Back on the virtual front line. Sorta.

Yep, still under the weather. I can feel my readership dropping by the day, but blogging is a harsh mistress. Yep.

The US Attorney scandal keeps getting worse for BushCo, but they just keep digging in: Snow is faux-shocked by any suggestion that the Bushies would try to conceal any (alleged) wrongdoing. Such as a curious, two-week gap in the massive document dump from the DOJ. Bush, ever the steely-eyed leader, has once again assured the public that everyone implicated in the mess has his full support. Although he'll fight tooth and nail to keep them from uttering a single syllable under oath.

But who expects them to change at this point? 70% of Americans realize they won't, and the other unfortunates will never, ever think they should.

The Grand Old Party is staying the course as well, insisting that anything less than an extreme, right-wing government with unchecked power is tantamount to rule by "Faggots, Niggers, and Bitches":

Please excuse the blunt language. From here forward, to avoid the ugly words, I'll refer to it as "FNB politics." With little to show the electorate in 2008--after six years of uninterrupted control--besides sub-standard care from a privatized workforce at Walter Reed Hospital, thrice-married "family values" presidential candidates, and a boom in home foreclosures, the conservative base's 2008 strategy has begun to emerge: Weaken the major Democratic opponents by making their image unpalatable to the public. . .

Take the saga of Trinity United Church of Christ and its "black value system"--a crucial building block in the absurd smear that Barack Obama is a Manchurian black nationalist. The first mention I could find of it via the blog search engine Technorati came in July, on a site called PollywogCreekPorch. The next was December 8, on the site Faith and Action, which reports that an "exclusive commitment to a cultural and national identity played a major role in Obama's decision to identify himself with Christianity." You find the claim proliferating around the time the madrassa smear refused to stick; a key driver was a column titled "Barack Hussein Obama: Who Is He?" by none other than Ted Sampley, the pioneering swift boater who invented the charge that John McCain was brainwashed by communists. By February, Tucker Carlson was quoting the Trinity document, noting it "calls for congregants to be 'soldiers for Black freedom.'"

Handily, he dropped the second part of the clause, "... and the dignity of all humankind."

Who knows? Maybe after eight years of Republican corruption and greed, the destruction of New Orleans, and thousands of needless deaths, GOP boosters with a brain will demand something more from their party than war profiteering, legislating religion, and driving the nation to the brink of ruin. And the endless procession of stupefying demagoguery, racial stereotyping, and WWII-era propaganda.