I love old westerns.

That admission puts me on thin ice politically, I know. I risk barrages of moral theatrics and dime-store psychiatrics just making it. American western expansion of the 19th century forever is scarred by ethnic cleansing of Native Americans and exploitation of the environment. It served primarily industrial barons and land speculators... blah, blah, blah... Imperialist!... blah... "Why can't you honkies be perfect - like me?"... blah... Rapacious!... blah, blah...

But still, I love watching these creaky films. They engage an earlier, though not long-lived, tradition that germinated with "dime novels" of the era. Many of the authors of these tawdry sensations were, in fact, railroad press agents, and although they were paid by the inch to popularize the image of West in order to populate its actual real estate, their fairy tales of expansion and the changing faces of civilizations - from Stone-Age communal to gaslight capitalist - are much more integral to our American souls than we'd like to admit. Illusions that lives can be remade, living arrangements dreamed up from thin air, and social approaches as free and open as the great plains still fuel and tantalize us, along with imparting dangerous delusions that justice is simplified by applied violence. 

But aside from all that crap, there's always a lot of action in westerns. Usually, just before all holy hell busts loose, Hollywood throws in a scene that is some variation on this one, just to add suspense:

The hero and his sidekick survey an empty town, or desolate prairie, deserted fort, etc., and one comments: "Sure is quiet." To which, Buck / Charley / Wyatt replies, knowingly, "Yeah... too quiet."

I've felt sagebrush in my craw the past couple of weeks, watching one-time Republican war chief (and former Vice President) Dick Cheney chant denials of wrongdoing and drum praises of vigilance about his past regime.

And through it all, not a peep from others, perhaps more level-headed, on the Right. Too quiet.

I'm not talking about the clowns here - not Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, whose constant fulmination and dietary sorrows render him top rival of Jupiter as gas giant of the solar system.

No - I'm talking about the Capitol Hill GOP. The smart people. The ones actually paid and praised to knife the rest of us in the back. From them, Cheney has attracted neither aid and comfort nor slings and arrows. And there's a simple reason for this:

Because they're fresh out of ideas and have nothing else going on, establishment Republicans plan to hang around and see what kind of response Cheney draws from the public. If it's thumbs up, they'll support his aberrant defense of torture and excruciating fudges on the Saddam/Osama "connection". If voters hold their nose when the ex-Veep enters a room, his party cohorts will be the first to shove him off the balcony, and file charges accusing him of everything from shredding the Constitution to skinning gerbils.

Evidently, that's the way of life in D.C.: Even your dog will shank you for a promise of immunity.

Everyone to the Left has been dancing on the grave of the Grand Old Party, absolutely convinced a "Taps" bugle has sounded for anything more conservative than Little Debbie's Cookies & Creme. Obama has been cleverly (until his friends in the media busted him) appointing Republicans in locked-up GOP districts to federal posts like Secretary of the Army and Ambassador to Getzistan. Whatever. A couple more devastating "bipartisan" feints like this and Republicans will share a convention stage with the Federalist Party in Why, AZ, come 2012.

As pissed off as I've been at the pathological arrogance sported by the GOP over the past 15 years, I feel there should some kind of political opposition out there, something to keep the Democrats and the Left from puffing up themselves into unassailable scary monsters every bit as hypocritically judgmental and draconian - in their own way - as was the Right in its late glory days.

So, let me give Mike Steele and the Republicans some advice: Find your souls. Its time. Don't wait around to see how retreads like Cheney and Karl Rove play to the peanut gallery. Don't help that lying son-of-a-bitch defend our ghastly descent into dungeon horror. Disavow all that crap right now. Come out hard against it and don't mention the Democrats. They've got their own fish to fry at this hootenanny; let them do it. Clear your own slates.

No. I don't expect them to listen. I mean... who am I? Right?

But somebody with heft needs to sit them down and demand that Republicans seek someone with ideals, someone with sights fixed on higher ground. The rest of us are exhausted... no, disgusted with the same old talking heads playing the same old word games to find newer, better ways of telling lies. Of cheating us. We've had it. We need, in the words of one of your comparatively minor catastrophes, "the vision thing."

Traditional American conservativism has some real pluses - like genuine aversion to intervene militarily in other countries' affairs and commitment to prudent approaches not only to public spending, but how American private business conducts itself, as well. Might be time to re-examine and "rehabilitate" those paleoconservatives you so bluntly excommunicated from the party when they had the temerity to suggest invading Iraq was the worst idea since Titanic's crew decided an Atlantic ice field was the perfect spot to accelerate. You remember. Frum. Oh, c'mon... you remember:

War is a great clarifier. It forces people to take sides. The paleoconservatives have chosen -- and the rest of us must choose too. In a time of danger, they have turned their backs on their country. Now we turn our backs on them.

( Dave's out with a new book, trying to rectify the cataclysm of last year - at least, pull his own chestnuts out of the fire. Somehow, we just knew he'd say it wasn't his fault Republicans suddenly became as welcome as Bernie Madoff at a south Florida golf tourney. That title alone, Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again, I mean, c'mon: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, and I'm out $24.95 for this piece of crap. )

No. It's gotta be for real. It's gotta have some soul, this time. No Palins, no Romneys. No Barbies, no Kens. And no Frums. Turn your backs on him and the rest of the neoconservatives. It's way past time for that.

You must find something worth saying, because, right now, you've rendered yourselves irrelevant. No one's listening.