After watching last night's episode--the speed and and laser-focus of which was disconcerting, to say the least--I can't help the notion that Tony will die in a gutter, full of bullets, covered in blood.

Is this not where he has been headed since the very first episode, really?

(I've known a few shrinks in my time, professionally and personally, and I can say, from my limited experience, that the Melfi character is a very bad psychiatrist. And has been from the first time she showed up. Tony should have found a better professional.)

...is that Bush would have been a one-term President without the Iraq war. For all their hagiography of Bush, and for all their glorification of the conservative agenda, the conservative movement was going to fail miserably in 2004...but for a war, and a compliant media that managed to dupe just enough people to allow a bit of careful voter-suppression in Ohio to carry the day.

The conservative agenda is a failure. It's been a failure for 80 years and more, but, like a child wishing for the Tooth Fairy, movement-conservatives just can't face the possibility that there's no tooth fairy...worse, that there's no tooth.

The only thing the "conservative" agenda ever did was enrich the few at the expense of the many, and that appears to have been its sole purpose. Hardly the sort of thing one can easily sell to voters. So, movement-conservatives dress up their piracy in fancy clothes, and parade into the party, ready to pick the pockets of everyone there.

Who in this country ever venerated Bush? No-one I know. Not even orange county republicans I know. They held their noses over the dude almost the whole time.

All that hagiography was the desperate attempt of conservatives obsessed with Daddy, to perfume a turd. Their constant grovelling praise of Shrub always seemed grotesque and absurd to me.

I'm hardly a bellwether, but I can't have been the only one.

Jenny wrote:

So why is he such a marginal candidate?

*********

In an America controlled by corporate interests (both specific and general), Kucinich is a dodo bird. I'd vote for him too, I agree with everything he says. But corporate america now owns the democratic party more firmly than it ever has, and a candidate like Kucinich is utterly unacceptable to the corporate interests that run the Democratic Party.

Also, for what it's worth, when Kucinich was Mayor of Cleveland, he was cordially hated by the entire power-structure there, partly because he was, according to gossip, a lousy manager, and difficult to work with.

I'd guess that the disdain for Kucinich was partly the result of his kicking against special interests, or working for the wrong special interests, and partly the result of some genuine lack of management skill.

This is all just static anyway. The day world-production of fossil-fuel begins its permanent decline, is the day the United States will begin a relatively rapid evolution into a police-state. We can anticipate a century of Bushs, Cheneys, Giulianis, and worse. That's just how it'll be. It's always been that way. Always will be. In a time of scarce resources, the brutal and merciless rule. And the sheep follow.

www.warsocialism.com

www.dieoff.org

For one of the most cogent and insightful analyses of the current political scene, see:

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/

Hey, Joan, you ever thought of employing Kunstler as a columnist? He'd be an even bigger coup than Greenwald, imho.

Just a thought, Joan, but have you read much James Kunstler?

He'd be an even bigger coup for Salon than Greenwald.

His current blog is as insightful of the current political swamp as anything I've read here, or elsewhere..

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/

Salon needs to start talking about the issues Kunstler is discussing. Otherwise, your heads are as much in the sand as anyone else's. We need some big-picture thinking here.

this could be big. It's been clear for some time now that the sole reason Bush and Cheney suspended habeus for "enemy combatants" was to protect themselves against what would happen if the Guantanamo detainees were tried in American courts. The truth would out: that nearly everyone down there, sometimes for years, had done nothing at all. The government has no good evidence...except for the handful of hardcore cases the CIA recently imported to Gitmo to beef up the prisoner population with actual bad guys.

The Guantanamo situation, and the suspension of habeus, and the real reasons for it are together one of the biggest scandals of this scandal-ridden mess. I imagine Bush and Cheney are a little concerned right about now. If even the military refuses to try them, then what?

You put a few of these guys on television or radio, telling their easily-verified stories, and there could be some fast unraveling. I heard two stories on *this American Life* a year ago, and I couldn't fathom why Bush hadn't been impeached yet. For that shit all by itself.

I haven't seen the numbers in detail, but I'd bet you those opposed to the war, who most disapprove of the Dems, are the voters who will vote democratic anyway. So the Dems aren't worried about them.

Does anyone here think the Dems do *anything* without all kinds of focus-group testing and polling? With the kind of money the two parties have to throw around, trust me, they're polling and testing every inch of the way.

The Dems must feel that their strategy, such as it is, is the right one, based on testing and polling, or they wouldn't do it.

They probably discovered that the swing voters in key states, voters they so desperately need in 2008, would buy a Bush lie about "Dems not supporting the troops."

I think it's all utterly despicable. But this is our modern political reality. We all need to accept it, and figure out how to change it.