For Super(duper) Tuesday coverage

Please check out my posts at All Things Democrat (this, from a lifelong til now Indy) to see how:

• the Republicans are shitting themselves
• West Virginia votes first for Romney than seals its delegates to Huckabee "(Aren't dinosaurs still here?")
• why they're saying John McCain will break the Republican Party in two (don't believe it, myself - they've been a divided party for a long time, usually divided between those with a brain and no heart, and those with feint heart and little brain and then a huge number of folks with some brain and heart who get stuck with loser, pathological candidates).

More Than 60% Of Americans Say We Should Never Have Gone Into Iraq; 63% Wants Troop Withdrawal Before 2008

Republicans and even some Democrats insist they know what American citizens - and the critical demographic subset of America called Norman Rockwell-painted Ma and Pa U.S. voter - most want from their elected officials and others who run Washington. Yet opinion polls demonstrate the lawmakers and especially the White House (currently run into the ground by Edgar BergenKarl Rove and his "front man", Charlie McCarthy George W. Bush) seem to have no genuine clue re: "the will of the people." Check this out:

[...] there’s a strange paradox here. The decibel level of the fin-de-Bush rage is a bit of a red herring. In truth, there is some consensus among Americans about the issues that are dividing both parties. The same May poll that found the country so wildly off-track showed agreement on much else. Sixty-one percent believe that we should have stayed out of Iraq, and 63 percent believe we should withdraw by 2008. Majorities above 60 percent also buy broad provisions of the immigration bill — including the 66 percent of Republicans (versus 72 percent of Democrats) who support its creation of a guest-worker program.

What these figures suggest is that change is on its way, no matter how gridlocked Washington may look now. However much the G.O.P. base hollers, America is not going to round up and deport 12 million illegal immigrants, or build a multibillion-dollar fence on the Mexican border — despite Lou Dobbs’s hoax blaming immigrants for a nonexistent rise in leprosy. A new president unburdened by a disastrous war may well fashion the immigration compromise that is likely to elude Mr. Bush.

Frank Rich: "Failed Presidents Ain't What They Used To Be"

Finally! Someone has found a way to make the American public better appreciate Richard M. Nixon: by comparing him to the far, far, F-A-R more corrupt, destructive, and treasonous George W. Bush (the 2nd). Read all of Frank Rich here, but let me start you:

A few weeks ago I did something I never expected to do in my life. I shed a tear for Richard Milhous Nixon.

That’s in no small measure a tribute to Frank Langella, who should win a Tony Award for his star Broadway turn in “Frost/Nixon” next Sunday while everyone else is paying final respects to Tony Soprano. “Frost/Nixon,” a fictionalized treatment of the disgraced former president’s 1977 television interviews with David Frost, does not whitewash Nixon’s record. But Mr. Langella unearths humanity and pathos in the old scoundrel eking out his exile in San Clemente. For anyone who ever hated Nixon, this achievement is so shocking that it’s hard to resist a thought experiment the moment you’ve left the theater: will it someday be possible to feel a pang of sympathy for George W. Bush?

Perhaps not. It’s hard to pity someone who, to me anyway, is too slight to hate. Unlike Nixon, President Bush is less an overreaching Machiavelli than an epic blunderer surrounded by Machiavellis. He lacks the crucial element of acute self-awareness that gave Nixon his tragic depth. Nixon came from nothing, loathed himself and was all too keenly aware when he was up to dirty tricks. Mr. Bush has a charmed biography, is full of himself and is far too blinded by self-righteousness to even fleetingly recognize the havoc he’s inflicted at home and abroad. Though historians may judge him a worse president than Nixon — some already have — at the personal level his is not a grand Shakespearean failure. It would be a waste of Frank Langella’s talent to play George W. Bush (though not, necessarily, of Matthew McConaughey’s).

This is in part why persistent cries for impeachment have gone nowhere in the Democratic Party hierarchy. Arguably the most accurate gut check on what the country feels about Mr. Bush was a January Newsweek poll finding that a sizable American majority just wished that his “presidency was over.” This flat-lining administration inspires contempt and dismay more than the deep-seated, long-term revulsion whipped up by Nixon; voters just can’t wait for Mr. Bush to leave Washington so that someone, anyone, can turn the page and start rectifying the damage. Yet if he lacks Nixon’s larger-than-life villainy, he will nonetheless leave Americans feeling much the way they did after Nixon fled: in a state of anger about the state of the nation.

The rage is already omnipresent, and it’s bipartisan. The last New York Times/CBS News poll found that a whopping 72 percent of Americans felt their country was “seriously off on the wrong track,” the highest figure since that question was first asked, in 1983. Equally revealing (and bipartisan) is the hypertension of the parties’ two angry bases. Democrats and Republicans alike are engaged in internecine battles that seem to be escalating in vitriol by the hour.

On the Democratic side, the left is furious at the new Congress’s failure to instantly fulfill its November mandate to end the war in Iraq. After it sent Mr. Bush a war-spending bill stripped of troop-withdrawal deadlines 10 days ago, the cries of betrayal were shrill, and not just from bloggers. John Edwards, once one of the more bellicose Democratic cheerleaders for the war (“I believe that the risk of inaction is far greater than the risk of action,” he thundered on the Senate floor in September 2002), is now equally bellicose toward his former colleagues. He chastises them for not sending the president the same withdrawal bill he vetoed “again and again” so that Mr. Bush would be forced to realize “he has no choice” but to end the war. It’s not exactly clear how a legislative Groundhog Day could accomplish this feat when the president’s obstinacy knows no bounds and the Democrats’ lack of a veto-proof Congressional majority poses no threat to his truculence.

Among Republicans the right’s revolt against the Bush-endorsed immigration bill is also in temper-tantrum territory, moving from rational debate about complex policy questions to plain old nativism, reminiscent of the 19th-century Know-Nothings. Even the G.O.P. base’s traditional gripes — knee-jerk wailing about the “tragedy” of Mary Cheney’s baby — can’t be heard above the din.

“White America is in flight” is how Pat Buchanan sounds the immigration alarm. “All they have to do is go to Bank of Amigo and pay the fine with a credit card” is how Rush Limbaugh mocks the bill’s punitive measures for illegal immigrants. Bill O’Reilly, while “reluctantly” supporting Mr. Bush’s plan, illustrates how immigration is “drastically” altering the country by pointing out that America is “now one-third minority.” (Do Jews make the cut?) The rupture is so deep that National Review, a fierce opponent of the bill, is challenging its usual conservative ally, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, to a debate that sounds more like “Fight Club.”

What the angriest proselytizers on the left and right have in common is a conviction that their political parties will commit hara-kiri if they don’t adhere to their bases’ strict ideological orders. “If Democrats do not stick to their guns on Iraq,” a blogger at TalkLeft.com warns, there will be “serious political consequences in 2008.” In an echo of his ideological opposite, Mr. Limbaugh labels the immigration bill the “Comprehensive Destroy the Republican Party Act.”

For the rest.

Speaking of Opportunistic Health Crises

If yesterday, the news surrounded the announcement by John and Elizabeth Edwards that her breast cancer has metastasized (spread) to her bones, then today's was all about Tony Snow(job)'s disclosure that he was to undergo removal of a tumor. While I have less than zero respect for Snowjob, I do wish him well.

However, I'm feeling less than charitable after watching and listening to the way some of the rightwing responded to Elizabeth Edwards' tale. The (dis)likes of Rush Lamehog... er.. Limpfog... uh HamhogLimbaugh going way out on the metaphorical limb to suggest that the wife of the former senator and current 2008 Democratic race candidate for the 2008 Dem presidential nomination "engineered" this horrific crisis to aid her husband's poll numbers.

Were I a good Bushie, a great Kool-aid carrier for the far rightwing "always on message" agenda like a Rush or an Ann Coulter or a Michelle Malkin, I might ask if Tony suddenly "dreamed up" this surgical procedure simply to distract us from the sympathy extended to Mrs. Edwards, the lies Tony spins each and every day, and the GonzalesGate mess. After all, as one of the not-too-brighty righty bloggers yesterday posted, "The timing is damned convenient, so much so it makes one wonder."

Thankfully, however, neither you nor I is quite possessed of the cold lump of coal of a heart that so much of the "compassionate Christian conservative" right demonstrates. So we can wish Snow better than he delivers himself as water carrier for the Bushies, without looking into bizarre motives.

Classy, Caring, And Completely Human: Elizabeth Edwards

Words fail me as I keep replaying the words and affect today of Elizabeth Edwards, with her husband John, announcing that her cancer has spread YET she wants her husband to continue his campaign for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination because it's that.

Totally and utterly fake is usually the best thing that can be said about most politicians and their spouses, sporting smiles that freeze their mouths yet never reach their eyes. You know that every single word has been engineered to draw the maximum calculated affect from the audience and that they've probably spent a bundle on marketing and focus groups to refine the message down to a science. You see it with Laura Bush and with Hillary Clinton; you see it also with male pols.

But that is NOT what I got from Mrs. Edwards today. Instead, I saw and heard a very genuine human being expressing most genuine feelings. It left me not just with a wildly heightened great respect for her - the mother of still young children - but also for John himself. When she told us that America needs her husband in a leadership role, I know she meant it with every fiber of her being; not just for blind ambition but for the good of the country.

Of course, Rush Limbaugh and others from the hate-hugging far right immediately attacked her and ridiculed John, coming close to suggesting that the announcement today was a stunt, a ploy to gain sympathy. How sick - truly pathological - is that? Poor Rush wants sympathy for his drug addiction - which I doubt he overcame - but the Edwards, he wants us to think, are so desperate for attention they "conjured up" metastatic breast cancer in a still-young woman.

Elizabeth is amazing. She deserves our respect.