Bill Clinton's public support for the war is a matter of record. Just before George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair invaded Iraq, Clinton published an op-ed in the London Guardian (3/18/03) urging Britons to "Trust Tony's Judgment":

Clinton's column included the less-than-prescient prediction that "military action probably will require only a few days."

Soon after the invasion (3/30/03), Clinton appeared on CBS's 60 Minutes with former Senator Robert Dole and endorsed the war, saying, "Senator, unlike some of your Republican friends during Kosovo, I support our troops in Iraq and the president."

If you oppose the war, says McCain, you're – pro-Hitler. It was inevitable – the return of Hitler, that is. The third-rate painter and homicidal maniac always turns up when the War Party gets desperate. After five years of war, and nothing but a reinvigorated al Qaeda and thousands of dead and grievously wounded to show for it, there's just one way to stanch the loss of support for our Iraqi adventure, and that is the return of Hitler to the international scene. In John McCain's world, it doesn't matter that we were lied into war: it doesn't matter that there were no Iraqi links to al Qaeda; we only have to know that Saddam was a Middle Eastern Hitler, who has now been replaced by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and everything falls neatly into place.

In the long, hot autumn of 2000, the world was shocked by the contempt for democracy shown by the Republican Party. They knew their man had lost the popular vote to Al Gore by half a million votes. They knew the majority of voters in Florida itself had pulled a lever for Gore. But they fought – amid the confetti of hanging chads – to stop the state's votes being counted, and to ensure that the Supreme Court imposed George W Bush.

Today, that contempt for democracy is on display again. In California right now, there is a naked, out-in-the-open ploy to rig the 2008 presidential election – and it may succeed.

Soon we will learn whether a few desperate but very well-funded Republicans have succeeded in collecting the necessary 434,000 valid signatures to go directly to California voters on a ballot initiative to change the election laws. If the initiative were to succeed, it could significantly help elect a GOP presidential candidate in 2008.

With a tone of considerable loathing, The American Conservative magazine - a very Republican magazine -- describes this "California Schemin'" as a gimmick, arising out of a loser mentality, "to change California from a state that awards its electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis to one that hands them out proportionately." Simply stated, the magazine notes, the goal of this effort is "to scrape up another 20 electoral votes" for the next Republican presidential candidate.

It has become some sort of rule, some sort of perfectly delicious law of the popular culture upon which any open-minded and attuned and humor-licked and spiritually aware and intellectually curious and sexually alive human worth her moist, wine-massaged soul can now rely with utter and perfect clarity.

It goes like this: If there is some sort of creation, a piece of art, a TV show, a column or a book or a movie or a statue or a blog or a movement, a wine bottle or sexual position or Jesus-shaped dildo that somehow deeply threatens the various ultraconservative sects of Christian-blasted America to the point where their pale, dour representatives demand boycotts and distribute angry pamphlets and try to stop people from experiencing said hunk of culture because of how negatively it portrays their seething, condemnatory God, well, you know it's time to break out the Champagne. Or buy that book. Or get very, very naked. Or all of the above. Depending.