To all those who wish that people were talking about something else, well, they will be. But this hits everybody, and there's nobody I've met that doesn't get it. Face it, I just watched an elegant but shocking documenatry by Bill Moyers' unit on the Jack Abramoff, DeLay, Ralph Reed, etc., etc., scandal, and it was truly repulsive and just the reason why the GOP has to go. Tens of millions of dollars stolen from the tribes, all of it massively overcharging the tribes for things they knew they couldn't deliver. The cast of characters is a terrible collection of villains. But you can only grasp the enormity of it after you watch the whole hour and a half.

It's too complicated for most people to follow, frankly. You need to be an Abramoff addict to know who's who, and you have to follow complicated financial transactions to know why the FBI started to get interested, and why they all pled guilty.

But this thing really gets people pissed off. This guy, who said he was protecting kids, was a predator, and the leadership knew it and didn't do anything about it. They wanted to go into the elections unified, and they didn't care about the kids. Bang. Simple as pie.

In a real way, it's the same story, only with a really solid punchline. Same story as Iraq. Same story as Social Security. Same story as the Drug Plan. Same story as the Bankruptcy bill. Evil rotten scoundrels like power and money, and they don't give a damn about the people.

What do we need this jerk for? Okay, he's not as bad as Bush. Who could be? Delay for President?

I hate the cowardly, knee-knocking Dems who have buddied up to this jerk. And the cynical jerks like half the California Democratic consultants who have accepted this. And oh, yeah, "liberals" like Spielberg.

Do they actually know what a liberal is?

I just wish there had been a grassroots Democratic organization -- not the measly, consultant-driven mess of a party we have, but a real Democratic Truth Squad -- that could have brought facts like Freeh's craven deal to light back then. Instead, the right dominated the airwaves, and gradually grew to dominate newsrooms in the '90s. The individual charisma of Clinton could only go so far. We needed a blogosphere back then. It might have been that the regular press was largely on the Democratic side by the '70s -- though not at all before -- because of Vietnam, because of equal rights and all the other social upheavals we brought. But that newsroom consensus, and that societal consensus, was undermined by determined sappers on the right; so that by the late Clinton '90s, no one spoke for him. No one dropped the dime on Freeh's investigations and capitulation to the right. No one dropped the dime on what Starr was doing, or the various fraudulent investigations that would start with sensational charges, drag on as long as they were politically useful, and then disappear, having proved nothing but the immorality of the headline-maker. And the formerly "liberal" media became a ready client for his new information service, with the great headlines and no story attached to it. Broder. Woodward. The entire New York Times. Almost all the guys writing for the big-city press with their pictures on top of their stories, the ones who also gave lucrative speeches and spoke on TV. Especially the former "liberals." Joe Klein, are you listening?

The first book that pierced the veil for me was "The Hunting of the President," and that was definitely the minority position, and never really got to the page one level of consciousness. Bush's descent into the right-wing netherworld has shown a lot of people how prescient that book was about the future of these people calling themselves "conservatives."

So we need a lot of Zolas, and we need the institutional means of producing them and publishing them.

There's the opposite tendency loose in Salon. It's not as bad as Slate, that wimp's collection of wacky and quirky mental chewing gum, but there's a tendency to back off the barricades that Salon scaled in the late '90s. Maybe a straight publishing business has to play for the middle. But we'd better gather strength in the culture very soon, or everything will be lost.