The media is using every soapbox in the country to preach uber-nationalism and vilify America's critics as unpatriotic. Their "Love it or leave it" gibberish is being used to tar a presidential candidate who hasn't sufficiently prostrated himself before his corporate overlords to make them feel that he can be trusted to carry out their directives. That is what's really happening. Obama is just unpredictable enough to make the parasite class nervous that he might do something crazy, like serve the public interest. That would be a real disaster. It'd be better to install the appalling Ms. Clinton than take a chance on the “populist” Obama. That's why the wrath of the media has descended on Obama like a Texas hailstorm; they're afraid he doesn't understand who really runs things in America.

No one disputes Wright's summary of US history. His comments have simply been taken out of context to beat up on Barak Obama; everyone knows that. Just like everyone knows that the media has been retooled to destroy political enemies, which means anyone who poses a challenge to America's unelected corporate oligarchy. That's why it is so frustrating to hear people say, "The media is not doing its job."

That's just plain wrong; the media IS doing its job. It's cheerleading the country to war, it is diverting attention from the main political and economic issues of the day, and it is destroying its political enemies. That's what it's paid to do. Its foolish to think the media should perform differently because of the PR nonsense about a “free press”. The media gets its marching orders from its corporate managers; that's who issues the paychecks on Fridays. It's their agenda that counts, not ours. The political assassination of Barak Obama just happens to be on the top of their list this week. That's why the media is zeroing in on Rev. Wright; he is the sacrificial lamb.

What the media is trying to do by singling out Wright is to make it look like blacks are outside of the mainstream and hostile to white American society. It's all pretty straightforward. They're trying to create the impression that blacks conceal a deep sense of grievance which expresses itself in rage. This generates feelings of fear among whites which, of course, is all part of the strategy. The message is simple; "blacks are angry, blacks are dangerous and, oh by the way, Obama is black."

Is it fair to say that that is essentially a racist message?

"America's chickens are coming home to roost. Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred, and terrorism begets terrorism."

"A White ambassador said that, y'all, not a black militant. Not a Reverend who preaches about racism; an ambassador whose eyes are wide open, and who's trying to get us to wake up, and move away from this dangerous precipice upon which we are now poised."

So there you have it. This is what Obama calls "equating the United States' wartime efforts with terrorism."

Obama won't vote to impeach the president for his high crimes; he won't even denounce them for what they are. But he has sure enough impeached his preacher for all the world to see. Which, as Silber says, is "much more significant — and much more revealing — than any of Wright's comments themselves."

The pre-convention Democratic campaign could not be working out better for the Republicans even if the GOP had planned it this way.

Perhaps they did.

Every "expansion of government in business," Herbert Hoover had said, "poisons the very roots of liberalism -- that is, political equality, free speech, free assembly, free press, and equality of opportunity." That is, exactly the values reactionary Republicanism, aided by the courts it'd been packing since President McKinley's day, clobbered as it turned the 1920s into "the most expensive orgy in history" (as F. Scott Fitzgerald would describe it in 1931, when the party was over), "the whole upper tenth living with the insouciance of grand dukes and the casualness of call girls." That was before the orgies Reagan, that value-added conservative, unleashed in the 1980s, and that his dry-drunk ideological godson George W. Bush managed to squeeze in between two recessions. That they used government to underwrite their upper-class orgies while calling government names is among those elitist ironies men-of-the-people like Reagan and Bush chose not to consort with. It helps to live in the world of slogans.

But in the real world, is it really true that government is the problem, that business does it better than government? Not in my experience. Getting naturalized a citizen of this country was simpler than getting bogus charges taken off my cell phone account. Getting my passport or driver's license or tags renewed has always been more pleasant and efficient than dealing with the cable company (long since abandoned). Filing taxes? Give me that over dealing with health insurers any day. At least with tax returns, I usually get money back. Insurers just garnishee my wages and shave years off my life. I envy my parents' comparatively non-existent Medicare bureaucracy, and their complete freedom to choose what doctor they please -- up to and including the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, which I'd have to pay for on top of the $5,000 I pay in private health insurance premiums for me and my family for often mediocre services and artery-clogging bureaucratic grief. Seems to me private-sector insurance is the problem here, and government the demonstrable solution.

The “60 Minutes” interview time that CBS generously bestowed on Chief Justice Antonin Scalia highly informative. He presented the term “originalist” as defining his philosophy on the US Constitution, but after listening to him in detail the question would have to be asked whether what he presented is unstead unvarnished fascism.

Torture is legal, because it's not punishment?!?

It is 1939 all over again. The world waits helplessly for the next act of naked aggression by rogue states. Only this time the rogue states are not the Third Reich and Fascist Italy. They are the United States and Israel.

The targeted victims are not Poland and France, but Iran, Syria, the remains of the Palestinian West Bank and southern Lebanon.