First, John McCrory does a nice number on the David Brooks piece I was talking about yesterday.

Now, I got two separate emails today (well, last night at 2am) through my contact page. I thought some of you might get a kick out of them.

Subject: dean

Howard Dean is an absolute freak! This is ssssooooooo fun! Hope he keeps on ranting his stupid vapid spiel, funny as hell, bradley as running mate could not be any funnier! This is gonna be a great year! yours truly ad

Subject: power

He ended one speech I saw simply by repeating "you have the power." Can you imagine George Bush doing this?

Can you imagine someone so pathetic they really think the American people have to be told this? Of course Americans have the power. That is why Dean is a pathetic idiot, and that is why the American people are not going to elect this dumb dumb!!!!!!!!!! yours truly ad

This is going to be fun, I'll agree there. As for whether or not the American people have to be reminded from time to time that they have the power, I think the numbers speak for themselves. In national elections since World War II, the United States ranks 103rd in voter participation out of 131 democracies.

Oh, and while I disagree with your take "ad," I'm a staunch supporter of getting wasted and sending people politically-minded email. 'Nuff said.

It's bizarro world today. The Spin is on.

Update: How could I forget to mention John Kerry's "puff puff give" moment, which my man Franz blogged over at MfA. Laughable and bizarre.

The conservative Club for Growth is launching a truly bizzare attack ad aimed at my man Howard Dean in Iowa:

In the ad, a farmer says he thinks that "Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading ..." before the farmer's wife then finishes the sentence: "... Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs."

So they're trying to stoke up irrational Dean hatred based purely on canards and prejudice, or they're secretly trying to sabotage his opponents. I honestly don't know which, but there's little doubt that something is happening here. Vacation is over and the wheels are in motion.

At the other end of the media spectrum, David Brooks pens an NYT column which essentially suggests anyone who complains about the PNAC and the cabal of Hawks who continue to lobby for war without end is an anti-semetic conspiracy theorist.

The full-mooners fixated on a think tank called the Project for the New American Century, which has a staff of five and issues memos on foreign policy. To hear these people describe it, PNAC is sort of a Yiddish Trilateral Commission, the nexus of the sprawling neocon tentacles...

...there are apparently millions of people who cling to the notion that the world is controlled by well-organized and malevolent forces. And for a subset of these people, Jews are a handy explanation for everything.

It's funny, because I remember not too long ago -- oh, say, before the war in Iraq was revealed to be a quagmire prosecuted on fraudulent grounds -- people were all abuzz (in a positive way) about the neo con movement, how they were winning the foreign policy contests 100 to nothing. People were gearing up to write books about this new era of governance, until it turned out to be the same old imperial bullshit. Now Brooks politely informs us that any "neo-con movement" is a figment of our (likely jew-hating) imaginations.

Pardon me if I take a second helping of umbrage, yo. The piece would be laughable if it didn't contain the skeevy anti-semetic twist. Brooks claims that the neo cons travel in widely different circles -- yet acknowledges that many of them work at the same magazine, and often "sat around guffawing" at the "ludicrous stories" that kept popping up. He downplays the significance of Dick Perle, saying he had no significant meetins w/Bush or Cheny, but doesn't mention Wolfowitz's trips to Crawford.

Now, I don't think these people run the government, but the invasion of Iraq was clearly something they'd been pushing for quite a while. If Brook's attempt to sideline any discussion of how this group may have influenced US foreign policy by labelling any such notions anti-semetic is any indication as to what we've got to look forward to, it's gonna be a hell of a spin cycle. Welcome to the front, muchachos. The race of 2004 has begun.

Right the fuck on:

Artists, through their work, sensitize themselves to the world that they
find themselves in. I think that this process is inherently political,
since it ultimately leads to an understanding of our role in the greater
whole.

This is from an interview my co-worker Dan did with a band called the Books. read it. Listen to their music.

Just a reminder that a vigorous free press is an essential component to successful democracy. If you think the US press is being thorough and objective in its job, you might ask yourself why you'll only see Salam Pax on the BBC. One would assume that getting direct contact with the people over there is an important part of covering the story, but I can't say I've ever seen any non-exile Iraqi speaking on American newsmedia.

The US press establishment is a deeply diseased entity, dying even. For a long time I've been hoping that shame would jolt them back to life; and there's surely time for this to happen, but I'm beginning to loose my optimism on this one. People, it's bad.

Krugman's got a bit on this in todays Times, especially with regards to how it pertains to the coverage of politics. When a freakin' economist can deliver so many burns to the political journalism establishment, you know something ain't right.

You know, I was just sitting in my bathtub, contemplating a reading list, thinking about how to start spreading the word about what's wrong with the way the Bush administration deals with the rest of the word... and here comes my man Dean with some serious ammunition.

I aussme a lot of my readers probably don't follow the campaign super closely. Myself I've been a bit out of touch with the daily media stuff; dead trees and talking heads don't get a lot of attention from me anyway, and I've been pretty busy. But the Washington Post ran a very critical editorial of Dean's foreign policy speech yesterday in which they suggested that his views were outside the America mainstream. This is his response.

A critical presidential campaign is now underway. Americans face a choice between two very different views of our role in the world. My agenda returns security policy to its fundamental course: protecting Americans and advancing our values and interests -- democracy, freedom, opportunity and peace -- through effective partnerships and global leadership, as well as military strength.

The current administration strays wildly from this course and from the time-honored manner of pursuing it. In the end, I believe it will be clear who is in the mainstream and who is swimming against the tide of history.

I've been so caught up in movement politics, I forgot the spark that started it all for me. The doctor is IN!^* Can we bring that one back, 'cuz e're getting down to it now people; this is how you win the 2004 campaign air war. Two-fists and don't back down. We are right and Bush is wrong, those are the facts.

^* by that I mean he's here and present and giving us his A game, not that he's already the nominee or anything

With that healthy dose of Jim Moore in my head and a little Godspeed in my ears -- Kicking Horse on Brokenhill -- I cranked out the last part of my 3-segment brain-dump on the Blogging of the President.

This is Not a Drill
I'm 24 years old. I will have children someday, and they will ask me what I did in 2004. If you have children or grandchildren, yours will ask you as well. I don't want to be melodramatic about the importance of what is going on right now in the world, but I will not understate it either. What is at stake in this election cycle is absolutely enormous. Short of basic survival, there is nothing that is more important for each and every American, especially those of us who are going to have to live with the consequences for many years to come.

And it gets more strident from there.

Jim Moore officially gets it:

Perhaps Howard Dean is not running for the same presidency as George Bush.  That is, perhaps in an era of online communication, combined with grassroots community organizing, we need a new form of presidency that itself encourages more peer-to-peer problem solving across our society.  Perhaps we need a movement to reverse the consolidation of presidential and legislative and judicial power at the center, because this consolidation of power makes it harder for the society to solve its most critical problems.

This is exactly what the Participant Movement -- which Dean epitomizes from a political standpoint -- is all about. It's about the redistribution and decentralization of power. First we do it here, then we do it for the world. It's utopia or oblivion, folks. Same as it ever was. Thanks to Jay McCarthy for the pointer.

More essay-like accretion of content by me: Part two of my three-part series over on the Blogging of the Presidency.

The budding movement of participation is about more than presidential campaigns; it's also about our role in the world as people, the meaning of life itself. It's about our culture, how we live our daily lives. Participation is what you get done in your short time in this universe, and it would seem that people are increasingly discontent to spend their time merely as spectators.

It's not quite as rousing as I wanted it to be, but I think I covered all the bases.

Me on the daily kos, with my opinion on the last best Dean smear to come from other Democrats:

Quote me on this now: this is the last gasp of the anti-Dean wing of the Democratic party; if he can weather this, the nomination is his. This is the only thing he hasn't been directly attacked on, the idea that somehow because he wasn't a solder, he can't effectively criticise Bush's handling of the post 9-11 situation.

You can read my whole thing here. I also just gave Dean $50. I wish my dKos diary had an RSS feed; I'd do all my political bloggin' over there and just feed it onto this page.

It's widely expected that Al Gore will endorse Howard Dean tomorrow in NY. My sources on the inside aren't talking, but I have a good feeling about this. It's un-fucking precidented.

Think about the prospect of a President unowned. Someone who leads a regular life, a doctor who drives his kids to hockey and lives in a pretty modest house in Vermont. Imagine what someone who believes in facts might do if he didn't have one hand tied behind his back by special interests. What would it be like to have someone in charge who not only cared about me and my life, but who was seriously inviting me to be a part of the process of shaping the world.

That's a revolution, if you ask me; one without enemies. It's the Right Thing to have happen, and it can happen. It will. Especially if you make yourself a part of it.