It is kind of scary, actually. The extent of the Rovian metastasis through the vitals of our government sends several messages, but the most troubling one is the most simple one: it can be done. Or at least attempted. Alas, Rove's most damaging legacy will be in not achieving anything in particular (as a Salon article had pointed out previously, he hasn't really achieved anything but the ruination of his own designs), but rather in setting a precedent. The degree of targeted corruption that was nigh unthinkable even in Nixon's time has now become... thinkable. As Sulla has paved the way to Caesar's lifetime dictatorship in Ancient Rome, so Rove/Bush/Cheney may be paving the way for a transformation of this nation into a police state.

Mark my words, there will be people who will think that Bush/Cheney/Rove had the right idea but they screwed it up because they lacked the imagination (or the means or the ruthlessness or whatever) to do it right. The current administration has shown that by having a few key allies in Congress, intimidating or corrupting the media and stacking the government agencies with cronies it can pave the way to near autocratic powers. Perhaps there will come along a group of individuals who might think that by being cleverer than Cheney/Rove/Bush they can do it better and achieve lasting results.

As excited as I am to watch the current administration unravel under the weight of its own scandals (finally, after way too long), I am also terrified by the extent of the damage they have dealt to our nation, but most of all by the precedent they are setting. From now on, politics will be about personalities and the exercise of personal power, not about democracy and the power of the popular vote. Perhaps within our lifetimes, the American Caesar will arise. It's not out of the realm of possibility.

I am strongly reminded of a dictator who is finished but refuses to realize it. He is so wrapped up in his own idea of his god-hood (reinforced, when he is seized by a rare fit of self-doubt, by the flatter of his handlers) that he is blind to everything else. At this point, he wages a mythical war on terror with mythical divisions of nonexistent (but energized) volunteers. He might as well sit in a room and push around toy soldiers. In fact, that's what he should do. I revise my earlier statements: this man belongs not in a jail but in a mental institution. They can give him a big map of the world and he can spend his days sticking pins into one country after another, pretending that yet another "failed state" has succumbed to the "Democracy on the march". And the army of the self-important media pundits can then go on closed-circuit TV (that he would watch obsessively) and talk about what a great and effective leader he is and how grateful the Iraqis (and then the Iranians, the North Koreans, the Russians and the rest of the barbarous world) are to have America teaching them how to live.

Oh, but a man may dream. A man may dream.

Now... wait. "Notes from the Underbelly". Explain this please (and use small words, so that my pea-sized male brain doesn't implode from all that thar vocabulary): WHY is a show about pregnancy and motherhood called that? Never mind the obvious questions: is the fetus taking notes? Is Stewie from Family Guy finally starting his own show? No no. My question is: what does Dostoevsky have to do with childbirth? How can "the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator (generally referred to by critics as the Underground Man) who is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg" in any way have a connection to pregnant women "blathering about epidurials"? Who came up with this thing?

(Clearly someone who went to college and probably hated their History of the Enlightenment course. Or perhaps it's someone who thinks they're awfully clever because they went to college and probably hated their History of the Enlightenment course. Or maybe it's due to a Fortuitous Alignment of the Spheres (tm). How the heck would I know?)

On the other hand, perhaps in one of the later episodes (that kicks off a whole arc, most likely) a seven-month fetus is suddently going to start pacing within "the Underbelly" and ranting about the evils of the Anglo-French Utilitarianism. Aww yeah! (Maybe then I'll actually watch it.)

While the behavior of ABC news is, in their words, "outrageous" it is nevertheless nothing new. Successful institutions always seem to think that they owe their success to some sort of Inalienable Divine Right (tm) as opposed to continued hard work and incessant vigilance over their own conduct. It is no wonder that they become corrupt.

If you think about it, the United States government suffers from the same malady. After all, the presumption that we would be "greeted as liberators" in Iraq stemmed from the presumption that we were better than the Iraqis by the very virtue of being Americans. The question of why Americans are so great never seems to enter our Leader's mind. Americans have always been great. This is what the Romans had said shortly before their fall. I don't mean to sound poetic, but the scandalous behavior of some of America's journalists is not a disease but merely a symptom of a general decline.

On the subject of "Trust but verify". Someone said that they're loth to agree with Reagan on this matter, but I have to say that Reagan, in his now famous speech, actually quoted a Russian provert... in pretty terrible Russian, I must say. So, when you speak of trusting but verifying, you are not echoing Reagan, but dipping into the centuries of Russian folk wisdom. Which ain't that bad.