A little quote from the Royal Tenenbaums:

Royal: Are you trying to steal my woman?
Henry Sherman: I beg your pardon.
Royal: You heard me, Coltrane.
Henry Sherman: "Coltrane"?
Royal: What?
Henry Sherman: Did you just call me Coltrane?
Royal: No.
Henry Sherman: You didn't?
Royal: No.

This is how the current brand of Republican leadership operates. They simply assert whatever is convinent. I got an email from Party Chairman Edward Gelesipe the other day alledging that Joseph Wilson was "a liar."

No evidence was cited, and from all I can see (at best, they may be able to say "Joseph Wilson was wrong") this is a charge completely without merit, but they make it anyway. Lies, lies, lies, the email was entitled. Repetition (ritual, for any anthropology fans out there) often creates its own kind of truth, and the Republican party's current reigning cabal of dark shamen certainly understand this.

While I was on vacation in the woods in Oregon, carving the night-thoughts like a red-hot vibrating knife through kashmere on two microdots of clean Tennesee Acid, it occurred to me that what we need more than anything else to get this nation back on its feet are some good Republicans. It occurred to me just how much was lost when Karl Rove's push-poll backstab found John McCain's kidney in the spring of 2000 down in South Carolina.

I'd wondered about President Gore before, but I'd never stopped to think about President McCain. He was on a roll -- the people's candidate riding the straight talk express and a million dollars raised online -- until Rove's people placed 10's of thousands of phone calls in South Carolina asking likely primary goers (hypothetically, of course) whether they would still support John McCain if they knew he had an illegitimate African American love child.

It doesn't take much to derail an outsider's bid for a presidential nomination; ask Howard Dean about it sometime. John McCain never recovered from that series of dirty tricks, and we're all paying for it now. Ironically, the dearest political cost will be paid by the Republicans themselves.

Think of it. The Republican Party as currently instantiated is locked into the worst kind of political death spiral. Sandbagged with un-truth, their only hope for continued vitality is to further the decline of American politics, to drive down participation, poison discourse, create greater divisions and disillusionment. Their palace of media is crumbling and there emperor has been naked for years, decided he liked clearing brush in the buff and now its too late to go back.

But there's no more money to squeeze out of the working classes without hydraulics. There's no way to get more heavy-handed with messaging without resorting exclusively to overt propaganda. There are precious few young lives left to throw at foreign devils. All that's left is God and stupidity and rallying people to hate the queers, the intellectuals, the tattoed and pierced and secular-community minded. With good winds that can make 2004 competative, but beyond that there's nowhere to go.

Bush and his gang have led the Republican party -- the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosavelt (who at least understood empire and realized the danger implied by expansive corporate holdings) -- far far afield and deep into the muck. Their expidition in CEO-style governance is going nowhere. El Dorado will not be found, and provisions are running thin. Every day or two another face is gone; perhaps deserted, perhaps lost in the night, perhaps struck out on their own. Around quiet fires on the outskirts of camp there's talk of mutiny, while in the master's big tent corruption is evident. When a full accounting comes to pass, the people will not be pleased.

And they know this. The stink of impending hysteria seeps around the White House as secrets and silence lay deep the seeds of madness. The voodoo ragdoll bundle may or may not fully unravel in the next three months, but the stitching is thin and something unclean is leaking out around the edges. Everyone with skin in the game is hoping to ride it out; score one more time for an immunity fix and walk away a multi-millionare, hole up in one of those new gated communities to ride out armageddon.

I'm left wondering how a Vietnam POW would have reacted to 9/11, whether his secretary of defense would have told people to go looking for targets in unrelated countries, whether he would have resurrected ruination-syle deficits and fed them stereroids; whether he would have isolated America from the rest of the world, divided us sharply against one another, mocked and squandered the ideals of unity and social progress. While I'm sure I'd have plenty to complain about from President McCain, I just can't see him doing any of these things.

The realization rings true like a bell; if America is to prosper again, good Republicans will need to emerge, Republicans in the Eisenhower mold. Bush and his gang have sullied our nation, but we've got a good chance to make a course correction coming up in a few months. For those who believe in the Republican party, there's a hard rain coming. My hope is that the strong and wise emerge with an eye for truth and justice, and that when they do we're ready to meet them halfway with open arms.