The unhinged people who control the debate in this country are unconcerned with facts. They are immune to logic. They crave simple narratives that confirm their inner truthiness.

Allowing Ahmedinijad to speak allows him to muddy the waters with inconvenient truths and complicates the monochrome world they create in their own image. So of course they insist that he STFU -- "I know what I know, and no terrist is gonna change mah mind."

They fear the message even more than they fear the messenger. Ignorance is their only refuge from a world full of refutation.

... for they shall will be called sons of Bush.

Brooks and Broder and Cohen and Hiatt do that voodoo that they do because they can. Substance is secondary; facts tertiary. They made Bush king (by destroying Gore); they nearly unmade Bill Clinton. Now, having put wet fingers to the wind, it is beginning to appear that they have decided to coronate Hillary.

They still don't much like her, and D.C., in Broder's immortal construction, still isn't her place. But it matters not what her nominal party or her policies are; the point is to prove to themselves and to us that they remain the kingmakers. That is how they secure their endless supply of cocktail weenies and dinner party invitations and megaphones with which to reinforce their insular, circular prattle. Like that of Bush, their power comes not from facts and logic, but from itself -- from the kinetic energy endlessly recaptured from the echo chamber that defines their universe.

In Washington today, the tautology is the perfect perpetual motion machine.

Damn, man. You did tell us so.

And we miss you.

I was thinking about the Strangelove parallels, too. I have neither the time nor the techno-chops to do it, but one could create a splitscreen version in which damn near every absurdist line in the 1964 film could be matched with something equally absurd that has actually been said by one of the Neocons. The irony is that General Buck Turgidson is a composite of civilians Kristol and Krauthammer (Kubrick would have used him without even changing his name) with perhaps a dash of Ledeen. On the rationalist side, Mandrake and Muffley are as decisive and effective as the entire Democratic Party, and the good Doctor S., despite looking like a young Kissinger, could be swapped for Dick Cheney.

They all visualize themselves as Slim Pickens, but they would never put themselves so near harm's way.

The right wing (Larry Craig, Ted Haggard, Ed Schrock) is anti-gay.

The right wing (Mark Foley) is anti-pedophilia.

(incredibly long list of additional offenders @ http://wizbangblue.com/2007/09/19/republican-pedophiles.php )

The right wing is anti-Nazi.

Q.E.D.

Glenn, you seem to be traversing the same arc as many of us (albeit with more force and perhaps effect). But, like many, you seem reluctant to play out the string.

The Democratic cavalry has demonstrated, repeatedly, that they have no intention of rescuing the Constitution. You articulate our outrage. But the tsunami of scandals goes on; what does our sound and fury signify?

I find myself thinking in terms of triage. We can dismiss out of hand the possibility that our nation will recover without intervention. The hard question is this: is this patient so far gone that nothing we can do will save it? I want to keep trying to resuscitate, but what can I do that will have any effect? Voting for Democrats now looks as effective as chanting and burning incense. Protest is the sound of a tree falling with no TV cameras to record it.

You are one of the most important, and one of the best bloggers we have, Glenn. But we are stuck in an endless loop of diagnosis without treatment, and the patient is dying. Your posts indicate your own increasing frustration, yet you (understandably) seem reluctant to "call it."

Dx is obvious; it is Rx that we lack. What can we do? I have no answers. I am to the point that, absent a plausible plan for treatment, I am going to have to start thinking about other patients.

The reason the wingers detest logic is that it leads them to places they do not want to go. Logic is taking me to a sad and lonely place, but the only alternative seems to be self-delusion.

Not because she will foreswear torture and illegal wiretapping and secrecy and renditions. Not because she will embrace the joys of checks and balances in January 2009.

She won't.

We have to elect her because the Republican party will miraculously rediscover the Constitution the day she takes office.

And because, unlike their invertebrate Democratic colleagues, they will find ways to hamstring her regardless of the number of seats they hold in Congress.