I’m not going to do a huge post here, because not a lot needs to be said. But I just want to make something clear. If you are currently arguing against Sonia Sotomayor’s appointment to the Supreme Court because she’s unqualified, too abrasive, a reverse racist or an affirmative action pick, you’re full of shit. Just stop. You don’t believe any of that crap – or you didn’t before someone whispered those talking points into your ear. And an actual reading of her record (including the context for the one or two lines that the right pretends to be so upset about) dispels those myths. You’re opposing her because Barack Obama nominated her, and you oppose Barack Obama’s party and ideology.

And listen – it’s partisan politics. I understand that. But what you have to understand is that a Democratic President with a Democratic Congress is nominating a Supreme Court Justice. Who the hell did you think he was going to pick? What you have to ask yourself as a conservative is whether Sotomayor is about as personally acceptable a candidate as Obama is going to nominate.

That’s how I looked at Bush’s nominations – and my response reflected that outlook. I gawked at Harrier Miers, because she was legitimately unqualified. I shuddered at Sam Alito, because he apparently spends his evenings masturbating to the soothing sound of Antonin Scalia’s voice. And I agreed that John Roberts should be confirmed without serious opposition because while I don’t agree with him all that often, he’s about as reasonable a nominee as I was likely to see from Bush. And as the opposing minority, that’s really the only calculation worth performing.

Side Note: Neither this post nor its comments will be turned into a pissing ground over Sotomayor’s qualifications, or the empty talking points associated with them. So don’t even start.

As politics went, the first decade of this new century were pretty gloomy times for the Democrats. They lost two Presidential elections (to one of, if not the worst President in American history), they were completely scolded and impotent in both the House and the Senate, and even after regaining majorities they were still too abused and politically marginalized to get anything useful done. And yet it was a sort of underground revival for liberals in this country. The Republicans managed to do what the Democratic base had been unable to. It knocked the Democratic Party’s machine flat on its back without completely snuffing the party out. And what emerged was a party largely rebuild by constituents rather than consultants.

Liberals and progressives began to take the party back. Not completely or universally by any stretch, but the actual voting base has much more power than it ever did before. And make no mistake, all of this is largely thanks to Ye Olde Interwebs. The fund raising, organizing, and phone banking have all been exceptional – certainly Obama showed the power of of a multitude of minor donations adding up fast.

But it’s more than that. It’s also about a sense of community and interconnectedness that was never really present in the Democratic party of my lifetime. Liberals were often so very fragmented over individual issues and frequently lacked any sort of core message to articulate their core beliefs. It’s the failure of the Democratic establishment that none of these things came from within the party machine, but it’s also the triumph of the party as it exists today that the left realized it didn’t need to be spoon-fed wet noodle talking points.

Well now it’s the Republicans that are lost in the wilderness, devoid of a cohesive message or strategy, relying on failed arguments and foot-shuffling pointlessness to pass for a platform. Granted, the GOP wound up there for completely different reasons than the Democrats did, and the country is in a very different place. But many Republicans looked to the past eight years to figure out how a party goes from being a “permanent minority” to owning both houses and the Presidency in less than a decade. And that is when many of them (for the first time, I suspect) figured out what the internet actually is. Sort of.

So as liberals dominate the blogs, the community sites, the forums and the message boards, conservatives looked for the next big technological barrier to break. They were going to get in on the ground floor of something, damn it, and show those no goodnik Daily Kos punks that two can play at this internet game. And almost universally, the GOP focused in on the one facet of electronic communication that didn’t seem to have much of an organized Democratic presence. Unfortunately for them, that was Twitter.

Now don’t get me wrong – there’s nothing inherently wrong with Twitter. In fact, I find it to be a very interesting medium. The best explanation I’ve ever heard of it is as a “Broadcast IM” service, and that really does seem to fit. It’s  just that Twitter is designed to relay short, off-the-cuff bits of information, rapidly and regularly, to anyone who might care to listen. It simply isn’t a good place to do serious organizing or hold genuine debate. Though maybe it is the perfect fit for the Republican party today. 160 characters and you’re done. Just enough for a sound bite or a slogan without anything other than obstruction for obstruction’s sake behind it.

I don’t think the GOP has caught on yet that being the undisputed political Kings Of Twitter is kind of like having the most popular Twilight / Furry Fan Fic web portal on the internet. I imagine it will take them some time, and that the vast majority of them will never really understand what it is they’re playing at. Nor am I under any delusion that most of the politicians who claim to tweet are simply having their talking points mushed in with their daily planner and typed out by an intern in their spare time. And yet they’re putting a lot of stock – and money – into promoting the conservative Twitter community. Even Sarah Palin tweets now, which is weird because I didn’t know pitbulls could text without thumbs.

So I say let them have Twitter. Go ahead, you silly buggers. Own the hell out of it. Because while one political party is dominating every digital medium that’s broad enough to foster a serious discussion, the other party will be reduced to listing their political platform in lolspeak. u can haz permanent minorty kthxbye!

When the demo for Bionic Commando hit Xbox Live, I have to tell you, I was disappointed. I’ve long been a fan of the series (and by series I mean the one game) and I have been looking forward to Bionic Commando for some time. But the demo was a dark, crowded, single-level free for all gankfest dominated by twitchy sniper one-shots and the brazen overpowered spray of one or two select weapons. The truth is that without the Bionic Commando name (and the good will that Grin earned by gracefully remastering the original title as Rearmed), I can’t imagine that demo selling any units. In fact, when I first played it, I couldn’t figure out why Capcom chose such a mediocre experience to demo such a highly anticipated game. Usually that’s a bad sign.

Well, I understand why they did it now, having beaten the full game on the maximum difficulty setting, and it has nothing to do with a lack of quality. The game experience itself is unimpeachable. It is consistently challenging without ever being cheap, well designed, balanced, and taking full advantage of all of the unique situations that its primary feature – the bionic arm – has to offer. The reason they threw everyone into a multiplayer zone during the demo was so that your opponents would suck as much as you do. Because when you first start playing Bionic Commando, make no mistake, you suck at it.

And I mean you suck hard. Even once you get the basics of swinging and targetting with the grapple down, once you figure out how to do some basic weapons aiming and how to take advantage of cover (though there is no inherent cover system), you will still be very bad at Bionic Commando. To be honest, I think I was about a third of the way into the game before I really got good with the arm, and I know that by about two thirds of the way through the game I was performing maneuvers that wouldn’t have even occurred to me earlier on.

The progression and skill curve of using the arm not just as a weapon (because it is a powerful weapon) but as a tactical tool to place your character where you want to be is constant. Even having beaten the game, I’m sure that a second play-through would continue to build on my technique. In short, it just isn’t something you could have ever learned in the span of a demo. And it puts the early previews, which all said that the game seemed cool but the arm was very hard to use, in sharp contrast. Those reviews were dead on accurate. And that’s a good thing.

If you go into Bionic Commando expecting to be able to swing from rooftop to scaffold simply by spamming your grapple button (which has been the principle mechanic in most other swing-based action games), you’re going to be frustrated. If you go in unwilling to treat the basic “grunt” enemies with a certain measure of lethal respect, you’re going to die a lot. And if what you’re looking for is Grand Theft Auto with a retractable claw, man are you going to be pissed.

And it’s the last part that surprised me the most – the game is most definitely not a sandbox experience (ala Spiderman 2). The levels are strictly linear, with waypoints clearly defined. If you attempt to venture too far off course, you will start to take damage and eventually get killed by radiation (the game takes place in the aftermath of a nuclear-style attack).  This mechanic is a bit clunky at times, make no mistake, because there were a few occasions where I haplessly swung up into what I figured was clear skies only to die in the air with very little warning and almost no way to alter course. But this is nit-pickery at best, and exists only to highlight the single gameplay aspect that I wasn’t completely satisfied with.

The physics of the swinging are utterly flawless – once you understand how to properly control your character. And it keeps coming back to that element because the control is so very important. When you first start playing the game, you will spend a lot of your time hurling your character more or less at your objectives and floundering around mid-air because you let go of your swings too late. That’s quite normal. By the end of the game, I was using enemy hovercraft as swingpoints to grapple between buildings and riggings to dodge sniper fire without so much as a second thought. The curve really is that steep, but it’s also that rewarding.

As far as the combat goes, it’s surprisingly pure in its execution. I’d estimate, not counting bosses, that there are about ten enemy units in the entire game – and in some cases, that’s recounting the same unit if it’s armed with a different weapon. What sells the combat are the environmental situations they put you in when you are dealing with these enemy types. Sometimes you’ll have to take down mech-type opponents (who are impervious to normal small arms fire) without any sort of explosives. You’re limited to what you can use to damage them environmentally and how you can out-maneuver them with your arm.

Other times you will be put into a wide open space with limited cover and an array of deviously placed snipers – often without any long range weapons of your own. The challenge then becomes to travel from sniper nest to sniper nest at high velocity, because leaving yourself exposed and stationary will get you killed in literally three seconds. And eventually the game starts mixing up different combinations of enemy units and locations. And it’s the locations that are often important. Performing a wild dive down to a pack of grunts is a completely different combat experience from trying to assault them in a narrow tunnel full of debris.

Likewise, fighting a hovercraft (which can nearly one-shot you) on a series of scaffolds where you have to swing to avoid its exposives, but you also have to stay under cover to hide from a sniper, and you can’t advance too far forward or else you will draw attacks from the soldiers. . . it very much becomes a tactical experience. You begin to play a secondary metagame that’s all about limiting and controlling the parameters of the fight. And that’s when your progression with the swing mechanics comes into play. You simply can’t do all of that if your attention is 100% focused on the click-and-release controls of your arm. In fact, I doubt it’s even possible to beat this game unless you can learn to swing as comfortably as you would run or aim in most other games.

And that’s what makes it brilliant.

You can’t cheat the game. You can’t just hold back and pop every enemy from the other side of the board. You can’t always go in with the heavy explosives and splash-damage your way to victory. You don’t have that one cheap move that you can just use over and over again on everything that stands in your way – in fact, your most potent arm attacks also leave you vulnerable to other opponents. The game lacks one single I Win button, opting instead for a series of I Am Awesome buttons. But in order to push those buttons, you actually have to be awesome.

For those of you that never played the original (or Rearmed), there’s not really enough plot from those games to worry about. For those of you that care, the Chain of Command comic on the Bionic Commando website neatly bridges the old story into the new one, and sets up the major themes of the game nicely. Just about the only person I wouldn’t recommend this game to is the extremely casual gamer, because no matter how low you set the difficulty, no matter how easily bosses go down or how much damage you can soak before you die, the swing mechanics will always be there, waiting to be engaged and learned. They’re vicious and tricky – even deceptively difficult. You will reach what you think are zeniths in terms of your ability, and they will turn out to be minor plateaus at best. But the better you get at using the bionics, the more rewarding the game becomes.

In short, it is worth every last one of your sixty dollars. Go buy it.

So yeah, we’re talking about torture again. I’m sure some of my readers are bloody sick of the subject. Hell, on some level I’m even sick of the subject. But it’s too important to ignore, and I think I need to address a very important aspect of how our national conversation about torture has been framed. As an aside, it makes me a little disgusted that our nation is actually discussing it. . . but that’s another rant for another day.

I’ve been saying for a long time, both here on my website and to anyone that will listen, that torture doesn’t work as a tool for gathering information. And this is true, much in the same way that a hammer is a terrible tool for driving screws. That doesn’t mean that torture is ineffective – far from it. Torture is very effective at its intended purpose, which is and has always been the extraction of false confessions. If you hurt someone badly enough, over a long enough period of time, they will eventually say or do just about anything to make that pain stop. Some people might break in hours. Others might be able to hold out for months, even years.

From the Spanish Inquisition to the Third Reich to the Khmer Rouge and all points of totalitarian oppression in between, torture was, has been and always will be principally effective in eliciting false admissions – specifically, targeted admissions. In fact, when you get right down to it, torture is really only useful if you already know what you want to hear. It doesn’t provide useful information because unless you already know the answer to your question, you have no idea if the victim is telling the truth, or simply fabricating intelligence in order to end the torture.

The counter-argument I’ve heard consistently, in favor of the use of torture, is that we may (or may not) have received critical information from torturing prisoners that helped fight al Queda. The first problem I have with that assertion is that it’s being made by the same bunch of duplicitous pricks that told us that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, that Iraq was an imminent threat, and that Hussein had direct ties to al Queda. They were wrong on all counts, and continue (to this day, in some cases) to assert these fictions to anyone who will listen.

So why in the hell are we willing to believe them about torture’s effectiveness in fighting terrorism? If we assume they are telling the truth, it treads against literally thousands of years of human experience. If we assume they are lying, it precisely follows the pattern of covering-their-asses lies that we heard from every other orifice of the Bush Administration.

And that pattern is not unique to Iraq. No one could have predicted that terrorists would slam planes into buildings – except for the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and any counter-terrorism expert with more than a week’s worth of experience. No one realized the levees in New Orleans would breach – except for FEMA, Homeland Security, the Army Corps of Engineers, and hell, the freaking Weather Channel. We absolutely do not spy on American citizens – except that we do. And of course we get easily acquirable warrants from the very security-conscience FISA court first – except that we don’t.  I could go on for days. Hit the archives of this site, and you’ll see that I have. Occam’s Razor demands, at the very least, that you acknowledge the likelihood of a cover-up concerning the use and usefulness of torture.

Which brings me back to the original point. Why would we torture prisoners? It’s not that I think that everyone in the Bush Administration has some sort of sadism fetish, or that I think they’re “evil”. Excuse me for not seeing the world in stark, absolute black and white. What I’ve long asserted, and what is quickly coming to light, is that our government tortured prisoners for the exact same reason that every other regime or government has tortured people. To force confessions, accuracy be damned.

It’s a pretty open secret that the neoconservative movement has had a hard-on for toppling Saddam Hussein – as far back as the mid 90s. It’s clear as day on the Project for the New American Century’s website – specifically their 1997 Statement of Principles (signed by Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Bill Bennett, Scooter Libby and Jeb Bush, amongst others). At least four years before they took the White House, this group of people was advocating using overwhelming American military force to control the world’s energy supply.

In a 1999 letter to Bill Clinton they insisted that America’s top national security priority should be, “removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power”. That letter, incidentally, was signed by Dick Cheney, John Bolton, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfelt, Bill Kristol, Richard Perle, William Bennett and Richard Armitage. The same men who were telling us just three years later that Saddam was going to hand off WMDs to al Queda. And the same men that to this day defend the torture of prisoners in American custody.

I know that’s a lot of names, but I have a few more to throw at you. The first is Paul O’Neill. He was Secretary of the Treasury, appointed by George W. Bush. He resigned after less than two years, and later admitted that he was asked (read: told) to leave. In 2004 he wrote a book called The Price of Loyalty where he talked frequently about the new administration’s obsession with Saddam Hussein from the moment they took power – long before 9/11 and during a time when they effectively ignored global terrorism in general and al Queda specifically.

All of these assertions are corroborated by many sources, from the several books Bob Woodward (of Watergate fame) wrote about the Bush White House to the statements of counter-terrorism expert Richard Clarke. Clarke served under every President from Ronald Reagan on forward. In his book Against All Enemies, Clarke tells a very similar tale about the Day One efforts to remove Hussein and the complete devaluing of counter-terrorism efforts against bin Laden.

In order to sell the American people on a war in Iraq, though, the government needed a better rationale than the Reverse Domino Theory that PNAC so clearly outlines. What they needed was to link Hussein to al Queda, which of course they could not actually do because the two were enemies. On at least one occasion, bin Laden called for revolution in Iraq and the beheading of Saddam Hussein (on one of his Greatest Hits tapes, which we don’t really get many of anymore). So what the neoconservatives who found themselves in charge of the most powerful military on the planet really needed was some sort of evidence that could tie Hussein, even tangentally, to the men behind 9/11.

What they needed were false confessions from captured al Queda prisoners. And that’s exactly what they got. Because like I said before, any human being will break after the right amount of pressure is applied over the right span of time. And once that happens, they will say anything – anything – to make their own suffering stop. Rumsfeld, Cheney, Perle, Wolfowitz. . . that whole crew was well aware of that fact. It’s why they started torturing prisoners in early 2002, before the invasion of Iraq. And it’s why they stopped torturing prisoners in 2004, after we’d already sealed the deal. It was done specifically and meticulously to provide just another false justification for the invasion of Iraq.

And if that doesn’t piss you off, I honestly don’t know what will.

Update: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (the “mastermind” of 9/11) says that he lied to his interrogators in order to get the torture to stop. Like I said, torture is very effective. But not at gathering information.

So, Arlen Specter is now a member of the Democratic party. Allow me to just say, officially and unequivocally, “Big fucking deal”. Joe Lieberman was a member of the Democratic party. So was Zell Miller. Hell, Bob Nelson still is a member. And it doesn’t mean dick-ola. It’d be one thing if Specter had an attack of conscience and realized that he was running under a flag that thinks Sarah Palin is qualified to be in a position to launch nuclear weapons. But it had nothing to do with belief or structure, and everything to do with his own political future. Specter admitted as much when he listed his reluctance to have his long career in the Senate decided by the fringe of his current party as one of his primary reasons for swapping.

On one hand, the Republican party is shrinking, and in at least two important ways. The first is their base, which just keeps getting smaller and more isolated. In Pennsylvania, where Specter was staring down the barrel of a primary fight for his Senate seat against resident batshit-crazy former House Rep Pat Toomey. And while the guy is cracklier than an AM radio in a fallout shelter, his particular brand of nonsense and noise is what passes for policy amongst that Republican shrinking base. And since Specter has always been one of the party’s more moderate members, he knew damn well he’d lose that primary.

But it’s more than just Toomey that spooked Specter. The man, I am quite sure, can count. And he saw that in Pensy, his own party’s self-identified membership was shrinking rapidly. More and more keystoners were referring to themselves as either Democrats or Independents. And as low as approval ratings for Democrats in congress generally are, they look sky high compared to those same approval ratings for congressional Republicans. His party is becoming marginalized, impotent and cranky. And Specter doesn’t like it.

To which I say fine. Run as an Independent. If you’re going to do a Lieberman impression, go whole hog, mate. Because make no mistake, he is doing a Lieberman impression. Because from what I can tell, he might have changed the little letter after his name, but he certainly hasn’t gotten on board with the party’s platform or with very much of Obama’s agenda. Now, you could say that’s just Specter staying true to his beliefs. And I’ll say fine. But that means that he isn’t a Democrat, since those core beliefs fly in the face of what the party has been building over the past few years. Hell, he can’t even find a decent word to say about Al Franken. Find me one other Democratic Senator or Congressman that is actively rooting for Norm Coleman. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

So what it boils down to is that Specter wanted that very in-vogue (D) after his name – which I’m pretty sure Fox News has already “accidentally” given him a few times – but he doesn’t actually want to take part in anything associated with his party. Personally, I agree with Markos Moulitsas on this one. I hope Specter keeps on pissing in his newfound pot. Because one of the reasons that the Democratic party has been able to drag itself out from under the crushing obscurity of its predicted “minor party status” is that lousy Democrats get primary challenges of their own. And if Specter thinks he’d have a hard time squaring off as a Republican against a rusty hinge like Toomey, he’s in for a shock going up against Joe Sestak in the Democratic primary.

Now, some people don’t think Specter should be primaried as a Democrat, because there’s a lot of talk that the fairly popular Tom Ridge might run against Toomey on the Republican ticket. Ridge polls well against everyone, and his vast name recognition (not to mention his association with the recovery after 9/11) gives him an edge. Personally, I think that’s some pretty terrible logic.

First of all, you don’t allow a self interested schmuck like Specter represent your party simply because you think he has a better chance of winning. But more importantly, Ridge will be much easier to take down than most people think. To be honest, I find it a bit inconceivable that a state that went for Obama by 10 points and rejected Rick Santorum two years before by 18 points is going to elect a former Bush Administration official to be their Senator. All Sestak has to do is bust out the footage of Ridge standing there like a square peg, waxing incoherent about color-coded threat warnings. It’s a route that Specter really can’t go because of his Senatorial record. But a guy like Sestak could (and in my opinion would) hammer the hell out of Ridge for being a good little Bush lackie.

So Specter can think that he swapped himself into another Senatorial term if he wants to. And the Democrats can delude themselves into thinking that they now hold 59 (and soon to be 60, Arlen) seats in the Senate. But they’re both dead wrong, and the sooner acceptance sinks in, the better.

So how is it that when he was President Vice-President we heard from Dick Cheney about once every seven months, but now that he’s no longer in office the man’s got something new to say about how the government should be run every week or so? On one hand, I don’t really mind all that much. If the only guy in the Republican Party with a lower approval rating than George W. Bush wants to wedge his way back into politics, that’s good news for Obama and even better news for the Democrats in 2010. But on the other hand, it’s obnoxious. And the secret service costs of shuttling him back and forth between the Fox News studios and the partially constructed Death Star really aren’t helping out the budget crisis.

This week he surfaced to complain that the Obama administration released a variety of memos and reports about America’s faux legal justifications for torturing suspected and captured terrorists. And yes, I said torturing. Extended stress positions, extreme sleep deprivation, repeatedly slamming people into tables and floors, and of course the catch-all of the past decade, waterboarding, are all torture. And anyone who hasn’t been waterboarded needs to shut their armchair warrior cake holes until they get a taste of it first hand. We’ve executed people for waterboarding American soldiers, and that’s pretty much the end of the fucking argument.

Anyway, Cheney is all in a huff because there were other documents that Obama could have released that would show all of the incredibly important things we learned from waterboarding our prisoners. All of the foiled plots that we common folk never knew about and all of the super duper secret information we learned, without which America would have descended into terrorism and anarchy. And he requests – nay, demands – that Obama release these memos to the public so we can all see what a good job the previous administration did torturing people for freedom.

I call bullshit. I call one huge, honking pile of third rate bullshit. First of all, the Bush administration practically held a ticker tape parade any time they caught some fifth string terrorist intern. I started to wonder if radical Islam had some rule about only being able to count to 2 because every schmuck we caught was apparently “al-Queda’s second in command”. They were desperate to prove the validity of their efforts and policies to the American public. So if they really had foiled some crazy Tom Clancy shit, we’d have heard about it in the time it takes Sam Fisher to call for extraction.

Likewise, if there were any such memos, and they really were a cohesive argument for torturing prisoners, they’d have been either “leaked” or declassified years ago. At the very least, they’d have been made public before Cheney left office. So on one hand, we can believe that a man who would out a CIA agent in order to exact political revenge wouldn’t declassify documents justifying his entire administration’s world view. Or we can believe that Dick Cheney is full of shit.

What’s embarrassing is this isn’t even a new routine. You demand that your opponent release information that doesn’t exist. Then, when they tell you there’s no such information, you call that proof that the information does exist and the other guy is lying. And if that sort of logic sounds absolutely insane to you, I’d like to congratulate you on finally making it all the way to March of 2003.

You guys didn’t really think I was done with this whole teabagging thing, did you? Seriously? When the barely-literate right decides to stage a protest that, at best, sounds like they’re sitting around a table with petticoats and parasols and at worst sounds like something you have to pay an extra fifty bucks for, I simply lack the self control (and the desire) to leave things alone.

Now, the left would like to believe that absolutely no one showed up to teabag today, and that’s just not true. It was no million man march. . . hell, it wasn’t even a thousand man march, but most of the events turned up several hundred people. Those aren’t great numbers considering the fact that Fox News essentially turned into Teabag Central over the past week, but remember. This is the grass roots astroturf right we’re talking about. They’re pretty new to this whole “doing more than bitching about it at work” thing.

As I said yesterday, I remember 2002 and 2003. Everybody starts somewhere. Hell, I work with a few teabaggers. I didn’t even know it until lunch, in fact. They’re nice enough people, as long as you don’t ask them what country they think the President was born in. And I’ve long since made it a point not to talk politics with them because it just creates too much workplace tension when I grind their talking points into a fine, grey paste.

So like I said, this whole thing wasn’t a complete flop for the right. And the left is always going to paint it as a disaster no matter how it turns out. So I decided to try out something I’d ordinarily never punish myself with. My nerves steeled, I turned to Fox News to see how they were spinning all of this teabagging. And I have to tell you. . . anyone who is worried about these protests can rest assured that nothing significant was accomplished today. No groundwork was laid down. While the body count was significant, the brain count was effectively nil.

The right, it seems suffers from many of the same pains that the left used to (and sometimes still does) suffer from. The first is a lack of message discipline. Now, I’m not talking about the actual GOP. They’ve always run a tighter operation than the Democrats, and they have Reagan and later Gingrich to thank for that. But until public distaste for Bush was boiling up into over the 50% mark, most of the left-wing events that I attended felt like a pot luck of personal issues. The right has managed to take that to an entirely new level.

As far as I can tell, the teabaggers are upset that Barack Obama is a socialist, terrorist, fascist, muslim, abortion performing, immoral icon of the antichrist who is going to cause America to surrender by taxing the middle class  at a 150% rate, making everyone marry an illegal gay Mexican, and melting down all of our guns so he can use the metal to build concentration camps where our children will be sent to work in the ACORN mines. I might have missed some of the subtext there, but it’s kind of hard to read all of those signs when your eyes are watering up with laughter.

To be honest, I don’t think most of the teabaggers have any idea what they are protesting. It certainly isn’t taxation – I’ve yet to see a single person at any of those rallies that will be pulling in more than a quarter million a year. And it certainly isn’t socialism, since I don’t think most of them could define it without a trip to the publicly funded library to look it up. The truth is that all this teabagging is just one great big conservative hissy-fit about being out of power. I mean, really. Obama’s been the President for less than half a year. He hasn’t even had time to fuck anything up yet. Hell, it took his predecessor longer than that to really screw the country over, and that guy was a freakin’ expert.

Some of them claim they are protesting government spending, inflated deficits and unbalanced budgets. Others say they  are worried about the government having too much control over their lives or being too invasive of their privacy. And many of them are protesting under some catch-all banner about America being in crisis. Well, they’re all full of shit, cause I didn’t see any of them out there teabagging for the past eight years.

The only thing they have to be upset about is that their own party screwed the pooch so badly that they’re out of power now. And rather than turning to their former leaders and asking them what in the blue hell they were doing since the new millennium came around (which is what the left did with the Democrats when they were tired of getting their asses kicked), they are taking out their frustrations and their loathing on the man that stomped them so very, very hard last November. It’s Obama’s fault, you see, because he had the nerve to actually win an election.

And you know what? That’s fine. If they don’t like that they lost the election, they have the right to say so. They even have the right to protest the fact, technically. Although it’s a damn stupid thing to protest, since what they’re upset about is a matter of opinion. So let them go out there and march mill around aimlessly against their own disenfranchisement. Let them grumble and scream and caterwail like colicky infants on a twelve hour non-stop flight. The rest of the country will respond in turn.

You know, part of me almost feels bad for the politically disenfranchised right wing. Hell, I remember six or seven years ago when my world view was generally seen as crazy or irrelevant. I remember the opposition party chortling to themselves about their “permanent majority” (and I do hope the Democrats learn from their mistake). I remember when way more than 65% of the country firmly backed a President that I was sure would lead us into a downward spiral of ruin and disaster. Then I remember that no one is sending the thin-skinned right wingers any death threats or calling them unAmerican traitors, and I suddenly I don’t feel so bad for them anymore. Funny that.

But I do know where they’re coming from. I remember feeling ideologically abandoned by my countrymen, to the point where I hardly wanted anything to do with them. So I understand the whole “Going Galt” meme. For those of you that are unaware, “Going Galt” is a reference to the mysterious yet crucial character from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. John Galt is just about the richest, smartest, most industrious and ingenious man on the face of the Earth. He and his merry but generally disassociated band of do-it-yourself’ers decide that they are sick and tired of all the hangers-on and the crybabies demanding a slice of their hard earned pie. So one day, he just up and disappears, because he would rather vanish without a trace than work to support the lazy, worthless masses.

All of the other brilliant and talented industrialists follow suit, and their absence throws the entire world into disarray. Because without their inexplicable awesomeness, always present to tell the other 99% how to live their lives, the rest of us poor suckers are lost in a hazy doldrum of pointless existence. Without Galt and his caste of upper-echelon makers and doers, the rest of the world lacks a teat to suck on. Low and behold, we all learn the error of our ways and come to respect those who propped us up. Only at the end of the novel does John Galt re-emerge to end the suffering of the tiny-brained working class by re-structuring all of society into a calculated applause machine whose affections are permanently affixed on Galt’s sheer genius.

You want to talk about a self-aggrandizing masturbation fantasy? You just can’t beat Atlas Shrugged. Never before (and hopefully never again) will the rights of the privileged and the pompous be so thoroughly defended in their privilege and pomposity through such tedious and repetitive prose. I’ve spared you the fake mysticism and the badly arranged pseudo-science, and more or less spoiled the book at this point. But that’s only true in as much as one can actively spoil something that is already fetid with willful exaggeration and childish, intentional stupidity.

So beloved is Atlas Shrugged on the economic right (Alan Greenspan worshiped at the altar for most of his adult life) that, for a tiny, hilarious blip on the social radar, people started actually talking about “Going Galt”. Notice that I said they were talking about it, as opposed to actually doing it. In the end, no one went Galt because not a single Objectivist was willing to put his money where his mouth was. Because the entire philosophy is just one big rationalization for “poor, successful me”. Because even the true believers know, deep down, that they love money far more than they love their ideals. Either that or they know they’re full of shit. I’m open to either possibility.

Even those who actively, publicly called for people to Go Galt were full of shit. John Galt didn’t make his great big (fifty-six page long) speech before he disappeared. He just up and vanished. And the gap that he left in the workings of the world was evidence in his absence. Yet Michelle Malkin and her ilk didn’t just up and disappear (though I pine for the day, I really do). No, Malkin stuck around, cheerleading for everyone else to take a stand. Possibly because deep down she knows she doesn’t produce anything useful to society in the first place. But more likely because that’s where the easy money was.

And in a lot of ways, that’s the real trouble with Atlas Shrugged. It fails to realize that while there are a few prodigies and genuine geniuses out there shaping the world, there are ten times as many capable, intelligent people waiting in the wings. In its own absurd way, it fellates unfettered capitalism without acknowledging one of its core tenants. In a truly free and open market, if one person cannot or will not produce, another will gladly fill their spot and collect the wealth that could have been theirs.

So, back to our emotionally battered right wing. I said earlier that I understand their rejection of the countrymen that seem to be rejecting them. I remember that phase. For me, it lasted a few days after the election. For others, I guess it lingers a bit. But I also understand another need. The need for relevance. The need to roll up your sleeves and change the direction of the nation itself. When you realize that you cannot or will not abandon something you’re invested in, and you decide to take hold of it and make it your own again.

And as those sorts of movements go, the left did an amazing job. The resurgence of individually-powered politics and, dare I say it, populism in this country between Bush’s first term and the present day still leaves me a bit staggered and breathless. I watched as the left grew out of their anger (but not out of their outrage). I watched them organize, mobilize, and hold their party’s feet to the fire.

Yes, there were protests and marches and grand, media-grasping gestures. But there was also a lot of political footwork. There was time donated to causes and leaders we could genuinely respect. There was also money donated – so much that it rivaled the standard wholesale purchasing of politicians that is so repugnantly present in both political parties. It wasn’t just idle foot stomping and tantrum throwing. It was measured, decisive action. And hey, some of it worked, some of it didn’t. But today our President is Barack Obama instead of John McCain or Willard M. Romney or even Hillary Clinton. And anyone who was paying attention knows that it was the individual wills of many rather than the presumed logic of the failure-proned Democratic leadership that helped him get there.

So here we are, three months into the Obama Presidency, and the right is absolutely sure that the sky is falling, ACORN is wire-tapping their call phones, and that the government is going to give their guns to terrorists and their paychecks to welfare queens. Socialism is descending on their lives like some throwback McCarthy boogeyman, and they’re not going to take this shit sitting down!

They’re going to throw a Tea Party.

No, for reals. Actually, they’re going to throw a lot of Tea Parties. All over the country, in fact. Yes, in the spirit of the Boston Tea Party, and I’m using the word “spirit” loosely here, the wingiest and the nuttiest of the wingnuts are organizing protests and marches on April 15th – tax day – and rallying against the forces of Evil Obama Socialism. Of course, instead of engaging in acts of genuine protest they’re going to march down the streets waving tea bags  in their hands. Just like our founding fathers, I tells ya! And I’m sure once they take about ten minutes per person to explain to every onlooker what their gesture is intended to represent, the general public will be very impressed. You know. Once they get done making “teabagging” jokes.

Aww, who am I kidding? I’m never going to be done making “teabagging” jokes.

So, is Rush Limbaugh the defacto leader of the Republican Party? Personally, I don’t know if I care or not. Since their choices seem reduced to either completely sack-less leadership or batshit-crazy leadership, either way it’s a win for me. I am enjoying the sight of the party in a desperate scramble for meaning and significance. It’s almost as if they don’t know they’re completely and utterly in the minority now. A crippling election has come and gone, and they still seem to think that the majority of Americans trust them to fix the financial crisis. They still believe that “bipartisan” means the Democrats caving in to their every demand. They still trot out that tired, never-ran cliche of socialism as if the American public hasn’t failed to be terrified by it the last few thousand times. And they still blame the Democratic party for all that is wrong in the world, from the failing economy to the cost of health care – the GOP even seems to think the Democrats are responsible for the clusterfuck their own party has become.

The right can push these absurd meme that it’s some kind of Obama / Reid / Pelosi/ Carville conspiracy that elevated Rush to his faux leadership role within the GOP, but it’s just not true. There were a few factors that allowed Rush to gain so much clout within the party’s base. The biggest one is that the party doesn’t really have any leadership. They ran a weak Presidential candidate, chosen from an entire field of bullshit-weak candidates. Their supposed diamond in the rough is back up in Alaska, blissfully being forgotten by the majority of America. The minority leaders in Congress are both laughably unable to deliver leadership, and are selling a bill of goods that the country just isn’t buying.

Oh, and there’s the fact that Rush appeals to the absolute wing-nuttiest of the wingnuts. He’s certainly got that going for him.

But this idea that it’s an orchestrated effort between the Democrats and the media to cause tension between Rush and the supposed Republican leadership is absurd. It wasn’t the Democrats that put him on the air, or cowtowed to his lunatic rantings. Barack Obama didn’t enlist Rush to be a key speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference this past week (where he received an award, I believe, for  outstanding achievement in the field of excellence). And unless I missed some very creating video editing, James Carville wasn’t responsible for Michael Steele’s on-air fellating of Limbaugh after he dared to assert that Rush is an entertainer, and a crude one at that.

No no, boys. The Republicans own this one. They have only themselves to blame both for their inability to inspire their constituents and for their willingness to use Limbaugh as such a useful tool. A reliable attack dog who could say the sorts of hideous things that elected politicians never could. No one on the right minded when Rush defended eight years of the Worst President Ever, because it was convenient to let someone else do that dirty job. Hell, even Rush admitted afterwards that he was “carrying water” for Bush. Live on his show, no less. They invited a selfish, beligerent junkie into their homes, and now they’re surprised that he’s shitting all over the living room carpet.

Must be more of that “politics of personal responsibility” we’ve seen so much of over the past decade.