The Rule of Law is Sacrosanct*
(or don't fear the reaper, i.e avoid a bunker mentality**)

Glenn Greenwald is positively overflowing in his praise for Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder. Holder has been trying to do what's right and best for America in the face of the usual suspects' demagoguery and bedwetting over terrorism. As Obama has said more than once, "Let's not allow the terrorists to scare us into a bunker mentality." The only thing to fear is fear itself, as FDR put it. Greenwald:

Independently, Rahm Emanuel is the absolute last person who ought to be exerting influence over the Attorney General's decisions regarding where and how to try Terrorist suspects; remember when all Good Democrats agreed that Karl Rove's attempts to influence the DOJ was really bad because prosecutorial decisions are not supposed to be politicized?

Easy Glenn, don't want to praise Obama's AG Holder too much, it might make your never-ending hyperbolic criticism of Obama, that he's no better than Bush, etc., seem incongruent.

Last week there were news stories about a possible ouster of Emanuel after the Massachusetts Senate race loss. I disagreed with those who thought he should go, but after reading this I now wouldn't argue so strongly for keeping him. Emanuel might be right in is his argument that it would be better to get health care reform than try terrorism suspect as civilians and thereby respect international norms and put the Bush administration's lawlessness in the past.

I would say it's better to get health care reform than perform a witch hunt on a previous administration, which is what Greenwald wants. (People who complained about the witch hunts against Bill Clinton seem especially inclined to return the favor. Seems .... hypocritical and double-standardsish.) My hope would be that Obama follows his AG's advice and manages to gets health care reform done. That seems possible - even likely - while I believe they would have to chose between health care reform or partisan witch-hunt. (Besides Obama's whole Presidential campaign theme was bipartisanship, something his critics always seem to forget or ignore.)

According to the New York Times article Greenwald points to, Holder is currently reading "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, a Swedish mystery-thriller, and Slavery by Another Name, about its unofficial persistence into 20th-century America."

My question to Senator Lindsey Graham - who I've always admired and who Emanuel is trying to placate - is that if we can treat anyone who is not an American in any manner we choose, why can't foreign nations do the same to American citizens? And if they do how can we protest?
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*sometimes
**As Rorschach says in prison to his fellow inmates - many of whom he put there, "You don't understand, I'm not in here with you, you're in here with me!"

Ezra Klein: 

In related news, Evan Bayh has decided to retire. He said he wants to spend more time scolding his family for moving too far to the left.

Left-liberal analysis failure

Maybe I'm just getting older and more compromised, but I was underwhelmed by left-liberals efforts to put Obama's feet to the fire and hold him to his campaign promised this past year. I know, I know, Obama explicitly asked for supporters to keep the pressure on and stay involved - the only recipe for success - but still reading this news reminds me of critics' evidence that the Obama administration would be a failure:

Mr. Tauzin is leaving his $2 million-a-year job as the top lobbyist for the drug industry amid complaints from drug makers that he bargained away their profits too cheaply, spent too much in his $150 million advertising campaign to sell the overhaul and miscalculated in his assessment that the passage of the legislation was all but inevitable.

Other drug industry lobbyists, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said his departure raised questions about whether the drug makers would continue to support the proposed overhaul, which has stalled in Congress.

Several of the lobbyists said Mr. Tauzin was undermined by a rival lobbying powerhouse -- Thomas J. Donohue, president of the United States Chamber of Commerce, who had fought the health care proposals from the start and complained to the drug makers that Mr. Tauzin had gone along too easily. A spokesman for Mr. Donohue declined to comment on Mr. Donohue’s behalf and later released a statement from Mr. Donohue praising Mr. Tauzin as "a great friend."

On the other hand many of the left-liberals who pointed to the drug industry deal never supported Obama.

Schism

Hitchens on Thomas Cromwell and the English Reformation.

He writes, "In Cromwell’s mind, as he contemplates his antagonist [Thomas] More, Mantel allows us to discern the germinal idea of what we now call the Protestant ethic:

He never sees More--a star in another firmament, who acknowledges him with a grim nod--without wanting to ask him, what’s wrong with you? Or what’s wrong with me? Why does everything you know, and everything you’ve learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too. Show me where it says, in the Bible, "Purgatory." Show me where it says "relics, monks, nuns." Show me where it says "Pope.""

Ahmed Rashid on the present-day Taliban.

It's almost as if when the 21st Century "West" (and globalized Japan, China, etc.) looks at the Taliban, we are looking at our past.

From Rashid:

What [Taliban author] Zaeef omits or fudges is significant. He makes no mention of the ISI's financial and material support to the Taliban, and says hardly anything about al-Qaeda or how his hero Mullah Omar became so close to Osama bin Laden. He has nothing to say about the Taliban's repressive attitudes toward women, including the ban on their education, and he makes no mention of the Taliban's harsh punishments, including public stonings. 

By 2001, after UN sanctions restricted the Taliban's international contacts, Zaeef became the only Taliban leader who could meet with US and Western envoys. His relationship with the US embassy in Islamabad was dominated by American demands to hand over Osama bin Laden. In the days after September 11, he frantically tried to stave off the impending US attack on his country by appealing to Western embassies, writing letters to the UN, and trying to enlist support from Islamic countries. He met with Mullah Omar, who was convinced that the Americans would not dare attack. In Omar's mind, Zaeef writes, "there was less than a 10 percent chance that America would resort to anything beyond threats and so an attack was unlikely."

Review of Stewart Copeland's new book.

“Strange Things Happen” is just slightly more generous on the Police years than was Sting’s “Broken Music,” which dismissed the band in a single page. Copeland devotes 10 skimpy, highly impressionistic pages to the years between 1976 and 1984, at which time the trio became the biggest band in the world. (The guitarist Andy Summers was more expansive about the glory days in his endearing “One Train Later.”) Almost as much attention is devoted, for no clear reason, to a single show in which he sat in with middling alt- rockers Incubus, or an incomprehensible MTV event for which he accompanied the Foo Fighters. 

Above and beyond the Police, Stewart Copeland has had a pretty wild life. He was raised in the Middle East, the son of a C.I.A. operative. [Miles Copeland] He was something of a pioneer in the pop exploration of “world music,” recording with African musicians well before Paul Simon made his “Graceland” trek. He has worked on various documentary films and is an accomplished polo player. 

In “Strange Things Happen,” though, he glosses through these events at such high speed that at best, we get a wisecrack or a flip observation (“my daddy used to conduct his nefarious manipulation of local potentates with cocktail parties at our modest Ottoman palace”), but no real sense of what any of it means to him. 

 

Tony Blair on Iraq: "No Regrets."

As he says, the views in the Middle East are that the Sunni Saddam Hussein was a check on Shia Iran. But he's right that we shouldn't use one dictatorship to check another. He gave a big speech to that effect in Chicago in 1999.

Blair is the one politician I've changed my mind about. During the 90s, I believed he was a triangulator of the Clinton mold, and he was in a way. After 9/11 he took a lot heat for standing with America, but we are better off for it.

J.D. Salinger passed away.

Dana Stevens on why Catcher in the Rye was never adapted into a movie.

Howard Zinn is dead, too. He was a next-door neighbor to Matt Damon and his family, near Boston.

Damon's Will Hunting was a working class Holden Caulfield-type with a pronounced Southie accent.

Eccentric Cool
Hitchens on Gore Vidal:

More than a decade ago, I sat on a panel in New York to review the life and work of Oscar Wilde. My fellow panelist was that heroic old queen Quentin Crisp, perhaps the only man ever to have made a success of the part of Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest. Inevitably there arose the question: Is there an Oscar Wilde for our own day? The moderator proposed Gore Vidal, and, really, once that name had been mentioned, there didn’t seem to be any obvious rival.

Like Wilde, Gore Vidal combined tough-mindedness with subversive wit (The Importance of Being Earnest is actually a very mordant satire on Victorian England) and had the rare gift of being amusing about serious things as well as serious about amusing ones. Like Wilde, he was able to combine radical political opinions with a lifestyle that was anything but solemn. And also like Wilde, he was almost never "off": his private talk was as entertaining and shocking as his more prepared public appearances. Admirers of both men, and of their polymorphous perversity, could happily debate whether either of them was better at fiction or in the essay form.

I recently read a description of actor Johnny Depp which called his style an eccentric cool. Like Vidal and Wilde, there's a confident independence. Even though Vidal is in Italy and Depp is in France, they are still "involved" and not hermits. Not too long ago I saw Vidal on Henry Rollins's show, which was funny. And Depp has a new Disney blockbuster Alice in Wonderland movie coming out.*

Louis Auchincloss just passed away and I remember Vidal always spoke highly of him. From the Times obituary:

Admirers compared him to other novelists of society and manners like William Dean Howells, but Mr. Auchincloss’s greatest influence was probably Edith Wharton, whose biography he wrote and with whom he felt a direct connection. His grandmother had summered with Wharton in Newport, R.I.; his parents were friends of Wharton’s lawyers. He almost felt he knew Wharton personally, Mr. Auchincloss once said.

Like Wharton, Mr. Auchincloss was interested in class and morality and in the corrosive effects of money on both. "Of all our novelists, Auchincloss is the only one who tells us how our rulers behave in their banks and their boardrooms, their law offices and their clubs," Gore Vidal once wrote. "Not since Dreiser has an American writer had so much to tell us about the role of money in our lives."

And yet five judges of the United States Supreme Court remain oblivious.  Obama's pointed disrespect ("With all due respect to the separation of powers...") last night was amazing. The Times obit also describes the class traitor Auchincloss's partrician/cultural elite personal style (which also could be said of Vidal.):

Mr. Auchincloss had a beaky, patrician nose and spoke with a high-pitched Brahmin accent. He had elegant manners and suits to match, and he wrote in longhand in the living room of an antiques-filled apartment on Park Avenue.

What was most memorable about Vidal's memoirs, to me at least, was the anecdotes about his mother. They are unbelievably funny and she comes off as highly intelligent and unsentimental (i.e. a major bitch) with no trace of self-doubt (like the mother/matriarch on the hilarious sitcom Arrested Development**). For all I know she was a nice, if distant, woman, but Vidal's portrait is unforgettable.
 -----------------------------
* It's good to see Depp working again with friends Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter. It's also exciting to see they invited Anne Hathaway down the rabbit hole to play the White Queen. Hathaway was unbearably heartbreaking in Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married, a film that struck too close to home for me.
**That show is incredibly funny and absurd. I just started watching it.

State of the Union: Fabulous*

Gays in the military! Great speech by Obama as I expected. Very impressive outing by Obama and his speechwriting staff. Health care reform, jobs, climate change and immigration reform coming this year. Honest differences with the Supreme Court. Great optimism about the coming decade.
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* I stole this line from Chicago Disc Jockey Frank E. Lee, in reference to the Leettes(sp?). Obviously things aren't fabulous with 10% unemployment and the Democrats likely to lose elections in November, I just liked the way it sounded. Below, fabulous commercial nixed by the Superbowl people. (via Andrew Sullivan).

Taibbi's writings on the financial industry always seem a bit sloppy to me, if pleasantly hyperbolic. My estimation of him went up after reading his Baffler review of Blagojevich's book where Taibbi displays his knowledge of The Wire:

Fans of the HBO series The Wire who read this book will undoubtedly recognize in Blago’s public appeals for sympathy on the corruption charges--whatever he did, he did because he just loves the people of Illinois so goddamn much-- an almost flawless impersonation of Isiah Whitlock, Jr.s’ immortal character Clay Davis, a corrupt-as-fuck Maryland state senator. Indeed, the chief differences between the two are incidental: Davis quoted Aeschylus; Blago quotes Shakespeare.

...

The story that federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald tells in his indictment of Blagojevich--copiously borne out by the wiretap transcripts-- is in the grand Chicago tradition of open graft. Blagojevich is trying frantically to sell the Senate seat to Obama’s people, who apparently wanted African-American lawyer Valerie Jarrett, a longtime confidant of the Democratic presidential nominee, to get the spot. "I’ve got this thing, and it’s fucking golden, and uh, uh, I’m just not giving it up for fucking nothing," he says, in one such voluble wiretapped call. Later on, Blago deputy John Harris is heard negotiating with then-aide and now-White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, saying that if Jarrett were to be Blago’s pick, "all we get is appreciation, right?" To which Emanuel says, "Right."

(Video via The Wire fan Yglesias)

One more reminiscence about 2009: some favorite bits of writing.

From the Onion's Gateways to Geekery: Krautrock:

The gist of krautrock is simple: It was Germany’s answer to the musical upheaval at play all across the planet in the late 1960s and ’70s, when rock did double-duty as revolutionary art-music and strived to be newly psychedelic and free.

Henwood at his new blog where in he wrote in literary fashion:

The IMF, which was off the scene for many years, is, like a vampire salivating at sunset, returning to action. It's already developed a program for Iceland, which is being put through the austerity wringer; apparently being white and Nordic doesn’t earn you an exemption. It's likely to lend some money to some countries that it deems virtuous on easy terms - among them Brazil but not Argentina. More on all this in the coming weeks.

In a piece for Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi employed the vampire metaphor as well:

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

Hitchens on the deceased J.G. Ballard:

Fascinated by the possibility of death in traffic, and rather riveted by the murder of John Kennedy, Ballard produced a themed series titled The Atrocity Exhibition, here partially collected, where collisions and ejaculations and celebrities are brought together in a vigorously stirred mix of Eros and Thanatos. His antic use of this never-failing formula got him briefly disowned by his American publisher and was claimed by Ballard as "pornographic science fiction," but if you can read "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered As a Downhill Motor Race" or "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" in search of sexual gratification, you must be jaded by disorders undreamed-of by this reviewer. Both stories, however, succeed in being deadpan funny.

And Rick Perlstein on the Tea Party phenomenon:

In Pennsylvania last week, a citizen, burly, crew-cut and trembling with rage, went nose to nose with his baffled senator: "One day God's going to stand before you, and he's going to judge you and the rest of your damned cronies up on the Hill. And then you will get your just deserts." He was accusing Arlen Specter of being too kind to President Obama's proposals to make it easier for people to get health insurance.

In Michigan, meanwhile, the indelible image was of the father who wheeled his handicapped adult son up to Rep. John Dingell and bellowed that "under the Obama health-care plan, which you support, this man would be given no care whatsoever." He pressed his case further on Fox News.

In New Hampshire, outside a building where Obama spoke, cameras trained on the pistol strapped to the leg of libertarian William Kostric. He then explained on CNN why the "tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of tyrants and patriots."

 Last November Obama attended a Town Hall in Shanghai. From Time:

Instead of being greeted by voters mulling their options, Obama on Monday met with several hundred well-dressed, attentive and relentlessly on-message students, handpicked by Chinese authorities for the occasion. They listened attentively, nodding in agreement at some of his answers and laughing at his jokes. Most of their questions were something less than challenging. "What measures will you take to deepen this close relationship between cities of the United States and China?" asked the first questioner, a young woman whom Obama picked randomly from the crowd. "What's the main reason that you were honored with the Nobel Prize for Peace?" asked another. A third followed up on the Nobel Prize line of inquiry. "What's your university/college education that brings you to get such kind of prizes?"

...

But the Obama Administration's initial hopes for widespread Chinese broadcast of the event were not, in the end, realized. Though the event was covered on Shanghai television, elsewhere in the country the broadcast networks did not carry the feed.

A bright spot for the new year was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's forceful speech criticizing China over the "Great Firewall." The Chinese Communist Party immediately pushed back:

In an editorial, the English-language edition of a Chinese newspaper, Global Times, said that the demand for an unfettered Internet was a form of "information imperialism," because less developed nations could not compete with Western countries in the arena of information flow.

As Perlstein's examples above show, in the arena of information flow in the US, corporations dominate. The recent US Supreme court decision that campaign cash is free speech will ensure further domination of the corporate world-view.

Hang in there, kitty!

Earlier I linked to Charlie Jane Anders' 5 theories why Avatar was such a hit. My favorite was:

Conservative rage? Avatar is a perfect snowball of Conservative-baiting, from the jabs at the Iraq war and the War on Terror to its heavy-handed environmentalist messages. But that hasn't hurt the film at all, notes the L.A. Times' Hero Complex blog. The Weekly Standard called it "anti-American" and "anti-human." But actually, I'm left wondering if all of the controversy over the film's politics didn't spur more people to go see it so they could find out what the fuss was about.

Certainly conservatives are riled, which they demonstrated by winning the Massachusetts Senate Race and creating panic in the Democrats' ranks.

Here's another theory: Luminous 3-D Jungle, a Biologist's Dream, from the Times's science section.

Everybody Chill the Fuck Out. I’ve Got This. by Jonathan Cohn

Hopefully Obama will give a good State of the Union speech.

Hitchens on Haiti

A year ago I linked to this video where a woman is wearing a nametag with "Free Haiti" on it.



The other aspect of Avatar most conservatives probably won't like is that the villain is another one of James Cameron's immoral corporations. In the Avatar universe, humanity and its corporations have destroyed Earth's environment and left their home world a dying planet. In the real world, an activist US Supreme Court just set us on the same path by overturning a hundred years of precedent and ruling that campaign contributions by corporations are free speech.

Remember, be like Fonzie and stay cool.

Poker Face

In the realm of music, Lady Gaga took the nation by storm in 2009. By coincidence her hit song describes Obama's successful strategy for moving health care reform through Congress this past year, especially during this past summer.

Sweetheart Taylor Swift reportedly was the biggest seller of 2009 when you combine sales via downloads and bricks & mortar. I'd like to think Kanye West went onstage with Swift when she was receiving an award in order to get her more publicity, which the brouhaha did, in an act which reminded me of when Derek Zoolander went onstage to accept a fashion award which in fact Hansel had won. Not exactly the same thing and the latter took place in a movie, but that's what came to mind. Obviously Kanye doesn't care what people think. No doubt he lost a few fans when he opined on live TV that Bush hates black people (In reference to Hurricane Katrina). (Yes I'm taking all of January to reminisce about 2009).

Also in 2009 we had the French band Phoenix's album Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. The band's vocalist Thomas Mars is married to Sophia Coppola and the two had a baby in 2009. (Sophia's brother Roman made a great movie CQ starring Jeremy Davies which is set in France and contains lots of wonderful French '60s pop music. The Coppola family tree.)

Some of my favorite tunes that came out in 2009 include "Percussion Gun" by White Rabbits (Missouri by way of Brooklyn), "Mykonos" by Fleet Foxes (from Seattle), and "Cheerleader" by Grizzly Bear (Brooklyn). It was strange spending my time in 2009 as a cheerleader for the President of the United States and arguing against unrealistic critics. I didn't really like Bill Clinton as President, although his work getting the government to budget surpluses certainly helped out his Democratic successor. So credit where it's due.

 (Diane Krueger in Inglourious Basterds.)

Punching Hippies

2009 was a good year for thought-provoking and invigorating movies. Who can forget the Comedian punching hippies in Watchmen, and Rorschach decrying stay-within-the-lines liberal sensibilities from a darker perspective. There was Inglourious Basterds, Avatar, A Serious Man, Public Enemies, Whip It, Extract, The Hangover and (500) Days of Summer. Star Trek captured the hopeful, confident, smart, scientific* and youthful zeitgest of the first of the Obama years, with young pundits like Jonathan Cohn, Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias coming to the fore, and liberals like Obama, Emanuel, Geithner and Orszag taking over the levers of government. Remember when Bones asked Chekov "How old are you?!?"

I didn't see Invictus, Bright Star, Where the Wild Things Are, the Hurt Locker, the Messenger, Antichrist, Precious, An Education, Men Who Stare At Goats, or Up in the Air so obviously I can't judge those but undeniably 2009 was a banner year for Billy Crudup (Watchmen, Public Enemies), Giovanni Ribisi (Avatar, Public Enemies), Stephen Lang (Avatar, Public Enemies) and Kristen Wiig (Extract, Whip It).

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*Some may argue technocratic would be a better word than scientific, but I view technocratic as being more of a pejorative. (Dr. Manhattan in the Watchmen was technocratic, that is, doing Nixon's bidding in Vietnam without considering whether or not it was a just war.) Science tries to put political - more specifically, partisan - concerns aside. The glibertarians at Hit & Run wonder "why are so many sci-fi films left-wing?" The answer is that objective science is more of a priority on the left. On the rightwing science's findings and priorities are often overridden in the interests of profits and religious ideology or twisted to further rightwing goals. On the undemocratic left, like Stalinist Russia, science can be subsumed under ideology also obviously. As Wikipedia says:

Although the sciences were less rigorously censored than other fields such as art, there were several examples of suppression of ideas. In the most notorious, the Ukrainian agronomist Trofim Lysenko refused to accept the chromosome theory of heredity usually accepted by modern genetics. Claiming his theories corresponded to Marxism, he managed to talk Joseph Stalin in 1948 into banning population genetics and several other related fields of biological research; this decision was not reverted up to the 1960s.

(Sam Worthington feels like hugging a tree

OR Stephen Lang looks on as Sully goes native.)

5 Theories That Explain Why Avatar Was Such A Huge Hit by Charlie Jane Anders

If Only and Missed Opportunities

In 2009, I had a number of titles I wanted to use for blog entries but couldn't find content to support them for some reason. Here they are anyway:

Big Fish in a Little Pond
Bubblicious
Prison Sex
Punching Hippies
A friend asked, "What is it? You look like you've seen a ghost."
Hold Me Closer Tony Danza*

Marc Cooper on the last decade.

My person of the year for 2009 is ACORN, who managed to bring down the global economy and elect an Islamic Marxist to the Presidency, all the while fighting a rearguard action against an increasingly confident Teabagger movement. Can't wait to see what they do for an encore.
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*Correction. I found content for two of the titles since posting this. Also "Hold Me Closer Tony Danza" is sung to Elton John's Tiny Dancer.

Easy Tiger

David Leonhardt unloads on the Federal Reserve Bank and Ben Bernanke in an above-the-fold front page article.

Whether we like it or not, the Fed really does seem to be the best agency to regulate financial firms. (It now has authority over only some firms.) As the lender of last resort, it already has a vested interest in the health of those firms. The Fed’s prestige also tends to give it its pick of people who want to work on economic policy.

"The Federal Reserve has unparalleled expertise," Mr. Bernanke told Congress last month. "We have a great group of economists, financial market experts and others who are unique in Washington in their ability to address these issues."

Fair enough. At some point, though, it sure would be nice to hear those experts explain how they missed the biggest bubble of our time.

Eugoogly

Paul Krugman writes about Paul Samuelson.

Claude Lévi-Strauss died this past year at 100.

Hitchens on J.G. Ballard.

"Don't touch it, it's evil."

NPR interview with Terry Gilliam.

When I was 10 or 11 I saw Time Bandits and loved it. When I was 15 or 16 I saw Brazil and was blown away. According to Wikipedia:

Robert Hewison, in his book Monty Python: The Case Against, describes the dwarfs [in Time Bandits] as a comment on the Monty Python troupe, with Fidget (the nice one) as Palin, Randall (the self-appointed leader) as John Cleese, Strutter (the acerbic one) as Eric Idle, Og (the quiet one) as Graham Chapman, Wally (the noisy rebel) as Terry Jones and Vermin (the nasty, filth-loving one) as Gilliam himself.

Isn't it Ironic? Don't you think?*

In Pennsylvania last week, a citizen, burly, crew-cut and trembling with rage, went nose to nose with his baffled senator: "One day God's going to stand before you, and he's going to judge you and the rest of your damned cronies up on the Hill. And then you will get your just deserts." He was accusing Arlen Specter of being too kind to President Obama's proposals to make it easier for people to get health insurance.

In Michigan, meanwhile, the indelible image was of the father who wheeled his handicapped adult son up to Rep. John Dingell and bellowed that "under the Obama health-care plan, which you support, this man would be given no care whatsoever." He pressed his case further on Fox News.

In New Hampshire, outside a building where Obama spoke, cameras trained on the pistol strapped to the leg of libertarian William Kostric. He then explained on CNN why the "tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of tyrants and patriots."

The above is from Rick Perlstein's piece "In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition: Birthers, Town Hall Hecklers and the Return of Right-Wing Rage."

As it turns out the Teabaggers unsuccessfully primary Arlen Specter and drive him into the Democrats arms, thereby enabling the creation of government-run health care and rationing and death panels, i.e. the most progressive legislation since Medicare (which as we know all teabaggers hate with a passion.)

Ned Lamont and his single-issue supporters unsuccessfully primary Holydiver Joe Lieberman, and thereby thoroughly embitter him, so that he makes sure health care reform doesn't include a public option. Just because they wish Saddam Hussein was still in power. Well done.

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*As they said on The Wire, if you come at the king, you best not miss.