I hope I'm wrong. And I try to resist unwarranted cynicism and defeatism. But everything I've seen over the last week leads me to conclude that this is more or less inevitable. Our system is realy broken and it's not going to suddenly fix itself.

I've been part of the cynical Greek chorus here for some time, Glenn. I have had a bipolar relationship with your posts, alternately challenging what seemed like unwarranted (pun intended) optimism and taking succor when the darkness overwhelmed me.

But now that you seem to have finally reached a level of pessimism worthy of the facts, I am merely sad.

Our fragile, infirm Constitution is aflame. The blogosphere has been clanging the bell for several years now. But alarms don't put out fires. What I want is to put out the damned fire, but the "professional" fire department is populated with pyromaniacs.

We've all been howling about that problem, too. But the final, fatal ingredient is the apathy of our larger community. They just don't seem to care if it all burns down. A few of us form a ragtag bucket brigade, but the arsonists merely laugh.

I wrote this in January 2006:

As Benjamin Franklin left the final day of deliberation by the Constitutional Convention in 1787, a citizen supposedly asked him, "Well, Doctor, what have we got--a Republic or a Monarchy?" Franklin replied, "A Republic, if you can keep it."

If all goes as planned, in a week or so that Republic will finally escape our grip. When the Senate votes to affirm Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, the central tenet of our government - the separation of powers - will take a blow from which it will likely never recover. In its place a de facto monarchy will solidify and expand, and our Constitution will join the Geneva Convention as a quaint anachronism. And the Republic we have kept for two hundred years will join its Athenian and Roman predecessors as good ideas whose time has passed.

We can argue over the exact time and manner of death. But I don't think the outcome is in doubt.

Showing these folks that what they say today is inconsistent with what they said yesterday is about as effective as showing a dog a photo of the couch he chewed up last week.

The constant around which the right wing fixes policy is not philosophy. What unites past and present wingnuts is pants-pissing fear. They were afraid of the commies (thought they now see the Reds through rose-tinted goggles), they feared the Clenis, and now they fear Islamic Liberal Fascism.

Oh, and for 40 years they have been terrified of the DFHs. Can't forget the hippies.

I took on Dubya's peculiar concept of entitlements in a 2005 Raw Story piece:

http://www.rawstory.com/exclusives/steinberg/new_entitlement_031305.htm

This, then, is the New Entitlement. Where once progressive social programs that redistributed resources from rich to poor were (perhaps unfortunately) called “entitlements,” for unhappy “haves” like our President, the term now means “what’s mine is mine, and you ain’t getting any of it.” And so he schemes to end the limits on transgenerational transmission of wealth by framing the inheritance tax as the “death tax.” He demanded sharp reductions in taxation on income from wealth (dividends and capital gains), while tax rates on labor are largely unchanged. And he jousts with the Social Security windmill because a system that rounds off the sharp edges of poverty and misfortune is a reminder to everyone of the role of chance in the distribution of the wealth. And if net worth depends even in part on chance, his claim of entitlement is suspect.

We are ruled by men who were born on third base and think they hit triples.

The FISA bill appears to immunize a very broad range of illegal, 4th Amendment-busting behaviors:

http://www.news.com/8301-13578_3-9801975-38.html

I haven't studied the language myself, but this sounds pretty damned frightening:

A hotel manager who lets FBI agents into a guest's room to copy a laptop's hard drive in secret would not be liable. An apartment manager who gives Homeland Security the key to a tenant's unit to place a key logger in a PC would not be liable. A private security firm that divulges a customer's alarm code would not be liable. A university that agrees to forward a student's e-mail messages to the Defense Department would not be liable. An antivirus company that helps the NSA implant spyware in an unsuspecting customer's computer would not be liable.

No court order is required. And if an eventual lawsuit accuses the hotel manager or antivirus firm of unlawful activities, it'll be thrown out of court as long as the attorney general or the director of national intelligence can provide a "certification." The "certification" is, of course, secret--all a judge may say publicly is that the rules were followed, and then dismiss the case.

As of today, the number of elected officials who understand and value of the Bill of Rights would not crowd a phone booth.

We aren't there yet, of course, but a number of colorful concepts from the gulag era seem increasingly applicable.

Like samizdat, as applied to the blogosphere.

And zampolit as applied to apparatchiks like Boylan.

Walt Kelly nailed it decades ago.

http://www.igopogo.com/we_have_met.htm

Just read the update.

Glenn, I am afraid the form of your question ("can you confirm") left him wiggle room.

Boylan's "no" could just as easily mean "no, I cannot confirm" as "no, it was not from me."

That would explain the ambivalence about spoofing.