Tonight, in the tenth year of the 21st century, the government of the United States is torturing a young man -- one of its own soldiers -- whom it has incarcerated but not indicted. He has been held in solitary confinement for months on end, subjected to techniques of sleep deprivation taken from the Soviet gulag, denied almost all human contact except from interrogators, constantly harassed by guards to whom he must answer every few minutes -- all in an attempt to break his mind, destroy his will, degrade his humanity and force him to "confess" to a broader "conspiracy" against state power.

His name is Bradley Manning. He is 23 years old. The "crime" he is accused of committing is releasing video evidence of an American atrocity committed years ago in Iraq: the murder of Iraqi civilians by helicopter gunships. Under the American system of jurisprudence, of course, he is considered innocent until proven guilty of this heinous 'crime' of truth-telling. He has not been tried or convicted of this charge, or any other crime.

Yet tonight, in the tenth year of the 21st century, in the United States of America, under the leadership of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Barack Obama, 23-year-old Bradley Manning is being subjected to same tortures routinely inflicted on other unindicted, untried captives of the militarist state.

Journalist Andy Worthington, who has been one of the most thorough and assiduous chroniclers of the modern American gulag, has noted the parallels between the treatment imposed on Manning and that doled out to earlier prisoners of the bizarre, lawless limbo concocted by the American war machine for those who threaten -- or are perceived to threaten -- its ever-expanding, ever-more corrupt operations around the world. Worthington states that:

The conditions of Manning's imprisonment bear a marked and chilling resemblance to the conditions in which a handful of US citizens and residents were held as “enemy combatants” under the Bush administration. The key elements here are the elements of profound isolation and suffering ... not just the solitary confinement, with no other human being for company, but also the refusal to allow Manning to have a pillow, sheets, or any access to the outside world through the reporting of current affairs.

It is these factors that mark out his conditions of detention as sharing some key elements with the conditions endured by the three “enemy combatants” held on the US mainland under the Bush administration — the US citizens Yasser Hamdi and Jose Padilla, and the US legal resident Ali al-Marri.

...

al-Marri, along with two American citizens also held as “enemy combatants” — Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla — was subjected to the same “Standard Operating Procedure” that was applied to prisoners at Guantánamo during its most brutal phase, from mid-2002 to mid-2004. This involved the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including prolonged isolation, painful stress positions, exposure to extreme temperature, sleep deprivation, extreme sensory deprivation, and threats of violence and death.

...

There is, at present, no suggestion that Bradley Manning has been subjected to a wide range of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” but prolonged isolation is confirmed, and depriving him of a pillow, sheets, or any access to the outside world through the reporting of current affairs are all elements of discomfort and further isolation that were key to the program of belittling and punishing “enemy combatants,” and, crucially, “softening them up” or “breaking” them for interrogation. It is, sadly, all too easy to imagine that other techniques designed to disorientate Manning and to further erode his will — involving elements of sleep deprivation, threats and sensory deprivation — could also be applied, or are, perhaps, already being applied, especially if, as has been suggested by the Independent, the authorities are hoping to cut a plea deal with him, reducing a 52-year sentence in exchange for a confession that Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, whom the US is seeking to extradite to the US, was not just a passive recipient of the information leaked by Manning, but was instead a conspirator.

I am running out of words to describe the depths we are sinking into. I am running out of ways to try to shake people from their stupor and shock them into an awareness of the monstrous evil that is rising all around them. Even those who proclaim themselves the progressive friends of all humankind spend most of their time and energy wringing their hands over the political tea leaves, parsing the strategy and tactics of the partisan squabbles between the two scarcely-distinguishable factions of the militarist establishment. And while they are sometimes bold enough to criticize this or that element of the Peace Laureate's administration, they still fret and fight and pray to keep that administration in power.

But tonight that very administration is torturing a young man -- torturing him -- for telling the truth about the crimes being committed by the machinery of evil that their standard-bearer, the Peace Laureate, now proudly directs. If you support this administration, then you support the torture of Bradley Manning. You are working to guarantee that such tortures, and worse, are inflicted on more and more truth-tellers, more and more people whose consciences have been jolted to the core by the abominations they have witnessed or learned about from others.

The militarist, corporatist, liberty-stripping evil that our earnest lovers of humanity fear will come to pass if those evil Republicans come to power is already here, it is happening before their very eyes. "Oh, that Glenn Beck, how terrible he is!" Yes, he is terrible, but I tell you this: Glenn Beck hasn't tortured anyone. Glenn Beck hasn't killed hundreds of defenseless innocent civilians, men, women and children murdered without any warning by robot drones in an undeclared war on an allied nation. Glenn Beck hasn't "surged" an endless, pointless, murderous, money-making war of domination against a broken land and its terrorized people. Glenn Beck is not going to court to defend torturers. Glenn Beck is not proclaiming he has the arbitrary, unchallengeable power to assassinate anyone on earth whenever he feels like it.

But the Peace Laureate has done all these things. He is doing all these things, and more. No doubt Glenn Beck -- and all the other greasy-pole climbers seeking wealth and domination in our degraded society -- would like to do these things too. But those with their eyes fixed on the potential or fantasized future evil of their partisan opponents are blind to the fact that their own faction is committing gross evils right here and now. Barack Obama is entrenching the machinery of evil deeper and deeper into the structures of government and society; he is strengthening the foundations of evil that others will build upon, just as he is building upon the wars and gulags and corporate whoredom of his predecessor. Progressives who support Obama -- who support this entrenching process -- are in fact guaranteeing that their dystopian nightmares of the future will come true. They are helping Obama clear the path for an even rougher, more merciless beast now slouching toward Washington to be born.

As I said, words are beginning to fail me. And in any case, almost no one is reading the words on this site. [Most of the traffic is drawn by the magnificent -- and shattering -- collection of Iraq War photos compiled by the webmaster, Rich Kastelein.] So let me end with the words of someone else: the incomparable Arthur Silber, whose mighty heart and incisive mind have blazed with light through many dark years:

I repeat once more: these horrors are now what the United States stands for. Thus, for every adult American, the question is not, "Why do you obey?" but:

Why do you support?

Or will you refuse to give your support? Will you say, "No"? These are the paramount questions at this moment in history, and in the life of the United States. We all must answer them. Our honor, our humanity, and our souls lie in the balance.

His new piece is an eloquent description of how the nightmare dystopia noted above is already coming into being, a horrible mash-up of Huxley's "Brave New World" and Orwell's "1984." You should read the whole thing, but here are a few excerpts, beginning with his mention of the Bradley Manning case:

...The psychological torture of Pvt. Bradley Manning—who has now been imprisoned for seven months without being convicted of any crime—mirrors the breaking of the dissident Winston Smith at the end of “1984.” Manning is being held as a “maximum custody detainee” in the brig at Marine Corps Base Quantico, in Virginia. He spends 23 of every 24 hours alone. He is denied exercise. He cannot have a pillow or sheets for his bed. Army doctors have been plying him with antidepressants. The cruder forms of torture of the Gestapo have been replaced with refined Orwellian techniques, largely developed by government psychologists, to turn dissidents like Manning into vegetables. We break souls as well as bodies. It is more effective. Now we can all be taken to Orwell’s dreaded Room 101 to become compliant and harmless. These “special administrative measures” are regularly imposed on our dissidents, including Syed Fahad Hashmi, who was imprisoned under similar conditions for three years before going to trial. The techniques have psychologically maimed thousands of detainees in our black sites around the globe. They are the staple form of control in our maximum security prisons where the corporate state makes war on our most politically astute underclass—African-Americans.

...The public, at some point, will have to face some very unpleasant truths. The good-paying jobs are not coming back. The largest deficits in human history mean that we are trapped in a debt peonage system that will be used by the corporate state to eradicate the last vestiges of social protection for citizens, including Social Security. The state has devolved from a capitalist democracy to neo-feudalism. And when these truths become apparent, anger will replace the corporate-imposed cheerful conformity. The bleakness of our post-industrial pockets, where some 40 million Americans live in a state of poverty and tens of millions in a category called “near poverty,” coupled with the lack of credit to save families from foreclosures, bank repossessions and bankruptcy from medical bills, means that inverted totalitarianism will no longer work.

...

The noose is tightening. The era of amusement is being replaced by the era of repression. Tens of millions of citizens have had their e-mails and phone records turned over to the government. We are the most monitored and spied-on citizenry in human history. Many of us have our daily routine caught on dozens of security cameras. Our proclivities and habits are recorded on the Internet. Our profiles are electronically generated. Our bodies are patted down at airports and filmed by scanners. And public service announcements, car inspection stickers, and public transportation posters constantly urge us to report suspicious activity. The enemy is everywhere.

"We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. ... The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

These bedrock truths of our time are now being played out on the body and mind of Bradley Manning. The object of Bradley Manning's torture is not bolstering "national security" or upholding the "rule of law"; the object of his torture is the torture itself: the demonstration of power, the enactment of power, the physical embodiment of power. Power is not a reality until you exercise it -- inflict it -- upon someone else. And that is the essential, the ultimate concern of the militarist empire that rules us today.

Last week, Larry Summers, Obama’s old chief economic adviser, gave a valedictory address as he was walking out the door.

And he chose to give it at a curious place: the Economic Policy Institute, one of the leading progressive think tanks on issues of labor, wages, and unemployment.

Curious because Summers isn’t known as a champion of labor rights.

Yet there was this Clinton leftover, this Harvard scrap, sounding like John Maynard Keynes himself, or at least John Kenneth Galbraith.

He properly blamed the private sector for not spending enough to get the economy going again.

He properly recognized that “without rapid recovery, all of our other goals will become compromised.”

He properly diagnosed what is “holding our economy back” when he cited sustained high unemployment and low capacity utilization. “There cannot be any question,” he said, “that the constraint on our economy now and for the next several years will be lack of demand.”

He properly argued that “it is right and necessary for government to counteract” the failings of the private sector.

He properly acknowledged that “the tax compromise will help, but it’s not enough.”

He properly called for “renewing and upgrading our nation’s infrastructure,” saying “a substantial, sustained effort to rebuild America should be at the top of Washington’s priority next year.”

And he properly denounced the Republican ideology that “would have workers sacrifice wages, benefits, and bargaining rights…would slash taxes on businesses even as their profits rise…would shred social safety nets in the name self-reliance.”

As he put it, “Such Social Darwinism was bad morality and bad economics in the nineteenth century, and it is no better in the twenty-first.”

All this was nice to hear, I suppose.

But it was Summers himself who helped bring about the collapse of the economy by pushing for the deregulation of Wall Street in the late 1990s when he had Clinton’s ear.

And it was Summers himself who proposed a stimulus package that was at least 50% too small when he had Obama’s ear.

Oil is back above $90 a barrel. Copper and cotton have hit record highs. Wheat and corn prices are way up. Over all, world commodity prices have risen by a quarter in the past six months.

So what’s the meaning of this surge?

Is it speculation run amok? Is it the result of excessive money creation, a harbinger of runaway inflation just around the corner? No and no.

What the commodity markets are telling us is that we’re living in a finite world, in which the rapid growth of emerging economies is placing pressure on limited supplies of raw materials, pushing up their prices. And America is, for the most part, just a bystander in this story.

Some background: The last time the prices of oil and other commodities were this high, two and a half years ago, many commentators dismissed the price spike as an aberration driven by speculators. And they claimed vindication when commodity prices plunged in the second half of 2008.

But that price collapse coincided with a severe global recession, which led to a sharp fall in demand for raw materials. The big test would come when the world economy recovered. Would raw materials once again become expensive?

Well, it still feels like a recession in America. But thanks to growth in developing nations, world industrial production recently passed its previous peak — and, sure enough, commodity prices are surging again.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that speculation played no role in 2007-2008. Nor should we reject the notion that speculation is playing some role in current prices; for example, who is that mystery investor who has bought up much of the world’s copper supply? But the fact that world economic recovery has also brought a recovery in commodity prices strongly suggests that recent price fluctuations mainly reflect fundamental factors.

What about commodity prices as a harbinger of inflation? Many commentators on the right have been predicting for years that the Federal Reserve, by printing lots of money — it’s not actually doing that, but that’s the accusation — is setting us up for severe inflation. Stagflation is coming, declared Representative Paul Ryan in February 2009; Glenn Beck has been warning about imminent hyperinflation since 2008.

Yet inflation has remained low. What’s an inflation worrier to do?

One response has been a proliferation of conspiracy theories, of claims that the government is suppressing the truth about rising prices. But lately many on the right have seized on rising commodity prices as proof that they were right all along, as a sign of high overall inflation just around the corner.

You do have to wonder what these people were thinking two years ago, when raw material prices were plunging. If the commodity-price rise of the past six months heralds runaway inflation, why didn’t the 50 percent decline in the second half of 2008 herald runaway deflation?

Inconsistency aside, however, the big problem with those blaming the Fed for rising commodity prices is that they’re suffering from delusions of U.S. economic grandeur. For commodity prices are set globally, and what America does just isn’t that important a factor.

In particular, today, as in 2007-2008, the primary driving force behind rising commodity prices isn’t demand from the United States. It’s demand from China and other emerging economies. As more and more people in formerly poor nations are entering the global middle class, they’re beginning to drive cars and eat meat, placing growing pressure on world oil and food supplies.

And those supplies aren’t keeping pace. Conventional oil production has been flat for four years; in that sense, at least, peak oil has arrived. True, alternative sources, like oil from Canada’s tar sands, have continued to grow. But these alternative sources come at relatively high cost, both monetary and environmental.

Also, over the past year, extreme weather — especially severe heat and drought in some important agricultural regions — played an important role in driving up food prices. And, yes, there’s every reason to believe that climate change is making such weather episodes more common.

So what are the implications of the recent rise in commodity prices? It is, as I said, a sign that we’re living in a finite world, one in which resource constraints are becoming increasingly binding. This won’t bring an end to economic growth, let alone a descent into Mad Max-style collapse. It will require that we gradually change the way we live, adapting our economy and our lifestyles to the reality of more expensive resources.

The two greatest visions of a future dystopia were George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” The debate, between those who watched our descent towards corporate totalitarianism, was who was right. Would we be, as Orwell wrote, dominated by a repressive surveillance and security state that used crude and violent forms of control? Or would we be, as Huxley envisioned, entranced by entertainment and spectacle, captivated by technology and seduced by profligate consumption to embrace our own oppression? It turns out Orwell and Huxley were both right. Huxley saw the first stage of our enslavement. Orwell saw the second.

We have been gradually disempowered by a corporate state that, as Huxley foresaw, seduced and manipulated us through sensual gratification, cheap mass-produced goods, boundless credit, political theater and amusement. While we were entertained, the regulations that once kept predatory corporate power in check were dismantled, the laws that once protected us were rewritten and we were impoverished. Now that credit is drying up, good jobs for the working class are gone forever and mass-produced goods are unaffordable, we find ourselves transported from “Brave New World” to “1984.” The state, crippled by massive deficits, endless war and corporate malfeasance, is sliding toward bankruptcy. It is time for Big Brother to take over from Huxley’s feelies, the orgy-porgy and the centrifugal bumble-puppy. We are moving from a society where we are skillfully manipulated by lies and illusions to one where we are overtly controlled.

Orwell warned of a world where books were banned. Huxley warned of a world where no one wanted to read books. Orwell warned of a state of permanent war and fear. Huxley warned of a culture diverted by mindless pleasure. Orwell warned of a state where every conversation and thought was monitored and dissent was brutally punished. Huxley warned of a state where a population, preoccupied by trivia and gossip, no longer cared about truth or information. Orwell saw us frightened into submission. Huxley saw us seduced into submission. But Huxley, we are discovering, was merely the prelude to Orwell. Huxley understood the process by which we would be complicit in our own enslavement. Orwell understood the enslavement. Now that the corporate coup is over, we stand naked and defenseless. We are beginning to understand, as Karl Marx knew, that unfettered and unregulated capitalism is a brutal and revolutionary force that exploits human beings and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse.

“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake,” Orwell wrote in “1984.” “We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin uses the term “inverted totalitarianism” in his book “Democracy Incorporated” to describe our political system. It is a term that would make sense to Huxley. In inverted totalitarianism, the sophisticated technologies of corporate control, intimidation and mass manipulation, which far surpass those employed by previous totalitarian states, are effectively masked by the glitter, noise and abundance of a consumer society. Political participation and civil liberties are gradually surrendered. The corporation state, hiding behind the smokescreen of the public relations industry, the entertainment industry and the tawdry materialism of a consumer society, devours us from the inside out. It owes no allegiance to us or the nation. It feasts upon our carcass.

The corporate state does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader. It is defined by the anonymity and facelessness of the corporation. Corporations, who hire attractive spokespeople like Barack Obama, control the uses of science, technology, education and mass communication. They control the messages in movies and television. And, as in “Brave New World,” they use these tools of communication to bolster tyranny. Our systems of mass communication, as Wolin writes, “block out, eliminate whatever might introduce qualification, ambiguity, or dialogue, anything that might weaken or complicate the holistic force of their creation, to its total impression.”

The result is a monochromatic system of information. Celebrity courtiers, masquerading as journalists, experts and specialists, identify our problems and patiently explain the parameters. All those who argue outside the imposed parameters are dismissed as irrelevant cranks, extremists or members of a radical left. Prescient social critics, from Ralph Nader to Noam Chomsky, are banished. Acceptable opinions have a range of A to B. The culture, under the tutelage of these corporate courtiers, becomes, as Huxley noted, a world of cheerful conformity, as well as an endless and finally fatal optimism. We busy ourselves buying products that promise to change our lives, make us more beautiful, confident or successful as we are steadily stripped of rights, money and influence. All messages we receive through these systems of communication, whether on the nightly news or talk shows like “Oprah,” promise a brighter, happier tomorrow. And this, as Wolin points out, is “the same ideology that invites corporate executives to exaggerate profits and conceal losses, but always with a sunny face.” We have been entranced, as Wolin writes, by “continuous technological advances” that “encourage elaborate fantasies of individual prowess, eternal youthfulness, beauty through surgery, actions measured in nanoseconds: a dream-laden culture of ever-expanding control and possibility, whose denizens are prone to fantasies because the vast majority have imagination but little scientific knowledge.”

Our manufacturing base has been dismantled. Speculators and swindlers have looted the U.S. Treasury and stolen billions from small shareholders who had set aside money for retirement or college. Civil liberties, including habeas corpus and protection from warrantless wiretapping, have been taken away. Basic services, including public education and health care, have been handed over to the corporations to exploit for profit. The few who raise voices of dissent, who refuse to engage in the corporate happy talk, are derided by the corporate establishment as freaks.

Attitudes and temperament have been cleverly engineered by the corporate state, as with Huxley’s pliant characters in “Brave New World.” The book’s protagonist, Bernard Marx, turns in frustration to his girlfriend Lenina:

“Don’t you wish you were free, Lenina?” he asks.

“I don’t know that you mean. I am free, free to have the most wonderful time. Everybody’s happy nowadays.”

He laughed, “Yes, ‘Everybody’s happy nowadays.’ We have been giving the children that at five. But wouldn’t you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example; not in everybody else’s way.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she repeated.

We increasingly live in Orwell’s Oceania, not Huxley’s The World State. Osama bin Laden plays the role assumed by Emmanuel Goldstein in “1984.” Goldstein, in the novel, is the public face of terror. His evil machinations and clandestine acts of violence dominate the nightly news. Goldstein’s image appears each day on Oceania’s television screens as part of the nation’s “Two Minutes of Hate” daily ritual. And without the intervention of the state, Goldstein, like bin Laden, will kill you. All excesses are justified in the titanic fight against evil personified.

The psychological torture of Pvt. Bradley Manning—who has now been imprisoned for seven months without being convicted of any crime—mirrors the breaking of the dissident Winston Smith at the end of “1984.” Manning is being held as a “maximum custody detainee” in the brig at Marine Corps Base Quantico, in Virginia. He spends 23 of every 24 hours alone. He is denied exercise. He cannot have a pillow or sheets for his bed. Army doctors have been plying him with antidepressants. The cruder forms of torture of the Gestapo have been replaced with refined Orwellian techniques, largely developed by government psychologists, to turn dissidents like Manning into vegetables. We break souls as well as bodies. It is more effective. Now we can all be taken to Orwell’s dreaded Room 101 to become compliant and harmless. These “special administrative measures” are regularly imposed on our dissidents, including Syed Fahad Hashmi, who was imprisoned under similar conditions for three years before going to trial. The techniques have psychologically maimed thousands of detainees in our black sites around the globe. They are the staple form of control in our maximum security prisons where the corporate state makes war on our most politically astute underclass—African-Americans. It all presages the shift from Huxley to Orwell.

“Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling,” Winston Smith’s torturer tells him in “1984.” “Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

The noose is tightening. The era of amusement is being replaced by the era of repression. Tens of millions of citizens have had their e-mails and phone records turned over to the government. We are the most monitored and spied-on citizenry in human history. Many of us have our daily routine caught on dozens of security cameras. Our proclivities and habits are recorded on the Internet. Our profiles are electronically generated. Our bodies are patted down at airports and filmed by scanners. And public service announcements, car inspection stickers, and public transportation posters constantly urge us to report suspicious activity. The enemy is everywhere.

Those who do not comply with the dictates of the war on terror, a war which, as Orwell noted, is endless, are brutally silenced. The draconian security measures used to cripple protests at the G-20 gatherings in Pittsburgh and Toronto were wildly disproportionate for the level of street activity. But they sent a clear message—DO NOT TRY THIS. The FBI’s targeting of antiwar and Palestinian activists, which in late September saw agents raid homes in Minneapolis and Chicago, is a harbinger of what is to come for all who dare defy the state’s official Newspeak. The agents—our Thought Police—seized phones, computers, documents and other personal belongings. Subpoenas to appear before a grand jury have since been served on 26 people. The subpoenas cite federal law prohibiting “providing material support or resources to designated foreign terrorist organizations.” Terror, even for those who have nothing to do with terror, becomes the blunt instrument used by Big Brother to protect us from ourselves.

So, class, what have we learned from the past week or two of the lame duck Congress and our just plain-old lame president?

A few things, actually. Not – since lameness trumps all else – that they’ll necessarily matter, though.

One thing – which is actually only new to someone who has spent the last several decades not paying attention to American politics (Barack, are you listening?) – is that there is effectively no bottom to the depths to which Republicans will sink in order to serve their plutocratic masters and strip the country bare. I mean none. Zero. Nada. Zip. They are capable of absolutely anything. Learning From Lame Ducks

Again, this is only news if you somehow managed to sleep through McCarthyism. Or even through your high school history lecture on McCarthyism. It’s only news if you’d been on an extended Disneyland holiday for the two years of Watergate. Or maybe you were you were off fishing in Antarctica when the first failed Bush was using racist Willie Horton ads to win the presidency. It’s only novel if you were comatose later when Karl Rove and the Wee Bush, along with their merry band of Vietnam war avoiders, savaged in succession John McCain, Max Cleland and John Kerry for their supposed national security failings, in order to score political points. It’s only news if you somehow slept through the travesty of Bush vs. Gore, when the regressive majority on the Supreme Court did a total 180 on all their previously held, deeply-deeply-felt, values in order to shove the little brat across the finish line and into the Oval Office.

For the rest of us, however, this is not a giant shock. True to form, there were the Republicans these last weeks insisting on the one thing they absolutely had to have in any deal, which of course was massive tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. That was their sine qua non, and that’s just what they got when Mr. Happy in the White House went into the alley once again carrying only flowers, while the other guys brought knives. And aircraft carriers. After he repeats this performance two years from now and makes these boondoggles for the wealthy permanent, the cost to the American treasury will total something like $830 billion over the next ten years. All borrowed, of course. And almost all to be repaid by non-elites when it comes back in the form of loans due, plus interest. When even Ayn Rand disciple Alan Greenspan urges the government not to do this, you know it must be incredibly damaging.

But why not let Wall Street itself speak. These great patriots who demand that the government pile more wealth on top of existing enormous stacks will in fact completely abandon their much-beloved host country as soon as the financials suggest that is the way to go. It may not be long. This plan is so bad that Moody’s is now – for the first time in, what, centuries? Ever? – calling into question the credit-worthiness of the United States government. Their assessment of the deal is that “the negative effects on government finance are likely to outweigh the positive effects of higher economic growth. Unless there are offsetting measures, the package will be credit negative for the U.S. and increase the likelihood of a negative outlook on the U.S. government's Aaa rating during the next two years.”

Golly, you know, I’m not entirely hep on that whole investment-casino-racket-game, but that sounds an awful lot to me like the noise made by dead canaries in coal mines. Doesn’t it?

And yet these same Republicans held unemployment benefits hostage to this give-away to the wealthy. Benefits for people who are suffering because of the Great Recession that Republicans themselves created. And some of them even make the most astonishingly crass comments about the poor slobs out there with no jobs, no prospects, and no hope, thanks to the GOP. Said Orrin Hatch, “We should not be giving cash to people who basically are just gonna blow it on drugs." I’m not gonna say what I really think should be done to someone that heartless, because doing so would probably just buy me a visit from the Secret Service. Are there really people like this? In the highest bodies of government? In the world’s sole superpower?

It’s absolutely amazing. But not even that could top what these same folks did when they refused to pass legislation to pay for medical care for those first-responders who went into the burning maw of the 9/11 World Trade Center pile. They argued that the government couldn’t afford the expense a handful of billions of dollars to take care of these firemen and police officers and emergency crews, even though the expense was actually compensated for in the bill by raised fees. You really have to shake your head in wonder at these guys. First, because it is amazing to contemplate what could have happened to such people in their youth that could have turned them into these complete sociopaths, utterly unfeeling of other people’s grief, and utterly amoral. And secondly, you have to shake your head in amazement that any politician could be so seemingly out of touch with the values of the country that they would dare come out against funding medical care for 9/11 first-responders. But, finally, you have to shake your head in awe that these same people just won resounding victories in the last national election. Which makes you wonder just who is out of touch with national values and who is not? The voting public seems to agree that the wealthy need more and bigger tax cuts, and that they need them even if that means we can’t afford to pay for treating the severe respiratory illnesses of those who answered the call on 9/11 and plunged into a rescue effort. No, in addition to having to live through the horrors of those days and relive them for the rest of their lives, then getting extremely ill and having their quality of life ruined and its quantity cut short because of their sacrifice, they should also have to pay for their own medical treatment. You know, so that billionaires can become multibillionaires.

Fortunately, this story has a happy ending. Of sorts. After the amount in question was chopped down, twice, the Republicans finally relented and agreed to the bill. But, by all accounts, what really did the trick was Jon Stewart expressing the same moral outrage about their position on this question that inhabits the paragraph above. Which suggests that, yes, in fact, these sick sociopaths can be shamed. Or, at least – since I doubt they actually have any shame at all – that they can be moved to change their votes out of fear of losing their jobs (call it ‘play shame’). And this is the second lesson of the lame duck Congress.

But notice who did the shaming here, and who did not. It sure wasn’t the mainstream media. And, incredibly, it wasn’t the opposition party to the Republicans.

I hope to live long enough to understand American politics in our time. I really ought to, since people pay me money to teach it to college undergrads. But I confess it remains mysterious in certain profound ways. I certainly get that on economic issues there’s hardly any difference any more between Reptilians and Demoncrats. Indeed, on such issues it is nearly a complete misnomer to even speak of them as separate parties. They are merely two cooperative wings of the same plutocracy. Sorta like the Army and the Marines. Sure, those two services of the same Defense Department have lots of disputes and rivalries over mission and funding. But when they United States military invades your country, you’re not gonna be noticing any real difference between which part of the hammer is bonking you over the head. Similarly, when the oligarchs seek to strip the very paint off the USS US, ever since Bill Clinton brought us the New Democrat model they can call upon either party or both to get the job done.

So I get that part. What I don’t get, however, is why self-interested politicians don’t pursue their self-interest, especially when it is handed to them on a silver platter. I don’t believe that Democrats give a shit about the American public, but don’t they care desperately about their own political careers? Wouldn’t they really, really rather win elections than get humiliated in them? And isn’t it logical to assume that they would use every weapon available to achieve that end, especially those that actually come with no skanky baggage attached? What I’ve been puzzling about for decades is why Democrats don’t do the same thing Jon Stewart did?

Clearly, there are some things that Republicans do that are harder than others to criticize. Jingoistic displays of ‘toughness’ against some foreign bogeyman du jour is always going to play well with the hoi polloi, who like their politics bumper-sticker sized, and reducible down to one-act (if not one-sentence) morality plays, in which they inevitably are on the side of Good. And god. Same with taxes. It’s pretty easy to sell people on the idea of getting more money, especially when you pretend that such so-called tax cuts are cost-free.

But there’s also so much else that Republicans say and do that is just absolutely outrageous, and could be just hammered against them if Democrats had the slightest inclination to do so. Remember when George W. Bush said the Iraq war was over before it had really even begun? How utterly lame was that? Remember when that Vietnam era coward told the folks killing American GIs in Iraq by the thousands to “Bring it on!”? Remember when he did a ‘hilarious’ video send-up of himself searching all over his office for those missing WMDs, the whole pretext for the invasion of Iraq and the eight year war which has followed? Remember when he said he didn’t really care that much about catching Osama bin Laden, or when he just shrugged his shoulders in response to indications that the North Koreans were about to explode a nuclear warhead? Remember when Donald Rumsfeld amply demonstrated his indifference to the soldiers under his command after they asked for simple protective armament, and he responded that “You go to war with the army you have, not that one you want?”

I could go on and on here, but the point is obvious. These clowns continually leave themselves wide open for withering attack, just as they did by opposing unemployment extensions for ‘lazy’ laid-off workers, or by opposing the pittance cost to provide health care for 9/11 first-responders, all based on the claim that we can’t afford the spending, even though we absolutely must give massive tax cuts to billionaires.

But the Democrats don’t ever attack, even for their own survival, and least of all does the hapless excuse for a chief executive now in the White House. Like I said, lame I get. Bought-off I get. But this?

Oh well. Nobody in Washington is going to change their stripes tomorrow because I told them to. But if we’re looking for lessons from these last weeks, here’s another – and it’s a powerful one. One of the country’s preeminent comedians showed half the political class what they couldn’t figure out for themselves – namely, how to accept gift-wrapped opportunities from the other half for the latter’s annihilation.

These are not exactly surprising revelations, and they’re not even necessarily newsworthy. But there has been one development lately that is semi-novel and potentially very consequential. Or, at least, it would be, if the Democrats had even the slightest bit of gumption.

What I’m referring to is the splitting of the Republican Party on several of the key votes cast over recent days. On Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, on the New START treaty with the Russians, on the tax bill and on the 9/11 first-responders health care bill, the heretofore highly monolithic Republican Party showed fissures that are really unusual compared to most all of their historical behavior over the last thirty years. It’s not that the GOP never splits, it’s just that it’s so rare. And to have it happen this many times in this short a period presents some intriguing possibilities.

Party discipline has been key to Republican success during these years, especially the last two, when they were in the much repudiated minority, and at a time when every single vote in the Senate was potentially the difference between having the 60 necessary to move forward on legislation that had clear majority support, or seeing it bottled up forever. (There was, of course, always the third alternative, in which Democrats would make Republicans actually do the filibuster over an unpopular cause, thus forcing the GOP to bring a public relations disaster down on their own heads. Or the fourth alternative, in which the Democrats could have used their majority to change the rules of the Senate in order to make it far more democratic in nature. Of course, either of these would have required the Democrats to be interested in genuine public service and to have even a moderate willingness to stand up for themselves, which explains why neither occurred.)

In any case, there are now some preliminary indications that the Republicans are not so disciplined anymore. And, what’s more, while it’s very early to tell, the fissures within the party seem to perhaps be multiple. I see the GOP as having essentially three camps, which can be thought of as being arrayed ideologically, from right to way far right. There is also a chronological ordering these factions as well.

On the left side of the spectrum (though far from being left) are the last gasps of the old center-right, Eastern, Rockefeller Republicans who once in fact dominated the party. They are virtually extinct nowadays, either abandoned by constituents because of their association with the freaks controlling the party, beaten by those freaks in a primary challenge, or reinvented as some sort other creature, as Arlen Specter (who actually fits into all three of these categories) tried to pull off. But there are still a few of them around – Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe from Maine, sometimes along with Richard Lugar, may be the only remaining such dinosaurs – and in close votes they can matter.

To their right are the Establishment Republicans, which is simultaneously both the old insurrectionary class and the current defenders against the new insurrectionary class. These are folks who are the radical-bonkers-predatory-Cro-Magnons of 1990s vintage, who became the mainstream by virtue of the country’s politics moving rightward and by their killing off the Neanderthals mentioned above. These are the children of Gingrich and the grandchildren of Reagan – people (at least in appearance – they could as easily be reptiles instead) like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner.

They’ve had the party to themselves for a while, but now the tea party guerillas (or is it gorillas?) have arisen, in part by trashing the old guard as irresponsible big spenders. It’s not at all clear that the party leadership has control over these professed radicals, and not at all clear what happens if they refuse to play ball on, say, spending, or raising the debt ceiling.

All in all, this makes for some interesting opportunities and possibilities. Or, it could, that is. Again, there’s not much use for potential fissures in the opposition if there’s no one around to actually exploit them. There might be some real possibility here for the use of wedge issues to explode the differences in the GOP, or at least to make them pay at the ballot box for what they have to do to paper over those differences. Republicans have been doing this to their opponents for quite some time, to enormous electoral success – for example, using gay-bashing to peel off social conservatives from the Democratic Party and getting them to vote against their own economic interest.

But that would require Democrats to do what has come naturally to Republicans for decades, but is more or less anathema for the helpless, hapless Dems.

It’s called playing hardball. It’s called playing to win.

The lame duck Congress brought some surprises and some notable victories. It’s fair to say, for instance, that repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell may the biggest single civil rights leap forward we’ve seen in half a century. That’s no small thing, of course, but it’s well to remember two caveats there. The first is that what we’re talking about is essentially a negative victory – the undoing of what was a really bad idea to start with, going back to its beginning nearly two decades ago. That may be progress of a sort, but it’s kinda like somebody reaching into your pocket and pulling out a hundred dollar bill, then later handing it back to you. You might feel like you’re that much richer, but you really shouldn’t.

The other missing ingredient here is that the president, who may not have even worked particularly hard behind the scenes for this legislation, surely didn’t get out front on it. That is to say that he – unlike Lyndon Johnson or Jack Kennedy – never used the bully pulpit to make the moral case for why this is the right and essential task for the nation at this time. Civil rights legislation and moral haranguing go hand in hand, each reinforcing and further advancing the other. Barack taking a powder on one of the great moral causes of our day doesn’t exactly help make life in America better and safer for gays and lesbians. Indeed, it’s worse than that. By stating that he still opposes gay marriage, he is absolutely part of the problem, not the solution.

My guess is that we’re going to be seeing more of that. The last two years have been disappointing and arguably quite disastrous for the country. That produced a lovely vicious cycle, which gave us Election 2010, the results of which are now likely to produce even more disastrous politics over the coming two years.

This was all ridiculously unnecessary, but that’s how it works with Obama and his party.

So here's my question:

Really?

I mean, seriously -- really? This is how the Bush State Department was spending its time -- on a single screening of 'Fahrenheit 9/11' in freakin' New Zealand? Or maybe ... was this kind of interference happening just to New Zealand? Call me crazy, but I gotta feelin' it doesn't stop there. Just as a health insurance executive has now come forward as a whistleblower to reveal the millions spent to smear 'Sicko,' I can't wait for that day when the whistleblower from the Bush White House comes forward to tell the fascinating tale of how the Bush team believed they had to do something -- anything -- to stop 'Fahrenheit.' Or worse (like the "Plan B" the health insurance companies discussed -- to "push Michael Moore off a cliff."). I didn't want to think about what the Bush Plan B would be. Just wasn't worth the crazy-making. So I ignored the things I'd hear, kept my head down and motored on.

But, it does make you wonder. And I ask you, is it fair to pose the question: If they were this focused on some insignificant screening in New Zealand, what else were they up to? And I don't mean in regards to me. I mean anyone who was on their enemies list ...

I can't wait to read more classified cables.

P.S. Of course, given the false claims the State Department made in the other "secret" cable about my movie 'Sicko,' I guess anything was possible.