The lazy, hazy, spacey days of summer allow us opportunities to ponder the Really Big Questions: What ever became of Carrot Top? If an infinite number of convenience stores were lined up end-to-end, would at least one of them still stock Mr. Pibb?

And even though he’s left government employ, can we finally hang Karl Rove from the sour apple tree?

In our warm-weather vacation netherworld, we can roll around on a beach towel or swing in the hammock and think about the cosmos. We can consider infinity and the nature of the human spirit.

And we can wonder why personal political hypocrisy is so crucial to our worldview.

We pick and choose, we edit and stove-pipe information about any topic reaching us every day from the massive funnel of technological information distribution. Through a basket-weave filter of personal preference – and prejudice – we tend to favor only the data that reinforces our perception of reality… and morality.

In this daily shopping spree for background intelligence, nothing so focuses its profoundly discriminatory nature like an election.

Think about it: We simply cannot hold to an ideal or adopt a perspective on any specific issue without maintaining a precondition that actions are not defined by a universal moral code as much as by the identity of the actor or actors. It’s not the crime, it’s who commits it; an offense is only condemnable if it’s perpetrated by a condemnable person or group. And, by the same token, achievements are only laudable and profound when accomplished by those so blessed.

When Obama flip-flopped last week, expousing limited amnesty for telecoms that co-conspired in Bush’s illegal surveillance activities, his support on the left was momentarily sucker-punched. This wasn’t something the embodiment of hope and change was supposed to do. It had the stench of naked political horse-trading, and many of the candidate’s most ardent supporters felt betrayed.

And some were able to adjust pretty quickly. Myself, for one. I explained to huffy friends that players in a political game must sometimes... play the political game. Or something to that effect. On “Countdown,” Keith Olbermann did much the same cover-story tap dance late last week, and was roundly whapped for it by Glenn Greenwald, in his Salon column:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/06/26/olbermann/index.html

Olbermann reconsidered Obama’s reversal earlier this week, but if anyone thinks the anchorman's stiffened resolve gets him off scot-free with Greenwald - guess again. In fact, a review of Greenwald’s most recent columns are a sumptuous feast for those who enjoy speciosity broiled on a spit and served up smoldering.

Nevertheless, for everyone who believes Obama is the best choice for President – again, myself included - his actions are to be forgiven because, notably, he committed them. The shortcomings of his opponent are not so easy to overlook, among the Obama coterie. But, then again, McCain’s chronic flip-flops on everything from immigration to abortion won’t become punching bags for Fox News and radio’s howling blockleiters simply because McCain is their guy.

To nurture all we cherish and hold to be true, we strain each scrap of information through this constantly engaged personal hypocrisy sieve. Any issue, any “fact on the ground” can be gently nudged and twisted, distorted and re-fabricated, to fit our comfort zone. Pro-active methods for dealing with harsh contradiction can reach almost sociopathic dimensions:

- Discount the significance of the event. This is a favorite technique of the Bush Administration, when faced with clear evidence that its best-laid plans have gone Epsilon minus semi-moron. A good example is Donald Rumsfeld’s initial dismissal of the Iraq insurgency as the work of “dead enders”, intimating it would soon be mopped up.

- Mutating a bad call, lie or bust-out betrayal into something positive. With almost disquieting ease we can convince ourselves of, and browbeat others with, the idea that a breathtaking lapse of judgment or morality wasn’t really such a disgrace at all, that it actually was a blessing in disguise, and that the offender must have, subconsciously at least, realized its stealth correctness - and proceeded accordingly. Ah… delusion.

- Blame the damn thing on someone else. This is a universally favorite method. And the target is usually any individual or group least able to fight back. For instance, when Obama rapped Wesley Clark’s knuckles for pointing out an obvious truth – that McCain’s incarceration as a POW does not convey experience formulating national defense policy – it became instantly customary among Obama’s following to ignore the candidate’s wimpy exposure of cold feet and join in the critique Clark’s “ham-fisted” language. (These days, anything true or honest is usually dismissed as “clumsy” or “ham-fisted”.)

After all, honestly reacting to unexpected discrepancy entails admitting our own fallibility, and bluntly appraising ourselves and our deeply held opinions with honesty and accuracy. It’s easier to cut a few corners and modify our perception of reality to conform to preconceived notions and sanctimonious judgment. When we face ourselves in the morning mirror, we want an insightful, sensitive yet streetwise genius staring back.

As for the information deluge of the internet, and it's presumed potential to dilute our dogmas with troublesome opposition, TPM’s Andrew Golis wrote earlier this week, referring to Drew Westen's  “The Political Brain”:

“I'm thinking a lot about information cocooning and the extent to which this wonderful internet that I love may be narrowing, not broadening our media consumption. So far, Westen's argument hasn't exactly been heartening. He basically confirms what you would assume about our ability to consume information that conflicts with our partisan desire: we rationalize and ignore the shortcomings of our own leaders and party but have no trouble at all seeing the flaws of our opponents. I'll be interested to see how much I can take that psychological idea and apply it to media consumption, but certainly things are looking pretty dark so far.”

We seek reinforcement not only individually, but in the broad avenues of social discourse, as well. For instance, nobody has ever accused the Public Broadcasting System for having a right-wing bias. Despite a creeping neoconservatism around the edges, PBS maintains a political tone slightly to the left of Rosa Luxemburg. And viewers expect that. Simply put, PBS is attuned to audiences that are more comfortable proscribing (vicariously) the atrocities of the Nazis, or the abominations of the American South’s Jim Crow, than contemplating the millions ground to paste by Bolshevik aparatchiks in the first three decades of the Soviet Union.  Even today, American media and academia give the last century’s leftist revolutions considerable indulgence, and it’s often surprising to discover – or rediscover – that 73 years of workers’ paradise came at such a high price in human life.

On the opposite end of the political spectrum there is a spooky project in some conservative circles to accomplish nothing less than an overall rewrite of the Vietnam War. In this surreal rearrangement of facts, figures and collective memory, the war was a noble venture lost through strategic corrosion on the home front. The scenario, used often as a prop by neoconservatives to help underwrite their current international interventionist priorities, comes creepily close to the “stab in the back” slander that inflamed the early Nazi Party’s revision of the German surrender in World War I. And for some, the war never ended – the issue is still in doubt. As the always-effusive David Horowitz told PBS Newshour in 2000:

“It wasn't a civil war; it was a war for freedom, and we're going to win it; the Vietnamese will one day adopt a market system, private property, and civil liberties; it's just been prolonged by, you know, people like the people on this show.”

He was referring to the other guests on that “Newshour” edition, most of whom followed the obvious conclusion that the war was a colossal – and tragic – mistake. But for Horowitz:

“The so-called 'antiwar movement' was led by and organized by people who wanted a totalitarian regime to establish itself in South Vietnam. That's really what it was about.”

In many ways, Horowitz, who went from Black Panther attaché to far-Right blogmeister, represents just how polarized, radical political perspectives can evolve and then reverse themselves in just one person. Perhaps, cherry-picking information and opinion that reinforces particular viewpoint is anchored merely in the transience of time itself; what was good for the ‘60s is exactly the opposite of needed remedies today. If this is true, most progression traces a less jarring path than Horowitz’s bizarre mutations – or, at least, so we can hope.

Sometimes it isn’t times as much as subjects themselves that change over time. Take Zimbabwe’s chronic anti-democrat, Robert Mugabe. During the long war against white rule in what was then Rhodesia, Mugabe was a lion king of anti-racist warriors everywhere. In the intervening years, as the country under his rule has deteriorated to a kind of beggar-level police state, appraisals of him have… evolved. What is amazing, though, is the degree to which any criticism is qualified and muffled by his past as a real-life freedom fighter.

Last week, the BBC offered a roundup of editorials from across the African continent previewing Mugabe’s rigged victory in the weekend Presidential “runoff”. Many of the writers called for ostracizing Mugabe and his regime both from the United Nations and the African Union; such sentiments were a departure from the consensus of the past several years, in which Mugabe’s plummeting belligeratopia was mostly propped up by his neighbors and the world media at large. Nevertheless, on Monday, the African Union adopted a resolution calling for talks in Zimbabwe between the ruling Zanu-PF party and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change to create a government of national unity. Score one for the puffy throw-pillow counterattack.

All of this finally attracted the attention of the sanction-happy Bush regime, now trying to convince the U.N. to drop the economic hammers on the hapless country. Our domestic press has been imminently neutral, with some bizarre exceptions, notably Robert Dreyfuss’ blog in The Nation. In it, he quotes and extols a Financial Times of India editorial that “of Mugabe's many crimes, the one that is apparently unforgivable is that he has confiscated the land of white farmers, killed some and driven out others.” Except… that… the ethnic cleansing of white farmers is a long-ago done-deal, reaching an apex in 1999-2001; at that time, the sanctimonious court of world opinion, including our own politically correct media, kept virtually mum about the bloodletting. In reality, Zimbabwe stumbled onto front pages only when the plan to redistribute the confiscated farms to African "war veterans" resulted in near-famine and economic collapse. But for some, apparently, “Africa” will always default to “white racism” – regardless the issue.

As human beings, we grasp our beliefs with fervor. They, after all, define us, and center our concepts of ourselves and the universe that surrounds us. They have a religious power, because, simply, our beliefs can become our religions, or at least, our dogmas. Pat Buchanan rattled his Swiss Army knife this week, writing:

“The unbridgeable divide between the two portends a troubled future. Can Americans ever come together if we are divided in our deepest beliefs about morality and truth, where one side believes gay marriage is moral progress, the other holds it a moral outrage; where one side views abortion to be a mighty advance for women’s freedom, the other sees it as legalization of mass slaughter of unborn babies?

“There can be no peaceful coexistence in a cultural war because it is at root a religious war. Far into the future, Americans seem fated to face each other again and again ‘at some disputed barricade’.”

Except, a lot of what we believe we struggle mightily to preserve in the face of disproval's best evidence. We cobble together bits and pieces of fact that conform handily to our preconceptions of truth and order.

And in that airless stagnation our beliefs and dogmas have become toxic; they are killing us. The biggest problem with revisiting dogmatic conflict as devastating and complete as The Hundred Years War? Today, should worse come to worst, it wouldn’t last 100 minutes.