I think the distinction that is seldom made adequately is that those of us on the godless coasts are baffled by the absolutely pathetic excuses for human beings that southerners--and midwesterners (cf: Michelle Bachmann) elect to represent them.

Rather than diss an entire region, perhaps we can agree that the South, as a whole, has, for nearly 150 years now, had the really unfortunate habit of electing to national office people who most of us would not trust to take out our garbage.

People who seem not to have two functioning brain-cells to rub together; people who if they DO happen to have said brain-cells use them for the purpose of being profoundly corrupt and shameless hacks, appealing to the absolute lowest-common-denominator members of their voting constituencies.

Now, all areas of the country occasionally elect people like this. There are a number of such people representing California right now, for instance, mostly from inland regions, or from beautiful, if benighted, Orange County and San Diego County. There are many transplanted Southerners in these counties, I might add. Make of that what you will.

That said, Southern voters still reign supreme in their peculiar yen to be represented by cunning waterheads. By people who really do seem to have not the faintest understanding of what America is, and what it stands for. Except that many Southern representatives are very good at taking money from Coastal taxpayers, through the federal budget process, and giving it to their constituencies. I give them credit there, although it doesn't make me very happy.

These are representatives who, on all the evidence, would have been far happier living in Stalin's Russia, or, dare I say it, Hitler's Germany. Authoritarian, know-nothing racists all, it seems anyway, these representatives of the South, and it has been this way FOR OVER A CENTURY. With rare exceptions.

So, when we diss the entire South, it's not every last Southerner in the South we are dissing. No, it's the people those Southerners elect to represent them. We find those representatives to be an appalling embarrassment, if not an actual danger to the Republic.

Can you blame us?

(Apropos of which, I've often wondered if the Reconstruction had been handled differently, would we be in this ongoing political mess now? Probably there was no way to get that right. But you have to wonder about it. We ended up with two countries mashed into one. The South, parts of the Midwest and intermountain west one country, and the Northeast, Pacific West and northwest and great-lakes area as another country...or, more precisely, the urban areas as one country, the rural areas as another. That probably tracks better. A social problem that predates our Civil War by a good bit, too.

At any rate, this 200 year old political conflict should have been solved by the Civil War, but the Federal Government blew the aftermath--sound familiar?--and we have been left with a "cold" civil war ever since. With the added wrinkle of monied-elites using more ignorant voters as tools to put their people in power.

I can't help but think that until we, as a people, figure out how to resolve the basic conflicts that caused the Civil War, we will be fighting each other indefinitely. And we on the Left will have to do the heavy-lifting to keep the Authoritarians from ever getting power again.)

I was thinking about this situation this morning listening to an interview on my local NPR station with the guy who posted the ICRC report on CIA torture of prisoners in black sites.

That report seems as close to a smoking-gun as we'll ever get in the near-term. I can't help thinking that Obama and his people have to be unhappy the report leaked.

Here's what I wonder, hardly original, but would be worth a little digging to see if there's anything to it: Obama has a very ambitious agenda in the next year, health-care reform at the top of the list, not to mention the current budget.

Were he to assign a special prosecutor to investigate war crimes by top members of the Bush Administration, the GOP would absolutely go to war with him, and probably make any legislative achievements virtually impossible. A number of Blue Dog Dems would go over to the GOP side.

Thinking of it purely from a management point-of-view, and not ascribing any special powers, or even any special morality to Obama and his people, it seems to me you get your budget passed, and health-care reform done. THEN you start the investigations.

There's an order to this stuff.

Now, I'm not saying Obama will ever investigate GW Bush and Cheney and the other Principles. He may regard the entire matter as too difficult to tackle.

But if he was going to tackle it, he'd do it after the budget, and after Health Care reform. He might even wait until his second term, because a full-on criminal investigation of the previous administration would put Obama's re-election in jeopardy.

I'm hoping he has a secret investigation going on right now, so that when the time is ripe, he springs the whole thing at once, and Cheney and Bush will have nowhere to run.

'course, that's just a pipe-dream. But, again, from a management perspective, it'd be the right way to go.

I can't help a nagging feeling that Cheney is out there defending his actions because he's worried, not solely because he's a disturbed psychopath. I think he may have knowledge that makes him nervous. One can hope.

More likely these mofos will get away with all of it. But if more stuff like the ICRC report comes out, that may not be foreordained anymore. The pressure may really start building to do SOMETHING. Be interesting to see if this ICRC report has any effect on Congress, for instance.