The comment by DCLaw1 brought tears to my eyes, as so many of us have been hoping and praying for this kind of thing for so very many years. I see it and feel it as well. Whether it will form a large enough critical mass soon enough to save our country is another matter, but at least it's happening.

Thanks also for your fantastic analyses and writing, which I read daily.

I work on Wall Street in a very conservative part of the finance industry, and I too have noticed a change. Several of the most rabid Bush and Iraq war supporters I work with are now very uncomfortable with his leadership, and remarkably, they're starting to talk about it.

One co-worker's autographed picture with Bush and Cheney disappeared from his desk about a month ago. When I ribbed him about it last week, he responded in all seriousness with, "I just couldn't stand to look at such fuck-ups every day." This from a Greenwich and Golf Republican (The Northeast's Good Ol' Boys"). I know he's not reading TPM or Glenn or watching Jon Stewart, yet despite the corporate media's whitewash of the Bush record, came to the conclusion that Bush and Co. are an utter failure. I took this as a hopeful sign.

I'm convinced this war will be around for the next administration to sort out, and it will kill Republican chances for taking back Congress. That said, we seem to indemnify past administrations from investigations after they leave office. Will that be the case here? Can the next administration investigate the wrongdoing of the previous? Has there ever been an instance of this? We're only going to get to the root of the problems in this administration once they're gone.

Bebop-o, I know that unsolicited praise makes a good man like yourself run a finger around his collar, feeling it's maybe too tight, but I'll run the risk of praising you anyway. On my head be it.

If I ever figure out why a possum would give cold coins for a copper suit, from the previous thread, gave me shivers. Please don't ever stop being bebop-o. The need for touchstones is real, and you are one.

The following quote from Thomas Jefferson has helped sustain me in recent years. It now seems more prophetic than merely hopeful.

"...we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles."

I'll keep donating to, voting for, and sometimes working for progressives as I always do. But what makes me uneasy about the current political situation is this: does the American public now disapprove of the Iraq war because it was corrupt and illegal, or simply because (in all likelihood) it's been lost?

I realize that part of the debate springs from how we were sold a bill of goods - "greeted as liberators" and all that - which turned out to be so wrong that it would be hilarious if it were not so tragic.

But given the narcissism of our culture, our chauvinism toward "others" (like Muslims in particular) and our overall lack of interest in the rest of the world, I wonder if the souring of the public mood is equivalent to - and as fickle as - that of sports fans whose team has just experienced several losing seasons.

Ultimately I'm just not convinced that a confluence of thoughtful people, aided by new technology, is enough to offset the - yes, I'll just say it - blatant stupidity of so much of the public.

It seems just as likely to me that the Iraq disaster might prove to be a catalyst for a new round of American isolationism, which could be the most dangerous reaction of all. I hope to be proven wrong, but I've been too appalled at the choices of my fellow citizens for most of the last 20 years to be overly optimistic.

No more fucking compromise and no more surrender.

I want to see the GOP completely discredited, disgraced, deconstructed, defeated, disbanded and destroyed.

Every single Republican alive is a traitor and a war criminal and they should never, ever be allowed to have a voice in our national conversation again.

Since the start of the Iraq war it seemed to me that the Bush Jr. Republicans, by their sheer dedication to their crazy extremism at all costs, and their possession of absolute power (no one else to blame) would finally make Americans tire of their love affair with Reaganite right wing populism.

The right wing Reaganite revolutionaries finally got complete and total power, and ended up disgusting both their base AND the average American.

Here the revolutionaries have been promising how if they ever got real & total power, they'd really put things 'right'. And I know, from the intelligent and reasonable perspective, they have come awfully close to a counter-revolution against the original revolution of 1776.

But from the right wing revolutionaries' view, a lot more was supposed to happen once 'their' guys took power: Abortion was going to be over (not just chipped away); the Bible was going back into the schools (not just a half-hearted undermining of evolution); the IRS was going to be ended (not just tax breaks for the rich); and so on and so forth.

Meanwhile, the average American seemed to identify with a lot of the crazy right wing populist revolutionary ideas: cut taxes to grow the economy; we should really march into one of 'those' countries and show 'em how tough we are; no more stopping the gov't investigators for 'technicalities'.

And I think the average American has watched the crazy Bush Jr. right attempt all of their crazy revolutionary ideas with no force in the nation to stop them, and, not surprisingly, didn't like the results.

Thank god for two things:

(1) The crazy idiocy of the Bush Jr. crew, without which a smarter and more disciplined fascist mindset might have screwed us even further and more rigidly.

and

(2) The good ol' fashioned trendiness of American pop culture. The Reaganite populist right wing revolutionary rhetoric had a good run, but it really got its absolute over-exposure these last 6 years, and hey, times are changing, that was yesterday's fad, time for something else.

I do believe that 6 years of absolute power by Reaganite right wing populist revolutionism ended it, in a way which no liberal political forces would have been able to do. I can now read analyses about US foreign policies on liberal and Democratic blogs which through the 1980s and 1990s were relegated mostly to the haunts of leftist magazines & alternative radio, as official Democrats seemed to shun anything so fundamentally challenging of the hawk perspective as 'extremist' or 'fringe' or 'leftist'.

(Some of the most significant of US leftists have even been met with something other than derision from mainstream liberalism -- on occasion even praised -- for their steadfast dedication to principle and against international barbarism for the past 40 years. It is a strange development indeed for me to see that many liberals are familiar with and even admiring of the work of, say, Amy Goodman, another crusader of honorable principle committed to real and challenging journalism and news media work.)

Now may be the first time in my lifetime that the US population and its political structure are both open to genuine liberal political moves.

I would expect, also, that the national Republican Party will similarly react to these changes: if, as Thomas Schaller argues, the crazy right wing populist Republican base becomes more isolated in the South (my home), it stands to reason that outside the South, the Republican Party is more likely to shift back to its older incarnation as the party of pro-business moderates, because at some point, conservatives in the Northeast, MidWest, West, and Pacific Northwest will tire of being run by crazy, and more importantly, losing extremists.

And if *that* is true, then not only might Southern Democrats tire of being told that to be elected they must run away from economic populism and be as right wing as possible, but many Southern Republicans even will get tired of losing control over Congressional committees that bring them the pork projects which they love and which provide them with their spectacular ability to corrupt local politics.

In addition, the foreign element of Latin America basically having moved to assert its independence from US domination in the last 8 - 10 years, and its largest nations rejecting the crazy and harmful right wing US agenda on their economies they were forced to follow, this also is going to change US politics. Now, it's not just the revolutionary leftists in Latin America arguing for following domestically sane policies: even your conservative businessmen in Latin America see the benefits of growing one's economy indigenously rather than following the insane advice of US economic ideologues.

When US maniacal right wing hawkish policies (followed by every single U.S. president) in Latin America can no longer be enforced upon those nations either by gun or by loan policies or trade agreement, eventually *someone* in the U.S. is going to have to come up with a different, and presumably better, approach. And if right wing extremist economic trade 'theory' no longer wins in foreign policy...

But then, we've managed to avoid taking advantage of other positive moments and alignments before, so to me this is only potential improvement, and everyone will keep having to fight against not only the last throes of revolutionary Reaganism, but a news media which faces the often invisible but oh so real pressure to always return to the interests of their owners, advertisers, and their peers among the nation's super-wealthy.

Maybe over time all this zeitgeist in the liberal blogs & local populist liberal organizing and the newer liberal radio shows can somehow keep learning to work together -- the nation's news media aren't just going to change & improve because it would be the nice and right thing to do.