Sometimes to save America, you have to destroy it. That's their logic, scarily enough.

Once you realize that everything they say is political frosting for their actual agenda, and that everything they do is politically motivated, they're pretty apparent. Freedom = Capitalism; Democracy = GOP; Religious Diversity = Christianity; Racial Diversity = White; Free Trade = No-bid contracts to well-connected cronies; Peace = militarized police state; Voter Fraud = Democratic votes, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if they had people working in their reactionary think tanks to devise semantic camouflage for their ideas. Ideology crafts its own reality.

They'll probably dirty up the 2008 elections as much as they can to try to hold onto power. Let's hope enough people are wary and angry and get out there and shut them down, at least until people get clueless and complacent and the GOP crafts another set of buzzwords to mislead people into supporting them again.

Yeah, the incriminating e-mails are surely warehoused in servers somewhere, but RNC interns are busy massaging them with demagnetizers, right? Or somebody will spill a Coke on the server, or they'll fall off the back of a truck. Or something. Who knew that "Whoopsie" would be the "Sieg Heil" of American-style fascism?

And even if responsible parties are held to account for the wrongdoing, they'll suffer Republican Memory Loss Syndrome (RMLS), where they can't recall anything that they've done since 2000. Those who can't credibly do that'll take the 5th, and hope that Bush gives them all pardons before he turns out the lights in the White House.

I remember when Bush talked about restoring integrity, honesty, and decency to the White House. This must be what he meant! Funny people, those Republicans, mighty funny.

what they're actually doing is embracing incompetence.

Competence is for those with insufficient faith! Like if you already know you're doing God, Inc.'s bidding, you don't need to sweat competence -- everything that's happened is according to the Grand Design. Never mind that America's not in the Bible. Heretical trifles! Trust the charlatans who cynically push faithful people's buttons for political gains! The world's ending soon, anyway. Competence? Pfff.

Maybe somebody else has better knowledge. As it stands, the attorney general does not seem to know exactly what he has or has not done.

Republican Memory Loss Syndrome (RMLS) once again in action, the time-tested defense: Destroy evidence, deny responsibility and knowledge, derail investigations. I'd also call it "implausible deniability."

So much for "the party of personal responsibility." So many bucks are being passed these days, they'll need "Buck Passes Here" signs throughout DC. No doubt the GOP will come to vociferously demand honesty and accountability in the Executive Branch after 2008, once a Democrat is back in the White House. But maybe there won't be enough of them left in Congress to make much noise.

At least the two-day reprieve for Gonzales will help him "forget" that much more information.

McCarthy not so bad? Are you serious? I think the real damage McCarthy and HUAC did was that it criminalized political opinions, so, yeah, he was worse than bad.

If somebody wanted to a communist, a socialist, an anarchist, you know who's business that was? Nobody's. People are allowed to have their own political opinions, and are allowed to exercise them in the public sphere, free from coercion and oppression. That's the American thing to do, right?

But that's not what really happened -- instead, the Cold Warriors went after those "wrongful ideologies" and suppressed them by way of McCarthy, HUAC, and the Cold War, and the rise of the national security state, and through laws and Supreme Court rulings. And it had a chilling effect on political thinking in this country, this purge. It narrowed the range of permissible, expressible opinion -- shut down part of the marketplace of ideas (the backwash of that paranoid nonsense even today is how national healthcare, which this country desperately needs, can be derailed by somebody saying "socialized medicine" -- McCarthy grins from the grave, Mission Accomplished). The hysteria of anti-communism is with us today, morphed into anti-terrorism hysteria. Government-by-hysteria was McCarthy's contribution to our political culture. Nice one.

The most un-American thing McCarthy and his ilk did was to declare that things could be "un-American" -- as if they were the arbiters of civic virtue, in judgment over all, by drawing a line in the sand and symbolically denying franchise to whoever in the country didn't walk their line.

The "are you or have you ever been a member..." question should simply never have been asked -- not in a supposedly free and democratic society -- the mere asking of it mirrored the Stalinists and Maoists they were supposedly protecting us from, yes? The mere asking of it, the supposed legitimacy of their crusade, was an ominous development in our country's politics. It's why we have two fairly unrepresentative parties pretending to cover all permissible political opinion, while serving narrow interests -- duopoly -- instead of a far wider political spectrum available to us, the people, who surely deserve more options than that.

You're flat wrong about McCarthy, Mr. Keillor. We're still paying for the madness he helped create, in so many ways.