We may not have John Edwards to kick around anymore – though that hasn’t stopped us from putting the occasional boot into his backside, has it? – but he did leave us with a paradigm that remains useful in surveying the political landscape circa November 2009. Forget, for the moment, Edwards’ rhetoric about the rich and the poor, and focus instead on the two wildly disparate narratives about the nation’s politics that have emerged over the past 12 months. On one side are those are still living in Bamalot, who see slow but steady progress toward fixing enormous problems in the economy, health care and foreign policy; on the other are those who see nothing but dollar bills flying out the windows of the Capitol. On one side are those who remain quietly, but fiercely proud of what America accomplished last autumn; on the other are those who loudly trumpet their conviction (or who put up with people who remain convinced) that the president himself is not an American.

On Tuesday, in a couple of states, one side sat contentedly on their asses and did nothing; the other harnessed themselves into an angry, energized mini-electorate that drove to the polls and turned their governors’ mansions from blue to red.

There was something deeply ironic about HBO’s decision to debut its new documentary, By the People: The Election of Barack Obama, on Tuesday evening. At the same hour on every news channel, a debate was raging as to whether Obama’s “movement for change” had hit a roadblock with the Republican victories in New Jersey and Virginia. But over on pay cable, it was Decision ’08 all over again as the Edward Norton-produced doc replayed the goings-on behind the scenes of Obama’s primary and general-election victories – and portrayed his opponents as little more than flies to be swatted along the path to the inevitable.

So, yes, the dichotomy was ironic – but it was also a nice metaphor for Tuesday’s outcome. Obama’s voters, feeling like they did their job last year and remaining pretty happy with the way things have gone since then, stayed home and watched TV, while the unhappy folks dragged their butts to the polls and changed the status quo. Such is democracy in America – particularly in these off-off-year elections, when the voters of New Jersey and (particularly) Virginia love to send Bronx cheers to the party in power.

Whether or not Tuesday’s results were a referendum on Obama’s first year depends on who’s punditizing. Maybe Republicans are rebounding strongly from their annus horribilis … and maybe they just benefited from minuscule turnout, weak opponents and/or Democratic complacency. Take your pick. The truth, though, is that none of this year’s “big” elections meant much of anything to the direction of the country at large – except in Maine, where Americans proved once again that they’re not morally or intellectually worthy of being trusted with mob-rule decisions on minority rights. (It’s long past time that the Supreme Court took such decisions out of their hands for good; the whole enterprise of public voting to deny civil rights is patently unconstitutional.)

Even if Tuesday’s results were largely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, I couldn’t help but notice the juxtaposition of mentalities on display during Chris Christie’s victory rally and Obama’s equivalent celebrations last year. Remember all the respectful diversity and joyful weeping that attended Obama’s Grant Park speech last November? In contrast, Christie’s audience was the usual crowd of jackals – the kind we’ve seen regularly since the 1992 GOP convention, but especially since last year’s frightening election season. Note to Republican activists: When your own candidate shushes you because you’re embarrassing him on national television, as Christie did this week (and McCain did repeatedly last Nov. 4), you might want to modify your behavior.

Of course, conservative rally-goers have maintained that feral posture throughout this year, through tea parties and town halls that persistently echoed the worst expressions of racism, paranoia and xenophobia at last year’s Sarah Palin rallies. (HBO really ought to be airing its new Obama doc back-to-back with Alexandra Pelosi’s far more riveting film about those McCain/Palin crowds, Right America Feeling Wronged, which retains its raw-nerve immediacy the same way that footage of, say, Bull Connor still terrifies 50 years later.) Indeed, the positivity of the Obama campaign already seems like ancient history compared with the open, seeping wound of White Man’s Victimization that’s still being picked at on a weekly basis by right-wing pundits and teabaggers.

But then, that’s precisely the point of those efforts – to use lies and scare tactics to cover the fact that conservatives have no ideas of their own for fixing the nation’s problems. While Obama and the Democrats have turned from the generalities of campaigning to the specifics of governing, conservative activists have been left with little legislative influence and no standing whatsoever as purveyors of wise policy, considering the last eight years. So they’ve filled the vacuum by doubling down on the rabid, irrational arguments of fall ’08, hoping to whittle away at public support for Obama’s agenda via amped-up name-calling (Foreign-born! Socialist! Fascist! Socialist-Fascist!) and thinly disguised threats of violence.

Does anybody really think the results in Virginia and New Jersey this week were a validation of that strategy? In fact, both Christie and Bob McDonnell won by sublimating their conservative impulses – or flat-out denying them, in the case of McDonnell’s wingnut thesis – and embracing Obama’s themes, if not his policies, in an effort to win Independent votes. And they succeeded, even as exit polls showed that majorities of the substantially reduced electorates in both states still support Obama, and even favor the public option. Not that these lessons will be learned by the teabaggers, who are far more excited about what they accomplished in upstate New York – using an “independent” conservative carpetbagger to force aside a moderate Republican – than they are about winning the governor’s mansions in Richmond and Trenton. In the process they lost a congressional seat that had been in GOP hands since the Civil War, but never mind that … ideological purity was enforced!

If Republicans are smart, they’ll encourage their faithful to start emulating McDonnell and stop cheerleading for Michelle Bachmann and Orly Taitz. Perhaps a guy like McDonnell, despite his repugnant “past” beliefs, can grab the reins of the GOP and keep it from galloping over the cliff toward which Palin and Limbaugh and Bachmann and Beck have been steering it. Don’t bet on it, though; the teabaggers, empowered by their overthrow of Dede Scozzafava up in Watertown, are now sniffing under rocks nationwide to find primary challengers for districts represented by other insufficiently crazy Republicans. They’ll probably force McDonnell himself to rediscover his old-time religion soon enough.

Meanwhile, as health care reform lurches toward its denouement and Republicans pick their next battle – how dare Obama launch a jobs program! – the gulf between the Two Americas will no doubt widen in the coming year. Democrats need to re-energize their base and remind Independents that their agenda is about more than just spending a mint-ful of money; no matter how successful they are, they face an uphill battle to ensure that next November’s turnout looks more like last year’s than this year’s. Republicans, on the other hand, need to figure out whether they’re the party of Christie and McDonnell or the party of Doug Hoffman.

What’s that? You’ve forgotten who Doug Hoffman is? That’s because he lost on Tuesday – the same way that most every candidate who forsakes the center in pursuit of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck’s endorsements will lose next autumn. If that happens, we’ll still have Two Americas – but one will be even smaller than it is now.

Now is the autumn of our discontent … at least for us Los Angeles baseball fans. Last night the Dodgers were polished off by the ruthless Phillies, their forever-teetering staff of pitchers finally crumbling in the face of Ryan Howard and that goddamned Victorino. Tonight the Angels may suffer the same fate – and even if they survive long enough to fly back east for the weekend, the Yankees will have their $161 million man waiting.

Which $161 million man? Now, there’s a question that could only refer to the Yankees. The one I’m talking about is CC Sabathia, the team’s most recent nine-figure pitching purchase, who has already shut the Angels down twice in this ALCS. But I could also be talking about first baseman Mark Teixeira, whom the Yankees plucked off the Angels’ roster last offseason for $180 million and who has repeatedly robbed his former teammates in the field this week (though his offensive numbers are pathetic). Of course, I might otherwise be talking about Derek Jeter, who’s nearing the end of his own $189 million contract. And as for Alex Rodriguez … well, he’ll earn $161 million in about the time it takes me to finish this column.

At least A-Rod is earning his salary (for once) this postseason. Still, like most baseball fans who don’t root for the Yankees, I have a hard time watching the Bombers without becoming queasy from the tsunami of dollar signs. In fact, Sabathia, Teixeira and A-Rod have ceased to function for me as human beings; their uniform numbers may as well be replaced with contract numbers – 161, 180, and 275, respectively. (Jeter gets a pass, since he came up through the farm system back in the ’90s, but the mind reels at the thought of the Yankees’ other free-agent acquisitions this decade – including tonight’s starting pitcher, number 82, otherwise known as A.J. Burnett.) If you add up the number of dollars the Steinbrenners have committed to their Big Three free agents through the end of Sabathia’s contract in 2016 – a total of $616 million – you get a number larger than the expected cumulative payrolls of 18 of Major League Baseball’s 30 teams over that span, even accounting for inflation.

The reason I bring all this up – apart from my perennial disgust with the Yankees’ patently unfair revenue and payroll advantages, a hatred which frequently needs venting at this time of year – is because yesterday a phrase re-entered the public sphere that recently had been reserved for discussions of baseball and its competitive-balance issues. The phrase is “antitrust exemption,” and now it’s the latest cudgel being used by congressional Democrats to smite the Corporate Villain of the Day, the health insurance industry. Yesterday the House Judiciary Committee voted to repeal the McCarran-Ferguson Act of 1945, which removed the industry from federal jurisdiction and instead allowed the states to impose their own regulations. Democrats are furious over a bogus “study” the industry released last week, which claimed that current reform efforts would cause a spike in the premiums that insurers would be forced to charge. Still seething over the timing of that report (a day before the Senate Finance Committee’s vote on the Baucus bill), and frustrated by the continued uncertainty of passing reform legislation this year, the Dems say – or, more specifically, Sen. Patrick Leahy says — that repealing the antitrust exemption will help end the insurance companies’ long history of “price-fixing, bid-rigging and market allocation.” Industry spokesmen, of course, insist that Congress is engaged in an act of vengeance, not policy, and that Democrats are hellbent on fixing a problem that doesn’t exist.

So, what does that have to do with the damn Yankees? Not much, really – except that the last time Congress so publicly bandied about the concept of repealing an industry’s antitrust exemption, the industry was baseball. In fact, such threats have become relatively commonplace in recent years, ever since the players strike that wiped out the 1994 World Series. The issues behind that strike were spiraling costs and a lack of fair competition, which will certainly sound familiar to anyone following the current free-for-all over health-care reform. At that time, Congress — powerless to stop the strike, but eager to lash out at the owners who were shouldering most of the blame for baseball’s problems – reached for the only bow in its quiver, the threat of repealing baseball’s long-cherished exemption. That threat resurfaced several years later, when MLB commissioner Bud Selig considered dismantling the financially strapped Minnesota Twins and Montreal Expos, and again when baseball was excruciatingly slow to respond to the steroids controversy. So far, those threats have remained idle ones – primarily because baseball’s owners arguably (and particularly in retrospect) occupied the moral high ground during the strike, and because it was the players, not the owners, who resisted implementing a strong steroids policy.

Of course, comparing Congress’ antitrust threats against these two industries is an imperfect, even contradictory exercise, at least as far as baseball’s labor problems concerned the Yankees. Congress is now lashing out at insurers’ supposed fixing of prices at inflated rates … while in ’94 the owners were attempting to fix salaries at reduced rates. George Steinbrenner didn’t even approve of his fellow owners’ battle with the union; indeed, he was never enthusiastic about a salary cap, since his was the spending the other owners were trying hardest to restrain. So he sided quietly with the players, while Selig and White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf steered a course for labor unrest and earned Congress’ ire. Afterward, Steinbrenner’s teams of outrageously paid all-stars became the greatest beneficiaries of the owners’ failure to secure a cap – it’s no coincidence that in the 15 years since then, the Yankees have reached the playoffs 14 times and won four championships (for the moment), all while consistently doubling the payroll of the next-richest team.

So, no, the comparison of these two targeted antitrust exemptions isn’t perfect. More important, Congress’ threats to repeal them have served as little more than spiteful red herrings. One can argue that baseball might be forced to operate more fairly on behalf of all its teams (and the fans) if it didn’t enjoy its exemption, but repealing it wasn’t going to end the ’94 strike, save the Twins or solve the steroids problem. Similarly, punishing the insurers in this way won’t provide anything like the fix that’s required for our health-care system – only a full complement of reforms, including a robust public option (eventually approaching a single-payer system) will accomplish that. Repealing McCarran-Ferguson may be convenient, and it might be temporarily satisfying, but hopefully Democrats will come to realize that revenge is a dish best served comprehensively, and during an elaborate White House signing ceremony.

Still, as long we’re here venting … if, as Bill Veeck supposedly said, rooting for the Yankees once was “like rooting for U.S. Steel,” it’s now certainly true that rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for the health insurance industry. Here’s hoping those overpaid, soulless jerks take a huge tumble in the next few weeks. Oh – and here’s hoping the Yankees lose, too.

Now here’s a fast-moving story: Just a week ago, word leaked that Rush Limbaugh was part of an ownership group hoping to bid on the woebegone St. Louis Rams. Within three business days, the head of the players union, a current owner and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell had all come forward with essentially the same message: “Like hell you will!” By yesterday, ESPN had confirmed that Rush was being dropped from the bidding group. And just like that…

Well, what, exactly? What has been accomplished with this brief minuet of misplaced ambition and swift smackdown? For one thing, Rush’s media profile clearly has bumped up an extra tick, as if he needed it – though he’s clearly sought it, considering his eagerness to sit down for an interview this week with the sworn enemy of all conservatives, the NBC/MSNBC juggernaut. (Maybe he felt the sticky, Nyquil-inebriated breath of Time cover boy Glenn Beck down his neck.) Meanwhile, the NFL suddenly – and, for the most part, unwittingly – has found itself politicized, with the usual crackpots insisting over the past week that they would never watch pro football again if Rush got the team (or if he didn’t, depending on whether the pot was cracked on the left or right side). “I will NEVER go to a game OF ANY TEAM, WATCH ON TV, OR LISTEN ON RADIO to one more NFL game EVER,” wrote one typical rantboy, apparently convinced he could bring down the monolith all on his own. Just in case you were wondering which side this all-caps screamer was on, his message twice dared the NFL to “exhibit bias” against Rush’s “equal right” to buy a team. (Thus we arrive at a third result, this one inevitable: Conservatives now have one more reason to feel aggrieved, and one more excuse for twisting the language of civil liberties to suit their agitation.)

All those outcomes are ephemeral – we’ll forget about them as soon as the next temporary outrage presents itself. But we’re also left with a lesson in resume building – more specifically, a primer in careers that don’t function particularly well as precursors for (and may even serve as disqualifiers for) other careers. Indeed, this episode may well serve as a What Color Is My Parachute? for hyperpartisans on both sides of the political divide. (Note to Rush: the colors of your parachute apparently aren’t blue and gold.)

I have a bit of personal experience in this realm, having worked in media relations for the ACLU’s Arts Censorship Project during the early 1990s. My job required me to publicly defend (enthusiastically, I admit) a crucifix submerged in urine, a naked woman smearing her body with yams, rappers who fantasized about killing cops and George H.W. Bush, and a woman who inserted a speculum onstage and invited patrons to come have a look. Of course, none of the above descriptions fully describe the cultural artifacts whose right to exist the ACLU (and I) were defending at the time, but that hardly matters in the field of, say, opposition research. And so I quickly realized, the first time my name appeared in the Washington Post alongside “Piss Christ” or “Cop Killer” or Annie Sprinkle, that I ought never develop a taste for high elected office.

Similarly, Rush Limbaugh should have understood last autumn, as he cackled his way through “Barack, The Magic Negro” on the air, that future team ownership in a league that’s 60 percent African-American was not in the cards.

Now, it’s entirely possible that La Limbaugh was merely looking for a place to stash part of his prodigious fortune, and that he had no intention of being anything more than a silent partner in Dave Checkett’s ownership group. (Of course, Checkett’s own record as owner of Madison Square Garden and the New York Knicks and Rangers is more than a bit … well, checkered.) Even so, Rush’s previous involvement with the NFL should have clued him in that his brand of provocation is unwelcome there. I mean, come on! He didn’t last four weeks on ESPN’s pregame show back in 2003, before he pissed off the entire Players Association (and got himself fired) by calling Donovan McNabb an affirmative-action deadbeat.

This is a league so buttoned-down, so starched-collared that it penalizes players for excessive celebration and for showing their faces (i.e., removing their helmets) on the field. This is a league whose most valuable assets are not flashy players, but Napoleonic coaches; the league that invented the modern “hard” salary cap, and maintains it with brute force; a league that has spent three decades obsessing over how to keep its one renegade owner, Al Davis, in line. What genius thought a mouthy wild card like Limbaugh would be welcome in the No Fun League’s old-boy network?

Apparently the same type of genius who’s been accusing the NFL of hypocrisy this week, and using Michael Vick’s presence on the Eagles to do so. (Do conservatives really want to equate Limbaugh with Vick, in the category of degenerate embarrassments the league should be willing to tolerate?) But, of course, Vick’s role on the Eagles is far different from Limbaugh’s hoped-for role on the Rams – if not in terms of each man’s short-term impact on the NFL’s image, then in Limbaugh’s potential impact as an employer on the NFL’s competitive balance.

I certainly wouldn’t defend Vick’s actions – and neither would his fellow players – but team (and union) loyalty dictate that neither Vick’s teammates nor his rivals would ever attempt to drum him out of the league. On the other hand, no such loyalty binds the players to the owners, who may be considering a lockout after next season. And with 31 other teams to choose from – and with Limbaugh no more able to offer outrageous salaries than any other owner who’s bound by the salary cap – it’s easy to imagine many, if not all, of the best players and coaches simply refusing to work for him. Just think of the PR (and, potentially, legal) quandary the Rams and NFL would face the first time a high draft choice refused to accept being selected by Limbaugh’s team! How would such a scenario affect the quality — and attendance — of a team that’s already 0-for-its-last-15 and 5-32 since 2007?

Last weekend I heard an ESPN Radio jock dismiss this possibility, saying that players “become conservative as soon as they become rich” and that they would find Limbaugh’s money “as green as anyone else’s.” Not four hours after those comments, ESPN reported that the head of the NFL Players Association, DeMaurice Smith, had come out against Limbaugh’s bid. “Sport in America is at its best when it unifies, gives all of us reason to cheer, and when it transcends,” Smith said. “Our sport does exactly that when it overcomes division and rejects discrimination and hatred.”

In other words, a figure like Limbaugh who’s so antithetical to mainstream values (not to mention the NFL’s make-no-waves mantra) need not apply. The quick rejection of his ownership bid happened to come the same week that ABC has begun to panic about the precipitous ratings decline for the current season of Dancing with the Stars, whose biggest “star” has been Limbaugh’s fellow conservative icon, Tom DeLay. Out of sympathy for the Hammer’s currently aching feet, I wouldn’t dream of using the coincidence of their downfalls to make broader statements about the state of conservatism or the GOP. I would, however, suggest that both men’s failure to transcend their success in the world of right-wing hucksterism points to the minuscule size (and general distastefulness) of that world. A lot of us worry that a few million dittoheads (or even 70,000 teabaggers rallying in D.C.) are merely the serrated edge of a larger movement worth fearing in the coming years; the speed with which the extraordinarily popular NFL dismissed Limbaugh, and the mass channel-changing that greeted DeLay’s appearance on one of TV’s most-watched shows, seem to argue otherwise.

To which I can only answer: I don’t particularly want to watch Barney Frank do the cha-cha, either. As for Keith Olbermann’s success on Football Night in America … well, that’s a whole different kettle of fish, isn’t it? Heaven forbid the owners attempt to trim the players’ health care benefits! Keith might try to “call in Richard Wolffe” — and frankly, I’m not sure one more guy can fit on that overcrowded studio set.

As a wired citizen of our not-terribly-United States, you’ve no doubt received your share of cranky, mass-distributed partisan e-mails. I get them all the time, and my favorites (a phrase I use here ironically) are the ones that purport to show the differences between two viewpoints by offering the best possible description of one side and the worst possible slander of the other. The preponderance of these seem to come from the right side of our political discourse – the side that’s much better at name-calling and manipulating good ideas to sound like terrible ones. (But there I go again…)

One might think I have better things to do than take personal offense when one of these anonymous hatefests appears in my inbox … but, no, I can never seem to let these things pass without a response. Sometimes I offer a reasoned debunking of whatever bilge is contained in the diatribe, but too often I crank up the flamethrower and launch a torrent of my own uncivil rantings. The latter was the case recently, and as soon as I hit “send” I regretted my contribution to the coarsening of the national dialogue … even if it was just between myself and a friend.

And then I thought it might be interesting to conduct a bit of a thought experiment. (Actually, it’s just a cut-and-paste experiment, but whatever.) What if we compared only the “best” views of both sides, and ignored the “worst” views? Might that reflect the true essence of the body politic? Or, alternatively, is a comparison of the “worsts” more representative of how blue sees red, and vice versa?

Here, then, is my cut-and-paste job. It’s not perfect – even I could make more profound arguments for conservatism or against liberalism than the anonymous creator of the e-mail blast I received this week – but you can decide for yourself how well any of the statements represent prevailing viewpoints on the issues and attitudes of the day. (In each of the following comparative statements, italics are used not for emphasis, but for differentiation.) First, a look on the bright side:

If a liberal sees a child killed by gun violence, he looks for ways to stop the next such incident through responsible restrictions.
If a conservative doesn’t like guns, he doesn`t buy one.

If a liberal is a vegetarian, he hopes that his meat-eating friends will consume food that’s grown with respect for animals and the environment, that’s handled cleanly during processing, and that’s eaten with consideration for the health of the consumer.
If a conservative is a vegetarian, he doesn’t eat meat.

If a conservative is homosexual, he quietly leads his life.
If a liberal is gay, he wants to enjoy the legal rights and choices everyone else has.

If a black man or Hispanic is conservative, he sees himself as independently successful.
If an African-American or Hispanic is liberal, he proudly places himself within a tradition of civil-rights activism and tolerance, and expects equal opportunity.

If a conservative is down-and-out, he thinks about how to better his situation.
An unemployed or working-class liberal strives — together with his wealthier counterparts when possible, in opposition to them when necessary — to find ways to make life better and more equal for himself and those who share his status.

If a conservative doesn’t like a talk show host, he switches channels.
If a liberal doesn’t like a talk-show host, he laughs or complains and then finds more intelligent sources for information (usually not involving talk-show hosts).

A liberal non-believer expects his non-belief to be respected as much as the beliefs of those around him, in a free-flowing marketplace of ideas.
If a conservative is a non-believer, he doesn’t go to church.

If a conservative decides he needs health care, he goes about shopping for it, or may choose a job that provides it.
A liberal believes that affordable, high-quality healthcare is the right of every individual, and that if the private sector won’t do the right thing, then government must.

A conservative considers himself a child of God, endowed by Him with the freedom to make his own choices in life for himself and his family.
A liberal recognizes that America is a land of many faiths and creeds, and that favoring one over another is inappropriate in the public sphere.

A conservative believes in individual responsibility and free choice.
A liberal believes that society functions best when all Americans receive equal treatment and opportunity — and that government is often needed to counterbalance man’s baser instincts.

So much for live-and-let-live. Here comes the hammer:

If a liberal doesn’t like guns, he feels that no one should have one.
If a conservative sees a child killed by gun violence, he wishes the kid had had a gun, too, because more guns ALWAYS result in fewer dead people.

If a liberal is a vegetarian, he wants to ban all meat products for everyone.
No matter what a conservative eats, he believes that considerations like conservation, safety and health should be secondary to the accumulation and retention of wealth by the businesses that grow, process, sell and serve food.

If a liberal is homosexual, he loudly demands legislated respect.
If a conservative recognizes and accepts that he is gay, he quickly becomes a liberal, because there’s no place for him amidst conservative intolerance.

A liberal who’s black or Hispanic sees himself as a victim in need of government protection.
If a black man or Hispanic is conservative, he automatically gets a place in the Republican leadership (because there are so few minority conservatives, yet the GOP loves to pretend it’s a “big tent”).

A down-and-out liberal wonders who is going to take care of him.
A working-class conservative allows his political and religious leaders to convince him that minorities/immigrants/gays/Jews/atheists/liberals are to blame for his plight, which gets him so worked up he ignores the way those leaders are perpetuating his own troubles.

If a liberal doesn’t like a talk show host he demands that those he doesn’t like be limited or shut down.
If a conservative doesn’t like a talk-show host it’s usually because that host points out the idiocy, intolerance, corruption and hypocrisy of the conservative’s leaders.

A liberal non-believer wants any mention of God or religion silenced or removed.
A conservative non-believer wonders why he doesn’t get invited to parties, and questions his affiliation with people who are so intolerant.

A liberal demands that the rest of us pay for his healthcare.
A conservative believes, “I got mine — now you get yours. And if you can’t afford it, get out of the way. And keep your government hands off my Medicare!”

A liberal believes that he is qualified to make everyone’s choices about how to express their faith (whether they like it or not).
A conservative believes that the tenets of his own faith should be the law of the land, all others be damned (literally), and that every other American really ought to convert.

A liberal believes that he knows what is best for everyone and wants to use government force, in totalitarian fashion, to compel them to comply.
A conservative believes it’s every man for himself, and that he has a right to feel aggrieved and throw around words like “totalitarian” if minorities or the poor are granted “special rights” to the freedoms and privileges he himself already enjoys.

A quick observation: The positive characterizations sound entirely reasonable on both sides … but the negative depictions sure are funnier, aren’t they? I suppose that’s the point of such dumbed-down partisanship, as reflected in mass e-mails and extreme talk radio and TV – to legitimize your own argument by making the other side look ridiculous. But it’s nice to imagine that while screaming pundits and internet nasties continue to amp up the negativity – and I freely admit my too-frequent participation in all of that – there might still be a few actual statesmen in positions of power who are not only able, but willing, to see the merits (or at least the humanity) in both sides of these arguments.

Like I said, it’s nice to imagine.

All the dictionaries in my house are rather old, but I’m pretty sure the following definitions (from the Second College Edition of Webster’s New World Dictionary) still apply:

capitalism: the economic system in which all or most of the means of production and distribution … are privately owned and operated for profit

democracy: government in which the people hold the ruling power either directly or through elected representatives

Among the many, many problems with Michael Moore’s new film, Capitalism: A Love Story, perhaps the most basic is his apparent inability to distinguish between economic and political systems. His conclusion – one he repeated at length on Bill Maher’s show last week – is that we need to “abolish capitalism and replace it with democracy.” It’s a populist idea, to be sure, intended to rouse the (liberal, upper-middle-class) rabble to head directly from the theater to the local Home Depot for torches and pitchforks. But no matter what Moore actually meant – and what he meant is that we need to limit the overwhelming influence that corporations and financial elites currently wield over American life – his message is inevitably lost (at least amongst his decently educated audience) in his nonsensical juxtaposition of capitalism and democracy as mutually exclusive.

Sadly, little else about the scattershot Capitalism: A Love Story makes much sense, either. The film is a jumble of macro- and micro-economic diatribes that fails almost completely to show the link between the collapses and bailouts on Wall Street and the current struggles on Main Street. Moore wants desperately to make us see that link, and to get us angry about it, but he gets no closer than anyone else has to illuminating the complex financial instruments (derivatives, credit default swaps, etc., etc.) that played a major role in the banking catastrophe – or to showing us how they affect the lives of ordinary people through foreclosures, job losses and the like.

That story is out there, waiting to be told, but Moore clearly wasn’t the guy to tell it. For one thing, he’s too much an entertainer to let himself sink too deeply into the morass of financial-industry lingo, other than to show comically that even the “experts” haven’t figured out how to explain this stuff either. For another thing, Moore’s stature as a liberal lightning rod has placed off limits a vast array of business executives, Republican politicians and conservative economists who might be willing to speak with a less polarizing documentarian, but wouldn’t be caught dead giving Moore the time of day – much less giving him a reasonable argument as to why it was a good idea to overturn the Glass-Steagall Act in 1998. Without access to such figures, Moore is left with a lot of less-hilarious-than-it-used-to-be footage of security guards stopping him at the entrances to skyscrapers, but with no footage of Phil Gramm or Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis saying something Moore’s audience can get outraged over, or even disagree with. (Such balance is what made documentaries like Why We Fight, Taxi to the Dark Side, and No End in Sight so spectacularly successful in getting to the heart of the Bush administration’s failed foreign policy.)

As a result, there are plenty of victims in Capitalism: A Love Story, but few (human) villains. For that reason, Moore’s parade of foreclosure and layoff sob stories here doesn’t have the same resonance that such stories had in Roger and Me (the former GM employee turned rabbit skinner) or Bowling for Columbine (the survivor with bullets still inside his body) or Fahrenheit 911 (the dead soldier’s mom). What we get in the new film are foreclosed-upon individuals whose full stories we never hear, and the spouses of deceased corporate employees who’ve discovered that companies have profited from their loved ones’ deaths via “Dead Peasant” insurance policies. (Those stories of corporate greed are kinda despicable, sure, but what do they have to do with the financial meltdown?)

Similarly, Moore’s “stunts” in the new film aren’t nearly as effective as they have been in the past. It doesn’t require much inspiration to ask a security guard’s assistance in making a citizen’s arrest, or to circle AIG’s headquarters with crime-scene tape – certainly not as much as Moore displayed in showing up with that shooting victim at K-Mart to return the Columbine gunmens’ bullets, or in taking a boatload of chronically ill but healthcare-free Americans to Cuba for diagnosis and treatment.

The latter scene, from 2006’s Sicko, is perhaps Moore’s most controversial moment – and that moment, that film, are the ones we need to have fresh in our minds at this moment in history. Capitalism is frustrating, in part, because its story already feels like ancient history even as we’re still dealing with the aftereffects of the financial meltdown. It’s not simply the fact that Wall Street collapsed a whole year ago … a whole presidential administration ago. It’s that, while Moore treats the election of Barack Obama as the triumph of change over the status quo, and of populist outrage over corporate greed, in fact the “new populism” of mid-to-late 2009 is more anti-government than it is anti-corporate. It’s no longer the corporate bigwigs whose heads the teeming, furious masses want on a stick; it’s Obama’s, for having the gall to suggest that the government should get spend taxpayer money to compete with entrenched corporate interests.

I know Moore has dealt with healthcare already – and done a magnificent job of it – but it’s too bad he didn’t reserve some space in Capitalism: A Love Story to reiterate the essential (and destructive) role of the health-insurance industry in our current economic struggles. Focusing instead on the big banks, and on George Bush and Hank Paulson as targets for outrage, is sooooo 11 months ago. And Obama’s ascension hasn’t brought much change at all to the financial markets, except to prop them up and allow them to resume business as usual – a point that Moore himself acknowledges while noting that current treasury secretary Tim Geithner is as much a tool of the banking industry as Paulson was.

More essential to Capitalism’s failure is the fact that, despite Moore’s protestations, the Wall Street collapse doesn’t actually reflect the failure of capitalism itself. Yes, corporate greed and manipulations of our financial system have run amok over the last few decades, and the last couple years have exposed numerous systemic flaws in both the banking and the political sectors. Moore does a good job enumerating some of these flaws, from the lobbyist money that flows through Congress and the White House to the wholesale deregulation of the lending industry, to the top-heavy corporate hierarchies that punish the working class in order to provide greater rewards to CEOs and shareholders. Still, “overthrowing capitalism” isn’t required to fix these problems; by claiming that it is, Moore overstates his thesis and radicalizes his film in a way that’s provocative, but not particularly useful to the current debate.

What Moore really wants is a form of socialism, or at least what the Europeans call “democratic socialism” – the establishment of an economic order that serves the middle and lower classes instead of the wealthy. That’s a philosophy I can get behind — but it’s a huge mistake, semantically speaking, to equate such an order with “democracy,” and in doing so Moore undercuts his own goal. Americans love democracy (no matter how elusive it sometimes seems), but they also love the idea of amassing a huge pile of money (and holding onto as much of it as possible). That’s why America can’t even seem to build a decent bridge anymore, or insure all its people – and it’s why Moore himself is afraid to use the word “socialism,” leaving it to the right-wing jackals who have abused it in much the same way Moore abuses “democracy.” If he can’t even get his terminology straight, how can he expect Americans to allow the government to tax them appropriately?

So my conservative friends will be pleased to hear that I cannot recommend Capitalism: A Love Story, even though I know many of my liberal friends will see it anyway. To everyone, however, I would say this: If you see only one movie this week that subverts the social order in a way Bill Maher would appreciate, make it Ricky Gervais’ The Invention of Lying. It’s not a very good film either, but it’s funnier – and, unbelievably, more thought-provoking. After that, go rent Sicko, which is the movie we need now anyway, and head back to the barricades.

Glenn Beck scored another pelt for his demagoguery-fur coat this week, when Congress voted to cut all federal funding for the community-organizing group ACORN in the wake of those seedy undercover videos Beck has been pitching all month. (Hope Glenn realizes that demagoguery fur starts to smell like old tires when you weep on it too much.) I’m sure Beck is very proud of himself for finally landing a solid punch on this target, considering that his fellow conservatives hadn’t been able to lay a glove on the group despite flailing away at it for years. But I’d suggest that, in the context of all the other Republican ugliness of the last several months, their Javert-like pursuit eventually is going to wind up saying a lot more about them than it does about ACORN.

Mind you, I’ve got no sympathy whatsoever for those staffers who offered all sorts of untoward advice to a couple of right-wing David O. Selznicks pretending to be a pimp and a ho engaged in human trafficking. And the fact that similar scenarios played out in a couple of different ACORN offices suggests an organization with some serious boundary issues when it comes to dealing with the more illegal and/or despicable aspects of inner-city life. (I don’t care that surreptitious videotaping is a nasty thing to do, and I don’t want to hear about entrapment. Is there no clause in the ACORN training manual stipulating that staffers might occasionally use the simple phrase “I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to ask you to leave”?)

ACORN certainly deserves some time in the penalty box for its staffers’ transgressions – a nice grilling at a congressional hearing, perhaps, or a period of J. Edgar Hoover-like oversight of all the organization’s activities that receive federal funding. Unfortunately, de-funding the group entirely, and ending its participation in next year’s Census, will do considerably more damage to the cause of American democracy than it will do to ACORN. And the method used by Congress to implement that penalty – using legislation specifically to punish a single organization — reeks of Democratic flop sweat, not to mention a desperation to avoid the sorts of scandals that laid Republicans low in 2006.

The fact that we reached this point at all is a tribute to the Republicans’ obsessiveness, and their well-rehearsed ability to keep picking at a scab until it finally bleeds. Indeed, the ACORN brouhaha – in which years of fruitless attempts to tar the group with allegations of voter fraud have finally resulted in a scandal that has nothing whatsoever to do with votes or elections — is a slightly (but only slightly) less tawdry rerun of Ken Starr’s progression from Whitewater to Paula Jones to Monica Lewinsky. That, too, was a relentless quest to pin something – anything! – on an institution whose very existence offended the right wing.

At least the harassment of ACORN is slightly (but, again, only slightly) more rational than the pursuit of Clinton was. After all, while ACORN is not an arm of the Democratic Party, the constituency it serves is a key part of the Democratic base of voters, and ACORN’s success in registering millions of lower-income, inner-city, mostly African-American voters over the years has directly benefited Democratic politicians. Such voter-registration drives proved to be a sharp thorn in the side of Karl Rove’s push for a “permanent Republican majority” – to the point where Rove and his minions instigated a major scandal of their own by pressuring U.S. Attorneys to prosecute bogus allegations of voter fraud, then replacing prosecutors who refused to do so.

The “ACORN” acronym didn’t become a household word during the Bushies’ 2004-06 PR campaign – perhaps because ACORN’s reputation was sufficiently high, and the importance of its activism to America’s inner cities sufficiently well established, that the Bush administration itself steered more than $14 million to ACORN over its two terms in office. It wasn’t until after the U.S. Attorneys scandal had helped shame Rove and Alberto Gonzales out of the White House — and until an African-American and former community organizer had become a leading candidate for the presidency – that Republicans latched onto ACORN as a symbol of the sort of … how to phrase this delicately … black hooliganism that Democrats were counting on to wrest power from its rightful (and Right-full) owners.

Oh, I’m sorry – did I just accuse Republicans of exploiting racial insecurities in an effort to attract white voters?

Here’s what ACORN actually does. Founded by a group of lower-income Arkansas mothers in 1970 to press for subsidized school lunches, veterans’ rights and funding for hospital emergency rooms, ACORN has blossomed into the nation’s biggest community-organizing group. It has half a million dues-paying members, and chapters nationwide that employ more than 1,000 staffers. In the last four years alone, ACORN has designed, and lobbied successfully for, minimum-wage increases in five states, and is currently active in seven more. The organization also has led legal efforts in several states that have forced major banks to limit the interest and fees they charge to homeowners, and ACORN has spearheaded legislation in nine states to end predatory-lending practices.

Compared to all that, it seems an afterthought to mention that during the last election cycle alone, ACORN registered 1.3 million new inner-city voters. But as far as Republicans are concerned, voter registration may as well be all ACORN does, because it has the most immediate impact on their electoral prospects. Since the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, it has been no secret that Republicans are desperate to drive down the African-American vote By Any Means Necessary. In 2000, those means included purging 50,000 registered voters off the rolls in Florida – a key element in Bush’s “victory” there. In 2004, those means included Ohio’s Republican secretary of state arranging for far too few voting machines in African-American precincts, resulting in long lines and thousands of voters either turning away in frustration or being locked out of their polling places at the end of the night. All of that doesn’t even take into account robocalls that lie to inner-city voters about changes in the locations of polling places or in the dates for voting; rumors that are planted about police looking for parole violators at the polls, and documented cases of “security guards” being paid by the GOP to intimidate black voters; and, of course, the Republicans’ repeated efforts to impose enhanced voter-identification requirements without providing poor people with sufficient means to obtain such IDs.

And now ACORN. The group seemed last year like a useful tool for Republicans attempting to belittle Barack Obama’s own work as a community organizer; this year, the continuing drumbeat of criticism of the group served mostly as one more means (among many) of de-legitimizing Obama’s victory among the ever-shrinking, yet ever-more-rabid Republican base. The trouble for the GOP, however, has been that ACORN never was shown to have engaged in significant voter fraud. In the isolated cases of false names being registered by ACORN “stringers,” who were paid by the number of signatures they obtained, ACORN itself reported the violations and threw out the improper registrations.

Of course, none of that has mattered to Beck and the other Fox News blowhards, who diligently search for fresh meat for the baying teabaggers. They’ve kept up their attacks, and finally they’ve found a way to document an ACORN impropriety. And … nobody’s surprised. Nobody’s surprised because the relentlessly bad press ACORN has received over the last year – for no good reason except Republicans playing politics – had left it, even before this month, with a soiled reputation and few vocal defenders. The American public, which famously can’t even place Iraq on a map, knows nothing of ACORN except what the Republicans have told them (enabled, of course, by the mainstream media, which played the voter-fraud allegations for considerably more than they were worth last fall). And when ACORN employees finally did do something worthy of those attacks, Democrats overreacted in a craven effort to save themselves from being tarnished along with the group.

So, fine. ACORN now is crippled in the public eye (and deservedly so, at least for a while), but more importantly it is crippled in its financial ability to engage in the laudable activities that have served inner-city communities for 40 years. And now Glenn Beck, and the Republican Party that steps to his tune, can go off in search of other people and institutions to toss into the coliseum with their ravenous beast base.

But in the context of “he’s an Arab” and “palling around with terrorists” and the birthers and “you lie!” and the Joker-face posters and the assault weapons at town halls and all the rest of it, the Republican Party’s ACORN obsession sure looks like it’s grounded in something uglier than pure, zero-sum partisan politics. President Obama, for obvious reasons, isn’t allowed to agree with Jimmy Carter, but if you don’t think there’s a racial component in the tactics and language of the disloyal opposition, you’re kidding yourself. Is power so important to the GOP that it’s worth engaging in morally repugnant and even illegal activities to ensure that Americans of a particular race don’t get a chance to vote (or hold high office)? And does the vitality of conservative ideals require politicians and pundits to stoke racial fears, and to convince millions that their own president is somehow the “other,” in a way that utterly shreds our character as a people?

And, most frighteningly, now that you’ve done all this (and finally succeeded in bringing down one of your targets), what’s your next move?

The words were spoken in London, casually, almost flippantly, and were directed at an audience that was sure to treat them in the spirit they were intended. It was not until the words traveled to the United States, and were heard by an audience of narrow-minded hypocrites for whom they were decidedly not intended, that they created a ruckus that led to censorship, destruction and even death threats.

No, silly, I’m not saying that Natalie Maines is bigger than John Lennon (or Jesus, for that matter). What I am saying is that both of them – all three of them, actually – learned one very important lesson the hard way: Speaking your mind can be a very dangerous business. It can even get you killed.

Here at Popdose and throughout the Western world, this week’s (admittedly consumerist) Beatlemania revival has offered plenty of opportunities to reflect on their music, their influence … the astounding greed of their record label over a 45-year period … (Did EMI really have to sell the stereo and mono mixes separately, particularly considering that every album from Please Please Me to Revolver was short enough that they could have easily crammed both versions onto a single CD?) But as long as we’re sitting around dissecting the effects of the remastering process on “Happiness is a Warm Gun,” or tapping colored buttons in time to the scrolling visuals on the Rock Band version of “Revolution,” we may as well pause to marvel at the historical import of the Beatles’ efforts – and John’s in particular – to use their stardom to advance causes and engage in social commentary. In this, as in their music, they created a template that has been imitated and amended by generations of celebrities in their wake, for better and for worse.

John may not have been the first popular artist to offer opinions on politics and other matters outside his creative purview, but he certainly recognized the size of the megaphone he was carrying around, and he had the balls to speak into it more loudly than most. He and Yoko did it with style, too – with dramatic billboards and rousing singalongs, by “eating chocolate cake in a bag” and “talking in our beds for a week.” He wasn’t afraid to offer his opinions straight, either, when the opportunity arose: It’s rarely remembered anymore that on one of the worst days of his life – the day he was forced to apologize publicly for his 1966 remark that “the Beatles are more popular than Jesus” – he used that very same press conference to criticize America’s escalation of the Vietnam War.

His mouth got him into trouble more than once – in addition to the radio bans and record burnings that followed that Jesus business, his late-’60s peace activism and his dalliance with radical politics in 1971-72 nearly got him deported by the Nixon administration. And it’s commonly argued that his activism eventually got the better of his artistry – conventional wisdom now holds that somewhere between “Imagine” and Some Time in New York City, John misplaced his instinct for shaping opinion and instead took to parroting other people’s opinions. The failure of that effort – both artistically and in the court of public opinion (not to mention the United States federal courts, where John found himself much too frequently between ’72 and ’76) – seemed to dampen his enthusiasm for both music and politics. He changed the original lyric of “Mind Games” – good thing, too, since it initially bore the already-cliché title “Make Love Not War” – and it’s more than just coincidence that his last recorded political statement, the grandiosely titled “Nutopian International Anthem” on the Mind Games LP, consisted of a moment’s silence.

But let’s get back to the “bigger than Jesus” brouhaha, and its startling similarity to the shitstorm Maines and her fellow Dixie Chicks faced in 2003 after she told a London audience they were ashamed George Bush was from Texas. Both protests were organized in what we today call “Astroturf” fashion – the Beatle burnings by preachers and radio-station execs, the Chicks-CD smashings by right-wing politicians and radio conglomerates. The two controversies played out as mirror images – in each case, a springtime comment in the U.K. unexpectedly created a big summertime mess in the U.S., and particularly in the South. Each conflagration led to forced apologies, concert tours poisoned by acrimony, and significant adaptations by the artists afterward. The Beatles never toured again; the Chicks, abandoned by country radio, abandoned the genre right back. (Of course, both those outcomes were distinct possibilities even without the flaps that preceded them … but that fact doesn’t really serve my argument, so let’s move on, OK?)

John may have backed away from his “Christianity will go – it will vanish and shrink” comments during that press conference in Chicago, but he spent the rest of his career exploring his own (lack of) faith, in song (“God is a concept by which we measure our pain,” “Imagine there’s no heaven”) and in the press. Meanwhile, he poked at U.S. administrations for years over Vietnam, John Sinclair, Attica and other issues, and he frequently indulged a taste for … how to put it … less-than-mainstream economic theories. When he wasn’t encouraging working class heroes to rise up against their oppressors, he was imagining no possessions. When the Beatles founded Apple in 1968, he and Paul gave interviews in which they joyfully mused about creating a socialist enterprise on Savile Row. Nevertheless, by the time of his death John was almost universally regarded as a visionary; while researching this article, I was floored by this tribute from Frank Sinatra, of all people: “Lennon was a most talented man and, above all, a gentle soul.” (Was there ever a less gentle soul than John Lennon?)

I’ll quickly note that the Dixie Chicks achieved similar redemption (or vindication, depending on your perspective) a few years back, even after declaring that they were “Not Ready to Make Nice.” But then I’d like to bring this discussion around – as you knew I would – to our current political moment. Wednesday night President Obama, at long last, fully grabbed the reins of leadership on health-care reform with an immensely powerful speech. He called August’s town-hall rabble and their enablers onto the carpet for their lies and distortions, even as he practically begged GOP legislators to rise to the occasion, engage in constructive dialogue and help create a bipartisan bill. He carefully and thoroughly described the depravity of the nation’s current system of caring for its sick, and he meticulously laid out his entirely reasonable proposals for repairing that system. Those proposals may now be watered down a bit – a bit too much for my taste, in fact – but they’ve always been reasonable, and they represent the direction a substantial majority of the American people voted for last November.

Yet the nation’s Republicans – particularly those in the South during a long, hot summer, just as it was in 1966 and 2003 – have responded to Obama’s reasonableness with a paranoia and mass-delusion that grows more dangerous by the week. Fed a continuous line of bullshit by their pundit masters and their increasingly impolitic politicians, they have cried “Socialist!” and “Water the tree of liberty!” at every turn; made it impossible for some congressmen to communicate with their constituents; hung other congressmen in effigy; accused the president of attempting to “indoctrinate” their children; even carried assault weapons to auditoriums where Obama was speaking. And last night, a Republican back-bencher had the temerity to heckle the President of the United States during a major policy address in the Capitol – an act of disrespect (to the man, the office and the American people) so outrageous, so despicable, that even the offending congressman quickly realized he needed to apologize to Obama personally as well as publicly, just to save his own career.

Nevertheless, the incivility and violent behavior of the town-hall terminators – and of way too many Republican politicians like Rep. Wilson – are merely the latest iteration of that lesson I mentioned at the top of this column. It’s a lesson that’s now been learned by John Lennon, Natalie Maines, Jesus and Barack Obama (uh-oh, “messiah” bait!): The truth can be a very dangerous thing, particularly when it reaches the ears of those who most need to hear it. The Beatles were bigger than Jesus; the Iraq invasion was an out-and-out snow job, perpetrated by the Bush administration to America’s (and Natalie’s) lasting shame; Jesus wasn’t kidding when he said “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God”; and 15 years of the Republicans’ recalcitrance on health care, not to mention their laissez-faire attitude toward the rest of the economy, has lined the pockets of a few rich men while screwing the rest of us to the wall.

In each of these instances, a simple message touched such a nerve of insecurity, within a populace so unprepared to deal with that message rationally, that the inevitable result was a spasm of screaming, destruction and threats of violence. This month, as Congress gets back to work (or at least the Democrats do) finding some politically viable solution to the health-care crisis, it’s finally time for Fox News, Sarah Palin, Jim Greer, Chuck Grassley and the tea-party malcontents to throttle back their destructive rhetoric – to stop warning of death panels and indoctrination and socialism and government takeovers. (I know they won’t do it — I know they’re too far gone — but don’t knock me off my soapbox just yet.) It’s time for the American right to realize that they look increasingly like those Alabama record-burners of 1966. And those folks, long since illuminated by a historical spotlight as brilliant as the new Beatles remasters, look utterly ridiculous.

Like (I suspect) most viewers, I wasn’t too troubled by self-recrimination at the end of Quentin Tarantino’s must-see exercise in “Jewish revenge porn,” Inglourious Basterds. (The description comes from the Jewish Daily Forward, not from me.) I wasn’t worried about Q’s preposterous deviations from history, nor was I concerned that some Jewish folks might not appreciate – indeed, might be appalled by – their forebears’ cinematic transformation from victims to vigilantes. Screw the strictures of morality, the heavy burden of humanity! The way I figure it, most people leave the theater thinking just one thing: Man, if only the Jews had been able to open up a can of whoop-ass on those damn Nat-zees – that woulda been sweet.

My wife – a (sorta) Jewess who emerged from the film similarly exhilarated, and ready to grab a baseball bat for some impromptu strip-mall justice – recovered her faculties quickly and asked to stop in at Big Box Boox (i.e., Barnes & Noble) to pick up some chick lit. So she went off to fiction and I stopped at the bestseller rack, where I was confronted by an entirely different array of “revenge porn.” The titles included Mark Levin’s “conservative manifesto” Liberty and Tyranny (which leaves some question as to where his sympathies lie), Glenn Beck’s Common Sense (the first of two oxymorons in this column), Dick Morris’ Catastrophe and Michelle Malkin’s Culture of Corruption. The latter two tomes, which see fit to pass final judgment on the new administration, were released in June and July, respectively – which, even accounting for the sped-up timeline for publishing political books, means they were written no later than March or April … before the stimulus bill had even been signed into law.

I decided to seek some sanity in the WWII section, hoping I might find some facts half as audacious as Tarantino’s fiction. Instead I stumbled into American History – where I learned (however belatedly) that conservatives are no longer content to create alternate realities in the present; they’ve gone after the past as well! The genius behind this endeavor is Larry Schweikart, whose publicity bio places his legacy as “a former rock drummer who opened for ‘Steppenwolf’” (drummers once played opening sets by themselves?) ahead of his current gig in the history department at the University of Dayton (go Flyers!). Following up his 2007 Patriot’s History of the United States (We’re always right! Historians are liberal-elite pussies! Those Injuns had it coming!), Schweikart’s most recent treatise purports to debunk 48 Liberal Lies About American History – perhaps because if he had bothered to dream up 50 such straw men and delusions, he might have been forced to acknowledge that Obama’s birthplace is an actual state.

If you’re a frequent reader of my ravings you won’t be surprised to learn that, at some point in that bookstore, I snapped from all the lunacy around me – and proceeded to spend the rest of the afternoon plotting inglourious revenge fantasies of my own. Sarah Palin, facing down a firing squad for her crimes against truth, justice and David Letterman, and being asked if she now understands what a “death panel” is. Dick Cheney, fresh from his 188th round of waterboarding, at the bottom of a naked-guy pyramid with panties on his head. Sean Hannity, disemboweled by a bald eagle tired of being exploited as the symbol of his bullshit. Teabaggers and town-hall crazies, desperate for meds that will turn down the voices in their heads, being turned away from one of those massive Remote Area Medical clinics. Chappaquiddick fetishists, forced to sit through the audiobook of Ted Kennedy’s forthcoming memoir — twice (heaven forbid they read). A bound and gagged Ann Coulter … oh, Ann … watching a gaggle of 9/11 widows advance on her, ready to pluck out her eyeballs with her own stiletto heels, as a classroom full of immigrant children recites the Pledge of Allegiance without uttering the words “under God”…

Eventually, though, I came to my senses and recoiled in horror at my misbegotten reveries. Of course I did; it’s what Democrats always do.

We just don’t seem to have that instinct for the jugular – to scream bloody murder when we’re down, or to stomp the other side when we’re up. We don’t “win” an election by one vote (in the Supreme Court) and then start acting like the other side doesn’t exist; we win the presidency in a landslide and obtain a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate, then start begging the other side to negotiate bipartisan compromises. When we lose an election, we don’t immediately start talking about impeachment, secession, or “watering the tree of liberty”; instead we form a tidy, circular firing squad. And when a president of the other side comes to our town, we certainly don’t turn up toting assault weapons just to show how angry and intimidating (and unbalanced) we are.

It has been exceedingly difficult, as a Democrat who worked so hard to help the most recent election turn out the way it did, to watch mainstream Republicans (there’s that other oxymoron) get away with behaving like petulant toddlers and schoolyard bullies in the aftermath. They often leave me thinking, as a friend said while watching a U2-hungry crowd boo the opening-act Waterboys back in 1984, “If this crowd gets any more violent, I’m gonna have to hit somebody!”

In the wake of Inglourious Basterds and that menagerie of madness in the bookstore, I was left to wonder: Is our reticence as Democrats to play dirty, to seethe with pure partisan malice, or to openly plot political vengeance a noble thing – or a character flaw? The film’s Jewish critics are of little help in the matter. Some are just fine with its vision of Semitic ultraviolence; others have worried that “to seek revenge by murder [is] to lower yourself to the level of the murderers,” in the words of Brandeis University Holocaust studies professor Antony Polonsky, or that the film’s image of WWII-era Jews as vigilantes will feed perceptions of contemporary Israel as aggressive and/or oppressive.

Tarantino himself isn’t playing along with such diffidence, as he made clear in a recent interview with the Atlantic:

“I hate that hand-wringing shit,” he said [of most Holocaust movies]. He had a revelation in his early 20s, he recalled, when he saw Red Dawn (1984), a Cold War revenge fantasy in which a group of American high-school students, the “Wolverines,” battle Soviet and Central American soldiers who invade Colorado. “The Wolverines capture a soldier, and there’s a little bit of back-and-forth — should we kill him or not — and C. Thomas Howell just blows him away with his shotgun,” Tarantino recalled. “Those are the kind of things you say, ‘That’s exactly what I would do.’ It’s what I want to see, and when I don’t see it, I become frustrated, and then it feels like a movie as opposed to real life.”

So much for Quentin and “real life” (he’d have been great at My Lai, apparently). But before we go any further (as if I haven’t gone far enough already), cool your jets, conservatives – nobody’s calling anybody a Nazi here. Not today, anyway. In fact, considering the obnoxious Nazi comparisons Beck and others have been trotting out lately, and the extent to which right-wingers seem to be perpetually teetering on the brink of violence, I thought long and hard about titling this column “Inglourious Republicans.” But then I realized they might actually like that, so … no dice. Besides, this column is about my revenge fantasies – and the fact that they’d never, in a million years, be carried out. Not by any self-loathing respecting Democrat, anyway.

No, today’s Republicans don’t bear much resemblance to the Nazis. They do, however, remind me a lot of my 12-year-old – when he was two. Blissfully free of common sense; unable to admit they’ve made a huge mess, and unwilling to participate in cleaning it up; prone to extended tantrums and the occasional violent outburst. They don’t require a Basterds-style scalping so much as a good, stern Time Out.

What say we give them one? Senate Democrats, let’s leave Grassley in the weeds and forget about that futile attempt at bipartisanship in the Finance Committee. Forge the best bill you can with the Blue Dogs – compromising just enough to keep them from joining a filibuster, even if they refuse to vote for the end result – and let health care pass with just a vote or two to spare. Drag Biden in to break a tie, even. Hell, use reconciliation to implement the public option, if you have to! Let Glenn and Michelle and Hannity and Rush and the rest of them throw their tantrums in their Fox bedroom, with the door locked from the outside. The majority of the electorate that will benefit from health reform (and that still supports a public option) will be immensely grateful that you pulled your thumbs out of your asses and got something done for the good of the country. And they’ll remember the ever-shrinking party that tried so hard, and with so little civility, to stand in the way.

Yeah, I know – even tough-love parenting is probably too much to expect from the Democrats in Washington at this point. But I’m going to have to indulge my lame fantasies about imposing party discipline, because it’s no use dreaming of a Kenyan voodoo prince (do such men exist?) shrinking Bill O’Reilly’s head to the size of a pin. I mustn’t think such thoughts. I can’t. I’m a Democrat.

P.S. I asked my wife to look this over and see if she thought I’d gone completely around the bend. She said, “No, it’s good. It’s a little long, a little too violent, and a little scattered maybe. But it comes together well in the end. Kinda like the movie.” So there you go.

Ted Kennedy was never one of my heroes. Like most people of my generation and those that came after, the three principal things I knew about him were these: He was the younger, still-alive brother of two really great men who’d both been assassinated; he drove a girl off a bridge; and he screwed up big-time in his one shot at the presidency, in 1980, in the process helping to bring about the Reagan era.

Beyond all that, we younger folks knew that liberals loved him because he was the next best thing to royalty, and his heart (and political positions) were always in the right place. We also knew that conservatives loathed him because, well, they didn’t like the idea of Democratic royalty (and, by the way, did I mention he drove a girl off a bridge?).

All of us on both sides always knew Kennedy was there, the embodiment of an extraordinary legacy who forever seemed to be grasping for his fair share of it, and coming up just short. But without a scorecard of Senate votes, we couldn’t help but wonder what, exactly, he was accomplishing all these years – apart from courting tabloid drama, getting his name bandied about by right-wing jackasses scraping for a direct-mail buck, and presiding over one family funeral after another. Such is the burden of being a senator – even a high-profile one – rather than a president.

I had the honor of meeting Kennedy twice – once in a Senate meeting room during the fall of 1989, when I was covering hearings that would help decide the fate of the National Endowment for the Arts, and again during the summer of ’96 at the 25th-anniversary gala for the Kennedy Center in Washington, where I worked at the time. Our first meeting came at one of his lowest points — he was becoming notorious for his post-divorce carousing and he was clearly drinking too much; it showed all over his face, from his red cheeks to his bulbous nose. The second time he was in much better form, accompanied by his second wife Vicki and flush not with booze, but with the recent success of his legislation to raise the minimum wage, the vanquishing of the “Contract with America,” and Bill Clinton’s pending re-election. On both occasions, though, he was gracious and thoroughly indulgent of a commoner who didn’t quite know how to approach a Kennedy.

With all of that in mind, I must admit that I often respond perversely to news of death and tragedy — and yesterday morning was no different. I like to blame this on my friend and Popdose colleague Bob Cashill, who many years ago dismissed the death of a prominent actor or director (I forget who) by saying, “He was good; now he’s dead.” But it’s unfair to blame Bob, really; after all, I was the one who couldn’t stop myself from snickering at the horrified looks on my classmates’ faces when we heard Reagan had been shot, and I was the one who (much later) offended my work colleagues by inexplicably breaking into song as we were evacuating our building at the United Nations on 9/11.

Anyway, when I heard from a friend about Kennedy’s death (“Teddy’s dead” was all she had to say) my first response was to remember a Jerry Seinfeld bit, about how the newspapers in New York should combine the obituaries with the real estate listings so that apartment hunters would know where to look in a tight market. I immediately thought of a Kennedy obit in that spirit: “He leaves behind a wife, three children … and a prime seat in the United States Senate, whose new inhabitant might make the difference in determining whether 45 million Americans acquire access to affordable health care.”

Callous, perhaps, but reflective of Kennedy’s massive role in keeping universal health care alive as an issue in times both dark (the Reagan and W. years) and … slightly less dark (Hillarycare). In his infirmity his presence already was sorely missed this year, as what began with a near-consensus on the need for major reform has devolved into a foolish debate dominated (this month, anyway) by town-hall screamers and “death panels.” We’ll never know whether Kennedy’s participation might have helped forge a quicker compromise, if not with the Republicans then with the Blue Ball Dog Dems; whether he might have been able to salvage some of the reforms that lesser liberals have already pissed away; or whether he could have stilled the Idiots of August. But a guy can dream, can’t he?

Speaking of which, my second thought about Kennedy yesterday was roundabout, but, thankfully, a bit more respectful. It was of the famous “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech given on April 3, 1968, by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who would be assassinated the next evening (a fate in which he would soon be joined by Ted’s brother Bobby). It wasn’t the classic conclusion of that speech that resonated in relation to Teddy; instead, it was a clause that King likely included as an afterthought, a throwaway: “Longevity has its place.” It seems to me that, if and when they light an eternal flame over Ted’s grave next to Jack and Bobby’s at Arlington Cemetery, that phrase might make a fitting epitaph on the stone in front of it.

For while Ted’s life was not nearly as mythologized, nor his death nearly as tragic as his brothers’, he may have been – and I’m going out on a limb here – the best of them. Certainly, he was the most accomplished. And, with a few very famous exceptions, he might have been the bravest.

I noted before that, without a scorecard, it was often difficult to see beyond Teddy’s foibles to his achievements. Well, here’s the scorecard of his Senate leadership: the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which ended quotas based on national origin; the creation of the National Teachers Corps; the National Cancer Act of 1971; the Federal Election Campaign Act Amendments of 1974, which set contribution limits and established that public-financing check-off box we all ignore on our tax returns; Title IX, which established the goal of equality for women’s sports; the safeguarding of the Voting Rights Act and the provision of funding for AIDS research through the Ryan White Act, both in the face of Reagan- and Bush-administration onslaughts or indifference; the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986; the COBRA Act, which extended employer-based health care for workers who had lost their jobs; leading the opposition to Judge Robert Bork; the National and Community Service Trust Act of 1993, which created AmeriCorps; the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and the Mental Health Parity Act of 1996 and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) of 1997, all of which helped chip away at the universal-health-care goal that had been squandered by the Clintons; and the No Child Left Behind Act, on which Kennedy accepted George W. Bush’s demands for mandatory testing in exchange for increased school funding that Bush never provided.

There’s a profound contrast between his brothers’ undistinguished records on Capitol Hill and the reams of legislation Ted was instrumental in passing. And it’s not just a matter of longevity; Jack and Bobby were on missions of personal ambition that didn’t involve getting their hands dirty with legislative minutiae, while Ted was – first by necessity, but eventually because he recognized it as his calling – a brilliant negotiator and an unparalleled advocate for the causes that were dear to him.

Ted, even more than his brothers, came to the Senate with a reputation as a substance-free playboy, but over many years he earned a gravitas that was forged, ironically, in response to his greatest personal failures. A blunder like Chappaquiddick might have forced many men – even many Kennedys – from public life entirely (seen William Kennedy Smith lately?), but Ted chose to press on and remain in public service despite his own shame, the brickbats of his opponents (not to mention many friends), and his obviously diluted national prospects. It’s worth remembering that he was the only Kennedy of his generation ever to lose a campaign. Two of them, in fact – in addition to the 1980 Democratic nomination, he lost his position as Senate Minority Whip in 1971, ensuring that he would never again rise above the position of committee chairman.

Each of those defeats presented a form of adversity his brothers never had to face, but each time Ted responded not by shrinking in dejection, but by immersing himself deeper into the legislative morass. He frequently had difficulty maintaining the balance between his work in the Senate and his personal foibles – and at times his tabloid-friendly behavior was painful to watch. But by the mid-’90s, with his personal life settled and his ambitions for higher office in the rear-view mirror, it had become impossible to ignore the mountainous record of achievement he had – and I apologize for this metaphor –pulled from the wreckage of his scandal-plagued past.

Yes, Ted Kennedy carried the burden of his family’s legend and expectations uncomfortably, and no, he didn’t live a particularly heroic life. His failures were huge ones, and it is perhaps a mark of our nation’s sense of fairness, as well as his own lack of his brothers’ charisma, that Ted was never fully able to charm his way past Chappaquiddick. But history will record that Ted Kennedy adjusted to his peculiar lot in life, worked his ass off for many, many years, and created a legacy of his own that is very much worth treasuring. Longevity, indeed, has its place.

This column needs to begin with an apology to the Secretary of State. Hillary, the primary reason I was unable to support you last year was my belief that your presidency would become mired in the same irrational Republican hatred that hobbled, then crippled your husband’s tenure. I was certain that, between the two of you, only Barack Obama could tame the rabid beast, by virtue of the generational shift he represented and the fact that his last name (however exotic) is not Clinton. I also believed, I freely admit, that his detractors would sense the need to tone down their belligerence and behave with more civility in order to avoid the stench of racism.

Whoops!

As if we needed any more evidence, the events of the last several days leave no question that the Republican Party has removed itself from the mainstream of political discourse. It doesn’t matter who the president is – Obama, or Hillary, or Jesus Christ himself (whom we all know would be backing single-payer). The small minority of Americans who still call themselves Republicans (hovering around 25 percent) have driven into insanity’s ditch, and are spinning their wheels furiously … not to pull themselves out, but to dig in deeper. The orchestrated assaults on town-hall meetings across the nation this week do not – cannot – reflect the GOP as a whole, but they’ve showcased the party’s public face: a tiny, frightened (and frightening) group of people, bought and paid for by special interests, who are hellbent on stifling the nation’s policy debate by hijacking the get-togethers with vicious invective and then shouting down any attempts to move intelligently past their outbursts.

Two weeks ago, when President Obama was asked why he was pushing Congress to finish its work on healthcare legislation before the August recess, he benignly noted that “if there are no deadlines, nothing gets done in this town.” Four days after that recess began for House members, anyone who wasn’t already clued in now knows the real reason his deadline was so important to the Democrats (and why extending it was so important to Republicans like Michael “Slow down, Mr. President” Steele). Obama and Steele both knew that once the congressmen’s planes left Washington, they’d be flying straight into a shitstorm of well-organized lunatics desperate to see them, and Obama himself, fail.

Their “protests” are not really about healthcare. The special-interest groups giving them their marching orders are the same folks who brought you April’s adventures in teabagging – the lobbyist-run Americans for Prosperity, FreedomWorks, and the Tea Party Patriots. (They’re planning to double-dip the teabags later this month.) And they’re shouting the same talking-points pabulum they sputtered last spring … the same material they’d be using if this summer’s debate were over climate change, or education, or the care and feeding of kittens.

They’ve been cheered on by the House Republican leader, John Boehner, who last week voiced a premonition that Democrats would face a “very, very hot August.” And they’ve been schooled in the art of anti-democratic disruption by a group called Right Principles (tied to FreedomWorks), which explained in a widely distributed “strategy memo” how protesters should proceed:

“1. Artificially Inflate Your Numbers: Spread out in the hall and try to be in the front half … The Rep should be made to feel that a majority, and if not, a significant portion of at least the audience, opposes the socialist agenda of Washington.
2. Be Disruptive Early and Often … Watch for an opportunity to yell out and challenge the Rep’s statements early.
3. Try to Rattle Him, Not Have an Intelligent Debate.”

Here’s that plan put into motion, at a town hall meeting held by Rep. Lloyd Doggett in Austin, Texas:

This is not democracy in action. This is a putsch. It has been designed, organized and funded by narrow interests to thwart the will of the people. And the results, in addition to such displays of sheer petulance inside town-hall meetings from coast to coast, have ranged from a Maryland congressman hung in effigy to a New York representative who needed police to escort him away from a seething mob, to a phoned-in death threat against a representative from North Carolina – not to mention a protester in Connecticut screaming that Sen. Chris Dodd, who recently received a prostate-cancer diagnosis, should be put out of his misery with a “handful” of painkillers “flush(ed) down … with Ted Kennedy’s whiskey.” Hilarious!

The lesson to be taken from this new round of reactionary ranting is not that conservatives are the last bastion of fiscal responsibility – they lost all credibility on that score years ago. Nor is it that, now that they’re thoroughly out of power, they’ve been liberated to indulge their charade that Ayn Rand-approved selfishness is a political philosophy rather than a character flaw.

No, the lesson to be learned is the one that should have been made clear 15 years ago, when the lunatic fringe began accusing Bill Clinton of rape and Hillary of murder – that conservatives, drenched in the bile of their absolutism, believe the reins of power in this country are their birthright. And whenever they are driven from power (1992, 2008) they feel entitled to use all means necessary, from insults to intimidation to outright thuggery, to deny their opponents an opportunity to enact the agenda Americans voted for.

That agenda, as far as healthcare is concerned, was already on the rocks even before this week’s marauders hung out their teabags. The odds of Congress passing some form of legislation this year, which once seemed like such easy pickings, currently seem to stand just over 50/50, and Democrats have already given up more than half the store just to get bills out of committee with some patina of intra-party consensus. It hasn’t helped that Obama turned the sausage-grinding process over to Congress in the first place, rather than put forward his own plan; it also hasn’t helped that individual congressmen have been forced to face the mobs this month without a specific bill to defend. Still, as this week’s steady push toward bipartisan compromise in the Senate Finance Committee shows, the final decisions will be taken in spite of, not as a result of, the chaos of August. The eventual bill will be a dog’s breakfast that doesn’t even include a “public option,” and few (if any) Republicans will vote for it – which means that meaningful reform will remain out of reach as long as Americans continue to accept the notion of healthcare as a profit-making concern rather than an individual right.

In the meantime, the most profound outcome of the town-hall uproar most likely will be a backlash against its perpetrators and a further diminution of the conservative “movement.” However, it’s impossible to deny the potential for these ambushes to escalate into physical violence, either this month or the next time the special interests decide to mobilize some ginned-up outrage. In fact, that threat seemed to escalate this morning when the AFL-CIO promised to send its members to meetings in 50 congressional districts to argue for reform. Should teabagger violence break out — directed at fellow attendees or even a member of Congress — will Boehner, Rush, Fox News and the rest of the vast right-wing conspiracy be chastened … or celebratory?