Oh. Shut. Up.

ROMNEY: Well, Hugh, my own view is as the Caucuses are a hot spot, and as Russians have shown their willingness to act militarily against a sovereign nation, that the International Olympic Committee ought to revisit locating the Games elsewhere.

Just stop talking. Go away. Shut your malevolent gob. I'm sorry, but it'd be something akin to a sin to be even remotely polite about it anymore. Listening to people like Mitt Romney and Hugh "I have absolutely no memory of the last week, much less the last five years" Hewitt... listening to Grandpa McBombsalot declaring that in this century, "nations don't invade other nations"... our U.N. Ambassador Zalmay NotBoltonThankGod saying "the days of overthrowing leaders by military means (in Europe!), those days our gone"... Russia "expert" Condi Rice furrowing her brow and declaring military intervention is "not the way to deal in the 21st century"...

Just. Shut. Up. Do you think, do you honestly think that there is anyone on the planet that has less credibility on this issue than you? Seriously?

And then we've got Joe Lieberman warning against people who exhibit "moral neutrality." No, "moral neutrality" is what you get when you assert that any action on the part of the United States is moral by definition, regardless of how transparently malevolent the same act is when taken by someone else. It's not even moral neutrality, it's complete abdication of any premise of morality or desire for morality. It is pissing on the very concept of morality, and doing so gleefully, and for no reason more substantial than mere convenience.

Yes: one of the problems with tenuously premised "preemptive war" is that it is an vacuous notion usable by any nation to justify any action -- it legitimizes even egregiously premised, first-strike military action by blandly painting it as moral necessity. That was, you know, one of the major arguments against it, not that anyone actually listened to two damn words worth of those arguments. The United States has squandered, nearly entirely, its moral authority in matters of war and peace, and for that we will be paying a price for decades. Yes, the Georgian-Russian conflict is abominable, but people like McCain, Rice, et. al. are so thunderingly flawed, as the voice of those sentiments, that they make a mockery of the moral authority of the United States merely in expressing them.

So, to put it succinctly... piss off. The greatest moral failing of the United States in the last forty years has been to continue to give credence to the architects of "preemptive" invasion. Active promoters of those wars should at the very least be condemned to lives of solitude, in which not a damn word they say is ever reported on again.

And so it begins. Via Ben Smith:

Scott McClellan advises Obama, in an interview with my colleague Daniel Libit, not to investigate the Bush administration — because it would, McClellan says, damage Obama's image. (Not that former Bushies have anything at stake in that choice.) [...]

[W]hen asked what advice he would give to a President Barack Obama or Democratic Congress on the matter of handling former Bush officials, McClellan speaks now of the perils of probing the past.

“If Obama were to win,” he said last week, “that would be an issue his administration would have to face early ... because he’s pledging to be a uniter, not a divider — without saying those exact words we campaigned on in 2000. He’s pledging to change the way Washington works, and if Congress were to pursue that, it would be very divisive.”

He continued: “That could be very problematic for his presidency right off the start.”

Investigations would be "divisive." Good Lord. I'd praise myself for predicting that exact sentiment weeks ago, but it's just too damn obvious.

I have no doubt that every pundit in America will be echoing that line come January. No doubt whatsoever. The Bush administration is over, let's just forget all about that stuff and get on with our lives.... screw torture and DOJ scandal, the Democrats have to rise above such divisiveness and petty thoughts of, you know, accountability for illegal acts. Blah blah fucking blah.

Accountability is for little people. That's the be-all, end-all message of the Bush administration. From Enron to Plame to FISA to the DOJ to torture, there is no larger philosophy at work. I'm in charge, so fuck you. And the odds are that the Dems will go along, Obama included, because that's the easier path.

Am I the only one here who's been slowly devolving into the feeling that this whole "trying to make government better" thing has been a useless exercise, at this point? Nothing like repeatedly being told by the press, the pundits, the government, the political opposition and your supposed political allies that any talk of good government, or rational decision making, or even, fuck it, consequences for illegal acts is just cruel partisanship and/or pie-in-the-sky dreaming.

I expect members of the Bush administration, McClellan included, to make frequent and urgent-sounding arguments that members of the Bush administration shouldn't be investigated after they've left office. But I almost can't wait to see how many of the usual "serious" hacks and lifelong politicos go along with it. You know, just to make sure it's not "divisive."

The media narrative around McCain's announcement that he's sending his own envoys to Georgia -- seemingly a grossly inappropriate move -- has not yet solidified. On one hand, there's the usual hollow drivel, such as this from the New York Times:

McCain Displays Credentials as Obama Relaxes
By MICHAEL FALCONE
Published: August 14, 2008

HONOLULU — For the last several days, Senator Barack Obama has seemed to fade from the scene while on his secluded vacation here, as his opponent, Senator John McCain, has seized nearly every opportunity to display his foreign policy credentials on the dominant issue of the week: the conflict between Russia and Georgia.

Only once, at the beginning of the week, did Mr. Obama discuss the fighting in public, when he emerged from his beachfront rental home to condemn Russia’s escalation, in a way that seemed timed for the evening television news. He took no questions whose answers might demonstrate command of the issue. [...]

Riiiiight. No controversy about McCain's actions, though the reporter goes on to make sure we all know that there's controversy over whether or not Obama's trip to Hawaii makes him "exotic". You know, because when one candidate is inserting his subordinates into U.S. diplomatic efforts surrounding a shooting war in Europe, and the other is visiting his grandma, we all certainly know which of those two things is going to make people titter.

On the other side of the spectrum, this Washington Post piece does a good job of actually, you know, asking the obvious question. And gets in a jab from Lawrence Korb:

McCain's Focus on Georgia Raises Question of Propriety
By Dan Eggen and Robert Barnes
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, August 15, 2008; Page A16

Standing behind a lectern in Michigan this week, with two trusted senators ready to do his bidding, John McCain seemed to forget for a moment that he was only running for president. [...]

The extent of McCain's involvement in the military conflict in Georgia appears remarkable among presidential candidates, who traditionally have kept some distance from unfolding crises out of deference to whoever is occupying the White House. The episode also follows months of sustained GOP criticism of Democratic Sen. Barack Obama, who was accused of acting too presidential for, among other things, briefly adopting a campaign seal and taking a trip abroad that included a huge rally in Berlin.

"We talk about how there's only one president at a time, so the idea that you would send your own emissaries and really interfere with the process is remarkable," said Lawrence Korb, a Reagan Defense Department official who now acts as an informal adviser to the Obama campaign. "It's very risky and can send mixed messages to foreign governments. . . . They accused Obama of being presumptuous, but he didn't do anything close to this." [...]

The rest of the piece gives McCain defenders ample opportunity to rebut.

So we'll see. To you, me, and anyone who actually pays attention to these things, it would seem rather obvious that a presidential candidate should not insert themselves into American diplomatic relations, especially in -- of all things -- a crisis situation: that's been a given for a very long time. But the way the "neutral" pundits generally play these things, Obama can't so much as visit certain states without looking "exotic" or "foreign", much less other nations; McCain can jump in with both feet and pretend he's got his very own State Department.

It's also fairly remarkable to see how deferential reporters and pundits are being towards McCain's supposed "expertise" in the area, an expertise that apparently consists of little more than making a steady stream of belligerent statements. If "get off my lawn" counts as a foreign policy, I suppose McCain has it down, but it's a bit wearing to see that even after eight years of George W. Bush, "serious foreign policy" consists solely in maintaining the highest level of hawkishness in every situation that arises.

The Hunters would like to announce new additions to our happy family.

Clockwise from top: Quacky; Quackzilla; Quackahontas, Quackenstien; Starfleet Lieutenant Commander Quacky; Quackasaurus Rex; Sir Quacksalot; Splashy; Dinner; Quacklander Two The Quackening; and Bill.

One thing I haven't seen touched on, in the Republican's ongoing war to wedge yet another massive corporate giveaway into the remaining months of Bush's abominable presidency, is that faster extraction of our domestic oil supply -- even if it actually happened, which isn't at all clear -- isn't just an environmental consideration, but a serious energy and national security question.

Put simply: we know oil is peaking. Unless you're a nutcase like Jerome Corsi, who believes oil comes from underground Jesus factories or the like, everyone can agree that there's never going to be more of it. Prices are going to continue to fluctuate wildly based on world events and speculation, but it's always going to be trending up. And as the years go by, more and more oilfields are going to pass their peak production, then dwindle, then run dry, and prices are going to start skyrocketing to an extent that makes our current bubble look like child's play.

It's that time, a few decades from now, that things are going to get dicey, especially if we haven't weaned ourselves substantially from oil by then. It's that time that's got experts worried, from economists to the Pentagon, as the nations of the world fight (probably quite literally) for the last large supplies of the black stuff. Other countries are planning for it: Middle Eastern nations are going to great lengths to invest their current oil profits into diversifying their economies, creating business, shipping and tourist havens. America? In general, we're not doing squat. We're doing worse than squat, because the Republicans and the current administration are actively opposed to any energy policy that does not revolve around momentary profits for the large oil companies. It's the Grasshopper and the Ant, being played out on the floor of the House of Representatives.

As a matter of policy, however, I think we should be able to agree on a few key things. First: when the oil crunch comes, we want to be one of the last countries to run out of domestic supplies. We want to still have untapped oil in Alaska, California, the Gulf, etc. after the fields of Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq run dry. If we're going to go begging because of lack of planning, better to beg at our own doorstep than in the future hotspots of the world. And has been pointed out repeatedly, those domestic supplies aren't very large to begin with.

Second, the longer that oil sits underground, the more valuable it becomes. Forget $4.00 gasoline -- what about $10.00? $20.00? If we're really ever going to be forced to drill in pristine areas, it'd be better to do it when gasoline is $500 a barrel than $200. And we'll be able to extract much more stringent environmental protections from the companies, as well as better lease rates, etc. That oil is our piggy bank -- yours and mine. It doesn't belong to Exxon, or Chevron, or anyone else until and unless we hand it over, which is what the Republicans are bound and determined to do.

Our coastlines aren't just pretty to look at. They're also a vast Strategic Petroleum Reserve. We'd do ourselves well not to worsen our future oil deficit at the same time we've so badly mismanaged the rest of the nation's finances.

Hey, here's a headline for you: Conspiracy-addled writer of lie-riddled smear book against first black nominee for President elects to promote his book on a white supremacist radio program run by execrable racist and anti-Semite, James Edwards. Twice.

No, that's too long. How about this: Anti-Obama Book Author Has Racist Ties. How's that?

Remember the serious, respectful media coverage this guy got for his asinine and disproven anti-Kerry smears in 2004? Yeah, me too.

Via Greg Sargent:

At a press conference just now, John McCain redoubled his efforts to thrust himself into a leadership role on the Russia-Georgia crisis front, announcing that two top campaign surrogates, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, are going on a visit to Georgia.

So if merely giving a speech in Germany is "presumptuous", how freakin' "presumptuous" is it for a candidate to send their own diplomatic team into a foreign conflict? Isn't that, you know, a job for the President, not a candidate?

Why no outrage on this? I think it's safe to say that if another candidate did this, conservatives would burst into flames from fury, and the talking heads would be beside themselves talking about how unprecedented it was for a candidate to inject themselves into an international crisis -- politics should stop at the water's edge, and all that. Instead, McCain is using a shooting war to buff his credentials? Seriously? And nobody in Washington sees a problem with that?

One bright side of this campaign: the nation is indeed finally getting to see what a supreme tool John McCain is. And to see what two tools can do together. And what a professional campaign tool can do when they've been paid to lobby by one of the countries in question. And what the nation's most celebrated toolbox can do, when they just can't stand the idea of there being conflict somewhere in the world that they haven't been able to personally help make worse.

Honestly. Take all the worst things about the Bush administration, double them, then add Joe Lieberman. A McCain administration would be the presidential equivalent of a slasher flick.

John McCain's campaign has just spent a week mocking the very premise of conservation -- going so far as to start giving out "Obama" tire gauges to donors. The Republicans have taken to the House floor for their very special Exxon Sleepover Camp, in which they all hold flashlights under their chins and tell us that conservation is pointless and we're all going to die if we don't agree to yet another oil company giveaway right this very minute. McCain has flipped his position on drilling, and for that the Republicans gained a bevy of $28,000 checks from oil company executives. And office managers.

So what do my eyes see, during Olympic coverage, but that nutty McCain ad touting his commitment to... renewable energy. With pictures of wind farms.

Please, just stop. If you want, I'll let you egg my house, or kick my dog or whatever. I'll buy one of your tire gauges, or even pretend to still give a crap about what Newt Gingrich thinks. Just please, please stop draining my will to live by showing pictures of you and wind farms in the same ad.

Now, I know politics doesn't have anything resembling "truth in advertising" laws. And that it's generally common, during election season, to just bullshit people 'til the cows come home, never worrying about being consistent from day to day, or even ad to ad.

But trying now to sell yourself under the banner of policies you and your party mock, and rail against, and filibuster? Gawd, at least pretend to have some dignity.

Oh for the love of God. Cokie Roberts, opining on Obama's trip to Hawaii, which...

... does not make any sense whatsoever. I know his grandmother lives in Hawaii and I know Hawaii is a state, but it has the look of him going off to some sort of foreign, exotic place. He should be in Myrtle Beach, and, you know, if he's going to take a vacation at this time.

Let's review. Obama grew up in Hawaii, as we have been reminded countless times. His grandmother lives there. He's going on vacation and visiting his grandmother. In the process, he's visiting his 48th state of this campaign season, and rumors abound he's going to try to visit all 50, the first candidate to try to do so since Nixon.

According to Cokie Roberts, though, it conjures images of the foreign and exotic. He'll, he's pretty damn presumptuous. Hawaii!! Why doesn't he vacation in some God-fearing, non-foreign place? We have beaches near Washington! And grandmothers!

I've long ago realized that the entire reason for having elections in this country is so news pundits can have their every-four-years, "let's try to make everyone in America commit suicide rather than listening to us talk" competition. But what the hell, sometimes you've just got to cherish a quote. To hell with making it a signature line -- I'm going to needlepoint it and hang it on my wall.

"I know Hawaii is a state."

    -- Cokie Roberts, 2008

Thank you, Cokie. Well freakin' done.

Seeing even Zombie Newt Gingrich be unearthed, this last week, certainly added a bit of the surreal to the House Republican non-debating debate on behalf of yet another corporate giveaway. Just when you think they're one clown short of a circus, ta-dum: they deliver that one last clown.

Food for thought: the last eight years have seen numerous acts of terrorism, here and elsewhere, two wars, a catastrophic hurricane, floods, multiple violations of law by officials in government, confirmation of actually occurring global climate change, children's toys contaminated with ingestible lead, and a collapse of the mortgage market that has had nationwide housing and banking impacts. To name a few.

During this time, I believe there have been only two circumstances that have riled Republican congressmen enough for them to demand returning to Washington during a recess. The first was done so that 535 legislators plus the President of the United States could play collective doctor to Terri Schiavo based on a videotape and the pronouncements of Senator Bill Frist.

The second was to stage a mock debate on the floor of the House to demand new lease giveaways to oil companies during a time of record profits. After ending the previous session by blocking almost all other energy legislation.

So... there you go, I guess.

I think we all fully realize that when the Republicans uniformly block each and every effort to deal with the rise in gasoline prices, then hold a pizza party on the floor of the recessed House in order to demand something be done about gasoline prices, they don't give a damn about gasoline prices. They apparently see it as another opportunity for a multibillion dollar giveaway to the oil companies, and an opportunity to rail that Obama and NASCAR are in the pocket of Big Tire Gauge, but that's about it.

But here's a thought. Since Congress is all about stimulus packages and tax breaks, let's give everyone a $200 rebate on tuning up their car. It'd stimulate the economy. It'll reduce gas consumption immediately, and significantly. A lot of people wouldn't otherwise do it, especially the people who tend to most need it. In other words, it'd work.

The only potential problem is that the Republicans don't give a crap about mechanics, since grease monkeys almost never plop down $28,500 donation checks like oil companies do -- so that's not really the kind of "stimulus" they care about. But hey, I bet it'd have a big impact on the parts market, so maybe they can beg at GM's trough afterwards. (And, cough, many of those parts factories are in swing states...)

Or, hell, we could just grind up some polar bears and call it a gas additive. I bet you'd find sixty votes for that.

I think there's something almost refreshing about the new "Drill Here, Drill Now!" battle cry from Republicans, oil companies, and conservatives. It's at least blisteringly up-front about being a giant screw-you to environmentalism, to the oncoming freight train of peak oil, and in fact to having any actual energy policy in general. The Republicans have decided that, since they don't have anything better to do, they're just going to use soaring gasoline prices to screw with everyone else. Soaring energy prices? Bah! Converting to alternative energy sources? Bugger off!

It's the legislative equivalent of mooning a tollbooth attendant.

But just to insert a good dose of conspiracy theory into the mix, isn't all this playing out suspiciously similarly to the Enron debacle?

It was the first years of the Bush administration: prices are soaring uncontrollably in the newly deregulated California energy markets. Enron, a company that has newly decided there is far more money to be made in marketplace speculation than in actual energy production or transmission, is powerful enough to control the flow of electricity throughout the state and region in question, which they do, squeezing supply further so that prices soar. They idle plants under their control in order to artificially reduce capacity; they reroute power away from the state, leading to an ongoing rotation of community blackouts. They and other energy companies then use the entirely manufactured demand "crisis" to demand long-term state contracts -- at locked-in rates far above what they would have gotten before the "emergency" -- as the only possible way to "solve" the problem. Republicans and Republican-controlled regulatory agencies take the side of the Enron and the corporations throughout the entire process. (Yeah, they were hoping we'd all forgotten about that -- we haven't.)

In the end, the contracts are signed, the Democratic governor of California is recalled due to a brilliantly plotted, corporate-financed campaign of misdirected consumer outrage, and the looting of the state energy markets would have gone off spectacularly except that in the process, the jackasses at Enron managed to leverage the company into a complete collapse via a number of similarly speculative/manipulative/illegal activities. Until the day they collapsed, though, they had politicians eating out of the palm of their hand, willing to grant them anything to "help" with the "crisis" that all of that unnecessary environmentalism and cruel corporate taxation had supposedly led us to.

Cut to 2008. Gasoline prices are soaring uncontrollably, and become a huge political issue. Oil companies and oil-connected politicians say that if certain corporate-friendly steps are taken to further consolidate the power of the extraction companies over existing regulation, prices will be better controlled. Republicans are at the forefront of this effort, taking the side of the corporations: we need to abandon our environmental protections, because they are suddenly killing our marketplace. We need more subsidies, and more cheap leases, and more corporate tax breaks, all so that noble but terribly put upon companies like Enron -- sorry, I mean Exxon -- can help us in this time of crisis.

What happens next? Let me guess, it's exactly what the Republicans and the oil companies are assuring us of -- we abandon the offshore drilling restrictions and, remarkably, prices almost immediately start subsiding this fall, even though not a single drop of oil is being drilled that wasn't being drilled the months before. The crisis is "solved", merely by acquiescing to something that didn't have any actual production or refinery impact. In the meantime, billions of dollars worth of new assets have been added to the very companies currently enjoying higher profits than any companies in the history of mankind.

Of course, there are differences. What Enron did was unequivocally corporate terrorism -- by intentionally cutting power to traffic lights, homes, elevators and whatnot they created an uncountable number of situations that could have led directly to injury and death, statewide. It wouldn't be reasonable to assume the same level of collusion here -- and it would be terribly irresponsible to muse on whether or not there aren't plenty of other energy executives and speculators who saw the Enron model of governmental blackmail, and decided that it was nothing short of brilliant, and looked to use it in a model in future anti-regulatory efforts.

But the similarities are striking, and in some ways, the Republican and energy company efforts to open offshore drilling -- something that everyone who isn't a baldfaced liar all agree will have zero impact on current production or prices -- are a very good analogy to the Enron blackmail. The entire purpose of new offshore leases would be as a boon to energy companies and market speculators, by infusing the speculative market with billions of dollars worth of new product at almost no expense to the companies themselves.

The oil companies can't drill those new leases, that much is clear. There's plenty of existing leases to drill, and they aren't drilling those either, and there seems no particular interest in rapidly expanding capacity in order to actually drill them.

But each company can hold those leases, and borrow against the value of those leases, and trade those leases, so that's the primary value of the new offshore plots -- as tradable assets on the speculative market. If we give them the leases (that is, charge them at the usual pittance), we're vastly increasing their available capital, vastly increasing the capital of the entire speculative market, and they don't have to lift an actual finger to see it happen. No drilling; no additional exploration; nothing. Only the creation of new paper.

In that sense, it is identical to Enron, in that these companies want these leases purely as tradable commodities in and of themselves, without actually having to do any actual extraction. It's 100% giveaway to the companies, it has nothing to do with the actual current cost of oil or gasoline, and it's being done in an environment of record profits and near-blackmail.

You have to admire the chutzpah of Republicans actually staging a pizza party on the floor of the darkened, shuttered House in order to actually celebrate their desire to help another set of corporate speculators plunder the energy markets at taxpayer and consumer expense.

Truly, the word "shameless" has lost all meaning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We know we have tortured the innocent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Politico, via Greenwald:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clearly, a true profile in courage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I can count three reasons.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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