about John McCain's slow political demise is that he has become desperate. He has hitched his wagon to a runaway train and there's no one at the controls. He has put himself, politically, in the classic runaway train situation where to jump off now would likely mean getting mangled and to stay on means certain death. The latter is the martyr's way, but dead is still dead.

McCain does not, can not believe the things he is asking us to believe - they are manifestly not so; yet he has taken the "good soldier's" path into the void and there is now no way out for him, no way to save a marvelous legacy of good work and service to his nation.

It has always been my mantra that whoever expresses a desire for ultimate responsibility is insane. McCain may have crossed that line. It is one thing to place one's self in the pool of the available because it is a time of great need for leadership, but a sane man expresses willingess with a certain reluctance. McCain apparently really wanted to be President, and that's where he ultimately loses out with me. All the rest, the blunders, the lies, the sucking up to lunatic fringe figures, all this only underscores what, for me is axiomatic: rather than seeing the job as a challenge to his responsibility, he began to see it as a "thing" to be coveted and won, even if that required lying to himself and to us.

It's over, sir. This battle is lost.

But not all perception is incidental. There is a massive grass-roots, organized effort to distort the perceptions of those who are most susceptible to having their perceptions warped: those with little to no exposure to the groups they are being taught to mistrust and, ultimately, to hate. This is not happening by some essentially benign accident. It is carefully planned, worked and played out by a very worrisome movement among the far right, and while Bill O'Reilly may actually be stupid enough to be a pawn of the movement it seems infinitely more likely that he is a part of it. For that matter so would the Fox network executives who keep his potentially-exlpoding head yakking on the screen.

O'Reilly's intent, on this occasion, ran into a brick wall in the form of fellow media pimp Rivera, who coincidentally happened to be right this time. What O'reilly was saying was utter "bull." However, he had carefully chosen his example, an illegal alien, which was like a gift from the heavens and argues strongly against the dumbshit defense.

It doesn't matter now, because the damage has been done. Rivera, correct as he may have been and righteously indignant as he may have been, fed right into the conspiracy theory ("They" are taking over - just like blacks before them and Jews before that) simply by virtue of his name. Among the ill-informed (that is to say the brainwashed Fox viewership) a man with the name Rivera is naturally going to take the part of the evil intruders. O'Reilly, on the other hand, is perceived by these people (and they are legion) as the beseiged spokesman for the "good, decent, ordinary men and women" who comprise what today passes for a lynch mob and one day soon may actually revert to lyncherdom.

It does nothing to help the cause that the accused was in the US illegally. However, this is the red herring which O'Reilly successfully rubbed all over Rivera, who otherwise acquitted his point exceedingly well. It's lost on the Fox clientele.

The finest point that can be put on this is that we who consider ourselves intelligent and good need to work toward bridging the gap between critical thinkers and those who believe illegal immigrants are natural-born criminals, blacks are lazy and shiftless, and Jews control the media and the banks (or is it the Freemasons?). The left has helped create this pocket of intransigent ignorance by showing its disdain for those who aren't quite up too speed on the hipness curve. By looking down on the more concrete thinkers, the earnest-but-mistaken part of our nation, by making them fair game for all sorts of ethnic and social ridicule and disdain, the "enlightened" among us have helped create a virtual civil war in which aliens, illegal and otherwise, have become the latest pawn.

We need to take our ethics and our love to the street; not just for the downtrodden Latino or black or Muslim or Jew or sexually non-traditional person, but to all persons. Start talking now, and not down but across, or we will all find ourselves in a cross-cultural brawl that will make the Rivera-O'Reilly fiasco look like Abbott and Costello - which, upon reflection, it did.