This is excellent

Savvy to a Fault: Coming to Terms With Imperial Power

Well worth reading. It's becoming increasingly apparent that the machinery of the American state has a life entirely apart from and unresponsive to the ballot box, and to the framework of government envisioned in the Constitution. How one effectively combats that is unclear to me. The linked essayist and others, like Arthur Silber at Power of Narrative, suggest that participation in the various rituals and processes of our nominally democratic republic - like voting, for example - are not only fruitless but imply an endorsement of the system itself. Non-participation, they seem to argue, is the only effective opposition. More and more, I'm inclined to agree.

Evidence of the sickness within

The slide continues. In this country, one feels that the ingredients for something nasty are being assembled. Torture, the degradation of the discourse, widespread unemployment and poverty, despair. It's not clear when the tipping point will be reached, or if we've already passed it, but things seem like they will certainly get worse before they get better.

The many sides of a pig

Edroso, dday, and Greenwald on the newly developing manufactured "Did Obama call Palin a pig?" flap.

There are apparently millions upon millions of people who see/read/hear about this sort of infantile stuff, whose immediate impulse is not to gouge out their eyes and stab icepicks into their ears to make it stop. Rather, they think it's important. Who ARE these people?

Drill, baby, drill

I was out running today and thinking about this chant from the assembled at the Republican National Convention. Digby, citing Atrios, observes that it's of a piece with the overall Republican strategy of activating and motivating their base by actively pissing off liberals. Which it definitely does. But I was also thinking about what it suggests about the deeper mindset of your basic right wing activist.

There's a scene in the documentary Jesus Camp in which Becky Fischer, the children's pastor, talks openly about what a "sick old world" we live in, and how eager she is to be done with it. Watching that movie, and watching monstrosities like the Republican National Convention, it's hard to escape the idea that a lot of these people are motivated primarily by absolute guttural hatred of everyone and everything outside of their tribe, including the natural world. I think it largely explains the sheer avarice of that chant - one gets the sense that the fact that offshore drilling and drilling in ANWR make no sense from any perspective except a malicious one is one of the reasons it's so wildly popular with them.