Chucklehead

Chucklehead (2003)

Bush ratings drop yet again -- and the prezdent admits leaking declassified info. Deadliest day in Smiley Face Land Iraq this year. Pedophiles lurking in Homeland Security. Some days the blog writes itself.

But not as well as some people. Sometimes, I read a post that sums up what I feel so completely, there's no point in typing -- just pasting. And I have that experience frequently when I read Digby. Today, writing on whether our watchdog press has dropped the ball and seem like suckers and saps cozily catnapping in BushCo's lap, Digby notes:

For my part, I waited for more than a decade for the press to report what I could see with my own eyes: a powerful political party had morphed into a criminal enterprise that was bent on permanently altering our fundamental system of government. This is not hyperbole. The Republicans wrote about their dreams of empire and executive infallibility. They advertised their plan to dominate Washington. The information was available to those who had the time and patience to wade through the cacophony of media static to find it. But the media itself behaved like a flock of birds, startling to every rightwing noise and flying off together into whatever direction the Republicans wanted them to go.

The smear jobs of the early to mid-90's were not new. The Republicans did it better than most, but they didn't invent it. They fed damaging titillating information to a gullible and eager press at a time when harsh competition, 24 hour cable and tabloid ethics were starting to permeate the news media. It created a constant sense of crisis that served them well when they upped the ante.

But tabloid smears aside, using institutional power and the levers of government to deny the people their democratically elected choice of president, whether it was through impeachment or the Supreme Court deciding an election, was not business as usual. Openly abrogating treaties and setting forth an aggressive doctrine of preventive war is not business as usual. Consciously governing on a strictly partisan basis in order to render the opposition completely impotent despite its near parity in the nation, is not something we've ever seen in American politics. Using the power of the executive in "wartime" (the war being purely defined by the executive) to embed a theory of a unitary executive is a dramatic shift in the constitutional design of checks and balances. None of this is benign. These are steps toward dictatorship.

He's right and right on. And this bunch of Devil-Wearing-Pravda, propaganda vacuuming, myopic, bootlicking chuckleheads are the guardians of our freedoms?