrayed in the movie, "A Beautiful Mind,"--to whom Glenn Beck has compared himself, I might add--and who, we all know, was CRAZY."

I'd mention, again, the conservatives I read--even throw in somebody like Charles Krauthammer just to see what they'd say. 

Nothing.

Back to, "You're close-minded because you won't consider other viewpoints than the far-left news shows you watch."

So, I'd seize on that, and I'd say, "I don't WATCH news programming.  I don't watch Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann or Chris Matthews, either!"  (at least, not very often)  "I READ!  I read the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the L.A. Times, the London Financial Times, the U.K. Guardian--Jesus!  It's not like I read the New York Times, which I know you consider liberal, and then run over to Daily Kos to get my opinion validated and then steam off and spew out an angry blog!"

Then they would get mad and say, "Oh well, I guess you think I'm STUPID because I don't read all the stuff YOU read, just because I don't have TIME..."

And I'd say, "Not at all.  All I'm saying is BRANCH OUT and not trust just ONE NEWS SOURCE because you are only getting ONE SLANT to your news!"

And they would insist that FOX news was "fair and balanced," not like the "far-left liberal news" that they were certain I was watching.

These arguments were so one-sided and impossible that I started to feel like Alice through the Looking Glass--I could not reply or respond to them.

In one instance, a family member sent a viral e-mail showing a photograph of the president and first lady holding their LEFT hands over their chests as some sort of subversive salute to the flag ON THE WHITE HOUSE LAWN and demanded I explain THAT by God.

Of course, Snopes.com did so immediately, showing that the photo had been photo-shop "flipped," and that the Marine in the background was wearing his uniform ribbons on the wrong side of his chest, as proof.

STILL, they were suspicious of Snopes.com!  They kept pushing and pushing, until I just started to delete the e-mails altogether because you cannot reason with this kind of psychic blindness, and I was really starting to despair...

Until I heard about "EPISTEMIC CLOSURE."

It was originally defined by Julian Sanchez back in March in a brilliant blogpost: "Frum, Cocktail Parties, and the Threat of Doubt":

"One of the more striking features of the contemporary conservative movement is the extent to which it has been moving toward epistemic closure. Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted. (How do you know they're liberal? Well, they disagree with the conservative media!)"

Now, to be perfectly clear on what Sanchez meant, I actually looked up the word "epistemic" in my handy online dictionary.  It is from the Greek, and means:

"of or pertaining to knowledge or the conditions for acquiring it"

Ah-HA.

(Back in my hard-core feminism days, this would be what Gloria Steinem would refer to as a "click!" moment.)

But Sanchez doesn't just point out the danger of closing the loop on knowledge to a limited, approved number of sources--he goes on to point out how "apostates"--those insiders who dare to criticize either one of those sources or one of the approved conclusions therein--get shunned and kicked out of the inner circle, attacked, diminished in stature, so that they are no longer on the "approved" list of sources and therefore, no longer to be included in the approved loop, which has just gotten smaller:

"Think of the complete panic China's rulers feel about any breaks in their Internet firewall: The more successfully external sources of information have been excluded to date, the more unpredictable the effects of a breach become. Internal criticism is then especially problematic, because it threatens the hermetic seal. It's not just that any particular criticism might have to be taken seriously coming from a fellow conservative. Rather, it's that anything that breaks down the tacit equivalence between "critic of conservatives and "wicked liberal smear artist" undermines the effectiveness of the entire information filter.  If disagreement is not in itself evidence of malign intent or moral degeneracy, people start feeling an obligation to engage it sincerely--maybe even when it comes from the New York Times. And there is nothing more potentially fatal to the momentum of an insurgency fueled by anger than a conversation. A more intellectually secure conservatism would welcome this, because it wouldn't need to define itself primarily in terms of its rejection of an alien enemy."

Ahhhh...

Sanchez is not only getting closer, but he hit the nail on the head, according to one of the more famous of those "apostates," David Frum, who dared speak out and criticize the company line and was summarily told "OFF WITH HIS HEAD!"

He, quite literally, did travel to China on business, and upon his return to the United States, had this wry observation to make, in his blogpost, "Groupthink at the National Review"
(which we all know, fired him over one uncomfortable position he took with which they disagreed):

"How wonderful to return to a free country, I thought as I stepped off the plane from Beijing at Washington Dulles. No more censorship, no more official lies, no more kowtowing to high officials who gained power by their mindless repetition of party dogma...

"Then alas I opened my browser and read the dump-on-Manzi comments on NRO's The Corner. Manzi had deviated from the One Correct Way of Mark Levin Thought, and all his former colleagues had been summoned together to Denounce and Struggle Against Him.

"Not one stood up to be counted in Manzi's defense, not even colleagues whom Manzi might have had reason to regard as close personal friends...

"What makes this episode all the more remarkable is that Manzi is actually a member of NR's board of trustees - i.e., somebody who might claim a little more scope to speak his mind. But even for trustees, there are limits, and Manzi crossed them

I dunno what-all was going on here, but I gather a National Review trustee dared to contradict a popular but particularly boneheaded entertainment right-wing talk-radio host on global warming.

"OFF WITH HIS HEAD!"

And he's not the only one.

Soon after David Frum's head rolled, Bruce Bartlett posted a blog, "David Frum and the Closing of the Conservative Mind," in which he detailed not only his own head-chopping experience but a very real example of epistemic closure in the conservative loop:

"As some readers of this blog may know, I was fired by a right wing think tank called the National Center for Policy Analysis in 2005 for writing a book critical of George W. Bush's policies, especially his support for Medicare Part D. In the years since, I have lost a great many friends and been shunned by conservative society in Washington, DC.

"Now the same thing has happened to David Frum, who has been fired by the American Enterprise Institute... Since, he is no longer affiliated with AEI, I feel free to say publicly something he told me in private a few months ago. He asked if I had noticed any comments by AEI "scholars" on the subject of health care reform. I said no and he said that was because they had been ordered not to speak to the media because they agreed with too much of what Obama was trying to do.

"It saddened me to hear this. I have always hoped that my experience was unique. But now I see that I was just the first to suffer from a closing of the conservative mind. Rigid conformity is being enforced, no dissent is allowed, and the conservative brain will slowly shrivel into dementia if it hasn't already."

Yeah, I believe I'd say to the good Mr. Bartlett:  Too late.

In response to Julian Sanchez's original piece on epistemic closure, Jonathan Chait wrote a response in The New Republic, "The Right and Epistemic Closure," in which he faces conservative arguments that liberals do much the same thing when they get their news from Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo and MSNBC and Rachel Maddow or Jon Stewart, but adds a cogent and necessary point:

"The difference is that liberals do not see these outlets as replacements for the news. In the conservative worldview, mainstream media is not just flawed but fatally tainted by deep ideological hostility. Millions of conservatives believe the only sources of credible news are Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the like -- even a figure like Clarence Thomas once told an interviewer that his sole sources of news are Limbaugh and the American Spectator. Liberals may seek out ideologically friendly sources to augment their information intake, but the phenomenon of total epistemic closure that Sanchez describes is almost entirely limited to the right."

THIS, then goes right at the heart of the arguments I was having with right-wing family and friends, and why I thought I was talking to them--metaphorically--face to face, only to find, when I reached out, that my hand was smashing into a plate-glass window.  They were not hearing me.  To them, ALL NEWS EVERYWHERE FROM ANY SOURCE was suspect--one 80-year old family member even commented that my college education amounted to "liberal propaganda"--and ONLY Fox news, and to some, those maddening viral e-mails sent to them by fellow right-wingers, could be trusted as accurate.

Sanchez's column provoked a storm of to-be-expected defensiveness from the right, and the arguments were tiresome and predictable, falling pretty much into the: LEFT-WINGERS DO IT TOO NYAH-NYAH argument.

Still, in his devastating follow-up post, "Epistemic Closure, Technology, and the End of Distance,"  Sanchez levels those arguments with the simple example of young Constance McMillan, from small-town Fulton, Mississippi, who wanted to take her lesbian girlfriend to the senior prom and wear a tuxedo.  When the high school canceled the prom rather than permit it, the ACLU took up her case, and in the end, she was permitted her prom, but it was only her and a few sympathetic students, including the disabled and some minorities, who attended.  Parents threw a prom for the "real" students, and set up a website to attack little Constance for ruining their fun by simply trying to be herself.

Sanchez points out that, when the website became public knowledge and links went out, it was FLOODED with positive reinforcement for Constance from ALL OVER THE COUNTRY, which shocked and SHUT UP the mean girls and boys of Fulton, Mississippi and their bigoted parents.

Sanchez's point is that this increasingly narrow conservative loop mistakenly thinks that it represents a large segment of the American population's thought, when in reality, it is often shocked to learn that it does not.

On April 9th, Jonathan Chait examines the phenomenon more closely in his post, "The Great Epistemic Debate," and describes the two schools of thought, liberal and conservative, as best he can, namely, that conservatism is monolithic, whereas liberals are not as prone to groupthink.

But my favorite description of this difference came from a conservative columnist who just won the Pulitzer Prize, Kathleen Parker.  She writes for the Washington Post, and first came to my attention when, during the campaign, she dared to say that Sarah Palin was not qualified even to be vice-president, much less president, and was flooded with some 12,000 e-mails--mostly from right-wingers--cursing her and many, sending death-threats.

At that time, she wrote, "Dixie Chicks, I hear ya."

So I laughed when she was describing the health care summit President Obama called between Democratic and Republican senators, and she said that, when they walked into the room the Republicans were all carrying EXACTLY the same briefing book, period, and they were all carrying it in the same way, cover out, so the television cameras could show it.

The Democrats, she said, came in carrying all kinds of stuff--each one, something different.

So, from the get-go, we are a different mind-set.  We Dems value individualism.  They SAY they value it, but in truth, they fear it, because whenever it shows up in their own Party, they say, "OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!"

By the time two weeks had passed from Mr. Sanchez's first posting, the conservative blogosphere was in an uproar, and who better to take 'em on than Andrew Sullivan? 

In a slice-and-dice piece entitled, "The Closing of the Conservative Mind, Ctd.,"  the former conservative-turned-Obama supporter takes on right-wing critic Jonah Goldberg, who'd become outright obsessed with the whole epistemic closure thing, which he was certain that, whereas okay yeah maybe it DID exist it was also on the liberal side nyah nyah and all the worst problems facing this country had been caused by them anyway, to which Sullivan replied:

"Ah, yes. In the middle of the Bush administration's extreme extension of executive power and secrecy in the war against Jihadist terror, as the GOP was spending like inebriated seamen on pork, entitlements and defense, as Wall Street was gambling in a manner that wild-eyed liberals like Richard Posner and Alan Greenspan have conceded was recklessly irrational, as the Republicans embraced successful nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan as the sine qua non of American national security ... Mr Goldberg decided that the real crisis was "liberal fascism."

"To do so in that context is simply surreal. But inordinately successful in the ideological-industrial complex that is enriching so many pundits and killing conservatism as a serious attempt to govern the world as it is. It's successful because the untethered bromides of the utopian right are far easier to market than the awful choices and hard compromises that the US now has to grapple with. But contemporary "conservatives" - a lethal blend of denial, distraction and derangement - are not interested in hard choices. They are interested in an alternative reality, sustained by exactly the epistemic closure Goldberg wants - ah, the circle closes - to distract from."

DENIAL.  DISTRACTION.  DERANGEMENT.

I liked those words so much that I almost put them in my title, but even Andrew Sullivan couldn't top Alice in Wonderland to describe what's going on here.

In the end, Sullivan referred us all to an outstanding post that is long but well worth your time and trouble to read, by Conor Friedersdorf, called, "Weaseling out of Things is Important to Learn.  It's What Separates Us from the Animals...Except the Weasel."

In this post, he dissects and destroys every single argument out there that the conservatives are putting forth to deny, distract, and crazy-up the argument that they are not indulging in epistemic closure through closed information loops and knowledge control, and through swift beheading of apostates.

Like all thoughtful conservatives I have read in the past couple of years, he expresses growing alarm at the very real problems facing our country and our planet and the dearth of serious ideas being put forth by conservatives to deal with them.  As he points out, during the campaign, every Democratic candidate had some form of health care reform to discuss at length in debates and Republicans had nothing except some vague Romneycare at the most, and at the least, constant harrangues of Hillarycare.

And like most thoughtful conservatives, he took a dig at Sarah Palin, because they all know that the kind of cutesty sound-bites that she's so good at putting together may be popular to people like the ones arguing with me in e-mails and comment sections but, at the highest levels of government, where these desperate problems need powerful and careful solutions, they don't get the job done, and should she or someone like her actually garner enough votes to get elected, the country will be in very serious trouble.

I've tried to explain to my deaf and blind right-wing family and friends that painting all supporters of Obama with a broad "far-left liberal" brush is counter-productive and not even true.  My son is an Independent, a former Marine and Iraq war vet; my husband a Vietnam combat vet and moderate Republican; my daughter, a Hollywood actress.  They all supported Barack Obama, but you can't slap the same brush across all three of them--it's insulting. 

They are individuals with their own life experiences and own intelligent analysis of how current events affect their lives--they are NOT "Kool-Aid drinkers."

Makes no difference to the Glenn Beck followers and Sarah Palin fans.  They are not listening.  Socialists, all!

It is ironic to me that as much as the right-wing tried to portray Obama supporters as blank-eyed members of some sort of feverish cult, the truth is that cults actually work by RESTRICTING access to information--that is the FIRST thing they do to ensure loyalty of their followers.  They work by trying to separate you from your family and friends by making them seem "other," or somehow "suspect," and to be feared.

The right-wing media machine works 24-7 to portray Obama as a subversive non-American who is working to undermine the constitution of the United States and deny "real" Americans their liberty.  He is to be feared; his policies are deliberate attempts to weaken America and make us vulnerable to our enemies.

Anyone who disagrees with that is portrayed as somehow "unAmerican," or at least caught up in the cult of worship of him as some kind of messiah--yet another character (anti-Christ?)--to be feared or at least deeply suspected.

And any source of information that says otherwise is immediately tainted and stained with the LIBERAL label--NOT TO BE TRUSTED OR EVEN BELIEVED.  Any poll, any statistic, any research finding, unless it comes from an approved conservative "think-tank."

If someone within the approved loop dares to speak out, they are "shunned" and excommunicated from the inner circle--banished to the dreaded LIBERAL MEDIA circuit, to be mocked, derided, and scorned--not to mention, FIRED, their livelihoods (and family health insurance) CUT OFF.

Which is quite a threat, don't you think?

This is epistemic closure.

And, I might add, it's what cults do.

And this is why we can't get into arguments with our conservative family and friends, period.  They start from a place of utter contempt for our beliefs--and even, by extension, to some extent--us.

There is nothing we can say that they will respect, in spite of their protestations that they want to hear what we have to say because they are willing to listen to facts and figures that might change their minds.

In the upcoming months, my friends, my advice is this:  Confine your remarks to Independents, disgruntled Dems thinking of not voting at all, people who haven't voted yet and haven't decided what they want to do, and so forth.

Anything else is a complete waste of energy and, in the long run, will only cost you a beloved friend or family member, and it is not worth it.

For the record, I will close by saying this:  My right-wing, proudly gun-nut friend Robby, God bless him, called me up when he knew I was upset about this.  He said that he knew that I was NOT close-minded, and that the dirty little secret was this:  "We're out of power and we're pissed off about it.  We want back in control, so some people attack others in arguments because they really don't have anything meaningful to say.  In your case, they're not as well informed as you are, and they know it, and it pisses 'em off sometimes.  Now, I'll argue guns with you all day long because that's my area of strength, but I won't argue other things.  Still, I don't listen to talk radio any more because it bothers me, how extreme the talk has gotten in some ways.  I worry about the safety of the president.  I don't agree with a lot of what he's done, but I would never wish any harm on him, and I think everybody needs to chill out.  There is no need for a lot of the rhetoric I hear on these radio shows, and I won't listen to it."

If conservatives like Robby can be run off  by this closed loop, to some extent, then there are others who might not just turn off talk-radio, but turn off the Party altogether, and cross over to the Independent column. 

They might be willing to listen.

And that's a start.

I think it hit me harder than most folks, at least, most folks who weren't there, or didn't have loved ones there, or who didn't live there.  People, I'm talking about who, like me, watched it on TV. 

People who'd never been to Oklahoma City, I mean, unless they were passing through or stopping at an airport.

Most Americans.

It hit me harder because, unlike most Americans, I'd spent the better part of a year crawling around inside the head of the Tim McVeighs of the world, trying to understand just what kind of mind would consider the bombing of a building full of everyday Americans to be an heroic act of war, and the murder of babies to be "collateral damage."

In the early minutes following the first horrific, shocked TV images of the gutted, smoke-billowing building, the bleeding survivors, the grim rescue workers, the stunned and terrified families waiting behind police lines, television commentators were already speculating that Muslim terrorists might be responsible, as they had been for the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993.

I don't suppose many other Americans did what I did when I heard that.  My head swiveled around to glance at the calendar, and as soon as I saw the date, I knew otherwise.

April 19.  High holy day to right-wing extremists bent on revenge for the Branch Davidian tragedy that had taken place in Waco just two years before.

I knew.

Right then, in spite of what all the TV journalists and commentators were saying, I knew that Muslims were not behind this terror.  I knew it was someone avenging the Waco deaths.  I had seen and heard and read too much during the previous year while researching the book I was writing at that very moment, ORDEAL, and I knew that my worst nightmare had come true.

I knew, in fact, that the plot I'd sketched out months before for my work of fiction, and which I was 400 pages into writing, was pretty much taking place in real-time, right in front of a nation's--and my own--helpless gaze.

I'd spent months in a netherworld of right-wing militia paranoia, hatred, and rage, attending their rallies and conferences, reading their underground books, pamphlets, and other publications, browsing their gunshows, talking to their militia zealots.

The misinformation surrounding the events that had transpired in Waco had reached mythic proportions.  At one conference, guest speakers conducted seminars dispensing outright lies purported to be facts based on such things as autopsy reports of federal agents who'd been killed in the shooting that day.  But the information was patently false.  I knew because I had the actual reports myself, copies of which had been given to me by a friendly Texas Ranger.

I learned, years later, that Timothy McVeigh had attended that same convention.

During that year I learned that an entire survivalist militia movement was underway, preparing for war on American soil against THE GOVERNMENT and anyone who worked for it--IRS agents, game wardens, ATF agents--anyone above the county level was considered fair game.  There was bountiful information out there--this was before the Internet was as ubiquitous as it is now, and before FOX news, mind you, or even Glenn Beck on TV--on how to stockpile and bury weapons and ammunition, how to make your own bazooka at home, how to form your own militia, how to hoard food and gold, home-school your children, form an underground railroad to keep felons away from law enforcement, how to make explosives, and so on.

Rhetoric was hate-filled and the Clintons, who were in office, were the devil and Satan's spawn, and there was no rumor, no myth, no lie unbelievable enough about them that it would not be circulated with absolute certainty.  They--and anyone who worked for them--were evil.

All that whole year I had this horrible nameless, shapeless dread that something terrible was going to happen, and I begged my conservative family and friends to tone down their rhetoric on the Clintons and other things but nobody would listen to me.  Everybody thought I was being silly.

Until they arrested Timothy McVeigh.

And he gave his name, rank, and serial number.

And the feds showed him the dead babies and he shrugged and said, "Collateral damage."

After that, everything seemed to settle down a little bit.  People stopped screaming about war all the time.  Ken Starr insisted that the Clintons didn't really murder Vince Foster.  The president got impeached but they couldn't throw him out of office. And then a Republican got put in the White House and everybody on the right was happy and they REALLY shut up.  After 9/11, they were quiet because then they had a REAL enemy to hate and fear.

So you could go to work at the IRS and not fear for your life.

Until Barack Obama, anyway.  And now, here we go again.

And again, I am begging my conservative family and friends to tone down the hate rhetoric and all they do is say that we did the same thing during the anti-war demonstrations and I call BULLSHIT.

We had, what? Cindy Sheehan?  Code Pink?

It has been FORTY YEARS since there has been ANYTHING on the left anywhere NEAR comparable to what we see on the right--nowhere on the left do we see stockpiling of weapons and ammo, explosives and militias and talk of civil war.

NOWHERE.

Even during the height of the protests against the Iraq war, NOBODY talked about seceding from the union--ESPECIALLY FROM THE OFFICE OF A STATE GOVERNOR.

NOBODY from the Democratic party stepped out on the balcony of Congress and egged on anti-war demonstrations and went out into the crowd and waved their own flags at them, the way we've seen the right wing do their crowds during the final debate of the health care reform rallies.

NOBODY from MSNBC called out anti-war rallies, organized them, raised funds for them, covered them exhaustively all day long, cheer-led for them, and started an entire political movement based on them, the way FOX news has done the anti-government Tea Party rallies.

NOBODY from the political left attended a George W. Bush rally wearing EXPOSED FIRE ARMS and holding up signs quoting the same T-shirt Tim McVeigh was wearing the day he bombed the Murrah building, about how the tree of liberty has to be watered with the blood of tyrants.

So please, conservative friends, don't tell me it's the same thing.

I have been down this road before, and it's not the same thing.  And you know it.

Tonight, on MSNBC, at 9 p.m., 8 p.m. central, Rachel Maddow is hosting a program called, The McVeigh Tapes: Confessions of an American Tyrant.

For the first time in history, we will be hearing Timothy McVeigh's own words.  Although he never spoke to prosecutors, he hand-picked a couple of reporters from Buffalo, New York, and he spoke to them for more than 40 hours, in detail, about exactly what he did, how, and why.

MSNBC has boiled those tapes down to an hour-long broadcast, and has done a re-enactment of the crime.

What is particularly chilling, from this writer's point of view, is that the words he uses so enthusiastically to present his thoroughly unrepentant story, are the very same words we hear at these rallies today: anti-government, words of war, words of arming to fight, words of extremist hatred against a nameless, faceless "government" foe.

Just this weekend, for example, at a rally in South Carolina, here are a couple of quotes that were put up on video right here at TPM:

"Pastor Stan Craig, of the Choice Hills Baptist Church, was particularly angry about the state of Washington, saying he "was trained to defend the liberties of this nation." He declared that he was prepared to "suit up, get my gun, go to Washington, and do what they trained me to do."

and

"Dan Gonzales, who Chairs the Constitution Party in Florida, asserted that "this is the end of America right here," and if the Tea Partiers "don't get to work we're going to be fighting in the streets."


The worst I ever heard any liberal say during the heaviest fighting in Iraq and the worst outrages of the Bush administration was that they might move out of the country.

MOVE.  Not FIGHT IN THE STREETS.

As President Clinton pointed out so beautifully in an op-ed today in the New York Times, the people McVeigh murdered on April 19, 1995 were not nameless, faceless GOVERNMENT:

"Most of the people killed that day were employees of the federal government. They were men and women who had devoted their careers to helping the elderly and disabled, supporting our veterans and enforcing our laws. They were good neighbors and good friends. One of them, a Secret Service agent named Al Whicher, a husband and father of three, had been on my presidential security detail. Nineteen children also lost their lives."

He also said:

"Finally, we should never forget what drove the bombers, and how they justified their actions to themselves. They took to the ultimate extreme an idea advocated in the months and years before the bombing by an increasingly vocal minority: the belief that the greatest threat to American freedom is our government, and that public servants do not protect our freedoms, but abuse them. On that April 19, the second anniversary of the assault of the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, deeply alienated and disconnected Americans decided murder was a blow for liberty.

"Americans have more freedom and broader rights than citizens of almost any other nation in the world, including the capacity to criticize their government and their elected officials. But we do not have the right to resort to violence -- or the threat of violence -- when we don't get our way. Our founders constructed a system of government so that reason could prevail over fear. Oklahoma City proved once again that without the law there is no freedom."

Yes, that is the KEY.

President Obama is not a TYRANT.  He was ELECTED president by 69 MILLION PEOPLE.

When disgruntled losers--meaning, Republicans and Tea Partiers (who are Republicans) whose candidates lost--throw rallies in which they carry guns and threatening signs, and when elected members of congress receive death threats for casting votes they disagree with--THAT is tyranny!

They are THREATENING my freedom when they threaten my elected representatives with violence because they are not getting their way. 

It is mob rule.

You can't tell me a single "founding father" ever postulated such a thing.

Clinton writes:

"Criticism is part of the lifeblood of democracy. No one is right all the time. But we should remember that there is a big difference between criticizing a policy or a politician and demonizing the government that guarantees our freedoms and the public servants who enforce our laws.

"We are again dealing with difficulties in a contentious, partisan time. We are more connected than ever before, more able to spread our ideas and beliefs, our anger and fears. As we exercise the right to advocate our views, and as we animate our supporters, we must all assume responsibility for our words and actions before they enter a vast echo chamber and reach those both serious and delirious, connected and unhinged.

"Civic virtue can include harsh criticism, protest, even civil disobedience. But not violence or its advocacy. That is the bright line that protects our freedom. It has held for a long time, since President George Washington called out 13,000 troops in response to the Whiskey Rebellion.

"Fifteen years ago, the line was crossed in Oklahoma City. In the current climate, with so many threats against the president, members of Congress and other public servants, we owe it to the victims of Oklahoma City, and those who survived and responded so bravely, not to cross it again."

Yes.  Oklahoma City, where 168 empty chairs stand to commemorate lost souls who will never sit in them again.  At night, those chairs glow like stars, up to the heavens.

Do we really want to turn back that clock?

Understand, as liberals and progressives, we are not immune to hate talk and paranoia.  I hear it all the time in comment sections on blogs and Facebook.  As a Marine mom from a military family, you would not believe what I sometimes hear from dedicated "peace activists" who call my son (who is no longer active duty) a murderer and worse.

The hate-rhetoric can cut both ways, and it needs to be toned down, because all it takes is one John Hinkley, one Tim McVeigh, one lonely irrational seething hater to be provoked, to be VALIDATED by what he hears on the blogosphere and on talk-radio and TV.

But I gotta say, it's worse on the right-wing, and what frustrates me the most is that so many of them refuse to take responsibility for it.

However, I would be remiss and unfair if I refused to give a nod to those who DO. 

In his piece, "Tone Down the Hatefulness in Politics," Michael Gerson  called out Sarah Palin, Gov. Bob McDonnell, and others, as well as some liberals who were hard on Bush (to be fair)--but I like what he says here:

"The most basic test of democracy is not what people do when they win; it is what people do when they lose. Citizens bring their deepest passions to a public debate -- convictions they regard as morally self-evident. Yet a war goes on. Abortion remains legal. A feared health-reform law passes. Democracy means the possibility of failure. While no democratic judgment is final -- and citizens should continue to work to advance their ideals -- respecting the temporary outcome of a democratic process is the definition of political maturity.

"The opposite -- questioning the legitimacy of a democratic outcome; abusing, demeaning and attempting to silence one's opponents -- is a sign of democratic decline. From the late Roman republic to Weimar Germany, these attitudes have been the prelude to thuggery. Thugs can come with clubs, with bullhorns, with Internet access.

He mentioned, too, how Sen. Tom Coburn has been attacked by conservatives for saying that Nancy Pelosi was a nice lady.  And added, "I don't hate President Barack Obama.  There.  I've said it."

In the second column she wrote after winning the Pulitzer Prize, conservative columnist Kathleen Parker zeroed in on, "What Americans Can Do to Discourage Future McVeighs."

Like Gerson, she, too, took issue with Sarah Palin's gunsights over Democratic congresspeople's districts and the language of "reloading."

"Words matter," she says, and she knows whereof she speaks.  During the '08 campaign, she wrote a column in which she dared to say that Sarah Palin was not qualified to be vice-president, much less president.  In return, she was flooded with some 12,000 e-mails, most of them hate-filled vitriol, and not a few death threats--all from conservatives--which unnerved her to such an extent that she wrote, "Dixie Chicks, I hear ya."

In fact, she quotes the following e-mail she received recently:

"Sorry, honey, but we don't need the squishy middle right now. We need the hyper patriots, the combat vets ready to defend the constitution with arms if necessary."

--and goes on to add:

"The distance between such thinking and recent examples of overt hostility seems too little. In this space, the unthinkable becomes plausible. "

She lays out the responsibility of the press, as she sees it, at such times:

"The challenge for all, but especially the media, is to find a balance between vigilance and restraint. How do we expose the unhinged without emboldening them with attention? Inevitably, the lone operator hears his own name summoned from the crowd.

"The only palatable answer is what conservatives say they love best: self-control and personal responsibility. When someone spews obscenities, shout them down. When politicians and pundits use inflammatory language, condemn them.

"When you choose to remain silent, consider yourself complicit in whatever transpires."

These voices of reason--more of whom speak out almost daily on the left--need to keep speaking out, and we need to continue the drumbeat here at home, to our family and our friends. 

When we get viral e-mails spewing hatred from a right-wing family member or friend, it would be wise to refrain from a screaming match in return.  Rather, simply snopes.com it and send them the refutation.  Just let them see that it is inaccurate or misinformation.  It will simply deflate their angry red balloon.  They won't always admit it or get back to you, but they will see, in time, that somebody, somewhere is making fools of them by continuing to send this garbage to them, just to provoke.

Answering the hatred, rage, and paranoia with more of your own only fans the flames and gives them more of what they seem to want, which is provocation.

And even when we agree with each other, we should be careful with our speech, I think.  It's not necessary to use some of the words of violence that I sometimes encounter even among people I consider peace-loving.

We need to all sit back, take a deep breath, and remember April 19, 1995.

Because there is nothing we have to say that is worth that.

Governor Bob McDonnell of Virginia was perplexed.

He couldn't understand what all the hubbub was about.  After all, the proclamation of Confederate History Month in the state of Virginia was strictly intended to enhance the study of history and to promote tourism in the state.

What could be so wrong about that?

Everybody likes tourism, don't they?

After all, it's the 150th anniversary since the start of the War of Northern Aggression, which everybody knows was fought for things like state sovereignty and things of that nature, and this was just to honor the sacrifices of our brave boys in gray.  So what's the big deal.

He had fully expected the liberals to get their panties in a twist because they get upset about everything anyway but he didn't expect the whole damn world to get all frothy at the mouth.  After all, this had been a tradition going on...what...13 years now, not counting the years a Democrat was in the statehouse...a fine old tradition, and Virginia thrives on tradition.

Just because he forgot to mention slavery.

He thought he made it clear to the Washington Post when he said that he had not included slavery because, "there were any number of aspects to that conflict between the states. Obviously, it involved slavery. It involved other issues. But I focused on the ones I thought were most significant for Virginia."

Then people got all in an uproar because they thought he didn't think slavery was significant.

So, Gov. McDonnell thought he needed to write a letter to explain the omission, you know, to explain better why he forgot to mention the slaves.

Here's how the letter went:

"To the former slaves of Virginia and your descendents:

"I am sorry I forgot to mention you in my proclamation about Confederate History Month.  It was not my intention to offend you.

"The thing is, we always overlooked the slaves.  It's because we didn't think of them as people.  We didn't even really think of them as property.  When it came to field hands, we thought of them as machinery.  You know, like a good combine, or a good thresher.  Cotton-pickers.  That kind of thing.  The slaves were there to provide the massive agricultural industry that enriched our coffers and built our mansions and made us fat and wealthy.

"This is why we didn't think of you when we put together the history books.

"And like, in the house?  We would pick the ones who were the most physically attractive and the best-spoken, but even then, they were supposed to be unobtrusive.  NO SASS!  They were supposed to wait on us, see.  Quietly, in the background.  Fan us in the sweltering Southern heat.  Cook our food in the suffocating kitchens located separately from the big house so the rest of the house wouldn't get so hot.  They were even supposed to nurse the babies for our Southern ladies who were too delicate for such a demanding task.

"And if the Southern gentlemen wanted to, they could grab up a pretty slave girl and have their way with her any time they pleased, and if she got pregnant or otherwise embarrassed the family, she and/or her baby could be sold, or he could just be shipped off to school and nobody would be the wiser. 

"These things were always handled in just this quiet Southern way, you see.  So, surely you can understand how it is that it just slipped my mind, that whole slavery thing?  I mean, we're just used to not thinking about such unpleasantness.

"We keep insisting that the War Between the States WAS NOT ABOUT SLAVERY and that many of our Southern leaders opposed it, but the truth of the matter is that, without slavery, we could not have maintained our economy and, in fact, we did not.  It collapsed. Took almost a century to rebuild and still has some of the biggest pockets of poverty in the whole country.

"I mean, you can not run those great big plantations by paying field hands for labor you used to get, basically, for free.  Even Scarlett O'Hara, after the war, wound up making her fortune by using prison labor, when slavery was no longer an option to her.

"So anyway, like I was saying.  Here in the South, we just sometimes forget all about that slavery thing because, well, we're just not used to thinking about it in that way.

"I mean, to us, it was commerce, see?  Surely you can understand.

"Like...tourism.

"So, as you can see.  I'm sorry and everything, but I really don't get all the fuss.  I really don't.

"Sincerely,
"Governor Bob McDonnell, Republican, Virginia, Confederate State of America"

Next month my husband, "the educated cowboy," as he's known in his family, and I will be celebrating our 36th wedding anniversary.  Sometimes friends or family members who've been divorced--occasionally more than once--ask how it is that we've managed to stay married, and happily so, all that time. 

And one of the things I mention is that, at least for me, the man continues to surprise me.

Not to brag or anything, but I've been known to have a certain mental agility from time to time and a lesser man would bore me, frankly.  And, I'm a pretty tough old broad, to tell the truth, and a weaker man would let me push him around, so I wouldn't have as much respect for him as I do my husband.  Not that I put up with any crap, mind you.  The Mills men are all--as I've mentioned before--combat vets (some are career military)--and are masculine men; and every one of them is married to a strong woman, and has been, for the duration.

I like to say that we never use the "D" word in our house.  We have, however, been known to use the "M" word from time to time.  (In other words, if Tammy Wynette had sung a song called M-U-R-D-E-R, I might've bought it.)

It's with this in mind that I've been watching what's been taking place with the health care reform bill, this president, our party, politics in general, and of course, the ever brilliant and prescient political punditry--you know, those people who all said Hillary would be president. 

And the ones who said that President Obama couldn't possibly concentrate on more than one thing at a time once he WAS in the White House. 

Which probably explains why he signed the health care reform bill on a Tuesday afternoon, met with Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel in the White House Tuesday night, finalized a nuclear arms reduction bill with President Medvedev of Russia on Thursday, and gave a speech to the troops in Afghanistan on Sunday--all in one week.

One thing at a time.

And the ones who said, back in January, that health care reform was dead, done for, over, end of story.  Thirty, as they say in journalism.  Or used to, back when they HAD journalism.

Soooo, right NOW, the pundits are predicting that this horrible health care reform bill that the whole country must apparently hate because that's what the conservatives keep telling us, are going to vote out the Democrats in massive numbers--maybe even turn over the House and Senate to Republican control (!)--and man the first thing they're gonna DO is repeal that horrible health care reform bill baby.

And the long and terrible nightmare of Barack Obama will be over because the subtext--unspoken but clear--is that the NEXT two years will be spent shutting down his presidency once and for all and insuring that he is not re-elected (can anyone spell Jimmy Carter???) and/or finding some way, some how that they can impeach him because that is what they do when they can't be in power absolutely.

That's the plan, Stan.  Get it?  Got it?  Good.

Only...not so fast.

Because there are more than a few little glitches in that outdated roadmap.

For one thing, I hate to break it to these mostly white-haired pundit-people, the same ones who were already going gray in the Clinton years, but as much as they may believe it, this country is no longer "center-right."

In fact, if anything, it's pretty much "center."  And if you wanna know the truth of it, yeah, it's pretty much starting to lean left.  If you've got any doubt about that, just follow the trajectory of the gays-in-the-military debate from the 80's through the 90's until now, and do it generationally.

Speaking of generations, let's take a look at the changing demographics of this country, period.  It's a pretty poorly-kept secret that the reason the Tea Baggers are so predominantly white and over-50 is that they fear the changing demographics of this country, as Frank Rich pointed out in today's New York Times:

The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House -- topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman -- would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It's not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver -- none of them major Democratic players in the health care push -- received a major share of last weekend's abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan "Take our country back!," these are the people they want to take the country back from.

They can't. Demographics are avatars of a change bigger than any bill contemplated by Obama or Congress. The week before the health care vote, The Times reported that births to Asian, black and Hispanic women accounted for 48 percent of all births in America in the 12 months ending in July 2008. By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven't had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded.

.
The point is that, as much media attention as this group has garnered, the truth is that they don't really represent the majority of Americans, as much as FOX news may want America to believe that they do.  They represent a small angry sliver of Americans that, frankly, is dying out. 

They don't represent America's future.

By shackling themselves to this movement, the Republican Party has, in effect, shackled itself to the past, more effectively than any other way.  Young people Googling or YouTubing or Jon Stewarting a brief bit of news will not see anything in that bunch that will make them want to join up and become activists.

By some accounts, as many as 42% of the American electorate right now identifies themselves as Independents.  This is because so many of them have gotten disgruntled with the Republican party that they have fled in droves, but they are not yet ready to register as Democrats.  This means they are up for grabs and could be folded back into the old party.

But the GOP is not doing itself any favors.  Take, for example, it's brilliant strategy to block unemployment benefits as Time magazine puts it, not just once, but TWICE:

In the wake of their health care defeat, Republicans in Washington would be wise to remember one famous definition of insanity as repeating the same behavior again and again but expecting different results. After all, there's hardly a politico in Washington, Republican or Democrat, who thinks Senator Jim Bunning's one-man filibuster of unemployment benefits last month reflected well on the GOP. So why are Senate Republicans doing it again?
And if that weren't smart enough, what with all the projects that ground to a halt the last time, such as highway construction and other major state government employment projects forced to lay off workers while Jim Bunning sunned himself in front of the kleig lights--this big idea of stopping work at two p.m. every day is yet another stroke of genius, because, ultimately, it had nothing to do with health care reform and everything to do with making them look like IDIOTS:

Burr used a parliamentary maneuver to derail an Armed Services Committee hearing for which commanders had traveled from South Korea and Hawaii to discuss the Pentagon's needs for the next year.

It was one of several hearings on issues ranging from homeless veterans to police trainers in Afghanistan that were upturned by Republican tactics to slow the workings of the Senate.

Meanwhile, the over-the-top incendiary rhetoric coming from sitting congressmen ("Armageddon," "clear and present danger," "deadly enemy within"), and violence from Tea Partiers (hangman's nooses and coffins sent to congressmen, death threats, bricks through windows)--this is not the kind of behavior or talk that appeals to centrist Independents.

It's scary.  It's RIDICULOUS.

And they know it. 

In fact, it appears that most Americans respond well to a calm, intelligent demeanor, a sense of humor, and strength, which could explain why the ONE person who has emerged the strongest, with the biggest jump in poll numbers, is the very man who the GOP has portrayed as a "clear and present danger" to this country, a socialist, a Marxist, Hitler, a tyrannical ruler bent on totalitarian control of the population...

It seems that the vast, overwhelming majority of the American people AREN'T LISTENING:

Several recent polls, conducted after the House vote Sunday night, show that public support for Obama's efforts on reform have jumped, and that he has re-endeared himself to his Democratic base.

A USA Today/Gallup poll released yesterday showed that the public thought that Obama did the best job when it came health care reform. Forty-six percent of respondents to the poll said he did an "excellent or good job" on reform over the past year. That was significantly higher than either the Democrats in Congress (32% said they did an excellent/good job) or the GOP on Capitol Hill (26%).

In other words, the GOP is listening only to THEIR OWN ECHO CHAMBER, which is comprised of FOX news, Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, the Drudge Report and conservative news websites and blogs.  They have trained themselves to believe that any and all mainstream news outlets are "liberal" and therefore NOT TO BE TRUSTED and so, they only believe the canned news that is presented to them on their own canned news networks--and of course, those viral e-mails.

Consequently, they believe their own canned news.

And they are flat-out stunned to find that the rest of the country just ain't buying it.  In fact, they keep going on all the news programs, repeating over and over again, how much the country hates this legislation, when, in reality, it really doesn't.

When you add the percentage of progressives who didn't like this health care legislation because IT WASN'T LIBERAL ENOUGH, meaning, it wasn't single-payer or it didn't offer the public option, with those who DID like it, you came up with a majority who DID like the legislation, a little fact overlooked by just about every news network out there, so used to spouting the conservative line are they.

There are other little factoids coming to light.

Like...how the Republicans were for it before they were against it:

Republicans were for President Barack Obama's requirement that Americans get health insurance before they were against it.

The obligation in the new health care law is a Republican idea that's been around at least two decades. It was once trumpeted as an alternative to Bill and Hillary Clinton's failed health care overhaul in the 1990s. These days, Republicans call it government overreach.

All these things combined create an atmosphere that is very favorable to Democrats.  Put in simplistic terms, Americans like gutsy moves.  They like people who stand up for their principles.  They like winners.

And, frankly, they like the individual components of this health care reform package.  As time passes, they will come to like it more and more, and they will come to see, more and more, that the heated rhetoric comes nowhere near to fitting the reality, at which time the Republicans will look worse and worse, especially as they move closer and closer to embracing their Tea Party lunatic fringe and further and further away from the moderate (read: sane) center.

So, how do we make the Honeymoon of last week last?

First of all, the Bridegroom himself is key, as was pointed out so beautifully in the British-run publication, the Financial Times, in a piece by Edward Luce, "America: The Recovery Position."

He pointed out that, to foreign governments, Obama already looks more powerful, just by achieving this difficult victory here at home.  In fact, in other articles as well, it's been pointed out that Russian president Medvedev thought for a while there that he could push Obama around on the arms control treaty they were negotiating, and tested his boundaries with the new American president--and found to his surprise that that was not the case.  It is perhaps no surprise to foreign observers that the final deal was struck after Obama signed the health care reform bill in the United States.

To his own party, as well, Obama seemed to reach his stride in this battle, after seeming to drift for some months.  Some thought he left too much to congress and the senate, some thought he tried too hard for bipartisanship.  Some thought he needed the wake-up call of the Scott Brown takeover of Senator Kennedy's seat in Massachusetts.  Whatever the catalyst, the man came out fighting, and cannot be faulted for either his tireless efforts behind the scenes (Robert Gibbs says he personally phoned 94 senators or congresspeople), or his crisscrossing stemwinding speeches to the country, or his smackdown to Republicans on-camera and in their faces.

But there's another way to look at this.

In another piece for Financial Times (subscription necessary, but free), "Obama Throws Out the Political Rules," by Clive Cook, he points out that since the Republicans won the PR battle through fear, misinformation, and hate-mongering (okay, I added that last part; he just said they won the PR part), then the health care reform package was politically unpopular at the time it was passed:

A year ago there were two scenarios for healthcare reform. One was that the Democrats would carry a willing public with them and pass a comprehensive bill. Another was that opinion would cool, forcing the Democrats to settle for less. What happened was extraordinarily unlikely: the public turned against the Democrats' proposal and the party went ahead and did it anyway.

In Europe, rule by a political class that tells voters what is good for them is an idea so familiar that it is quite taken for granted. In the United States it is novel, and not instantly welcome.

Between now and November, Democrats must persuade the country that they acted in its best interests when they overrode the public's doubts. If they succeed and retain their majorities in Congress they will have a green light to advance their wider aims, which include tax reform, labour relations, energy and industrial policies. They will conclude that Clintonism, with its submission to centrist opinion, was an error: they will have learned that they can capture and move centrist opinion. But if voters punish their arrogance, their momentum will be stopped. US policy will be set on a very different course.

He goes on to say that the vile rhetoric of the Republicans is a mistake, because centrist Independents don't like it, and that furthermore, all this talk about repeal merely sounds like so much whining unless they've got a solid health care reform package of their own to replace it with--and we all know they don't.

However--and this would come second to the Bridegroom (call it the work-part of marriage)--he says that Dems need to take care and not get too carried away with the celebrations. 

We've still got to implement this thing, and as Jonathan Cohn points out, that is going to be the hard part.

If we can start getting the putting-into-place right, we WILL start looking like geniuses.

And we have to not just "deliver the deliverables, as Cohn puts it, but we have to EDUCATE THE PUBLIC that the deliverables are out there to be delivered.  Some benefits drop into place in three months, some in six.  Some right away.  Some not for four years.  As Democrats, we need to educate ourselves to these basics and make sure our family and friends--especially those opposed to this plan--know what they are.

They might find themselves less opposed than they thought.

For instance, I was able to send this article to everybody in my family who has served or knows anyone who has, from Stars and Stripes, (completely trusted source to conservatives) that reassures active-duty military and veterans that their health care benefits will not be affected by the health care reform bill.

My brother, a conservative Republican and evangelical Christian who teaches at a private Christian school and who is a retired Chief Warrant Officer from the army, wrote to thank me.

There are other reasons Democrats have to be optimistic in 2010.

As Dylan Loewe writes, it's not just that the GOP is self-destructing, it is that there are things working in our favor. 

Even so, right now, there are some things over which nobody--not even Barack Obama--has any control.

The economy.  Jobs.

However, new job loss hemorrhaging seems to have stopped.  It has not yet turned around, but it has stopped.  There are signs of recovery in the economy but they are small and most people don't feel them yet in their pocketbooks.  People are still frightened and the Republicans smell that blood in the water and love nothing better than to throw red meat in and call the sharks to heighten the fear level to panic.

The ugly anger of the Tea Partiers is the flip-side of that panic, since many of the Tea Partiers themselves have been laid off and--irony of ironies--draw unemployment, social security, or veteran's benefits while they go to the protests and scream about government programs and demand lower taxes and FEWER government programs; and that health insurance reform (designed to help just those people who ARE laid off) be "killed"--is egged on and fueled by the GOP rhetoric in hopes of drawing their money and votes.

But as Loewe points out in his piece, the unintended consequences of this may be the "Ross Perot effect"--Tea Partiers drawing votes to the rightest-right-winger and away from the regular Republican candidate, thus throwing the election to the Democratic opponent.

In other words, the plan the Republican Party has to harness the Tea Partiers may be like a cowboy trying to rope a rattlesnake.

Go ahead.  Try it.  They look mean--downright poisonous--and you think you can use them against your enemy, right?

I'll sit over here, out of the way, and watch.

Now, speaking of cowboys.

Back when I first married mine, I was a city girl.  I grew up in a major metropolitan area.  I had never been west of Fort Worth.  In fact, come to think of it, I'd never been to Fort Worth.

I'd never been ten feet from a cow.

And I married a man who was living on a ranch at the time where land was measured by the SQUARE MILE.  It was, in fact, a three mile drive to the MAILBOX.

The nearest small town was 20 miles away, the nearest mall, 100 miles away.  My home city was 300 miles away and my mama a good 500.

It was a lot like moving to the moon, as far as I was concerned.

And I found out later that the pundits--if that's what you'd like to call the "wedding guests"--had taken bets at the wedding that I wouldn't last six months before I went crying back home to my mama.  Or, at least, back to a mall.

Looks like they were wrong, too.

What amazes me about the punditry when it comes to Barack Obama is how, first of all, they are so unapologetic.  Wrong time and time again, they keep prognosticating and they keep being wrong and they don't even bat an eyelash about it.  They just keep on spouting off like they've got a right!

What do you have to do to get fired in that town???

Now they're all predicting a bloodbath for the Democrats in November and a lame-duck Obama for the last two years of his Carteresque presidency.

They say that even as he has had the single most successful first year of just about any president in our history, or at least, in the past 70 years, especially when you consider the fact that he has had NO cooperation from half of his congress or senate.

So...go ahead on, you dumbasses.  Keep on predicting his doom and our gloom.  It only emboldens the Republicans and gives them reason to crow while they're marching naked down the street and you are ooohing and aaahhing at their finery.

Meanwhile, we Democrats and our president are busy over here, governing, making our "marriage" work. Sometimes he surprises us too, but in a good way.  Mostly we're working for the same thing, to make this country better for everybody, not just the top 2%.

Most of the American people have figured that out.  Someday it will dawn on you guys, too.

But then, I can't really blame you.  Most of you probably don't even know what a good marriage really looks like, anyway.

A brief encounter I had on a social networking site that triggered an over-reaction in me, emotionally, because it brought back a flood of bad memories and distressing feelings I thought I had processed already in a thoroughly grown-up way and put behind me, got me to thinking about something far more crucial that lies behind the headlines you see about all this faux-populist "rage" everybody is supposed to be feeling these days.

It's about something I think most people are missing.  It's about what I see as the real deficit this country is facing right now, and it's an important one if we want to regain the kind of energy that can put us on the path to real recovery, not just economically, but in other, less measurable, ways.

They say that when you have been through a traumatic event, a simple, sometimes small thing, can trigger an outsized emotional response because it can bring back a flood of memories that can plunge you into a real-time re-living of that event.  This happens to victims of post traumatic stress disorder all the time, and they don't even have to have severe cases of it when, say, they have been to war.

Ask a combat veteran you know, for instance, if he or she truly enjoys going to Fourth of July fireworks celebrations.  The crowds.  The noise.  The fireworks themselves.  Most of them can do it and, especially if they have small children, will do it, but that does not mean that they are comfortable there.

Or, say, someone who has been through a bad divorce; ask them if there is a certain song they hope never to have to hear again.  Or an aftershave or perfume that can trigger a flood of memories both good and bad. 

In my case, in a discussion over health care, someone commented that, it was wonderful how, "the harder you work, the better life you have."

And I said, "It's not true that the harder you work, the better life you have.  I worked very hard for 15 years at a career I loved and I lost it through no fault of my own.  In this country right now people are losing their jobs and getting laid off through no fault of theirs, and they can't find jobs.  They're losing their health care, and they're scared."

And a conservative young man who is not one of my own "friends" but who has expressed contempt for the "liberal" point of view before in general and mine in particular, said this:

"'It is not true that the harder you work the better life you have.'  Oh brother, another victim.  I need to hear this back story.  I would have offed myself if I thought I didn't have any control over my life.  Listen to some Tony Robbins Deanie.."

A snarky, snotty remark.  A little thing.  Not even on one of my blogposts or on a political website but on a social networking site among friends.  The thing is, in that particular discussion, I had not even been arguing policy with anyone.  I'd simply been answering a question someone asked about veteran's benefits because I come from a military family and most people don't understand how the VA works.

And I suppose if I'd been thinking clearly I could have provided him with a back story because I'd written about it previously.

Instead, that one nasty little comment by a conservative young man out of the blue triggered in me such a flood of emotion that I was just smacked down by it; instantly transported back  years to the day my literary agent had called to tell me that my publisher, who had paid $75,000 for my previous book, with foreign sales pushing it well past six figures, was now offering a meager $5,000 for my latest, and was renigging on bringing out my next contracted manuscript as a hardcover but was instead bringing it out as a paperback original.

All because Timothy McVeigh bombed the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City--it's a long story.

That phone call had set off a ten-year odyssey of Hurculean struggle as I did everything I could possibly think of to salvage my career--changing agents, changing publishers, changing genres, writing under pseudonyms, writing with partners, without partners, writing fiction and non-fiction--you name it, I did it.  Having 10 previously published books did not shield me from collecting rejections after rejection while the creditors called and I filled out student loan forms in a desperate attempt to make sure my kids got to stay in school until they graduated.  (They did, but both owed student loans.)

I'll never forget the day I sat down from my accountant and told him that, for the first time in 20 years of being in the writing business, I had no income to report for that year.

That one quick snap of a few fingerstrokes on a keyboard by that young man made me feel about six inches tall, as if he were laughing at me, making fun of my heartache and pain, belittling my struggle. It made me feel defensive, it made me want to EXPLAIN about what it's like to be over-50 in this job market, to live in a town of less than 10,000 people 100 miles from the nearest shopping mall fer chrissake, with crappy health, (which was the reason I started to write in the first place, so I could work from a home office), to do the best you can and STILL, it's not good enough.

I wanted to talk to him about the nature of grief, about how when you lose a career that you love so much, it is like a death in the family; it is like a death of SELF, because you lose a part of yourself--you lose who you were when you were at your best.  It wasn't just what I did, it was WHO I WAS.

It was a loss I have not been able to recover.  I go to Amazon.com and my books, some of them anyway, go for a penny now.  Soon you won't be able to find them at all.  If I want to write another one, as people urge me to do, chances are, I will have to invest the money to publish it myself, and take the loss if I can't market and sell it properly--a risk I'm not sure we can afford at this point in our lives.

It's relatively easy to start over when you are in your 20's.  Not so much 30 years later.

I'm going into all this detail about my personal life not because I love self-confession but because I believe my story is taking place all over this country now; in factories and computer software companies and newspaper offices and small businesses that have closed up shop.  I read somewhere, for instance, that local and regional television news stations are laying off their oldest anchors because they are the most expensive.  So you've got 50-something news anchors being laid off from small markets after giving, say, 20 years to them.  Many of them have settled in those small towns; they don't necessarily make THAT much money, comparatively.

What now?

There is very real fear out there right now, very real despair, especially if you're over 50.

And yet, in our zeal to be RIGHT in a given argument, in our snarky desire--no matter what side of the political spectrum--we ignore that very real suffering just beneath the surface, and we go for the jugular, man.  We want to draw blood.

I read that a man called into Rush Limbaugh's show.  He'd broken his wrist and owed thousands in medical bills and didn't know what he was going to do without health insurance.

Rush said, "You shouldn't have broken your wrist."

Funny.

I'll pass that one along to my sister.  She's a Republican.  A conservative.  She'll get a big kick out of that. 

OR MAYBE NOT.

See, couple of years ago, on an icy morning, she stepped out her back door juggling a brief case and papers on her way to work, slipped and fell and broke her wrist.  Had to have emergency surgery.  Pins all over the place.  A huge Medieval contraption on the thing looked like a torture device.

She showed her veteran's card at the emergency room and they said the VA would cover it, but then later, she got a bill for $64,000.

Well hell.  She just shouldn't have broken her wrist.

Could this have something to do with the fact that my sister VOTED FOR OBAMA?

Right-wingers are laughing at the letters Democrats read at the president's health care reform summit, like the one where the woman was so desperate that she was forced to wear her dead sister's dentures because she couldn't afford the dental care to get her own teeth.

Funny.

Here's the thing.

Here's the REAL deficit we've got going in this country right now.

It's a deficit of COMPASSION.  It's a deficit of COMMON HUMAN DECENCY.

The right-wing, especially, likes to claim some sort of monopoly on Christianity in this country, like they own Jesus.

But I don't think Jesus would have laughed at the woman forced to wear her dead sister's teeth.

When my sister was crying because she couldn't dress herself or go to the bathroom without help, I don't think Jesus would have mocked her and said, "Maybe you shouldn't have broken your wrist."

When people in this country lose work they love and are good at, and lose the income, and lose health care and fear losing their homes or worry that their kids will have to quit college, I don't think Jesus would make fun of them for being "victims" and demand "the back story" while sniping that they should "listen to some Tony Robbins."

Maybe I'm too hard on the conservatives here, because I have seen it on our side, too.  It's part of the rage and the snark and the snottiness.  Everybody so quick to type out something hateful and nasty in order to be clever or right.

There are times I've lost my temper, times I'm sure I've said things I shouldn't have, too.

How much time would it take to type out something like this:

"Well, I'm so sorry about what happened to you.  I know that right now a lot of people are hurting, but I must respectfully disagree on what role the government should play in helping to restore their livelihoods to them."

Rush?

How hard would it be to say something like,

"Man, that's a tough break on your wrist.  It really is, and I'm sorry, but I just don't agree that it's the taxpayer's responsibility to provide ANY health care coverage options for the uninsured."

(I'm not saying I agree with Rush, just that you don't have to mock the man's pain.)

The thing is, I AM  a tough broad, and I have a loving, supportive family.  Eventually, I talked to them about the funk I was in and how stupid I felt for feeling stupid.  Because they love me, they gave me more sympathy than I deserved, most likely, and they made me feel better.

But it's not me I'm worried about.  There are so many people out there who are desperate, afraid, alone, and hurting.  And when you lose a job or a home or your status in the community (which matters a lot more to some people than it ever did to me), or your financial well-being--you tend to withdraw.

You are raw, vulnerable.  You feel like a failure even if you know, intellectually, that it's not your fault.

Those people who worked at Worldcom and Enron, for example.  They knew it was not their fault that they lost their life savings when those businesses went under, but they blamed themselves for somehow not KNOWING.  It's human nature.  It's natural.  And you just feel lousy.

And a silly little trigger on a silly little place like FaceBook or MySpace or Twitter can do a tremendous amount of damage to someone who is in that position.

You don't know, when you're sitting their at your keyboard back-and-forthing with someone. 

They could be suicidal.  Why would you make fun of their vulnerability?  What have you to gain from it?

What have ANY OF US to gain from this constant hatefulness?

It doesn't take any more time to be kind.  It doesn't take any time at all to imagine how the other person feels.

The best moment in the president's health care reform summit was when he was talking to Republican Senator John Barrasso from Wyoming, a former surgeon, who was going on about "health care savings accounts" and "catastrophic insurance."  The senator kept talking about how cost-effective it was because people wouldn't get health care unless they absolutely had to because it would be too expensive.  He even allowed, when prompted, as how that might work for all of congress.

Then Obama asked, "Would you feel that way if you made $40,000 a year?"

I was watching then.  It's one thing to read about that, as I have done in several op-eds, but you had to be watching.  The senator was literally stymied for an answer, because I daresay, that as a surgeon, it had been so many years since he had earned such a puny amount that he simply could not wrap his mind around the figure in time to give an answer.

Yes, if you earn that amount and you are raising a family with two kids, and you are paying a mortgage and car payments, and both of you are working outside the home--man, you can barely afford a doctor's visit.

Shoot, I can remember a time when our kids were babies and my husband was training horses and we didn't have health insurance, the local small-town country doctor would have Kent come out and take care of his cows for him.  In trade, he would encourage me to bring the kids by the office if they were sick, no charge.  I'll never forget, if they needed antibiotics, he'd have his nurse raid the pharmaceutical samples closet for me so we wouldn't have to buy expensive drugs we couldn't afford.

Where has our empathy gone, as a nation?

Why can we no longer seem able to do that, to put ourselves in one another's shoes?

And while we're at it, maybe we need to be less hard on ourselves, as well.  My husband reminded me of that old Eleanor Roosevelt quote, the one that goes, "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."

So yes.  I am now withdrawing my consent.

But if we want to see some of the hate rhetoric toned down on the talk shows and blogs, we need to start out small, on our own social networking sites and in our own commentary.  We need to be kinder, not just to ourselves, but within our own little worlds.

There is a lot of suffering out there that we don't know about, hidden behind the made-up names and emoticons and yes, even the hostility.  Rage, as Psych 101 tells us, is the flip-side of fear.

But we can reach out, in our own way.  Simply tone down the quick and easy quip that comes at the expense of someone else's pain.  Recognize their humanity; their common soul, their own struggle. 

Let them know we've been there. 

And we survived.

*(investigation still ongoing, but based on what we know so far...)

Why isn't what  happened in Austin today considered an act of domestic terrorism?

A man publishes a six-page manifesto ("suicide note" they call it in the media) on his website, detailing all the ways he feels he has been screwed by the Internal Revenue Service over the past 20 years.  With the final sentences, "Here is my pound of flesh.  Sleep well," he then allegedly sets fire to his own home (with his wife and daughter inside), gasses up his plane, takes off, and (apparently) deliberately flies it right into the building that he knows houses the federal offices of the IRS. 

The resulting crash, as he (we can guess) no doubt anticipated, causes a massive explosion and fireball.  I suspect that, if he was found to do what we're all pretty sure he did, then his fondest desire was to cause as many casualties as possible.

This was also the express purpose of Timothy McVeigh when he bombed the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, because he considered himself to be at war with the federal government of the United States, and it was also the mission of al Qaeda when they crashed two jets into the Twin Towers in New York City--both clear acts of terrorism on American soil.

And yet this has been carefully framed as a "criminal act" by federal spokespersons and by the media. 

I want to know why, since the right wing was so quick to howl, loud and long, that when an American Muslim shot up his own military base causing the deaths of numerous of his own colleagues--this was not workplace violence but terrorism as far as they were concerned; yet another act of Islamofascism...

Then if an angry white male who, no doubt, was at least sympathetic to the anti-government ravings of Glenn Beck and the Tea Partiers--many of whom espouse constant ongoing rage toward "Big Government" (referred to as "Big Brother" in his manifesto), who sometimes discuss seceding from the union, who talk about armed revolution, who often urge the stockpiling of weapons, gold, and food and encourage the homeschooling of our children, who consider our president to be evil and who even advocate praying for his death--(allegedly) flies a plane into a federal building and tries to kill people, how is that not also, then, considered a potential act of terrorism?

I have been warning about acts of violence, either assassination attempts or acts of terrorism on American soil, for some time now, as I did in an April, 2009 blogpost, "I've Been Down This Road Before and I Won't Go Back."

In it, I wrote about what I observed while researching a book back in the '90's:


Fifteen years ago, give or take, I sat in a crowded convention room at the Sands hotel in Las Vegas, (which, by the way, was leveled long ago, wiping out a legacy of Frank Sinatra and ushering in Disney), and listened to a parade of speakers at the annual Soldier of Fortune
convention who, basically, set up the construct that we were potentially at war with the U.S. government and that we needed to protect ourselves from invading jack-booted thugs who might want to mount assaults on our homes and take away all our guns.

I learned about how to bury my assault weapons and other arsenals in special underground vaults that the dreaded bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms would never find.  I learned how to make my own bazooka.  I learned how to use urban or rural settings to protect myself from the government stormtroopers who were coming to steal my guns.  I learned hand-to-hand combat.  I signed up to receive publications that would teach me how to prepare for the coming war--including hoarding gold, stockpiling canned goods and water, and home-schooling my children--without leaving any kind of imprint that would put me on some government-snooping radar.  I paid cash.  For obvious reasons...


Guys, for the rest of this post, come on over to Blue Inkblots where we're building a pretty lively group of TPM refugees who love the comraderie but have grown weary of the trolls and flaming of late.  You are all welcome, and I think you'll be delighted to see some old friends.

In this post, I provide a number of links to make my case that this right-wing hate rhetoric is nothing new of course, but that it is growing in danger and that what happened in Austin, if the investigation points to what it seems to be indicating--that the guy was nursing a grudge against the IRS and wanted to punish government employees by flying a plane into the building--this should be considered a shot across the bow to Glenn Beck, the Tea Partiers, FOX News commentators, shock jocks, and anybody else who thinks their rhetoric is harmless and has no consequences.

I also give links that provide some historical context to that kind of political paranoia, and a touch of science behind the mindset of people who respond to that kind of political thinking.

And, there are links and outlets for readers who would like to DO SOMETHING to counteract this trend toward violence and hate-speech, who feel a sense of helplessness and would like to help turn back the tide, if they can.

My blogs are free--no ads sold--then backspace and return home to TPM.  I always do.

Usually, in a time of war, the troops on the ground can't really pinpoint when the tide begins to turn in their favor.  They're still getting shot at and blown up.  They're still far from home and it seems as if they're never going to get to see their loved ones again.  Sometimes idiots tell them to do things they feel uncomfortable doing but they don't have a lot of choice in the matter; as long as it's not illegal or stupifyingly death-defying, they gotta do it.

But there is a difference, and they can feel it.  Usually it has to do with a smarter strategy coming down from command structure.  Whereas before, they were basically running around in a sort of clusterf**k, short on supplies and common sense, now they have clearly defined goals, good leaders in place to help them achieve those goals, and the weapons necessary to keep them alive.  Maybe before, morons who didn't know what they were talking about barked blind orders at them from ivory towers, and now, their hard-earned combat experience is respected and listened to, and consequently, they're not losing as many good men and women in bad situations.

And there are fewer bad situations, all around.  Civilians who once might have feared them, for instance, now come out into the marketplace again.  Children play in their presence.  Life flows around them.  And soon, they realize that their work is done and they can go home.

Peace returns, not just to that country, but to their own.

Although the political battlefield is not life or death and lacks the intensity of war, the consequences can be every bit as serious, because, as we learned in 2000, elections do have consequences.  Presidents may not have the constitutional power to declare war in this country, but they can certainly find ways to engineer them if they please, to the devastation not only of the countries they invade but of our own.  War profiteering and private capitalist piracy can bankrupt nations and throw its citizenry into destitution if there are no checks and balances in place, no watchdogs or accountability or consequences for that wrongdoing.

The advent of modern technological advances have dramatically changed campaigning--instantizing and prolonging it.  During the early years of President Clinton's presidency FOX news didn't even exist, and Internet use was far, far less than it is today.  Social networking sites like FaceBook and MySpace didn't even exist.  Google didn't exist.  Political websites like Talking Points Memo and Red State didn't exist. YouTube didn't exist.  God knows Twitter hadn't even been imagined at that point.

Many of these things didn't even exist during George W. Bush's first term.  Some of them, in fact, were created in reaction TO him.

As we all know, President Obama was the first to take full advantage of the new media in his presidential campaign, and I think what happened during his first year was that, first of all, he got completely blindsided by the absolute depth and depravity of the problems left to him by Bush.  The financial problems, alone, which soared into crises mode just before the election, were so much worse than anyone had imagined in part because they'd been so skillfully hidden for so long, and no one on Obama's team had really counted on having to dedicate so much time and energy right out of the starting gate dealing with, basically, the potential bankruptcy of the United States of America.

All the problems had been neglected so horrifically.  As many of you know, I come from a military family and so I have spent the past decade, really, reading everything I can get my hands on about both wars that Bush and Co. plunged this nation into, and most people have no CLUE as to how badly neglected Afghanistan really was.

Our guys over there...many of them were plunked out on the edge of some godforsaken mountain someplace and abandoned.  They didn't have equipment to build basic shelter.  They didn't have enough WATER.  They didn't have HELICOPTERS.  They didn't have enough AMMO.  And they were left there like that for MONTHS.

This had been going on for years, because Bush pulled everything out and shipped it off to Iraq.

Now, it's not my plan to get off into a debate about either of the two wars here, but what I'm trying to say is that the DEPTH of the problems facing Obama were SO MUCH WORSE than anyone could have POSSIBLY IMAGINED that he and his team were just DROWNING in them.

These problems extended, in other words, into every single aspect of our government.  Natural disaster management.  The Justice Department.  The Veteran's Affairs Department.  Education.  Interior.  The You Name It Department.

And President Obama and his team just bowed under and went to work.  And they did take on their signature issue, which was health care reform, because they knew they were going to lose some seats in 2010; they knew congress would be running scared for re-election this year, so they knew they had only one year to really have a fair chance of getting it through.  They also believed that the only way to fix the toweringly rotten economy was to fix health care.  Plus, if they could do that, it would help the Dems GET re-elected.

And in all that staggering amount of WORK...they forgot about MESSAGE.

Which, as we all know, is what the Republicans can twist around best to their advantage....


Guys, these are the first few paragraphs of this post.  You are more than welcome to join me over at my blog, Blue Inkblots, to read the rest and get into a vigorous debate and discussion.

In the remainder of the piece, I provide a number of links demonstrating ways in which the Republicans seize control of message and twist it to their advantage.

Then, when all seems lost, ha ha, I go on to show how, also, with plenty of links, in recent weeks, the Obama administration has turned the tide of the political battle, and how they have developed a four-point strategy to win the message wars.

I also show how we can help, as "troops" in this political warfare, in helping to see that the things we most believe in are not lost in the fog of war, so to speak.

I would like to point out that my website is a free blog--I do not sell ads or solicit funds.  It's just a blog, folks.  Follow the link, and then I urge you to return home right here to TPM, where I hang out three or four times a day.

All I want to do by continuing the discussion at Blue Inkblots is to keep out trolling, flaming, and discussion-hijacking that seems to upset the more timid souls among us who might be lurking and grow weary of scrolling down through a hundred comments of mindless arguing to get to the meat of the issue.

We talked about this in a short post last week, and most of you seemed to "get" what I hoped to do today.

So come on over, lets talk about message control, or lack of it, that has plagued the administration this past year and how it may or may not be changing.

You can find me, here, at Blue Inkblots.  Look forward to seeing you guys!  It'll be fun.  I'm hoping to recapture some of the flavor of what some of us feel like we used to have here at TPM Cafe. 

Guys,

This is a love letter to the Talking Points Memo "family" with whom I've been a part pretty much since Josh started it.  I have seen many fine bloggers bail out from the TPM Cafe family because they felt as if they'd been driven away by trolls.

After my recent experience with my last blogpost, "How Media Makes Us Comfy With Our Own Prejudices" I came t-h-i-s close to doing the same.

And it's not just that one, it's really the last several.  I will spend the better part of a day working on a blogpost, putting together research I've spent maybe weeks compiling, with links and whatnot, hoping to stimulate an interesting debate on the topic at hand with a wide range of points of view among mostly like-minded but not necessarily Stepford souls, and things will get going great, and then The Tea Partier will show up, turn on his flamethrower, and some of you just can't resist getting drawn into his specious arguments, and before you know it, there's a free-for-all.

In my last post, there wound up being 154 comments, and while I haven't done a scientific survey, I daresay only about 10 or 15% of them had anything to do with the topic at hand; all the rest were ongoing brawls with DugFMJamul.

When I requested that he just start his own blogpost rather than hogging mine, Dick Day did me one better and started his own, calling the guy out, and there's a fistfight going on over there as we speak.

Power to you guys.  I don't expect many conclusions to come of that one, but at least it's an honest brawl.

But when I come to TPM Cafe to post a blog, that is NOT what I am doing it for.  I come here for intellectual stimulation and to discuss events and issues of the day--it's the reason I started reading TPM in the first place, and for the most part, I find that stimulation is still here, even among the commenters who lose their tempers so completely when provoked by the flamethrowers.

So here's my proposition.

I like to think that at least SOME of you like to read my stuff.

This is not my website, and as one commenter pouted, I have a choice.  If I don't like it, I can leave.

True.

But that's not really fair to the people who really like to read my stuff and get shouted down by the flamethrower and those who just can't resist a good barrroom brawl.

So from now on, when I am posting a new blog, I will put it up here on TPM Cafe--the title, that is, and a summary.

AND A LINK.

That link will take you straight to my website, where I DO have control.

Right now, you are all welcome at Blue Inkblots.

All except for flamethrowers.  Sorry, DugFMJamul.  You are not welcome at Blue Inkblots because I tried to be civil with you and I asked you not to use my comment section as an excuse to brawl but right up until comment number 154, you continued to engage and blame others even as you were quoting them and fighting with them.

So if you guys want to read my stuff, I will let you know when I'm posting it; I'll tell you what it's about, and I'll give you a link to my website.  You are most welcome there.  Comments of all kinds are welcome and I will respond to most of them as quicky as I can get to them.

Over at Blue Inkblots, I do have conservative commenters from time to time and so far have not shut any of them out, but  these individuals tend to be intelligent, thoughtful, and committed.  They do not call names; they are not flamethrowers.  And in recent posts, they've been silent.  We've had some great discussions.  One of my commenters is from Britain and one from Canada, which puts a nice perspective on some issues.  Sometimes, we just have fun.

I love you guys and I enjoy our discussions.  I don't want to lose that and I have no desire to "disappear" from here because of trolls.  I'm a pretty tough ole Texas broad and it would take a lot more to scare be off. 

Besides, I don't think that's fair to the vast majority of you who would just like to read a thoughtul, well-documented piece and get into some stimulating discussion.

So come see me, anytime, over at Blue Inkblots.

http://deaniemills.com

I look forward to it.

Hope to see you there.

Before I'm too hard on the media, I gotta hand it to ABC News, because they were the first on the story.

It seems that on the opening night of the ongoing Tea Party convention, their welcoming speaker, former representative Tom Tancredo of Colorado, put forth the following idea:

That we should bring back into fashion literacy tests.

You remember literacy tests, don't you?

But before I enlighten those of you who are maybe too young to fully understand what it meant, particularly in the deep South, for persons of color to be asked to take a literacy test before they could vote, I'll let Tancredo speak for himself, as quoted in the article in the online ABC News:

"The convention's first speaker, former Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado said that people who voted for Barack Obama could not pass a basic civics literacy test. "People who would not even spell the word vote or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House...named Barack Hussein Obama," he said.

"Yes, that's right. The president is a socialist, his supporters illiterate.

"Today, Tancredo stood by his comments. "These people didn't have the slightest idea about what America is all about, about the Constitution," he said. "And they went and voted!"

"The leader of the Tea Party convention, Judson Phillips, had no problem with it, either. "I think what Tom Tancredo was saying, he thinks a lot of people really didn't understand what they were voting for when they voted for Barack Obama," adding, "He did a fantastic job, didn't he?"

"Tancredo went even further about voters saying, "I think it should be exactly the same test that we give immigrants coming into the country. And if you can't pass a test about American civics that an immigrant has to pass in order to be here, then I don't think you should be able to vote."

Oh, I see.

Is THAT all?

Just a little civics test, to make sure you know what you're voting for, so that all those Meskins who can't speak English can't be bamboozled into voting for the colored guy, and all those ignernt ghetto thugs can't be railroaded into the voting booths to vote for the Negro.

THAT WAY we wouldn't wind up with a BLACK GUY in the White House!

I get it.

Really. 

I do.

Although, just to enlighten things a TAD bit.

First of all, I might mention, just as an aside, that it is actually EDUCATED people who are the most drawn to Barack Obama, according to the latest Gallup Poll:

"Gallup has a new poll out. What does it indicate? That smart people like Barack Obama the most...What it says is that educated people with advanced degrees tend to be Obama's most loyal supporters."

Just to clear that little point up.

And, just so we're clear on what LITERACY TESTS really are.

The Raw Story goes into a wee bit more detail:

"Southern states used literacy tests as part of an effort to deny suffrage to African American voters prior to Johnson-era civil rights laws.

"Prior to passage of the federal Voting Rights Act in 1965, Southern (and some Western) states maintained elaborate voter registration procedures whose primary purpose was to deny the vote to those who were not white," a website for civil rights veterans explains. "In the South, this process was often called the 'literacy test.' In fact, it was much more than a simple test, it was an entire complex system devoted to denying African-Americans (and in some regions, Latinos) the right to vote."

"Because the Freedom Movement was running "Citizenship Schools" to help people learn how to fill out the forms and pass the test, Alabama changed the test 4 times in less than two years (1964-1965)," the site adds. "At the time of the Selma Voting Rights campaign there were actually 100 different tests in use across the state. In theory, each applicant was supposed to be given one at random from a big loose-leaf binder. In real life, some individual tests were easier than others and the registrar made sure that Black applicants got the hardest ones."

"White applicants could be approved even if they didn't pass the test.

"Your application was then reviewed by the three-member Board of Registrars -- often in secret at a later date," the site continues. "They voted on whether or not you passed. It was entirely up to the judgment of the Board whether you passed or failed. If you were white and missed every single question they could still pass you if -- in their sole judgment -- you were 'qualified.' If you were Black and got every one correct, they could still flunk you if they considered you 'unqualified.'"

Yeah.

THAT "literacy test."

And make no mistake about it.  THAT was the literacy test Tancredo had in mind.

Now, when I first read that, I was so horrified I literally shouted in my chair, at my computer, so loud that my husband came running to make sure I was all right.  I copied the entire Raw Story article--which I encourage you all to read--into the body of an e-mail and sent it to everybody on my list.  I put it up on my FaceBook page.

Then I opened up the Washington Post and read THEIR version of the opening day of the convention.  Tancredo's session was given three short paragraphs at the end of an article entitled, "The Tea Party is Still Taking Shape," and was written by  Ann Gerhart and Philip Rucker.

And here are those three paragraphs, in their entirety:

"On Thursday night, giving the opening address, former U.S. representative Tom Tancredo (Colo.), who ran for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination as an anti-immigration candidate, railed against Obama and "the cult of multiculturalism." Americans could be "boiled to death in a cauldron of the nanny state," he said. "People who couldn't even spell the word 'vote,' or say it in English, put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House."

"When Tancredo said, "His name is Barack Hussein Obama," the audience booed loudly.

"The race for America is on," Tancredo said. "The president and his left-wing allies in Congress are going to look at every opportunity to destroy the Constitution before we have a chance to save it. So put your running shoes on."

In other words, "the cult of multiculturalism" was the only mention made of Tancredo's loathsome call for literacy tests.

Now, according to ABC News, Tancredo's remarks brought bursts of applause, and furthermore, convention organizers defended the remarks.

And yet the Washington Post's political writers didn't even notice, or find reason to mention, them at all.

Back when I was writing and publishing suspense thrillers, I was often a keynote speaker at writer's conferences around the country, and it was not unusual for me to address hotel ballrooms packed full of hundreds of people, so I know how these kinds of conventions go. 

The keynote speaker is there to inspire and fire up the convention-goers.

But the opening speaker, the welcoming speaker--they set the tone for the entire event.

Tom Tancredo's remarks basically stated that the purpose for the Tea Party movement is to ensure that we don't see any more people of color in the White House, among other complaints.

Even one convention attendee commented to a reporter that it hurt the movement that pretty much everybody there was white and middle-aged or older and said, "We need more diversity."

Yeah well, that boat done sailed, buddy.  It left the dock about the time one of your organizers sent out a fund-raising e-mail showing our president dressed as a witch-doctor.

When the New York Times covered the opening day of the convention, it didn't even mention Tancredo's remarks at all, which is why I'm not bothering to go dig up a link to it.

What I'm saying here is that, if a major political paper like the Washington Post finds it necessary to tone down such a blatant expression of racism in their coverage of a political event, to the extent that they don't even bother to MENTION the literacy tests he clearly emphasized in his remarks, and the New York Times doesn't even refer to them at all, then what that does is, it makes those remarks palatable, acceptable.

Comfortable.

That way, we can all just settle in, get comfortable with our prejudices, and not notice when, suddenly, a Tea-Partier we weren't paying much attention to takes over the local election board and the next thing you know, there are real literacy tests in place.

It's not just our elected officials who have to be accountable.  It's our media.

Racial prejudice has been driven underground but make no mistake about it; it still exists, and I swear to God some people don't even know it when they're doing it.  I have conservative friends I've known for 30 years or more who send me jokes comparing the president or First Lady to monkeys.  They do it in a spirit of play. They honestly think these jokes are harmless and are surprised to find that I find them racist and offensive.  This is what happens when we get comfortable with our prejudices.  We don't even know them when we experience them ourselves.

It's not a matter of being "politically correct." 

It's a matter of compassion. 

I have African American friends who I love.  I can't imagine what they would think if I forwarded them the jokes that had been sent to me comparing the Obamas to monkeys.  These things are deeply hurtful to people of color everywhere. 

THEY CAUSE PEOPLE PAIN.

This is why we have to speak up.  Speak out.  Say, "That's not funny."  Say to people whose job it is to report:

"Why didn't you call a literacy test a literacy test?  A spade a spade, so to speak?"

If the Tea Party people truly want to be taken seriously as a serious political movement, then I suggest they look more to the future, and not, as a friend of mine who IS an avowed Tea Partier said to me one time:

"I want to take this country back...forty years."

In the song, "Tangled up in Blue," Bob Dylan writes about how we all feel the same but from different points of view, even though we drift apart through the years, and listening to that song recently got me to thinking about words, how words count, how they're used, and how we don't use them.

For many years now, the Democratic Party faithful--me included--have been increasingly frustrated with the Dems' apparent inability to keep up with the Republican Noise Machine. 

Although there is nothing new in this--think McCarthyism, or even the vicious jokes that went around about FDR from the right wing who most assuredly hated their own private traitor to his class--this flood of propaganda seemed to gain its real foothold in the 90's with the advent of talk radio and the ascent of Bill Clinton.

To this day, I have trouble understanding the utter insanity of the right-wing hatred directed toward the Clintons.  It was during that time that I was researching a book, Ordeal, on the survivalist underground in the weeks and months leading up to the Oklahoma City bombing, and what I saw and heard was so unhinged that, at times, it literally made me sick to my stomach.  I worried about assassination attempts.  And I remember thinking that, in time, he would come to be regarded as a pretty damn good president, once all their hysterical racket died down.

I couldn't possibly have guessed, of course, that my own inept, dumbass governor would wind up taking his job, with such predictable results, that even the right wing would wind up speaking longingly of the days of Clintonian balanced budgets, surpluses, and genocides stopped without a single lost American life.  But I digress.

Now, here we are, back again with a Democratic president and more hysterical ranting and raving from the right, only NOW, we've got to deal with an ENTIRE NEWS NETWORK to act as a supposedly legitimate megaphone for every nutcase conspiracy theory out there, attempting, yet again, to de-legitimize yet another Democratic president.  They can't bring this one down with any visible Achilles heel (sex scandal), so they're trying every other shit storm they can throw at him in the hopes that SOMETHING, ANYTHING will stick.

He's not a real American!  He's a Marxist!  A socialist!  A communist!  No wait!  What other kind of IST is there?  Oh yeah!  An atheist!  No?  A Muslimist???  SOMETHING BAD!

And, yet again, Dems are forced to play Defense in this endless game, responding to ridiculous charges which then, give those same accusations a certain credibility.

During the Long Hot Summer of Alice's Tea Party Madness, I really didn't think that most Americans would take it seriously.  Clearly these people were crazy.  I mean honestly.

So imagine my surprise when Independents started LISTENING to them and the Democratic Party numbers began to drop and Republican Party numbers started going up as ever-fickle Independents began to be frightened YET AGAIN by hysterical panic-attack ravings from the right.

If it's not terrorists or "Islamo-fascists" gonna getcha, it's the guv'ment.

So I started my usual shouting at the TV news, to the Dems, that is:

IT'S THE MESSAGE, STUPID!

I was sick and tired of our losing the message wars to the nutcases.

Then we started losing races we shouldn't lose, and then I started reading more and more articles about all the successes the Obama administration was having, and I could not understand why I was having to read this stuff in places that most people never see:  The Washington Post or the New York Times.

In other words, I wasn't seeing it on the network news, or the Sunday morning talk shows.  I wasn't hearing it from Robert Gibbs, and I wasn't seeing David Axelrod stammer it out when he was asked.  I didn't see Harry Reid whisper it over his receding stooped shoulder nor did I hear Nancy Pelosi smilingly mention it to Jon Stewart.

WHAT THE HELL.

I was, instead, hearing all sorts of lunatic diarrhea of the mouth from any Republican who could get near a microphone, and if they were REAL crazies, I'd see their rantings amplified by every news broadcast or online political webcast in existence as it was repeated over and over and over again.

Over on the Blue side of the aisle, we didn't have any lunatic ranters.

We did have that Grayson guy down in Florida, God bless him, but every time he spoke the truth, he wound up being forced to apologize by somebody, and since he was a junior congressman, he didn't have enough punch to push it.

I watched the subtle ways in which the right-wing machine would shape the dialogue of the mainstream media.  For example, Media Matters catalogues how, when President Obama talked about letting the Bush tax cuts on the wealthiest 2% of Americans lapse--those making $250,000 a year or more--the Right Wing Noise Machine started in about how, to some people, that's not really all that much money...and how, gradually, some mainstream newscasters picked up that baton and ran with it. 

Well, I dunno about you guys, but if WE made $250,000 a year, WE'D be feelin' pretty rich.  But I digress.

Brian Beutler writes for Talking Points Memo that part of the problem is that Dems just aren't all that good at (a) LYING and then (b) KNOWINGLY SPREADING THE LIE:

Part of the problem, (Congressional expert Norm) Ornstein says, is that Democrats don't have a vast propaganda machine.

"When an issue emerges--how to pound away at it? You don't need to [conspire]...Republicans just kind of know how to do that," Ornstein says. "It becomes an echo chamber that once its out there for a bit, bleeds over to the rest of the press. If it doesn't, then those entities [Rush Limbaugh, etc.] pound away at the Times, the Post and the Sunday talk shows for ignoring a big story."

That echo chamber goes hand in glove with a separate advantage Republicans have: a willingness that Democrats lack to tell huge whoppers about their opponents.

"Republicans are wiling to take rhetoric that goes way beyond reality--continuing to talk about the health care plan as a government takeover. It doesn't matter much if you can take the fact and say it's not true." Once it's out there, it's out for good.

Fivethirtyeight.com's Nate Silver doesn't think things have to be that drastic.  He says all the Dems need to do is start paying attention to a couple of things, like, the fact that MOST Americans don't live in Washington, D.C, and live and breathe politics:

We've repeatedly highlighted Kaiser's health care polling, which revealed that only about half of the public knows about many of the key provisions that are in the Democrats' bill, such as coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. Meanwhile, a Pew poll this week found that only 26 percent of Americans know that it takes 60 votes to overcome a Senate filibuster -- and only 32 percent know that Senate GOPers voted unanimously against the Democrats' health care plan. And a Rasmussen poll of likely voters found that only 21 percent of them believe that the Democrats have cut taxes for "95% of working families", a fact which is probably true.

I don't particularly blame the public for this. The number of politics "fans" probably numbers somewhere on the order of 10 or 20 million out of a country of 250 million adults. Most people have lives and have better things to do than to follow politics all the time. They pay quite a bit of attention during Presidential elections and, I would argue, make reasonably sophisticated decisions. But outside of that, most people aren't watching MSNBC or Fox News every evening or logging onto the Washington Post or FiveThirtyEight. They're developing impressions based on limited information, often gleaned from partisan news sources and politicians who have an incentive to tell them anything but the truth.

He faults the Dems for allowing three long months to lapse while they--and their cable-TV supporters--fought bitterly amongst themselves about the public option, which hijacked the entire health care reform debate and enabled the Republicans to sneak in and basically thieve the issue right out from under them, which has now imperiled the entire thing, because what happened was that the vast majority of people don't pay enough attention and were not aware that the term "government-run health care" was ITSELF a lie, and that the Dems didn't even explain THAT, they didn't even highlight the term OPTION properly.  They let the whole thing degenerate into a fight over details that could have been worked out later, frankly.  The public option was not the entire bill, but by making it seem as if it was, they lost the message war.

He stresses the importance of repetition.

He stresses the importance of repetition.

He stresses the importance of repetition: 

And all Democrats need to realize, meanwhile, that sometimes the message isn't going to sink in until the sixth or seventh time that you repeat it. Before Tuesday's State of the Union, for instance, the White House had almost literally never mentioned that the stimulus contained a huge tax cut -- they shouldn't expect the public to believe it any more than Warner Brothers should expect a ton of people to go out and see their new movie if they only begin advertising it 48 hours beforehand.

Rather, the Democrats need to figure out what their November messages are now and begin planting seeds for them now. You want to run on Republican obstructionism? Well then, don't neglect the golden opportunities that the Republicans are providing you with today, such as when they voted unanimously in the Senate against re-imposing pay-go rules or unanimously in the House against a very centrist financial regulation package. How many people know that House Republicans voted 174-0 against a jobs bill? It's probably not even 20 percent or 30 percent -- more like 2 or 3 percent, at best. The DNC, DCCC, DSCC, and sympathetic groups like unions should be blasting out advertisements whenever the Republicans cast a vote like this.

He also mentions what I think should have been done all along, which is more crowing needs to be done about successes.  We all hated the strutting and arrogance and boasting of the Bush administration every damn time they crossed a T or dotted an i properly, or just did their damn jobs without tripping over their own dumbass feet, but I'd like to see a lot more bragging from this White House, and I think we're starting to.  Silver says:

But if it were me, I would err a little bit less on the side of caution in highlighting numbers like, for instance, the 5.7 percent GDP growth that the country experienced in the 4Q. It's not that I expect these messages to be winners now; rather, it's that you want to plant the seed with the public for the fall. Otherwise, it may feel like too little too late when the employment numbers turn positive too, and the public may believe that the recovery occurred in spite of, not because of, the stimulus.

What he's saying is, it's all about framing future messages, not so much worrying about how it looks now, but taking risks that things will improve enough in the future that you can ride the wave of how they look now.  And if they look worse in the future...well, like Scarlett O'Hara, we'll worry about that tomorrow.

What Silver is saying about how most Americans really don't pay enough attention to realize lies when they are hearing them was brought crashingly home to me by another piece right here at TPM, that, while it was based on a Republican poll taken for the National Review--so you have to take it with a grain of salt--the results basically say that even though most Americans know very little about the Tea Party movement, they like what they THINK the movement is about.

It's kinda like thinkin' Sarah Palin would be a good president because she's "one of us."

It doesn't take a great deal of thought.  And let's face it--so many Americans don't put a whole lot of thought into current events unless it's right up close to a big national election.  This is how they get bamboozled and hornswoggled by the bait-and-switch artists of the world.

But something happened on the way to the State of the Union.

Just when I thought we were going down for the count, my Republican husband was right again.

(Psst--please don't tell him I said that.  He's just so insufferable when he hears it.)

In a previous post, AGGIE POLITICS, I wrote about how my husband, a moderate Republican but strong Obama supporter, told me that no matter how bleak things may look at the moment for Dems, we should not give up on our President, because he's always pretty much been the smartest man in the room, and we should not count him out yet, and that, never fear, when it comes to Republicans, they always go too far.

He also said, "This Massachusetts loss may be the best thing that happened to your party and Obama, because it will be a wake-up call.  You can re-organize, re-group, come out with a new plan.  It might actually be a good thing."

I thought about this a few days later, during the president's speech.

When I heard the State of the Union address, I heard a very, VERY smart reach-out to Independent voters.  I heard a COMPLETE re-framing of the Democratic message.

I've seen a few op-ed writers who seem to have caught on to that but none of them have come right out and said it, so I will, because I spotted it immediately.  In fact, I shouted and fist-pumped when I heard the paragraphs in question, simply because of the CHOICE OF WORDS.

See, I'm a writer by trade.  I make my living, such as it is, by language.  And choice of words is CRUCIAL in just about everything in this world.  It's crucial in diplomacy.  It's crucial in politics.  It's crucial in, say, job-hunting or resume-writing.  It's crucial in, oh, say, marriage proposals.

Language matters.

And no one knows this better than this president, as he has proven time and time again.

Now, this past year, the language of governing has been robbed by the Republicans.  They stole it pretty much during the campaign and they continued the rhetoric throughout the Inauguration and all through the entire first year of Obama's presidency.  And he was just plain working too damn hard to care, I think.

But the losses in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts--combined with the threat of the loss of health care reform--gave him what my husband had predicted would be a "wake-up call."

The White House had seen the same poll numbers the rest of us saw--that we were losing Independents to the Republicans.  And it wasn't "populist anger" that is the ongoing conservative-driven meme in the media.

It was the message.

So they reframed it.

Consider this passage:

From the day I took office, I've been told that addressing our larger challenges is too ambitious; such an effort would be too contentious. I've been told that our political system is too gridlocked, and that we should just put things on hold for a while.

For those who make these claims, I have one simple question: How long should we wait? How long should America put its future on hold?

You see, Washington has been telling us to wait for decades, even as the problems have grown worse. Meanwhile, China is not waiting to revamp its economy. Germany is not waiting. India is not waiting. These nations -- they're not standing still. These nations aren't playing for second place. They're putting more emphasis on math and science. They're rebuilding their infrastructure. They're making serious investments in clean energy because they want those jobs. Well, I do not accept second place for the United States of America.

As hard as it may be, as uncomfortable and contentious as the debates may become, it's time to get serious about fixing the problems that are hampering our growth.

COMPETITION.

This is Mom and apple pie to Americans everywhere, and is just the kind of thing that appeals to Independents and (closeted) moderate Republicans.  It's very Kennedyesque.

Here's another fist-pumper moment:

I know that there are those who disagree with the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change. But here's the thing -- even if you doubt the evidence, providing incentives for energy-efficiency and clean energy are the right thing to do for our future -- because the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy. And America must be that nation

In that way, he framed it not as a question over the science, or over the environment, but over JOBS and over America as a LEADER in the world--again, We're Number One rah-rah!

This is a re-framing of a message that moves the Dems away from Al Gore and more toward whoever your favorite sports team is.  We want to be winners.  And we want our economy to thrive.  If, in so doing, we can also save the planet, hey, it's all good, right?

I'm not going to isolate every incidence, although there were many, because my blogposts are notoriously long anyway, but I encourage you to read the full transcripts--this is the copy I was working off of, from the New York Times.  I prefer it over the Whitehouse.gov version because this is the one he actually presented, with applause and laughter typed in, and video included.

Along with the subtle reframing of the White House message is also a more aggressive push-back against right-wing rhetoric.  I had noticed that they'd been given such a free rein for so long that even congresspeople and senators had taken to spouting the latest FAUX-news talking-points as graven facts before the TV cameras without so much as a peep of protest, but those days are over.

Today, for example, Robert Gibbs AND Attorney General Eric Holder each presented point-by-point pushback memos against comments made by Republican Senator Susan Collins and House minority leader Mitch McConnell about the White House response to the Christmas Day bombing attempt.  They aggressively pointed out that the policies they followed were put in place by and followed by the Bush administration--facts well-known by the Republican talking-heads.

It's still responding to lies, but I did see this on the evening network news, which means that even so-called "Joe (and Josephine) Sixpack" is getting the message that his handy Republican spokesperson spokeslied or at the very least, spokesforgot.

The reframing of message is deeper and clearer than most have picked up on, although E.J. Dionne, who interviewed Joe Biden today, got it loud and clear:

Biden, more self-aware than people give him credit for, realized what he had just done. "I've sort of gotten off the Recovery Act," he said with a rueful smile.

Yet by the end of the interview, I realized he had bumped into the hidden political issue of the 2010 elections. Beneath the predictable back-and-forth between Obama and his Republican adversaries over government spending lies a substantively important difference over how the United States can maintain its global leadership.

For Republicans, American power is rooted largely in military might and showing a tough and resolute face to the world. They would rely on tax cuts as the one and only spur to economic growth.

Obama, Biden and the Democrats, on the other hand, believe that American power depends ultimately on the American economy, and that government has an essential role to play in fostering the next generation of growth.

Notice that when Obama spoke about keeping America in first place, he said not a word about the military. He referred instead to the efforts of our competitors in the public sphere of the economy, and of our past complacency.

"Washington has been telling us to wait for decades, even as the problems have grown worse," Obama said. "Meanwhile, China is not waiting to revamp its economy. Germany is not waiting. India is not waiting. These nations aren't standing still. These nations aren't playing for second place. They're putting more emphasis on math and science. They're rebuilding their infrastructure. They're making serious investments in clean energy because they want those jobs."

Suddenly, Obama's approach is not about old-fashioned Democratic spending. It's about patriotism, competing successfully, investing to maintain American economic leadership. John F. Kennedy provided a slogan for such an effort 50 years ago: "Let's get America moving again."

(emphasis mine)

The purpose of the interview had been for Biden to point out instances of the success of the stimulus program, but this turn of topic turned out to show him to be crazy like, well, a FOX.

Biden's insistence on "pushing back" against unfounded criticisms of the program was clearly part of Obama's post-Scott Brown offensive, and it's bracing that the administration has finally seen the wisdom of a Napoleon axiom that is a favorite of Karl Rove's: "The whole art of war consists in a well-reasoned and extremely circumspect defensive, followed by rapid and audacious attack."

Transforming a listless national argument about the stimulus and health care into a larger debate over how to maintain American preeminence is both audacious and useful. Off-message, Biden found the right message.

Perhaps the Dems have been "tangled up in Blue" ever since, well, the days of what I call the Clinton Crucifixion, when the sheer gall and power of the opposition's noise and nastiness overwhelmed them.  They've been like that plastic clown punching-bag ever since, bouncing back with every blow.

But this president is different.  It's not that he's smarter than President Clinton.  I'm not going to compare the two men, because they have different strengths as well as weaknesses.

But one difference that does seem to count right now is Obama's quickness in learning from, and adapting to, the opposition--outfoxing them--if you will.

He has not given in to them.  He is still fighting for health care reform, clean energy legislation, education reform, and other things he believes in and campaigned on.

But what he has done is reframed the message in such a way that makes it much more appealing to the middle-earth voters, so to speak, those who were being frightened off by the scare tactics of the far right.

It's the same message.  Different words.

And he's presenting those words differently, in a fiestier fashion.  What the surly commentators on FOX called "arrogant," most Americans took as a fighting spirit, and by a margin of 83%, they liked it.

As Democrats, it is important that we not get so "tangled up in Blue" that we forget that, as Americans, most of us, as the song lyrics say, "feel the same" about most things.  This is the beauty and the brilliance of Barack Obama. 

He's not pretending this to get votes.  He is UNDERSTANDING this.

We want to take care of our families, find decent work we can halfway enjoy, and have some sort of retirement with dignity.  When we get sick, we don't want to die because we couldn't afford medical care.  And, we care about our planet and our environment and don't want it choked with pollution and grime.  We want a place for our children to play safely.

We pretty much all feel this way.

The Blues feel as if the Reds tried it their way, for the most part, since Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980.  They had a pretty good run of it, and from 1994 until 2006, they pretty much ran the country into the ground.

Now it's the Blue's turn.

But we can't forget all those people out there who aren't paying that much attention--at least not until they get screamed at or frightened into it.  We have to take care not to fight so much amongst ourselves that we forget all about them and they turn away from us. 

They're not "an illusion" to us now.  We have to concern ourselves with "what they're doing with their lives."

We have to talk to them.  Reach out to them.

Show them a better way.

Republicans have been drooling over their last few ballot-box victories in New Jersey, Virginia, and Massachusets, stars twinkling in their eyes as visions of 1994 dance in their heads and they see a big landslide takeover of congress in the offing for them once again.

But the concrete steps their party is taking to make this dream come true actually have more in common with the DEMOCRATIC congress of 1994 than with the Republicans. 

As was the case with the Dems back then, the GOP leadership is old-fashioned and out of touch with mainstream Americans, their party has calcified into a more extreme version of itself to where it now demands party purity among those it supports for campaigns, and it grumbles and separates itself from a young, charismatic, more moderate and popular president in the White House.

A key component to the way in which Rahm Emmanuel and the DCCC built up the Dem takeover in 2006 in the first place, and a BIG reason Barack Obama won the White House in 2008--was an appeal to disgruntled Republicans, moderate voters on both sides, and, basically, the vast majority of Americans who sit in the middle on most issues and swing slightly to the left or right on some things.

Maybe you're a fiscal conservative and pro-life but big on the environment and think Gays should serve in the military if they want.  Maybe you own a gun and are a card-carrying member of the NRA but you lost your health care when you got laid off and  you've wanted comprehensive reform ever since.  Or maybe you're a union rep but not sure global warming is all that.

Few people are ideologues all the way down the line.

Few people on either side of the aisle could pass a friggin' PURITY TEST, but apparently, they'll get funds withheld from them by the RNC for political campaigns if they fail to pass such ideological purity.

The Big Tent theory of political partying that was embraced by the Democratic Party in recent years means that, yes, it is harder to manage a party under those circumstances, as Ben Nelson and Max Baucus and Jim Webb and others have proven time and again, BUT, when push comes to shove, they DID VOTE for the big things their president asked for.

Let's examine President Obama's REAL record this first year, not the one the media keeps whining about.

*According to a little-known and virtually unpublicized (it came out around the time of the Haiti earthquake) study by the Congressional Quarterly:


"In his first year in office, President Obama did better even than legendary arm-twister Lyndon Johnson in winning congressional votes on issues where he took a position, a Congressional Quarterly study finds.

"The new CQ study gives Obama a higher mark than any other president since it began scoring presidential success rates in Congress more than five decades ago. And that was in a year where Obama tackled how to deal with Afghanistan, Iraq, an expanding terrorist threat, the economic crisis and battles over health care."

His success rating, the study goes on to say, was 96.7%.

Think about that for a minute and contrast it with all the news stories, op-eds, and blogposts about what a failure this president's first year has been.

A success rate made possible by the votes he had available to him by a Democratic majority, I might add, even so-called "centrist" Democrats, that liberal Dems seem to think need to be tarred, feathered, and run out of town on a rail. 

(Or at least, given a purity test???)

*Here's another great piece, this one from Daily Kos.

It's a list--just a list--of NINETY accomplishments--President Obama has had in his first year in office.

Read them through.  It will knock your socks off.

*Also, in a quick graph, the Washington Post put up a list of 25 campaign promises Obama had made, and of these, 21 of them had either been completed or were in progress IN THE FIRST YEAR.  This is a phenomenal record.

Again, made possible because the DNC decided, after a dozen years in the wilderness, to reach out to the center, to moderates and disgruntled Republicans to run for congress and the senate, and they nominated in 2008 a candidate who, while a progressive at heart, was a pragmatist at his core, and he knew how to get things done.

Give him time, ladies and gentlemen, because he has only just begun to fight.

Yes, right now the GOP is licking its chops, certain that the "populist rage" it thinks it has captured is going to carry it into a majority and then the White House--maybe on Scott Brown's handsome naked shoulders!!!--but an essay by Charles M. Blow in the NY Times nails why it is really not a serious political movement when you try to harness the energy of a bunch of pissed-off paranoids.

The nightmare that the first "Tea Party Convention" has turned into, of hucksterism, profiteering, and inner-tea-party feuding--not to mention the fact that they can't give away tickets to see their keynote speaker, Sarah Palin, who has demanded more than $100,000 for a speaking fee--is just a glimpse of how ephemeral FOX-ed up, trumped-up rage can be as a serious political movement.

Not that the GOP has learned anything from that.  They voted down a measure to create a commission on deficit reduction, even though at least seven who voted against it had earlier actually CRAFTED the legislation, and, among other things they voted against--they actually voted against Pay As You Go legislation that requires congress to pass only deficit-neutral legislation that is paid-for upfront, which is the way congress had balanced the budget and left a surplus under President Clinton, a Democrat, before President Bush, a Republican, took office and the Republicans took over congress and squandered the surplus.

I'm not arguing the merits for or against each individual piece of legislation mentioned in the previous paragraph, but what I'm saying is that, as in the State of the Union speech, when even after the president spoke of tax cuts for small businesses, and the entire Republican block sat like stone statues rather than muster up a smattering of applause for their OWN policy--they risk looking like the obstructionist dumb-asses they are.

And he knows it, as he so brilliantly showed when he spoke--on live TV--before the Republican Caucus last night.

In fact, so rope-a-dope perfect was Obama's performance at the Caucus that, as Sam Stein pointed out in a great blogpost for Huffington, FOX news cut the whole thing off 20 minutes early.

The GOP has, in fact succeeded in boxing itself into a pretty small corner since it first took over congress in the 90's and "The Hammer" and Newt Gingrich proceeded to run off some of the best Republican congresspeople and senators they'd ever had because they were moderates and had a record of working across the aisle with Democrats on landmark legislation.

Since that time, especially after their own re-districting fiasco that narrowed a candidate's area into even more partisan zones than ever, their party has bottlenecked its focus so badly that this "Tea Party" thing is their only hope of a pretense of "populism." 

It's not real, though, not on a large scale.

It could be, though, if we think, over on our side of the aisle, that the only way to combat them is to follow their lead and, as our own Progressive Caucus recently stated, demand party purity of our own.

I've heard people insist that Obama act more like Bush, ignoring the vast majority of Independent and disgruntled Republican voters who helped to put him in office and only adhere to his "base" of progressive party purists, by "ramming through" his agenda while "he's got the chance."

I've heard people complain that the Democrats don't act more like Republicans, marching in lock-step like Stepford legislators, repeating cult-like mantras of party loyalty.

(Recently, even Sarah Palin was soundly criticized on Glenn Beck's program...why?  Because she had backed Sen. John McCain in a difficult primary against the Tea Party opponent.  McCain, it seems, wasn't "pure" enough for Beck's listeners.  The fact that Palin wouldn't even EXIST, politically speaking, WITHOUT McCain was lost on him and his viewers, and any semblance of decent human loyalty was completely tossed in the name of party purity.  THIS is what we want?)

But our own president has said that the reason he keeps reaching out across the aisle is because he wants the things that are passed in his term to LAST for GENERATIONS--not just until the next Republican administration comes in and, with the stroke of a pen, overturns everything he has done--which is pretty much what he has been doing to the bullshit Bush put in place himself when he was busy "ramming through" legislation.

And his patience, and willingness to listen and to reach out--while frustrating to his base, maybe--is working.  According to polls taken following the State of the Union address, he is beginning to win over the Independents who had been frightened away by GOP scare tactics this summer.

The Independents are the key.

So what can we do, as supporters and as either Democrats or Independents who do not want a GOP/Tea Party takeover in 2010 to rival 1994?  Not to mention a President Palin in 2012?

I suggest we follow Steven Benen's advice.  Admittedly, it was aimed more toward the Dems in congress and the Dems in the partisan media than toward you and me but those of us who do blog or volunteer or even just speak up at the dinner table or stand chatting by the shopping cart at the grocery store, let's scream bloody murder:

Just pretend that the Democrats have pulled every stunt pulled by the Republicans in the past year, such as voting against funding for the troops, in order to obstruct the president, or trying to woo a segment of the party who would actually send out a fund-raising letter that depicts the president dressed as a pimp--and imagine the howls of outrage that would dominate the FOX airwaves and everyplace else Republicans gather.

Benen thinks that the reason the Republicans continue to dominate the message and the messaging is because they do the loudest screaming.

We don't have a screamer for a president, thank goodness, and I'm not advocating same, but I'm saying that the Republicans have allowed the screamers to take over their message, to their detriment.

At the very least, we need to be ready with the fact-checking and the righteous outrage whenever these stunts are pulled, to remind voters that what the GOP stands for, right now, isn't even very Republican.

And it won't be, until they let go of the party purity tests and reach out across the aisle, first of all, to a popular president, and then, to the rest of the country.

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