...or, for that matter, to even vaguely comprehend the essential nature of the opposition.

Everybody got it? Dissent, fine; undermining, you're a traitor. Got it? So, all those clowns over at the liberal radio network, we could incarcerate them immediately. Will you have that done, please? Send over the FBI and just put them in chains, because they, you know, they're undermining everything and they don't care, couldn't care less.
  - Bill O'Reilly, June 20, 2005

Those were the days, huh?

"Dissent"... whatever that is... is fine. "Undermining", on the other hand, well, that's treason, and the FBI should put anyone doing it "in chains". 

I'm not sure exactly what either 'dissent' or 'undermining' are in any particular objective context (they seem to be almost entirely subjective terms) but I'm willing to bet that Bill O'Reilly does not think that blocking President Obama's stimulus bill counts as 'undermining'.  Certainly, he would never say that those who are deliberately standing in the way of a legislative package crafted in the hopes of starting to dig America out of the biggest economic hole we've seen since the Great Depression are committing 'treason' and should be put 'in chains' by the FBI.

In fact, I'm pretty sure that if you get a few shots of bourbon into Bill O'Reilly and tell him he's off the record, he would most likely cheerfully admit that as far as he's concerned, it's not possible for Republicans to commit treason... certainly not by opposing a Democratic President or a Democratic Congress.  Treason is something that can only be committed by spineless Democrats, progressives, and/or liberals, when they try to in some way substantially impede the agenda of Republicans and/or conservatives.

With the above you can start to see part of what we're dealing with -- the constant redefining of terms, the eternally shifting parameters, the way an entirely subjective, vehemently toxic worldview constantly modifies itself so that what was said a week ago, or even yesterday, doesn't necessarily have any bearing on what is being said today. 

But you have to see the other part of what we're dealing with, too, and it's tough, because we liberals and progressives try to be a tolerant lot.  We try to be high minded and unbiased and see the best in everyone.  We tend to say things like "Well, despite all of our differences we are still Americans and still united in the common things we all believe in".  That, and "There are good Republicans, good, decent conservatives, good people on the right whom we can work with, because they are principled men and women who only want what is best for America, in their own way".

Like Fox Mulder, we want to believe.  In this case, however, wanting to believe in the innate decency, honor, and strong principles of conservatives and Republicans is less like faith in our common good intentions and more like willingly blinding ourselves to the actual truth of the matter... and the truth of the matter is, if there are any good, decent conservatives or Republicans with staunch principles who only want what is best for America, well, there aren't very damn many of them. 

None, apparently, in the House of Representatives.  Three, maybe, in the Senate.

We ask ourselves where all the real conservatives have gone, what happened to all the old school Republicans... you know, the genuine patriots, the sincere Jeffersonians, the ones who honestly believe in liberty and justice for all and a real, competitive open market and small government and like that.  Maybe we had Republicans like that once, I don't know.  What I do know is, we sure don't have any like that any more.

The contemporary conservative movement, which entirely encompasses the Republican Party, is about one thing and one thing only -- preserving and increasing the privilege, wealth, and power of the privileged, wealthy, and powerful.  The rest of the Republican/conservative rhetoric -- "government small enough to drown in a bathtub", "family values", and, most especially, "America First" -- is bullshit.  They shovel it by the bucketful in election years to get out the vote.  It means nothing to the people who are actually in charge of the movement; fortunately, the average right wing voter they consistently manage to sway with their varying screeds and polemics is generally too stupid to catch on.  

The truth underneath the standard conservative snowjob is as follows:  we are rich, and we are powerful, and we are privileged, and the law does not apply to us, and we will not tolerate anyone trying to change this in any particular.  The only legitimate purpose of government is to maintain and increase our wealth, our power, and our privileges.  The law does not, shall not, and must not constrain the wealthy and the powerful.  The law is our tool and our weapon, it exists to keep the proles in line.  This is how it is, how it has always been, and how it will always be. 

Like Spinal Tap, they don't literally say it.  Unlike Spinal Tap, they DO literally mean it. 

They are enthusiastic supporters of wars that will benefit their stock market portfolios, as long as they aren't going to have to fight those wars themselves.  They never met a tax break they didn't like, unless it was a tax break for the poor working schmucks who actually produce the wealth they all live off like disease carrying ticks.   They are overjoyed to approve a $700 billion stimulus package as long as it's going to their cronies and campaign donors in high finance, but adamantly opposed to spending any money at all on unemployment, public education, or social services. 

And it is important... it is absolutely crucial... to understand that they will never cooperate with any President or Congress that is genuinely trying to increase other people's opportunities, to lessen other people's burdens, to save anything or revive anything that does not benefit them, the wealthy, the privileged, the powerful.  They understand, deep in the vast spiritual voids that they use for souls, that wealth and resources are finite, and every time you do anything to increase the amount of wealth and/or resources that other people might be allowed to have access to, you decrease the amount that they themselves get to hoard.  And that is not, in the words of one of their most honored prophets, The Way Things Ought To Be. 

Republicans do not have the same emotional objection to the entire globe falling into a massive economic depression as normal, thinking humans do.  Why should they?  They're all rich as hell, and a depression is a great time to be rich as hell... prices are low, and nearly anyone will do anything for a couple of bucks and a warm place to sleep.  For the Dick Cheneys of the world, that's not a crisis, and it's certainly not a catastrophe.  That, again, is The Way Things Ought To Be.

It's wonderful to be open minded and tolerant, to show maturity to one's opposition, to reach across the aisle, to try to work together with everyone to come up with a mutually acceptable solution. It's great to be a grown up; there's always a fabulous view from the moral high ground. 

But let's not kid ourselves.  Republicans are not the Loyal Opposition and they have never put America First.   They want to shovel as many taxpayer dollars into their offshore accounts and pay out as little in taxes back as they possibly can.    That is pretty much the be all, end all of their entire social and political ethos. 

We cannot work with them.  We cannot cooperate with them.  We cannot compromise with them.  We cannot be conciliatory.  They are not the opposition, they are the enemy.  This is, indeed, a class war.  If we are to succeed in taking power back from the powerful, in redistributing the hoarded wealth of the wealthy back to those who actually produce it, in removing all unearned privilege and truly creating a level playing field for all, we have to stop trying to regard these people as patriots, as citizens, as our fellow Americans. 

A good place to start, I think, would be for the Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate to say to the Republican minority "You know what?  You want to filibuster everything we try to move?  That's great.  Do it.  Actually DO IT, though... we'll bring the legislation up for a vote, and then you guys get up on your hind legs and talk.  Yak it up.  Go for it.  No food, no water, no leaning on anything.  If you're going to filibuster, get up and filibuster, baby.  And after you all collapse and they drag you out on gurneys, we'll still be here, and we'll hold our vote."

Filibustering is supposed to be difficult, it's supposed to be uncomfortable, and hard, and physically demanding.  It is not supposed to be something that the minority threatens to make the majority immediately cave. 

We have to stop playing nice with these people.  They don't play nice with us when they're in charge.   Let's stop being kind, and start getting serious here.

This ain't a tea party, folks, and those people across the aisle ain't anybody's maiden aunts.  It's time to bring the hammer down. 

The Obama Administration is losing the spin war surrounding the stimulus bill.  Obama is allowing himself to be pwned by the Republicans.  By continuing to insist on seeking bipartisan solutions, he is making himself and the Democratic Party look like weak sisters.

Obama's caving, this we know, for the MSM and bloggers tell us so.

It's true.  It's so true.  It must be true.  Everybody says it's true.

And yet... and yet...

In the middle of Matthew Benjamin and Christine Harper's exultant victory cry regarding the ineffectuality of President Obama's newly announced executive salary caps, I find the following passage:

"In addition, some executives may be compensated for the potential reduced salaries with restricted stock grants, which may result in huge paydays after the bank repays the government assistance with interest.

"They're just allowing companies to defer compensation," said Graef Crystal, a former compensation consultant and author of "The Crystal Report on Executive Compensation."

The restrictions are "a joke," he said, because "if the government is paid pack, you can be sure that the stock will have risen hugely."

Weak.  Ineffectual.  Wimpy.  Stupid.  Any idiot can clearly see from this that... er... wait.  Hold on.  Does that actually say that President Obama's executive salary caps will allow restricted stock grants in lieu of executive salary and bonuses?  Stock grants that would never mean anything if the bank did not recover, and thrive, and pay the government's TARP money back again?

Why, that sounds like... a clever, and probably effective, incentive for the distressed banks to pay the government back all the bailout money they've received... assuming, of course, that their CEOs want a huge payday somewhere down the road.

But that couldn't be.

I mean... it's not like this Obama guy is smart or anything, right?

I don't know, guys.  Maybe we shouldn't take to the lifeboats just yet.

Maybe the major media outlets have some kind of vested interest in spinning things so President Obama and the Democratic majorities in Congress look weak and ineffectual.  Maybe the vast hypercorporations that actually own pretty much the entire mainstream media would prefer to do everything they can to minimize the effectiveness of Hope and Change, because Hope and Change aren't going to put any money in their pockets.  (In fact, given the way these modern day robber barons have been lining their pockets throughout the Bush Jr. era of massive deregulation, corruption, and corporate fraud, maybe the actual owners of the mainstream media have known for months or years that if Hope and Change ever actually did come along, they stood to lose a lot of money... and maybe go to jail.)

Maybe, just maybe... that, y'know, kinda bright fella we elected President actually knows what he's doing.

Obama's new executive salary caps are toothless.  He's losing the spin war on the stimulus bill.  His bipartisan approach is a bad miscalculation.  An unknown black man who was born in Hawaii can't get elected to the U.S. Senate from a state like Illinois!  A first term junior Senator can't run for President!  This is Hillary's year, Obama can't possibly beat her in the primaries!  A black man with a Muslim father and a Middle Eastern middle name can't get elected President!

It's impossible.  We should all just give up.  The world... is doomed.

I don't know.  I'm no expert.  I don't want to go out on a limb, and I certainly don't want to tell anyone else how to think. 

Just for myself, though, I think I'll have faith in President Obama for at least a few more weeks... or months, maybe, whacky as that sounds... before I write him off entirely.

Call me crazy.

Remember shame?  Remember embarrassment?  Remember when public officials would actually resign their posts, or withdraw from consideration for office, after it was revealed that they had been behaving disgracefully?

You may not.  It's been a long, long time since we've seen it.  The closest we've come to it from 2000 through 2008 was the rare spectacle of seeing the far right conservative base grow enraged at a Bush nominee for high office... which happened, what, twice, maybe three times, in eight years?  Linda Chavez, Bernie Kerik and Harriet Miers.  And what about them enraged the base so much?  The first two got entangled with matters concerning illegal aliens... there isn't much that infuriates the wingnut base more than that.  (It's worth noting that so virulent is the far right's hatred of illegal aliens that Chavez actually lost her shot not because she broke any laws, but because she actually gave money to a destitute woman who had once lived in her home, and who, as it turned out, was an undocumented illegal alien.)   As to  Harriet Miers, even the dead enders couldn't stomach the level of blatant cronyism and utter disregard for minor, unimportant factors like 'qualifications' that her nomination to the Supreme Court embodied. 

Yet these failures were anomalies for the Bush Administration.  In the 8 years that Bush the Junior nominally ran the country, disgraceful behavior on the part of his fellow Republicans in every branch of our government was more typical than not.  For eight years scandal followed upon scandal in an endless deluge, and as Bush's two terms wore on, it seemed that no one who served under his Administration, up to and including Bush himself, was going to get out unstained, untainted, or unindicted.  The President himself was not only frequently accused of breaking the law, but he just as frequently (and apparently proudly) admitted to it.  The Vice President outed a covert CIA agent in an act of childish pique, and then actually shot a man in the face!  Every prominent Republican at one time or another seemed to be up to his or her ears in some kind of blatantly criminal activity.  Most of Congress was nearly openly accepting overt bribes from lobbyists, our intelligence agencies were breaking the law on a daily basis, our military was torturing and raping children, our highest officials weren't even bothering to hide their lucrative connections to private military contractors that were growing fat off our unnecessary wars... which was odd, because they were classifying everything else they could get a TOP SECRET stamp on. 

And, of course, they lied.  They lied constantly, and they did it stupidly, without paying the slightest attention to whether or not this week's lies were even remotely consistent with last week's lies.  It didn't seem to matter; nobody in the mainstream media was interested in keeping track of anything as complex as whether or not what the President was trying to float this week as a justification for the war that was enriching the Vice President's stock portfolio bore any resemblance to the justification he'd been trying to shill to us the week before. 

They could not be embarrassed.  They were incapable of chagrin, impossible to abash. They gave orders and enacted policies that led to atrocities, they blatantly lined their own pockets with blood money and war profits while simultaneously hammering their fists on the table and demanding more and more tax breaks for themselves and their patrons.  They broke the law, ruined lives, destroyed our economy and wrecked our environment... and they weren't even particularly subtle or stealthy about it, either.  When they got caught, they would smile and wink and say it was all for the good of the country, and then turn around and sink their snouts blissfully back into the public trough.

They hired only good, loyal Republicans and then fired them if they were even suspected of being gay.  Yet, strangely, so brazen was the culture of lawlessness and the sense that one could do anything at all without lasting consequences that when conservative Senator Larry Craig was caught soliciting gay sex in a public bathroom in an Idaho airport, he simply denied it, refused to resign, and served out the remainder of his term.  When Senator David Vitter was caught sleeping with prostitutes, he actually admitted to it, apologized, and continues to serve as Louisiana's junior U.S. Senator to this day. 

It was as if both Craig and Vitter recognized that, with Bush, Cheney, and their Republican Party firmly in power, there was no way they could or would be held accountable for their own failures of character or blatant, publicly revealed hypocrisies. 

In many ways, the American political system has always operated on Eastern moral principles rather than Western.  In the Christian influenced West, we are largely motivated by the concept of guilt -- we are supposed to feel bad about the bad things we do, even if no one else ever finds out about them.  In Eastern philosophies, there is no guilt, there is only shame -- and shame can only occur in a social environment, i.e., when someone else discovers, and disapproves, of something a person has done.

Politicians and officials have always functioned within this particular paradigm.  Most seem to have little conscience and very little sense of morals or ethics.  What scruples they have seem to largely revolve around what our culture has always colloquially referred to as 'the Eleventh Commandment -- Don't get caught'.  But as a general rule, in the days before Bush/Cheney, if you were a political official, when you broke the Eleventh Commandment -- when you 'got caught' -- you at least pretended to be ashamed of  yourself.  You called a press conference.  You issued a press release.  You wrung your hands in public and said 'mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa', usually with your spouse and children standing behind or beside you, looking on with obvious love and support.  You apologized, you abased yourself, you said that with the help of God and your family, you would leave the past behind and become a better person from this point forward. 

And, if whatever it was you did was shameful enough, you resigned. 

This is a classic display of the Eastern concept of shame in action.   Prior to Bush/Cheney, it was so commonplace that we took it for granted.  And, under Bush/Cheney, this sort of natural, expected response to being caught with one's hand in the cookie jar seemed to become all but extinct among our ruling political class.

So it is that I applaud Tom Daschle's withdrawal from consideration for Secretary of Health and Human Services.  This is certainly a setback to the sweeping reforms our healthcare system badly needs, but it heralds the return of something our political system needs even more, and that I, personally, have missed terribly for the last 8 interminable years -- a sense of shame. 

Similarly, I applaud President Obama for not passing the buck as to who is to blame for the debacle.  That we have a President who can come out and say, to a reporter, in front of a live TV camera, "I screwed up", is such a refreshing, even astounding, change from the shameless spin and relentless scapegoating of the past 8 years that I cannot help but hope that we are, finally, back on something at least remotely approximating the right track. 

Shame is back.

It's an excellent start.

NOTE: In my original draft, I inaccurately stated that both Linda Chavez and Bernie Kerik had illegally employed undocumented aliens, and that this was the cause of their downfall.  This error was pointed out to me in comments, and I have corrected the draft to reflect what, as far as further research can determine, actually happened.  I genuinely apologize for my original mistake, and sincerely appreciate the commenter who pointed it out.