Saturday, July 17, 2004

Despite being only marginally employed these past few days, I've had little inclination to post anything here.   Substantial fears undercut my fleeting hopes about the political minutia of the coming Kerry victory.  My union might get busted (thanks, NLRB!), our soldiers were sodomizing little Iraqi boys before murdering their brothers, 80 million Americans will live without health insurance this winter,, spring, summer, or fall, Ray LaHood is the 'honest' one on Capitol Hill.  But John-John's three points up in Gallup, or is looking good in the Carolinas, or [fill in the blank whimsical Dem-hope-for-crushing-Bush-defeat-scenario]!! 

Tuesday, July 13, 2004

My last post had something to do with the inane mysteries of my questionable readership. Such untoward introspection! Well I'm not no Ted Hughes, so forward.

A particular turn of phrase from Josh Marshall caught my eye this afternoon. It's to do with overheated war hawk justifications for shameless White House law-breaking in the Plame Affair:

It may be that [they] could only serve the cause of the higher truth by breaking the law, a sort of oddly insider form of civil disobedience. But they were still breaking the law.

It's the open defiance of the law, of liberal judges and 'Washington', that really heats right-wingers up. Blather about lawnorder notwithstanding, our forces of soon-to-be folksy fascism have as little respect for the law as it exists in America as my friends on the left, who know in their heart it's all a capitalist trick. The law in all its majesty forbids the rich as well as the poor from sleeping under bridges, no doubt.

So what does that say about our prospects as a democracy here in the United States? Well, the articulate extremes of the American divide share a common contempt for the due majesty of the law. The weight of respected procedure, which is really all that authority boils down to, inheres in the military, the police, and perhaps ultimately local circuits of power. But not in Congress. So when the estimable liberal Kevin Drum dismisses the danger of GWB-style election prevention, maybe he um dismisses too soon.