Two posts I think are woth reading; one by Digby and the other by Mahablog that cut to the core of what I find so motherfucking frustrating about the Republican Establishment and the Right Wing Propagandists: they take incredibly serious issues and treat them in a melodramatic and unserious way in order to build and maintain political power. In the end, they don't have many principles other than that, and they're rather dependent on using fear as a motivating force.

While this has proven (I hope only temporarily) effective in the objective of building power, it is not an actual means of solving problems. And that, in a nutshell, is why things are not going so well.