Oh, I imagine Batman and Robin chatting about today's news, like something out of a Tom Tomorrow cartoon.

This is my first post, but I've been following for three or four months now. It's fascinating watching the dots get connected in this search to reveal the bottom of things--even as the bottom keeps dropping and dropping. I'm reading as I would an epistolary Dickensian work for our times. And today, Christmas, where the villains are being especially obvious. As a friend in Fairbanks used to say: Christmas, Thanksgiving, Halloween, New Year's--they're all for amateurs.

Guaranteed, tomorrow there'll be more developments, unimaginable yet somehow predictable. If only we knew. There are infinite ways for the bad guys to keep being bad. But there are just as many ways for the good guys to keep at them.

I'm happy to keep being informed.

I remember in May 2004 seeing Donald Rumsfeld go before some committee and warn that there were more horrible images to come than the first ones out of Abu Ghraib.

Not for our eyes, anyway.

On a side note--which fits some of Glenn's post--earlier this month, driving through rural Georgia one Friday midafternoon, I was stopped by a cop, ostensibly for a broken passenger side view mirror. He didn't much like the little chip on my windshield either since he wrote me up for that too. There I was, waiting in my minivan after giving him my registration and driver's license, and saw he'd called a back-up, so now there were two cop cars, the blue lights flashing. When he motioned me out of my vehicle, he warned me not to go to my pockets, then had me lean against the back of my van as he frisked me very thoroughly, then had me stand by his partner as he rummaged through the debris inside my van--a mess that depresses me even.

I suppose I could have asserted my rights, but I had a gig that night and had been running late so just wanted him to get on with it. He went through my car more thoroughly than it had been gone through the past few times going into Canada. Oh, I had nothing to hide (though, in retrospect, I did have copies of a book I'd written that could by some definitions have branded me a terrorist), so just let him go at it for fifteen minutes, through boxes of CDs, papers, music instruments, some clothes--all in disarray to begin with since it was twelve days into a tour.

Afterwards, without apologizing, he said simply, and flatly, that there were lots of dangerous people out there, with guns. He was doing his job to protect all of us.

I guess I could have been thankful he'd decided I wasn't worth the trouble to take everything out of the van and delay me there for a couple of hours. And I know I was thankful I was just a 52-year-old white guy who'd recently had a haircut (and had just had the car inspected with the documents to prove it). I rode to my gig that evening wondering what would have happened if I were black, Latino, Middle Eastern, or if I didn't have all my paperwork in order (which was no small thing given the chaos of the car that day). I wondered what would have happened if they had decided to take me to the county jail, decided I wasn't to have a phone call. I wondered about all that. And a lot more.

The bottom keeps dropping and dropping and you'd think there'd be an end to it, but the present regime has created such a universe that there's plenty more darkness until we hit that floor. It'll feel really really hard when we do hit.

One thing we can do is keep pressuring those who do have power in the system to do what they can--it can work here and there as Dodd's stand versus FISA showed the other week. Otherwise, we can continue working around them as we can, which sometimes just means going out in the world doing what we do as best we can and contributing in forums like these.

It does get more and more interesting (it must be wired in how our species can't stop watching disasters unfold).

Of course, this post is no surprise. One more slow-motion train wreck approaching us in an era full of them. It's not like we're not being given notice.

Just last week I was at a conference in NYC and saw a DC-area friend who just threw up his arms and said though his hometown pals inside the DC bubble say otherwise, it's looking to play out for McCain to be the next president--just as this post warns.

What to do?

Like so many others have written, it just seems reasonable to vigorously oppose not just the Republicans but those offending Democrats (I realize there's a line that has to be figured--what constitutes "offending Democrats" and which incumbents are to be opposed--but, really, these days it seems so many Dems are unprincipled on so many of the issues, which makes it a ridiculously Sisyphean task; the whole system is so very deeply rotten).

So, while I like to stay optimistic, it does keep looking like it's going to get worse. I know I'll hang in there, do what I can for as long as I can. But until enough people are desperate enough to force necessary changes, that big old train will keep on at us. Slowly, yes. But inexorably.