A couple of years ago, I told of an incident from my youth. An adult neighbor demanded to know what I thought about politics, and so I answered.

Pointing his finger in my face, he screamed that young bums like me just wanted to tear the country down, that we had no respect for the law. I managed to blurt out that I had not broken any laws that I knew of, but that only made the man more angry. In a flash, I had become the manifestation of every unpatriotic punk he had seen on television, burning flags while our brave boys died fighting communism.

My mom quickly spirited me out of the fellow's house while my dad stayed behind to calm the enraged man. I could hear him yelling behind us as we went down the street. "You broke my law. You broke MY law." Before we got home, the neighbor's son caught up with us. "Man, that was COOL."

A syndicated columnist, Leonard Pitts, shares his frustration at similar logic, expressed with less drama. A reader of his, writing to his office, insisted that no black US soldier had ever been a combat hero before 1947. He was under the impression that, since the armed forces had been segregated up to then, black men had been barred from combat. Documentation would not sway him. He knew for a fact that black Americans had never seen combat, and any evidence to the contrary was liberal trickery.

As conservatives repeat the most elemental untruths as fact, we on the not-lunatic-right-wing roll our eyes at outrageous acts of false witness. A couple of days ago the Republican Governor of Mississippi, Haley Barbour expressed his opinion that Americans have rejected the health care proposals passed by the Senate and the House. Nothing wrong with that opinion, and you can make the case, depending on what poll you use. But then he explained why he believes Americans don't like the plan under consideration. "Their idea of health care reform is the cost should go down. And in this one, CBO says the cost will go up." Actually, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office says the exact direct opposite. Reform would lower health care costs and reduce the deficit.

The Governor went on. "So this is a system that is very bad for jobs because it clobbers small business." In fact, only 14% of America's businesses, the largest mega-corporations, would have any shared responsibility requirement.

As it happens, polling shows that the more Americans are informed of what is in health reform plans, the more they are enthusiastic in supporting reform. It is possible that Republicans are simply as deceptive as they appear. Never let the truth interfere with a good story. An alternative is that they genuinely do not know what they choose not to know.

...if they could do it, and I don't know if they can do it, but if they could do it -- what you have done, effectively, is to take away the filibuster in the United States Senate. So, therefore, you have 51 votes in the House and 51 votes in the Senate. That is not what our Founding Fathers had in mind. That is not the constitutional process.

 - - Dan Quayle, former Vice President, February 12, 2010
     On what his imagination informs him of US Constitutional History

It was not pay to play but sacrifice to serve. Rod Blagojevich wasn't possible in the old politics.

 - - Former Senator Adlai Stevenson III (D-IL), April 9, 2009

The ebb and flow of political life is exciting. We watch with the enthusiasm of a rabid sports fan. It is, in some ways, about more than policy. It defines a relationship between each citizen and the society at large.

As Republicans prepare for ascendancy we can take some comfort in a political time line with an arc longer than a single election cycle. Over the last three decades, we have seen the pendulum swing somewhat wildly. We have gone from a Reagan revolution, complete with the public smashing of the Democratic Party, followed by the victory of Bill Clinton. Then the Newt Gingrich-led re-revolution, and the political scandals that we all thought would topple a Democratic President. The squeaking victory of Bush, bought with some muscle in the vote counting in Florida, overturned a narrow expression of popular will for Gore. 9/11 brought back Republican victory, followed by two elections favoring Democrats. And, of course, there is Barack Obama. In November, Republicans will very probably take the House, perhaps the Senate. So if you don't like who's in office, you can wait a couple of years.

Except, except. Under the surface, a process hides. Each Democratic swing has been more pronounced. Each Republican turn has been weaker. GOP bluster has not been matched by numbers. There is a reason that goes beyond the "R" or "D" behind the name of electoral hopefuls.

Beginning in the 1990s, the underlying trend became pronounced. Thoughtful blogger Steve Benen catches the edge of it, but only the edge, in his review of a poll of Republicans. "The results were discouraging," he says. It is true on several levels. More Republicans want to see the President impeached than not. A large number buy the myth that he was born outside of the United States. A sizable percentage think he hates white people, and that he wants terrorists to win. A huge majority of Republicans say he is a socialist.

Benen links to politico for a silver lining: "One of the lingering questions is whether these extreme beliefs will push more reasonable voters away from the GOP." He understandably bemoans what he calls the megaphone gap. Voters at large don't seem to notice the extremism of the GOP.

It is that very gap that is, over time, dismantling what used to be the Party of Lincoln. Technology is the fuel. Cable and internet now give conservatives the ability to shield themselves from the day-to-day news coverage that we in the reality based community follow. The extreme John Birch Society type conspiracy belief system is an important symptom, but not the only one.

Moderates were expelled, and the influence of conservatives grew in their absence. Mainstream conservatives are being driven out, and their flight leaves the GOP in the hands of an ever bolder extreme element. The party shrinks as a consequence. It's been going on for a long time.

Need encouragement? Don't watch the waves. Watch the tide.

Power corrupts, begins the old saying. But an alternate temptation, I think, is associated with ideology. The quest for victory carries its own siren call. Over the years, I slowly developed a grudging empathy with the Watergate criminals. I completely agree with the condemnation by such luminaries as the late Stewart Alsop, who contrasted that Republican dirty tricks campaign with the OSS, and declared it to be outside the realm of politics. "They were making war, special kind of war," he wrote. "The kind of war they were making has been made between nations for a long time now, but it has not before been made within a nation, certainly not within this nation."

The special form of warfare waged by OSS against Adolf Hitler was morally justified by the moral necessity to destroy Nazism...(but in) the internal American political process...Any person proven to have used these techniques should not only be punished by the law; he should be banned forever from participation in American politics.

Yet I could see how an ambitious, committed individual could be tempted. More than that, I could see myself drawn in, if the circumstances were right. My thoughts were reinforced in the final months of the Reagan Presidency, as Oliver North testified, defending his own criminality. Add a North type charisma to the mix, and I would have been doomed. Following that fellow to the dark side of the moral universe would have been hard to resist.

So it is hard for me to work up the passion to equal that of others at the arrest of James O'Keefe, who until Monday was a folk hero to conservatives. O'Keefe was the undercover dirty trickster who, hidden camera in hand, tried to convince employees of ACORN that he needed money to expand a prostitution ring. One employee ordered him out. But he would not give up. Another listened, then, after he left, called the police. Eventually, O'Keefe put together enough material to make it look, with some creative editing, as if ACORN was encouraging pimps to apply for federal funding. Conservatives were thrilled. An organization that not only helps poor people, but encourages them to vote, was discredited.

O'Keefe, a young and impressionable man, was apparently so intoxicated by his newly adoring fans, he needed more. He has been arrested and charged with federal criminality for, depending on the source, attempting to wiretap or sabotage the phones in the offices of a United States Senator. Fox News, which gave hours of coverage to the ACORN video, now seems to have forgotten their initial fascination with O'Keefe. They have accumulated 4 minutes and a few seconds so far.

We are human. We are sinners. Many of us can rejoice at having escaped the soul robbing temptations sponsored by the darkest forces of American political life.

One should no more deplore homosexuality than left-handedness.

 - - London Yearly Meeting. Home Service Committee, 1963
     Towards a Quaker view of sex : an essay by a group of Friends