Legislating while under the influence of ideological inebriation is not yet a statutory offense. It is only a multi-directional menace to much of what anxious Americans hold dear for themselves and their children.

The dominant Republicans in Congress - both the new and many of the longer-term incumbents - are in heat. It is as if a mob psychology has seized them, starved them of facts, and deprived them of reality. Their chief mad dog is Eric Cantor - he of the sneering soundbites so memorably described in a recent Washington Post column by Dana Milbank.

Cantor is the big burr under Speaker John Boehner's saddle; Boehner himself is terrified of the young fanatic from Virginia and the even younger fanatics elected in 2010 on the Tea Party wave. The Republicans have suckered President Obama into a game of chicken, but fanatic Republicans don't blink. Why not raise the nation's debt limit to pay for debts already incurred by Congressional appropriations, as has been routinely done nearly 60 times since the 1930s? "No way!" say the self-styled Tea Partiers.

Polls show that 70 percent of Republicans believe that, along with spending cuts, there need to be some tax increases for more revenue. Nearly half of people polled back home who called themselves Tea Party people even agree.

So what gives with these hard core Tea Partiers behind Cantor? First, it seems they're having fun just hypocritically shaking up Washington on spending while pushing for funding their own pet projects back home, like Republican Steve Fincher's (R-TN) Port of Cates Landing project. The Republicans are having fun with a spineless President Obama who already has given them 80 percent of what they want and seems ready to slip further into their budgetary abyss. Bill Curry, former special assistant to President Clinton, says it isn't that Obama is spineless; it is that he is closer to his opponents in his real beliefs than his liberal/progressive supporters like to think.

They're having fun because many of the House Republican freshmen class don't care about being re-elected if the price is to adopt the old ways of despised Washington. Yet, they are raising campaign money vigorously in the old Washington ways.

Still, most of the newly-elected Republicans are upper-middle-class, come from successful small businesses or professional firms and don't empathize with tens of millions of impoverished or heavily indebted Americans.

It's fun being the center of attention, holding hostage small health and safety budgets such as food safety, auto/truck safety, air and water safety, and needy children's programs, while giving a pass to massively bloated military spending and very profitable corporations like General Electric that pay no federal income taxes.

It's fun going back to the country clubs where the wealthy undertaxed slap them on the back and exclaim, "Way to go, Congressman." After all, the wealthy are paying the lowest rates of taxation, especially on their capital gains and dividends, in modern American history.

Conservative columnist, David Brooks, is not amused with them. He thinks the Republican Party has gotten far more than they envisioned at the beginning of the negotiations with Obama and should take this "mother of all no brainers." That they do not, says Brooks, is because the "Republican Party may no longer be a normal party," but is "infected by a faction that is more psychological protest than a practical governing alternative." He sees this dominant faction as having "no sense of moral decency," having "no economic theory worthy of the name."

The latter is certainly true. For if they are really against Big Government, why aren't they cutting hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate welfare, subsidies, handouts and giveaways or gigantic Pentagon over-spending and waste, or enabling federal law enforcement to crack down on corporate crime that is looting Medicare, Medicaid, royalty collections and violating pro-competition laws?

Arrogant fanatics tend to outsmart themselves. Already, 470 business leaders have written Congress urging it to raise the debt ceiling to avoid a financial crisis, along with spending restraints. More than a few of these leaders, Republicans or not, think the Tea Party faction on Capitol Hill is nuts and playing Russian roulette with the American economy. The Senate rules don't help, allowing a minority party to control the Senate.

These fanatical Republicans are playing another game of Russian roulette with their own Party's electoral future. The polls are starting to turn ominously against them. Wait until October when the cuts hit Main Street and Elm Street. Back home, most Republican voters want tax increases, probably on the wealthy and corporations, as part of negotiating a deal. The critical independent vote is starting to turn away from this extremism on Capitol Hill.

The Republican faction that David Brooks is so appalled by may well destroy the Republican Party's chances for electoral victory through and well beyond 2012.

In a campaign almost as frenzied as the effort to get Barack Obama into the White House, liberal groups are now mobilizing against the White House and reported deals that would cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits. They accuse President Obama of being weak and willing to "cave" to corporate and conservative forces bent on cutting the social safety net while protecting the wealthy.

Those accusations are wrong.

The accusations imply that Obama is on our side. Or was on our side. And that the right wing is pushing him around.

But the evidence is clear that Obama is an often-willing servant of corporate interests -- not someone reluctantly doing their bidding, or serving their interests only because Republicans forced him to.

Since coming to Washington, Obama has allied himself with Wall Street Democrats who put corporate deregulation and greed ahead of the needs of most Americans.

** In 2006, a relatively new Senator Obama was the only senator to speak at the inaugural gathering of the Alexander Hamilton Project launched by Wall Street Democrats like Robert Rubin and Roger Altman, Bill Clinton's treasury secretary and deputy secretary. Obama praised them as "innovative, thoughtful policymakers." (It was Rubin's crusade to deregulate Wall Street in the late '90s that led directly to the economic meltdown of 2008 and our current crisis.)

** In early 2007, way before he was a presidential frontrunner, candidate Obama was raising more money from Wall Street interests than all other candidates, including New York presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani.

** In June 2008, as soon as Hillary ended her campaign, Obama went on CNBC, shunned the "populist" label and announced: "Look: I am a pro-growth, free-market guy. I love the market." He packed his economic team with Wall Street friends -- choosing one of Bill Clinton's Wall Street deregulators, Larry Summers, as his top economic advisor.

** A year into his presidency, in a bizarre but revealing interview with Business Week, Obama was asked about huge bonuses just received by two CEOs of Wall Street firms bailed out by taxpayers. He responded that he didn't "begrudge" the $17 million bonus to J.P. Mogan's CEO or the $9 million to Goldman Sachs' CEO: "I know both those guys, they are very savvy businessmen," said Obama. "I, like most of the American people, don't begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free-market system."

After any review of Obama's corporatist ties and positions, the kneejerk response is: "Yes, but Obama was a community organizer!"

He WAS a community organizer. . .decades before he became president. Back when Nelson Mandela was in prison and the U.S. government declared him the leader of a "terrorist organization" while our government funded and armed Bin Laden and his allies to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. That's a long time ago.

It's worth remembering that decades before Reagan became president, the great communicator was a leftwing Democrat and advocate for the working class and big federal social programs.

The sad truth, as shown by Glenn Greenwald, is that Obama had arrived at the White House looking to make cuts in benefits to the elderly. Two weeks before his inauguration, Obama echoed conservative scares about Social Security and Medicare by talking of "red ink as far as the eye can see." He opened his doors to Social Security/Medicare cutters -- first trying to get Republican Senator Judd Gregg ("a leading voice for reining in entitlement spending," wrote Politico) into his cabinet, and later appointing entitlement-foe Alan Simpson to co-chair his "Deficit Commission." Obama's top economic advisor, Larry Summers, came to the White House publicly telling Time magazine of needed Social Security cuts.

At this late date, informed activists and voters who care about economic justice realize that President Obama is NOT "on our side."

Independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont -- widely seen as "America's Senator" -- is so disgusted by recent White House actions that he called Friday for a challenge to Obama in Democratic primaries: "I think it would be a good idea if President Obama faced some primary opposition."

Although Sanders has said clearly that he's running for reelection to the senate in 2012 – not for president -- his comment led instantly to a Draft Sanders for President website.

Imagine if a credible candidate immediately threatened a primary challenge unless Obama rejects any deal cutting the safety net while maintaining tax breaks for the rich. Team Obama knows that a serious primary challenger would cost the Obama campaign millions of dollars. And it may well be a powerful movement-building opportunity for activists tired of feeling hopeless with Obama.

It's time for progressives to talk seriously about a challenge to Obama's corporatism. Polls show most Americans support economic justice issues, and that goes double for Democratic primary voters.

At the time of writing, President Obama's hoped-for "Grand Bargain" with Republicans is apparently dead. And I say good riddance. I'm no more eager than other rational people (a category that fails to include many Congressional Republicans) to see what happens if the debt limit isn't raised. But what the president was offering to the G.O.P., especially on Medicare, was a very bad deal for America.

Specifically, according to many reports, the president offered both means-testing of Medicare benefits and a rise in the age of Medicare eligibility. The first would be bad policy; the second would be terrible policy. And it would almost surely be terrible politics, too.

The crucial thing to remember, when we talk about Medicare, is that our goal isn't, or at least shouldn't be, defined in terms of some arbitrary number. Our goal should be, instead, to give Americans the health care they need at a price the country can afford. And throwing Americans in their mid-60s off Medicare moves us away from that goal, not toward it.

For Medicare, with all its flaws, works better than private insurance. It has less bureaucracy and, hence, lower administrative costs than private insurers. It has been more successful in controlling costs. While Medicare expenses per beneficiary have soared over the past 40 years, they've risen significantly less than private insurance premiums. And since Medicare-type systems in other advanced countries have much lower costs than the uniquely privatized U.S. system, there's good reason to believe that Medicare reform can do a lot to control costs in the future.

In that case, you may ask, why didn't the 2010 health care reform simply extend Medicare to cover everyone? The answer, of course, is political realism. Most health reformers I know would have supported Medicare for all if they had considered it politically feasible. But given the power of the insurance lobby and the knee-jerk opposition of many politicians to any expansion of government, they settled for what they thought they could actually get: near-universal coverage through a system of regulation and subsidies. It is, however, one thing to accept a second-best system insuring those who currently lack coverage. Throwing millions of Americans off Medicare and pushing them into the arms of private insurers is another story.

Also, did I mention that Republicans are doing all they can to undermine health care reform - they even tried to undermine it as part of the debt negotiations - and may eventually succeed? If they do, many of those losing Medicare coverage would find themselves unable to replace it.

So raising the Medicare age is a terrible idea. Means-testing - reducing benefits for wealthier Americans - isn't equally bad, but it's still poor policy.

It's true that Medicare expenses could be reduced by requiring high-income Americans to pay higher premiums, higher co-payments, etc. But why not simply raise taxes on high incomes instead? This would have the great virtue of not adding another layer of bureaucracy by requiring that Medicare establish financial status before paying medical bills.

But, you may say, raising taxes would reduce incentives to work and create wealth. Well, so would means-testing: As conservative economists love to point out in other contexts - for example, when criticizing programs like food stamps - benefits that fall as your income rises in effect raise your marginal tax rate. It doesn't matter whether the government raises your taxes by $1,000 when your income rises or cuts your benefits by the same amount; either way, it reduces the fraction of your additional earnings that you get to keep.

So what's the difference between means-testing Medicare and raising taxes? Well, the truly rich would prefer means-testing, since they would end up sacrificing no more than the merely well-off. But everyone else should prefer a tax-based solution.

So why is the president embracing these bad policy ideas? In a forthcoming article in The New York Review of Books, the veteran journalist Elizabeth Drew suggests that members of the White House political team saw the 2010 election as a referendum on government spending and that they believe that cutting spending is the way to win next year.

If so, I would respectfully suggest that they are out of their minds. Remember death panels? The G.O.P.'s most potent political weapon last year - the weapon that caused a large swing in the votes of older Americans - was the claim that Mr. Obama was cutting Medicare. Why give Republicans a chance to do it all over again?

The gravest threat we face from terrorism, as the killings in Norway by Anders Behring Breivik underscore, comes not from the Islamic world but the radical Christian right and the secular fundamentalists who propagate the bigoted, hateful caricatures of observant Muslims and those defined as our internal enemies. The caricature and fear are spread as diligently by the Christian right as they are by atheists such as Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. Our religious and secular fundamentalists all peddle the same racist filth and intolerance that infected Breivik. This filth has poisoned and degraded our civil discourse. The looming economic and environmental collapse will provide sparks and tinder to transform this coarse language of fundamentalist hatred into, I fear, the murderous rampages experienced by Norway. I worry more about the Anders Breiviks than the Mohammed Attas.

The battle under way in America is not between religion and science. It is not between those who embrace the rational and those who believe in biblical myth. It is not between Western civilization and Islam. The blustering televangelists and the New Atheists, the television pundits and our vaunted Middle East specialists and experts, are all part of our vast, simplistic culture of mindless entertainment. They are in show business. They cannot afford complexity. Religion and science, facts and lies, truth and fiction, are the least of their concerns. They trade insults and clichés like cartoon characters. They don masks. One wears the mask of religion. One wears the mask of science. One wears the mask of journalism. One wears the mask of the terrorism expert. They jab back and forth in predictable sound bites. It is a sterile and useless debate between bizarre subsets of American culture. Some use the scientific theory of evolution to explain the behavior and rules for complex social and political systems, and others insist that the six-day creation story in Genesis is a factual account. The danger we face is not in the quarrel between religion advocates and evolution advocates, but in the widespread mental habit of fundamentalism itself.

We live in a fundamentalist culture. Our utopian visions of inevitable human progress, obsession with endless consumption, and fetish for power and unlimited growth are fed by illusions that are as dangerous as fantasies about the Second Coming. These beliefs are the newest expression of the infatuation with the apocalypse, one first articulated to Western culture by the early church. This apocalyptic vision was as central to the murderous beliefs of the French Jacobins, the Russian Bolsheviks and the German fascists as it was to the early Christians. The historian Arnold Toynbee argues that racism in Anglo-American culture was given a special virulence after the publication of the King James Bible. The concept of "the chosen people" was quickly adopted, he wrote, by British and American imperialists. It fed the disease of white supremacy. It gave them the moral sanction to dominate and destroy other races, from the Native Americans to those on the subcontinent.

Our secular and religious fundamentalists come out of this twisted yearning for the apocalypse and belief in the "chosen people." They advocate, in the language of religion and scientific rationalism, the divine right of our domination, the clash of civilizations. They assure us that we are headed into the broad, uplifting world of universal democracy and a global free market once we sign on for the subjugation and extermination of those who oppose us. They insist-as the fascists and the communists did-that this call for a new world is based on reason, factual evidence and science or divine will. But schemes for universal human advancement, no matter what language is used to justify them, are always mythic. They are designed to satisfy a yearning for meaning and purpose. They give the proponents of these myths the status of soothsayers and prophets. And, when acted upon, they fill the Earth with mass graves, bombed cities, widespread misery and penal colonies. The extent of this fundamentalism is evident in the strident utterances of the Christian right as well as those of the so-called New Atheists.

"What will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise, ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry?" Sam Harris, in his book "The End of Faith," asks in a passage that I suspect Breivik would have enjoyed. "If history is any guide, we will not be sure about where the offending warheads are or what their state of readiness is, and so we will be unable to rely on targeted, conventional weapons to destroy them. In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own. Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime-as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day-but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe."

"We are at war with Islam," Harris goes on. "It may not serve our immediate foreign policy objectives for our political leaders to openly acknowledge this fact, but it is unambiguously so. It is not merely that we are at war with an otherwise peaceful religion that has been ‘hijacked' by extremists. We are at war with precisely the vision of life that is prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran, and further elaborated in the literature of the hadith, which recounts the sayings and teachings of the Prophet."

Harris assures us that "the Koran mandates such hatred," that "the problem is with Islam itself." He writes that "Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death."

A culture that exalts its own moral certitude and engages in uncritical self-worship at the expense of conscience commits moral and finally physical suicide. Our fundamentalists busy themselves with their pathetic little monuments to Jesus, to reason, to science, to Western civilization and to new imperial glory. They peddle a binary view of the world that divides reality between black and white, good and evil, right and wrong. We are taught in a fundamentalist culture to view other human beings, especially Muslims, not as ends but as means. We abrogate the right to exterminate all who do not conform.

Fundamentalists have no interest in history, culture or social or linguistic differences. They are a remarkably uncurious, self-satisfied group. Anything outside their own narrow bourgeois life, petty concerns and physical comforts bores them. They are provincials. They do not investigate or seek to understand the endemic flaws in human nature. The only thing that matters is the coming salvation of humanity, or at least that segment of humanity they deem worthy of salvation. They peddle a route to assured collective deliverance. And they sanction violence and the physical extermination of other human beings to get there.

All fundamentalists worship the same gods-themselves. They worship the future prospect of their own empowerment. They view this empowerment as a necessity for the advancement and protection of civilization or the Christian state. They sanctify the nation. They hold up the ability the industrial state has handed to them as a group and as individuals to shape the world according to their vision as evidence of their own superiority. Fundamentalists express the frustrations of a myopic and morally stunted middle class. They cling, under their religious or scientific veneer, to the worst values of the petite bourgeois. They are suburban mutations, products of an American landscape that has been perverted by a destruction of community and a long and successful war against complex thought. The self-absorbed worldview of these fundamentalists brings smiles of indulgence from the corporatists who profit, at our expense, from the obliteration of moral and intellectual inquiry.

Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's "Ulysses" acidly condemned all schemes to purify the world and serve human progress through violence. He said that "history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." Dedalus in the same passage responded to the schoolmaster Deasy's claim that "the ways of the Creator are not our ways," and that "all history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God." A soccer goal is jubilantly scored by boys in the yard outside the school window as Deasy expounds on divine will. God, Dedalus tells Deasy as the players yell in glee over the goal, is no more than the screams from the schoolyard -"a shout in the street." Joyce, like Samuel Beckett, excoriated the Western belief in historical teleology-the notion that history has a purpose or is moving toward a goal. The absurdity of this belief, they wrote, always feeds fanatics and undermines the possibility of human community. These writers warned us about all those-religious and secular-who call for salvation through history.

There are tens of millions of Americans who in their desperation and insecurity yearn for the assurance and empowerment offered by a clearly defined war against an external evil. They are taught in our fundamentalist culture that this evil is the root of their misery. They embrace a war against this evil as a solution to the drift in their lives, their economic deprivation and the moral and economic morass of the nation. They see in this conflict with these dark forces a way to overcome their own alienation. They find in it certitude, meaning and structure. They believe that once this evil is vanquished, an evil that extends from Muslims to undocumented workers, liberals, intellectuals, homosexuals and feminists, they can transform America into a land of plenty and virtue. But this fundamentalism, which cloaks itself in the jargon of scientific rationality, Christian piety and nativism, is a recipe for fanaticism. All those who embrace other ways of being and believing are viewed, as Breivik apparently viewed his victims, as contaminates that must be eliminated.

This fundamentalist ideology, because it is contradictory and filled with myth, is immune to critiques based on reason, fact and logic. This is part of its appeal. It obliterates doubt, nuance, intellectual and scientific rigor and moral conscience. All has been predicted or decided. Life is reduced to following a simple black-and-white road map. The contradictions in these belief systems-for example the championing of the "rights of the unborn" while calling for wider use of the death penalty or the damning of Muslim terrorists while promoting pre-emptive war, which delivers more death and misery in the Middle East than any jihadist organization-inoculate followers from rational discourse. Life becomes a crusade.

All fundamentalists, religious and secular, are ignoramuses. They follow the lines of least resistance. They already know what is true and what is untrue. They do not need to challenge their own beliefs or investigate the beliefs of others. They do not need to bother with the hard and laborious work of religious, linguistic, historical and cultural understanding. They do not need to engage in self-criticism or self-reflection. It spoils the game. It ruins the entertainment. They see all people, and especially themselves, as clearly and starkly defined. The world is divided into those who embrace or reject their belief systems. Those who support these belief systems are good and forces for human progress. Those who oppose these belief systems are stupid, at best, and usually evil. Fundamentalists have no interest in real debate, real dialogue, real intellectual thought. Fundamentalism, at its core, is about self-worship. It is about feeling holier, smarter and more powerful than everyone else. And this comes directly out of the sickness of our advertising age and its exaltation of the cult of the self. It is a product of our deep and unreflective cultural narcissism.

Our faith in the inevitability of human progress constitutes an inability to grasp the tragic nature of history. Human history is one of constant conflict between the will to power and the will to nurture and protect life. Our greatest achievements are always intertwined with our greatest failures. Our most exalted accomplishments are always coupled with our most egregious barbarities. Science and industry serve as instruments of progress as well as instruments of destruction. The Industrial Age has provided feats of engineering and technology, yet it has also destroyed community, spread the plague of urbanization, uprooted us all, turned human beings into cogs and made possible the total war and wholesale industrial killing that has marked the last century. These technologies, even as we see them as our salvation, are rapidly destroying the ecosystem on which we depend for life.

Michelle Alexander's ground breaking book, The New Jim Crow, is an outstanding expose of the horrors of America's criminal justice system that are perpetrated against black people. It is well documented proof of what many have long observed, that get tough policies on drug enforcement and "three strikes" laws are targeted towards the masses of often non-violent black Americans and are used to make money for private entities and for all levels of government.

The penitentiary manufactured license plate was long ago joined by more sophisticated methods of exploitation. Prisoners not only work in a variety of jobs without compensation, but are often fined and forced to pay for their incarceration. Obviously they end their sentences owing money and are permanent debtors, susceptible to be consumed by the system again and again.

Recent events indicate a new level of horror in the planning stages. The prison and jail system is perfecting its methods of extracting free labor. Perhaps the system ought to be called the new slavery.

In the state of Georgia, a recently enacted law targeting undocumented workers was deemed insufficiently evil and needed the addition of greater exploitation of people of color. The new legislation allows police to profile brown skinned people and also makes it illegal for the undocumented to work, to be housed, or even to be transported. But as in the rest of the country, Georgia's agricultural work force is comprised almost completely of undocumented migrant workers. Having chased these people away, the state was at a loss as to how to keep its farms afloat after their labor force fled.

The solution to the conundrum was simple but leads to a slippery slope which invites further abuse in an already inherently abusive situation. The state offered to pay probationers to do the farm work instead. The experiment drew a few desperate people, who did not have the wherewithal, knowledge or training needed to harvest crops in the midst of a heat wave.

The plan may have initially failed, but the setback is surely only temporary and the trend towards normalizing labor exploitation is being perfected and honed to make it more successful in many parts of the country. In Racine county, Wisconsin, the evisceration of public employee union rights has spawned an effort to give jobs that were once reserved for union employees to prisoners instead. These prisoners would not be paid with money, they would only earn the right to reduce their sentences. The public union collective bargaining contracts that are now null and void had barred the state from this practice. The right wing have figured out how to kill two birds with one stone. In one fell swoop, public unions were decimated and prisoners will be subject to greater exploitation.

It is difficult to fight against the diminution of rights of persons who are incarcerated or otherwise under judicial supervision. The average American has been given a steady does of fear related to crime, even as crime rates have fallen. The racism which equates criminality with black people makes it all the more easy to continue the rates of incarceration which mark victims with lifetimes of unemployment, loss of voting rights, and even the loss of the right to live in certain places.

Black Americans can be just as susceptible to the appeals to fear and self-loathing. We are afraid too, and don't want to be associated with people who are labeled and stigmatized as deserving of endless punishment, including the punishment of working for nothing. The ability to advocate for the rights of prisoners is therefore a difficult one, with few natural allies other than the incarcerated themselves.

However, it is necessary to persevere before these new schemes gain a stronger foothold. The mania to save government dollars and the American propensity to punish and permanently criminalize vast numbers of black people will combine to make these new policies extremely popular. The prison system is already highly profitable, and any means of making more money will have a high level of appeal for politicians and for the public too.