But your exasperation with Elephantman is not doing you much good. He is white, well-off, a country-club Republican. You are asking him to empathize with people he will never be, and does not care about. Of course most fo the people at Guantanamo are innocent of any crime. Hell, the Bush Administration admits it! But people like Elephantman just don't care. If a thousand are tortured and a hundred die, he could give a shit, if one guy who meant us harm gets his. And he speaks for a large plurality, maybe a majority, of our fellow citizens. Yes, its the old Stalinist "break a few eggs to make an omlette" mentality, but since his race, citizenship, money, and connections will almost certainly always insulate him from the negative effects of these policies, he will applaud them if they make him feel safer and stronger today than they did yesterday. He is a smart, rational, well-spoken man, but without an ounce of altrusim or empathy.

We have hit the wall of ethic conviction. He has his ethics, and we have ours. The facts are irrelevant when you get to that stage. Glenn is good at pointing out the moral hypocracy of the mainstream media. Elephantman cannot be accused of this hypocracy, for he does not pretend to care about universal human rights or the principle that all men are created equal or that they are entitled to the same basic protections under the law.

The problem with the Blue Dog Dems, much like with the Bol Weevil Dems of the first Reagan term, is that they make it impossible for the Party to Govern or to Oppose. I'm sorry, all you moderates out there, but a political party has to be able to do at least one of these things, or it is not a political party. You may hate the word purge, but if any institution became so befuddled and gridlocked that it could not perform any useful function, the dam has to burst. The Democratic Party has every right under the sun to remove members who render the party impotent.

A politcal party is not an employer. It has every right to discriminate. It collectively chooses what its principles and stances are. If any member cannot in good conscience abide by those principles and stances, they should leave the party. If they stay and gum up the works, they should be removed. That may not be all fuzzy and ecumenical, but it is the only way to run a railroad.

I'll give you serious. First, you need to explain why the Republicans who ran the House, Senate, and White House in the 2000s failed to check this problem. Once answered, you can then pontificate.

As for the crisis, I say this: everyone MUST stop trying to reflate this thing. That means no money for the people who will be foreclosed; that mdeans no money to bail out the stockholders of the finacial institutions. Cold Turkey, my friend. You got the guts to suggest that your country club buddies bight the bullet and lose out like the schmucks who took out mortages they couldn't pay for? I say, let it slide.

The banks and the homeowners should be offered this stark alternative to going down the tubes: houses will immediately be reassessed at 10% below the current market value. Then, the bank will right down the value of the mortgages they hold to those real numbers. Finally, the banks will be offered liquidity if they refinance the mortages at these new lower prices. The homeowners will then have to restart their payments from zero, lose all they have paid in already, and accept a fixed-rate 30 year mortgage on the government's terms, or vacate the premisiss. Thus, the homeowners and the lenders will have to eat it. Instead of socializing the costs, we privatize them. Now, all you free marketeers, tell me how this is a worse solution than the one on agreed to?

Your point is valid. However, is the games were being held in Los Angeles this summer, and a British guy wrote an article in The Guardian and all he could talk about was post-9/11 detentions, the No Fly List, Falluja, Bagram, Guantanamo, Abu Graib, Jose Padilla, redition, secret CIA prisons, and the NSA pissing on the FISA law, and our world-leading prison-industrial complex and fondness for the death penalty, the average American would NOT be amused. In fact, most Americans would be irate and tell that foreign gentleman to fuck off.

I'm not even remotely saying that living in China doesn't suck, or that it is in any way better than living in the US. But, you know, that old saying about glass houses may apply at least a little to George Bush's America.