On and on it goes. Republican followers, saddled with a legacy of failure in which each President they foisted upon this country in this century, besides perhaps TR and Eisenhower, has been more destructive and despicable than the last, attempt to tarnish Democrats with a pathetically selective and lame recitation, repeated off their ticker tapes, of made up and tangential liberal treachery.

Anyone who can fog a mirror has heard, endlessly, such unmitigated bullshit about how the Clinton era prosperity was really a product of Reagan's genius, Sept. 11 was Clinton's fault, Reagan's deficits were really caused by Democrats in congress, and, of course, now stagflation had nothing to do with the mindless extension and wasteful spending on Vietnam under Nixon and typically delusional energy policies promoted by Republicans, but Carter's four years of something or other.

Funny how, in Rightieworld, all good things flow from the right, and all bad things flow from the left. First clue for the clueless... When your delusions start to all fit together so perfectly, have you ever considered that many of them might be, well, claptrap?

Those of us who live in the real world understand that even our heroes are flawed human beings and make mistakes, like any other human, but that doesn't make them all bad. Likewise, and more importantly, even our opponents might occasionally do something right that deserves our respect and applause.

Right-wingers are incapable of making such distinctions, and therefore have nothing to contribute to civilized discourse, so addled they are by propaganda and plugged ears against the cognitive dissonance that piles up all around them.

Like their bullshit.

Thanks for reminding us, Maximus.

Adnoto... You're right, of course, but when they're so transcendently idiotic, it's admittedly a bit difficult to resist piling on the brain-dead troll du jour. And a measure of success can always be derived from the crickets that become deafening when they're clobbered. Yes, it's cheap thrills, a necessity in the second Bush economy, but of course they don't deserve the attention they've been craving since they were toddlers, and I'm deeply ambivalent about providing them.

The squirming and selective ripostes, however, are as entertaining as they are instructive, and fun for everyone to see.

Hey "hornet," (tough guy name to disguise obese, cheetoh-addicted putz in parent's basement) since you have presciently achieved knowledge of a pernicious threat in your darker-skinned nation du jour, please drop the mouse from your sweaty paw and head down to the recruiting office. Time's a wastin.' We liberals depend on real men like you.

Ooh, Hornet man, I'm impressed. You've only lost two wars, richly subsidized and lavishly financed by normal taxpayers. Have you ever considered getting a real job?

That would be Iraq and Afghanistan, but I'm sure you can't keep up. What an idiot you are. Keep typing.

It is remarkable, and sad, how little credibility the US has left to criticize dictatorships. Warrantless spying, unfortunately, is just a part of it. I have read similar condemnations of torture, censorship, show trials, imprisonment of political rivals, theft of taxpayer money by well-connected officials, soberly condemned by Human Rights Watch, and shuddered with embarrassment.

Worse, I have heard Condi Rice denounce all these same things, with all the conviction she was able to muster when she said, "No one could have imagined ____________."

Americans should be deeply ashamed.

A judge plainly stated that the preponderance of evidence showed that the telecoms' behavior was plainly illegal, and flatly dismissed the risible notion that they could possibly believe otherwise. Further, telecommunications law, dating back to the invention of the telephone, all recognized the dangers to privacy such companies represented, and were written to explicitly and emphatically render such depredations illegal. Before that, the Constitution was pretty straightforward about government spying.

Duh.

The only surprising thing about the egregiously false and insultingly disprovable piece of crap about this in Time is that it ran at all. I guess, as sysprog noted, they have a dog in this fight and therefore went out on a limb. In a pathetic Sunday NYT, nary a mention of this travesty, which is so, 48 hours ago, and long since down the memory hole. (They did find time to run a lengthy, "investigative" piece about torture, which ended up almost trying to justify it... nice work)

The "elegance," as it was eloquently called upthread, of this kabuki theatre is indeed a marvel to behold. The fake posturing by the leadership until the primaries were over, the sneaky and Bushian way it was slipped out on a Friday, the utterly craven and contradictory words about it from everyone from Pelosi and Hoyer to Obama.... and all along, the MSM mindlessly and mendaciously repeating administration memes, tired and debunked as they are, in perfect harmony like a choir of angels.

Glenn, and a lot of people here, are justifiable quite angry about this, to the point of being, gasp, "shrill." Anyone who isn't is a toady or a nincompoop.

But when one sees the enormous powers being brought together against democracy, and how they work in concert, the helplessness and inchoate rage one feels is all but debilitating.

Blame the media. Blame the Democrats. Blame the Republicans. Blame Hillary. Blame Obama. Blame the telecoms. All are richly deserving.

But Christ, who's left to do the blaming?

I'm going back to ActBlue to toss them some more cash.

Thanks, y'all at UT. Talk about Troubled Times.