Here's the deal:  Two years ago, I attended a televised debate for the Utah Senate race.  This year, I have a seat for the debate again.  Chances are pretty good I'll get to ask a question - it's a two hour debate with a small audience.  

The race between Hatch and Ashdown is one I care about.  I live near Pete Ashdown in Salt Lake, he's a great guy and has the potential to be a great Senator.

There are some basic rules:  Questions have to be for both candidates, can't be directed to one or the other, and it has to be an issue of relevance to Utah voters.  Finally, it can't be a speech - it has to be a fairly direct question - I get about 50 to 100 words.  

So I need help.  Help me draft a great question that Orrin Hatch and Pete Ashdown can answer.

The answer is nothing.  Conservatives in the US protesting anything that offends them is no different than the Muslims currently attacking embassies over editorial cartoons.  It's only a matter of degree.  Both groups are asking the rest of us to do the same thing - never utter a word, publish a story or image, produce a TV show or movie that offends their delicate religious sensibilities.  Both groups require the same response:

If you want to express your views, you have to let other people express their views.  If you are offended, the onus lies not on the rest of us, but on you.  Grow up.

I was listening to the Evita Soundtrack and there was a line that struck me as particulary apt for responding to almost everything George W. Bush says.  It's in the beginning as Che is recapping Evita's governing days and he says, "She didn't say much but she said it loud."

I think variations on this work for beginning almost any response to George W. Bush.  For instance, a domestic policy speech - we respond by saying, "What you have to admire about George W. Bush is the way he doesn't say much but he sure says it loud.  This was another call for tax cuts for millionaires and corporations.  Those are the only ideas he's got about domestic policy."  Or a foreign affairs speech.  "Well, of course he talked about terrorism.  He doesn't say much about actually uniting the world against terrorists because he doesn't have much to say.  That's why he keeps using the megaphone of the Whitehouse to repeat himself."

Just a thought.

I've been pondering the whole warrantless wiretapping, spying on Americans approach taken by Bush and defended by Republicans - what is an effective way to talk about it?  I think the beginning is the need to ask why the President and his defenders don't trust average Americans?  The whole premise is that Americans are in league with terrorists, are actively working to undermine the US, are making contact with terrorists in an effort to promote violence in the US.  This is a convenient and cheap way to score political points, but shows a basic distrust of American citizens.  Maybe we should start asking "Why does the President think ordinary Americans are in league with terrorists?  Can he point to one citizen knowingly, actively aiding terrorists?"

I'm also struck by the common refrain "If you're innocent you have nothing to hide."  The response I've started giving is, "As an American citizen I have the right to keep my conversations private from the Government.  Doing so is not hiding, it is exercising my freedom as an American and no president has the right under any guise to infringe on my liberty as a citizen."

There's a temptest in a teapot about a new website which claims to track leftist professors who are brainwashing students as UCLA.  Conservatives commentary seems to envision liberalism as something alien, foreign to the American body politic.  Liberals are seen as tainting people, as converting people.  Much conservative commentary contains the often stated belief that conservativism (at least in its current incarnation) represents "real" American values, the conservatives are "real" Americans, that conservative Christians as "real" Christians, while liberalism represents inauthentic, faux, or even outright traitorous Americans, Christians and values.

It suddenly occurred to me that conservatives at some level see liberalism as a disease, with the potential to invade, to take over the body politic, and one which must be destroyed or expelled to save the body politic.

To extend the metaphor, if liberalism is a virus, then avoiding the virus is the only way to be safe.  Conservatives often talk about surviving liberal university professors, much as they might talk about surviving a serious bout of the flu.

If liberalism is a contagion that can be caught or fought, it can be also be cured.  A consistent character in the Rightwing narrative is the liberal who saw the light.  That liberal may be someone who favored abortion rights, someone who was once a feminist, or someone who was once gay but has now been cured.  The conservative focus on ideological purity makes a kind of sense.  Indoctrination by liberal teachers is a danger because "impressionable young minds can't protect themselves."  

Read through a sampling of right wing religious sites and you'll see a mindset of preparation - preparing one's self to confront liberals, of preparing one's children to resist them.  

A few years ago, the book Battleground chronicled a fight in a Tennessee public school to remove a particular reading textbook because it supposedly contained secular humanism.  The mother who discovered it said to a friend of hers, "It's here!  It is here!  Secular humanism in Hawkins County!"  And dangerous because it was invisible - a disease reaching mind with no immune system to fight it off.  

That multiple ideas should be considered, that multiple points of view and opinions are valuable is dangerous because it means implicitly that no one idea is completely correct.  In the end, the mother lost her fight but maintained her worldview, rejecting every dangerously liberal idea.  She held true to the true beliefs.  Virtue for her wasn't seeing new ideas, evaluating them, understanding them and then changing her current belief system as necessary - it was keeping true to her original, "correct" belief system and resisting the dangerous liberal infection.

One of the downsides of having grown up in the US is the constant background noise of the wingnuts and their endless revolving enemies of America list.  First, they had the communists, who may have been real enemies but who were never quite the enemy conservatives wanted.  Communist expansionism pretty much stopped when Nixon went to China and the obvious cracks in communist bloc became apparent for all to see.  By the late 70's, it was obvious the Soviet Union was collapsing from internal pressures and it was just a matter of time before it fell to pieces.  

Robbed of their favorite devil, conservatives invented on a host of domestic enemies.

These "enemies" were liberals, gays and lesbians, feminists, abortion doctors, atheists, the ACLU, environmentalists, college professors intellectuals and finally "New World Order types".  This list filled the gap pretty well.  They provided convenient scapegoats for the general gone to hellness of the world.  Wingnuts could argue against their nefarious unfolding schemes endlessly since the schemes actually existed only in the febrile imaginations of the wingnuts.  The jeremiads against them could last forever and new "evidence" could be invented or discovered as needed to feed the red maw of the hungry conservative talk show circuit.

Sure, there are liberals, gays and lesbians, feminists, abortion doctors, atheists, the ACLU, environmentalists, college professors intellectuals and "New World Order types", but very few of them bother to work together and they certainly aren't some highly organized cabal seeking world domination.  They are largely ordinary Americans living their lives.  In the end, they were effective as bugbears precisely because they were average people who would mis-speak in public and give the conservative commentators a useful "scary" quote for their next show or article or book.  Michelle Malkin is a peddler of this kind of crap par-excellence.  

There's been much talk in the blogosphere about the way in which the 101st Fighting Keyboarders and chickenhawks are also pissing their pants scared of Muslim Terrorists.  The answer is easy - they've found themselves a real world enemy who fights back, who uses their exact same PR tactics and the kind of tactics they wish they could use in terms of actual real world destruction.  So of course all the Yellow Elephants and the Chickenhawks and the Fighting Keyboarders are scared trouserless of terrorists.  It is the first time in their lives they've had themselves an actual, real world enemy who actually has plans and means of doing what they've been claiming their enemies are doing.  

When your enemy is some college professor no one else had ever heard of, it's easy to talk tough.  But when your enemy is actually ready, willing and able to get someone to blow themselves up to kill Americans, tough talk doesn't cut it.  If you're only weapon is tough talk and a swagger, it's damned scary to face a real world enemy who doesn't give a flying fig about all your tought talk.  An enemy who hasn't read your latest screed from Regnery Publishing or your latest sermon delivered on Justice Sunday.  When your enemy doesn't care if Richard Melon Scaife dumped $5 million into your think-tank, the world is a much scarier place.  When your enemy isn't scared by your big nuclear missile, suddenly the world is a much scarier place to be.

So, yeah, the conservative hairy chested he-man woman-hater's club is full of scared little boys pissing their pants at the thought of facing a real world enemy.  

And you should be.  Compared to the hobgoblins you've been targeting for forty years now, you've got yourselves some real enemies boys, and they won't be cowed by your tough talk, your books, your radio shows, your speeches on the conservative talk show circuit.  

These real world bad guys aren't impressed by your gift of gab or your oh-so effective talking points.  They know your fears better than you know them yourselves.  So yeah, you better be afraid of them, cause they've got your number and they know every trick in your book is only going to get them more loyal followers.  

You've got yourselves som real enemies now boys, and it's going take a real leader to do anything effective against them.  And your coke-head, drunken fratboy President doesn't have the stones or the smarts to do a damn thing about this real world enemy.  Just cause you think he'd be fun at your latest pool party kegger doesn't mean that he's got what it takes to lead against a real world enemy.

If you're all real lucky, the next FDR is going come along and pull your hides out of the fire.  And then you can go back to scaring yourselves with your fairytales about liberals, gays and lesbians, feminists, abortion doctors, atheists, the ACLU, environmentalists, college professors intellectuals and "New World Order types".  Just don't try messing around in the real again you.  Cause you don't have what it takes.

Speaking in Code - i.e. "Rovian English"

When I was in college we had a saying: Reality is the leading cause of stress among those in touch with it.

For those out of touch with reality, it ultimately becomes the leading cause of stress as well - reality has a habit of intruding on your constructed reality and eventually bringing the house of cards down.  The time it takes to bring the edifice down and whether or not the reality denying can deal with this eventuality are the only uncertainties.  The Bush Administration is in this boat, right now - they can't escape reality and they can't deal with it.  Certainly, George Bush bears responsibility for this - after all, he's a dry drunk who has yet to acknowledge the mistakes of his past.  But, Utah born and raised Karl Rove is far more culpable.

Within the Mormon culture that produced Karl Rove public discussion is carefully coded; sexuality, violence, women's rights, glbt rights, racism, sexism are never addressed directly or honestly; the Mormon Church published a document about "Same Sex Attraction" to help their members cope with homosexuality, a word which is never used in the document.  Mormons learn to talk about same sex attraction, rather than sexual orientation.  The Mormon church has institutionalized and calcified a system of separate but equal for women, arguing that women should be kept out of decision-making and positions of authority by extolling the virtues of femininity, motherhood, and womanhood.  Women are told their calling as mothers is so great, so important, that it is equal to any position of authority in the Mormon church.  Women who complain who are branded trouble makers.  Women who want to receive the Mormon priesthood are regarded as somehow sick or wrong.

Andrew Sullivan is flogging a rumor about Rumsfeld being out and Lieberman replacing him.  It's a seductive and plausible rumor for several reasons:

1. Lieberman is actually dumb enough to take the job if it's offered to him.
   
2. Lieberman looks like a reasonable person who would be honest, end torture etc.
   

2a. Lieberman is actually as bad as Rumsfeld and so Bush would be comfortable working with him.
3. It gives conservatives the appearance of bipartisan cover for their war-mongering ways.

Here's why I think Lieberman would consider not taking it:
It would be the end of presidential ambitions and his political career.  He could never win a race as a Democrat again if he works in the Bush Administration and he can't run as a Republican because the R base would NEVER trust him, simply because he was Al Gore's running mate..  Lieberman seems to be a fundamentally self-serving man, incapable of truncating his political career by taking a job with the Bushies.