Photo by sumrow via Flickr

As the debate over U.S. health care reform degenerated into a battle over partisan positioning, Democrats found themselves struggling to inject some kind of legacy into their foundered effort. This meant that — sans Public Option, post-abortion compromise — Senators Harry Reid, Max Baucus, Tom Harkin, and the rest of their aristocratic and anachronistic cronies were, for their respective pre-victory self-congratulations and predictions of economic armeggedon, forced to turn away from the bill for inspiration. Reid found himself destroying baseball history. Senator Christopher Dodd tried to tack his party’s slackened reform onto FDR’s four freedoms. Their colleagues invoked the bible and George Washington.

Sigh.

We here at Unfit value nothing more than a creative cut-and-paste job. Still, such a desperately wide array of historical snipping seems to betray a certain lack of … focus. So, in advance of what will surely be meant as an epoch-defining moment, we offer President Obama’s speech writers the following wholly-borrowed concise message. After these last few weeks of total bullshit, the least our failed leadership can do is grant us all the simple honesty of uniform plagiarism.

The Gospel According to Franklin Delano Washington, or The Full Senate at the Bat

Good evening sports fans.

This is a day of national consecration. And I am certain that on this day my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the Presidency the occasion of my signing the policy on which I have so clearly staked my Presidency, I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our people impels.

[Let me start by saying:] Do not be wise in your own eyes fear the LORD abstract concepts of socialism and shun evil a clear, comprehensive system of health care coverage. This will bring health to your body and nourishment to your bones. Honor the LORD Aetna with your wealth, with the first fruits of all your crops; Say to him it: ’Long life to you! Good health to you and your household! And good health to all that is yours!

The period for a new election of a citizen, to administer the executive government of the United States, being not [too] far distant, and the time actually arrived [in like 18 months], when your thoughts must be employed designating the person, who is to be clothed with that important trust, it appears to me proper, especially as it may conduce to a more distinct expression of the public voice, that I should now apprize you of the resolution I have formed, to decline being considered among the number of those out of whom a choice is to be made sign this hulking abortion of reform, and thus attempt to preserve for myself a chance at the Presidency in 2012.

However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people, and to usurp for themselves the reins of government; destroying afterwards the very engines, which have lifted them to unjust dominion.

[Look duders, like Harkin said, this shit is just a starter health care bill.]

[Besides, this was SO HARD.] I mean, I was like: Verily I say unto you, Wheresoever this gospel [of health care reform] shall be preached in the whole world, there shall also this, that this woman hath done, the idea that it’s okay to be flexible, if you need to preserve your career, be told for a memorial of her to democracy. [But] [t]hen one of the twelve Senators, called Judas Iscariot Joseph Lieberman, went unto the chief priests Aetna, And said unto them, What will ye give me, and I will deliver him untoward profits unto you? And they covenanted with him for thirty pieces of silver.

[So we had a choice. And we decided to call] together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

The Outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine Muddied bill that day:
The score stood four to two Fifty-nine to Forty-one, with but one inning more to play.
And then when Cooney Kennedy died at first, and Barrows Byrd [nearly] did the same,
A sickly silence fell upon the patrons of the game.
A straggling few got up to go in deep despair. The rest
Clung to that hope which springs eternal in the human breast;
They thought, if only Casey the full senate could get but a whack at that -
We’d put up even money, now, with Casey the full Senate at the bat.

But Flynn Lieberman preceded Casey the full Senate, as did also Jimmy Blake Ben Nelson,
And the former was a lulu and the latter was a cake;
So upon that stricken multitude grim melancholy sat,
For there seemed but little chance of Casey’s the full Senate’s getting to the bat.

[So we compromised. For now. Look, like Harkin said, this shit is just a starter health care bill.]

[L]et me [now] assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life, a leadership of frankness and of vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. [And for that, you might have to wait like six years. Like Harkin said, this shit is just a starter health care bill.]

New-media maven

Three years out from an election is a perfectly reasonable time to start polling, right?

After all, if sports writers can argue about which NBA stars should be representing team USA in the 2012 summer Olympics (Brian Scalabrine?) and commentators can claim the 2010 World Cup as a valid topic of conversation while broadcasting from the 2006 World Cup and climatologists can bicker about the lifespans of glaciers and the endangered species that live on them, then surely political pundits and pollsters can have their fun speculating about which Republican is going to take on Barack Obama in the next presidential bout.

Just as I wrote a few weeks ago about the love of the sports fan waiting until the off-season to truly blossom, so too does the life of the political junkie find its greatest joy in the speculative irrelevance of the electoral off-year. When polls have no consequences and editorials have no weight and theorizing is so much crystal-ball gazing, the punditocracy, both professional and kitchen-table-based, can really feel free to let their minds and their mouths run wild, free from the philosophical tethers of, you know, reality.

Take, for example, a poll released this past Friday by Rasmussen: It’s not about health care or the war in Afghanistan or the economy or job performance on Capitol Hill. No. This poll looks at who the favorite is, as of October 2009, to win the 2012 Republican presidential nomination (which comes with a tiara, the keys to a brand-new Toyota Tacoma, and the thrill of taking on the Barack Obama political machine in the next general election).

According to the poll, as of Friday, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee is the preferred candidate of 29% of Republicans nationwide, followed by Mitt Romney (24%), Sarah Palin (18%), Newt Gingrich (14%), and Tim Pawlenty (4%).

It goes on: “Romney leads all prospects among voters who attend church once a month or less. Huckabee leads among more frequent churchgoers. Huckabee holds a huge lead among Evangelical Christians with Palin in second and Romney a distant third. Huckabee and Romney are essentially even among other Protestants while Romney has the edge among Catholics.

“Romney leads among Republicans earning more than $75,000 a year while Huckabee leads among those who earn less.”

Now, as much as I love this kind of ultra-specific poll-modeling – “While Palin has a slight edge over Huckabee in the all-important Jewish Moderate-Conservatives Who Don’t Eat Cake on Wednesdays demographic, Gingrich is doing surprisingly well with Anorexics Below the Poverty Line Who Think Organized Religion Is the Cause of All the World’s Problems But Who Feel a Deep Spiritual Connection to the Universe and All Living Things in It” – it’s hard not to shake the feeling that the results, printed more than two years out from the first primary, are the very definition of an institutional absurdity.

But in America 2009, absurdity in the defense of relevance is no vice. In our rapidly evolving media environment, ridiculousness is expected and accepted. But what cannot be accepted — what can not be tolerated, what can not be justified — is the sense that a company that bases its reputation on up-to-the-minute analysis is out of touch with the proper tools needed to cull information for that analysis. These days, the only sin in America is not being tuned in. And something about the old-school Rasmussen polling model – “You sir, who will you be voting for?” – smacks of rotting antiquity.

Take Chris Cillizza’s piece in The Washington Post today about the status of the Sarah Palin political identity on Facebook. It may seem like so much new-media fluff to stodgy old guys still married to old-school notions of political relevance, but it also might just prove to be more telling of the status of the Republican political landscape than any 10 Rasmussen polls could ever hope to be. There, Cillizza writes, “As of press time, Palin’s Facebook site had nearly 930,000 supporters … By way of comparison, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (R) has 82,000 Facebook supporters while former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee (R) has 121,000.”

That paragraph right there should be enough to have Huckabee and Romney shaking with fear. If Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign proved anything (as if this point really needed to be proven), it’s that you can’t view new media, especially social-networking, as some sort of cute adjunct to an otherwise traditionally managed campaign. A candidate’s approach to the Internet says everything about that candidate’s understanding of the times we’re living in and the voters who are living in them.

For all her faults, Palin is smart enough to know that having a million friends/fans on Facebook is like having a marketing/information-dissemination army on your side, ready with the click of a mouse to do your bidding. Facebook may have proven to us once and for all that the insignificant particulars of human lives are sources of fascination — both as writers and readers, both as exhibitionists and voyeurs — but perhaps more fascinating (and more important for politicians looking to get out the vote) is that it has shown people to be happy pro bono public-relations advocates for whatever cause, event, band, person, puppy video they deem worthwhile. People love being in the know, Facebook has shown us, and they love letting other people know they’re in the know. And the best way to let other people you’re in the know, and that you knew before they did, is to be the one sending that person what it is they don’t know about but you do.

Cillizza talks about Palin using Facebook to do an “end-run” around the mainstream media and talk directly to her supporters, both actual and potential. Which is true. But it’s more than that: Facebook allows Palin (just like Obama, who knew a little something about being written off by mainstream-media folks and needing to find new unfiltered ways of gaining momentum) to do an end-run around the mainstream PR/marketing/political advertising bureaucracy, putting aside traditional notions of pay-for-play access and huge media blitzes. Instead, all she has to do is throw up the occasional post about her support of Glen Beck, her distaste for Washington insiders, or (most famously) her belief that Obamacare will sentence the elderly to death, and – bang! – she’s got a million people ready, willing, even desirous to spread that message around the world.

In other words, Facebook has not only exposed us as advertisers for ourselves; it’s turned us all into volunteer sandwich-board wearers for others.

So if I were Mike Huckabee, I’d take cold comfort in that 28 when comparing it to Palin’s 930,000. One is just a number on a piece of paper taken three years — and a million media cycles — out from the next presidential election. The other represents virtual bodies on the virtual ground, ready to go to war for their favorite former governor from Alaska.

Especially when going to war means never having to leave your house or even change out of your pajamas.

In the spring of 2009, John Currence — recent James Beard Award winner for Best Chef: Southern Region and chef/owner of four Oxford, Mississippi-based restaurants — opened Snackbar, a small-plate raw bar that specializes in oysters.  It seems he took a look around Oxford – a town with a population of 19,000 and a local restaurant market that was already saturated before the national economy imploded — and thought, “You know what I bet the people of Oxford are hungry for?  Merman snot.”  Go to Snackbar any night of the week and you’ll see that he was right.  Then go anywhere else in Oxford, Mississippi, and see the ways in which Currence’s being right flew in the face of all pre-existing logic.

Jonathon Swift once said, “It was a brave man who first ate an oyster.”  A brave man who should have won the goddamn Nobel Prize, he failed to add.  Despite (or, perhaps, because of) the raw oyster’s reputation as an aphrodisiac and possessing the taste and consistency of oral sex, they are one of nature’s most perfect foods.  If a fine brandy melting down the back of your throat or going down on a supermodel aren’t for you, then neither are oysters.  For me, when fresh, they do more for a waterfront vacation than the subtext of an entire Jimmy Buffett box set.  In many coastal states, oysters are to local culture what Islam is to the Middle East.

But Snackbar’s success in Oxford has nothing to do with Mississippi’s being a coastal state. In fact, Mississippi is a coastal state in much the same way miniature golf is golf: It doesn’t eat like a coastal state, and it thinks like one only when someone’s handing out Katrina money. And, despite a lighthouse being the most prominent feature of the Mississippi license plate, it has more Sonic Fast Food joints than it does coastal miles.  Besides, those coastal miles are at Mississippi’s southern-most reaches, and if Oxford were any more north-Mississippi, it’d be Tennessee. Which is to say that, in this land-locked town, seafood used to begin and end with deep-fried catfish, a tasteless, ugly son of a bitch plucked from the bottom of a pond.

So what happened? Is it because of Oxford’s progressive nature? Its reckless abandon in attitude toward new things?  Well, that’s complicated:  Short answer, no.  Long answer, also no.  If you want progressive, don’t set foot on the University of Mississippi’s campus in Oxford, where the Trent Lott Leadership Institute is a proud institution.  Or the town square (known as the Square), where you’ll see a statue of a Confederate soldier standing atop a mighty Doric phallus with the lines The sons of veterans unite in this justification of their fathers’ faith inscribed on the shaft. The courthouse that it was, uh, erected in front of is painted so white — so ridiculously and achingly white — that when the sun hits it in just the right way, you can see through the walls and at the black people being denied justice inside.

Okay, Okay: those are all cheap shots at Oxford’s old guard.  And that old guard is old. Snackbar wasn’t and isn’t for these people.  These people voted for George W. Bush.  Twice.  Three times, if you count ballots cast for the former governor of Alaska and that creepy old guy who kept standing next to her. When they’re hungry, these Oxonians prefer the old-fashioned simplicity of gorging themselves on a singular and oversized plate overloaded with fried and gravied everything. What they don’t want they take home to feed the dogs.  In the 1980s this was called trickle-down economics: the few eating themselves to death while the many starved.

Snackbar feeds the face of a new kind if southerner.  A face so new it does not yet recognize itself but does recognize that we are currently experiencing one of those stretches of world history people are going to remember, to study, to write books about and teach courses on.  This is not going to be one of those gray, useless decades that disappears in retrospect, like a mediocre employee in a vast conglomerate.  The new-look southerner is self-aware and it is a self-awareness that is not defined exclusively by the past but by how tomorrow will define today.  “Don’t blame us,” the new South says at this crossroads.  “Our state’s on the wrong side of history, but look: We’re eating weird food off tiny plates.”

I admire this attitude even though it smacks of self-congratulatory liberalism.  In fact, 82% of liberalism is, in and of itself, self-congratulatory.  And I’ll take an Oxford liberal over a Seattle liberal any day of the week.  One finds a reason to drink Rumplemintz on a Tuesday while the other won’t burn me the new Wilco album because “I dunno, man.  I just can’t justify putting another CD out into the ether that’s just going to wind up in some landfill somewhere.”  Oxford liberals support the cause; they just don’t attend the meetings.  Seattle liberals assume every moment of their lives is the meeting.

Mississippi is both the fattest and the poorest state in the nation.  It eats too much and it starves.  Here, where the vivid contrast between wealth  (a lavish antebellum spread) and poverty (a real shotgun home) seems more tangible than anywhere else in the United States, Snackbar sits somewhere in between (inside the world’s most unassuming strip mall).  I found myself at the bar one evening asking the bartender what he’d learned about the human condition while serving Oxonians raw seafood.  We were downing Oyster Shooters (The Oyster Shooter:  Cocktail sauce.  One jigger of vodka.  One oyster.  One shot glass.), not Rumplemintz.  Though it may have been a Tuesday.

He told me about how people had been going crazy for oysters — men and women on dates, large parties, rebels, yankees — but, for whatever reason, many were going uneaten.  People would order a second dozen after openly not finishing their first.  My new bartender friend threw back an Oyster Shooter and banged the shot glass down onto the bar top.  Then he leaned towards me, secretively, and said how one of the perks of his job was that he got to finish all of the oysters that were otherwise dumpster-bound.

I generally don’t eat garbage, but something about that made sense to me. I realized then what oysters represented at this particular moment, in this particular restaurant, in this particular corner of old-money Mississippi.

Such is the advance of food socialism.

Really: Just as the Marxist insists in the beauty of a classless society, everything about Snackbar’s philosophy and architecture wants you to share your dining experience with those around you.  A long, large table runs parallel to, and spans the length of, the bar.  Next to this table, lining the wall, is a series of roomy booths that could easily seat eight if they had to, and often do have to.  On any given night, new and old couples pack the long table and, together, look more like a casual dinner party than a bunch of sardined strangers.  Groups of six, seven, eight jam the booths, their faces ruddy with laughter, elbows knocking as hands reach for the ice-chilled Joeys, Washingtons, Apalachicolas, the steamed jumbo gulf shrimp, and the marinated blue crab claws that cover the tabletop and belong to everyone.  Even the solitary diners aren’t solitary.  They sit at the bar, side by side with others who take their food as seriously as they do, preferring to appreciate it with a holy reverence, like a congregation worshiping at the altar of food, their mouths moving not so much to chew but in silent prayer.

This is food socialism.  A lot of people these days think this is a better way to eat.   They also seem to think it’s a better way to live.

Shared food, after all, isn’t new everywhere.  Many an Al Gore voter (or would-be voter, had they voted) went on a gloomy, conciliatory bender in or just down the street from their favorite tapas bar on Tuesday night, September November 7, 2000 — a night on which Currence would have been insane to seriously contemplate opening a small-plate raw bar in Oxford.

Still, despite the then-leader of the free world, things were changing down South.  Currence understood this thanks to the years he’d spent building menus from the ground up, based not on what Oxford has always been hungry for, but on what it’s going to be hungry for next.  Which led him to Snackbar, the reactive inversion to the plank-floored catfish house, just as Barack Obama represents, in many ways, the reactive inversion to the past eight years.

By this I’m not saying Currence is a genius or a madman (though he might be).  What I am saying is that if there is a connection between what a community is eating and what a community is thinking, then Currence is a socio-cultural barometer.  It’s also not that he’s ahead of the curve (which, again, he might be).  It’s that he just really knows where Oxford’s curve happens to be at any given moment.  It probably went something like this: On Election Day ’08, the dial tuned to CNN, Currence saw John King break down the results, county by county, on his magic view screen, and, when even the reddest of red republican strongholds turned blue, thought, it’s time, and immediately started shucking.

Is it a coincidence that raw bars and tapas restaurants — the bellweathers of the food socialist movement — are doing so well right now?

The thing of it is, personally, I’m a huge fan of capitalism  and the protestant work ethic that teams up with it so well on this side of the pond. But a part of that image is the reality that many of those solitary American dreamers, despite their better mousetraps and their calloused hands, fail miserably.  And that just flat-out sucks Then-candidate Barack Obama took time to talk about how much that just flat-out sucks when he accepted his nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Denver:

“For over two decades, [John McCain’s] subscribed to that old, discredited Republican philosophy — give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else.  In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society, but what it really means is — you’re on your own.  Out of work?  Tough luck.  No health care?  The market will fix it.  Born into poverty?  Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps — even if you don’t have boots.  You’re on your own.”

And he was saying this to the America that was ready to give a shit about the person standing next to them.  When the rest of America listens to Glenn Beck and then use the word socialism like a cudgel, what they’re trying to do is turn empathy into a dirty word.  And empathy is exactly what we’re talking about here.  It’s a mentality that half the country was ready to buy into and was already manifesting itself, in microcosm form, in restaurants all over the country.  Barack Obama became the single most powerful man on the planet because he was able to tap into this need in us to satiate our malnourished senses of empathy.  What men like Currence are doing with restaurants like Snackbar is satisfying a physical manifestation of that same psychological and emotional want.

Today, Snackbar’s patrons are going home happy and the help is going home full on the leftovers.  It’s important not to forget that a raw bar in Oxford is as precarious an experiment as liberalism in Oxford.  It’s new.  Uncertain.  Unpredictable.  Oxford likes the idea of the shared-food experience as enjoyed from a raw bar, but the reality of what they’re putting into their bodies sometimes makes them wriggle.  Just as these people liked voting for Barack Obama in ’08, knowing full well that their state was going to go very, very red and wouldn’t have to feel as though they themselves actually contributed to his victory.  What they did not know — and what is still unknowable—is how they’re going to feel if, after four years, they’re convinced that all they’ve done all this time was feed the help.

But they’re giving shared food a try in Oxford, Mississippi.  That’s something.  That’s quite a bit, actually.  And what’s going to come of it is hard to say.  When the time comes, I suppose I’ll ask John Currence.  He probably already knows.

So much for a quiet August in Washington.

Traditionally the time of year when Senators and Congressmen return to their home districts for a month to catch their breath, escape the swampy heat of D.C., and feign erotic interest in their spouses while quietly dreaming of their paramours back in Georgetown or Foggy Bottom or even Tenleytown, August this year has turned out to be louder and more stressful than Capitol Hill on voting day. The debates over health care, the daily confrontations at town hall meetings, the rabble-rousing of the media’s lunatic-fringe, and the patriots with thigh-holsters have conspired to turn what should have been a sleepy summer into one of the more disheartening eras in American democracy since Republican preppies tried to turn the Miami Elections Office into a frat house after a home loss.

As depressing as the last few weeks of political uh, debate, have been, what’s really sad is that the right-wing approach – trumped-up grass-roots mobs shouting down whomever they disagree with – appears to be working. Late last week, Democratic officials admitted that end-of-life counseling reimbursements in the House bill would probably have to go, a concession to the absurd allegations from right-wing demagogues like Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich that the sessions would be little more than “death panels” run by big-government bureaucrats granted the power by Barack Obama to decide who lives and who dies in America.

Then on Sunday, newspapers started reporting that Obama was considering dropping the bill’s “public option,” long coveted by liberal Democrats convinced that government involvement in health care is the only way to guarantee coverage for every American. Hemming and hawing and parsing his words like a true modern-day Abe Lincoln, Obama claimed at a town-hall-style meeting in Grand Junction, Colorado, that “[t]he public option, whether we have it or we don’t have it, is not the entirety of health care reform. This is just one sliver of it, one aspect of it.”

Wait. Didn’t we win the White House in 2008? Didn’t Obama run on a platform of hope and change and a belief in the positive role government should play in American life? And didn’t he come into office as the leader of a party with control of the House and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate? So what in the world is he doing listening to the demands of the psychotic fringe of the Republican Party, much less giving in to them? Shouldn’t he just stick them in a corner and forget about them for the next three and half years while passing the laws he wants passed?

Well, unfortunately he can’t, for the simple reason that it isn’t the Republicans he has to worry about. Just ask Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. Back in 2006 it was Emanuel who decided that the best way for the Democratic party to reclaim majorities in Congress would be to sacrifice core values in the name of appealing to the vast political center. Looking to win at all costs (not such a bad idea at the time, considering we were coming up on year seven on an unfettered Bush administration), Emanuel recruited dozens of moderate Blue Dog Democrats – many of whom were pro-life, pro-business, and pro-gun – to knock off the ultra-conservative Republicans who had finally started creeping out the average American voter. Figuring even moderate Democrats were better than Republicans, Emanuel (along with Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Harry Reid) sold out his party’s philosophy in the name of securing his party’s dominance.

In other words, that filibuster-proof majority is really nothing of the kind, Al Franken or no Al Franken.

Because in return for selling our souls we got “Democrats” like Mike Ross of Arkansas, a man whose main priority in the health care debate isn’t making sure  that every American is covered or that insurance companies can’t turn down people based on pre-existing conditions, but rather that the plan be deficit-neutral. That’s it. Deficit-neutral. Oh, and that it not provide health care for illegal immigrants or funding for abortions. In other words, we got a Republican. A Republican from 1992 maybe, but still a Republican.

Serves us right. We liberals wanted so desperately to hand Bush and his crew a defeat in 2006, we checked our ideals at the door and supported anyone with a “D” next to his or her name. Pro-corporation? Anti-immigration? Pro-life? Anti-environment? Who cares; come on in! Anything to pad our numbers and make everyone feel good about themselves. Only now that little Faustian bargain is biting us in the ass – a part of the body, it turns out, not covered by any insurance company.

So when Representative Ross of Arkansas spits out a piece of pandering, insidious, reprehensible, irresponsible, shameful, vacuous nonsense like “I will never vote for a bill to kill old people. Period” (how very brave, Mr. Ross, to come out in favor of old-people), like he did this past weekend, we on the left have to pretend we didn’t hear him. We expect this kind of bullshit from Republicans – Obama’s plan will force euthanasia on the elderly and haul retarded babies into work camps? Who here was honestly surprised to hear Sarah Palin say that? – but from a Democrat? Really? Was that devil’s bargain really so costly that we have to count Mike Ross as one of our own? That the success of Obama’s health plan, not to mention the rest of his agenda, is in the hands of moral and intellectual half-men?

What is with this country? Why is this stuff even up for debate? Why are we listening to these people claiming death panels and Nazi chemotherapy rationing? And why are we humoring the low-lifes who believe what they say? How much respect do we have to have for differing opinions if those opinions are built entirely out of lies? At what point, in other words, do you cross the line from debate into lunacy?

Obama may claim to be a populist, but he must be looking at all those Glen Beck fans regurgitating lies in the streets all over this ridiculous land of ours and just dying to drop a giant blanket over all of them. And well he should. Volatile debate is necessary to a democracy and should be welcomed. And god knows health care is a complicated enough issue to support many different, even opposing, opinions. What doesn’t need to be welcomed, however, is willful ignorance, barely shrouded racism, implied threats, and sheep-like obedience to liars and fear-mongers. It’s time for Obama to step up to the bully pulpit and let the world know that a bold new age of American intelligence is at hand, that this country will no longer be held hostage by any nitwit who comes along with a gripe and a big megaphone.

From now on, only very special nitwits will get that honor.

As you’ve no doubt read by now, this weekend brought fresh allegations about former Vice President Dick Cheney and his seeming unending capacity for evil-doing.

Dicking Around: Cheney's Policies Could Help the Dems Achieve Their Goals

But, just in case: According to the New York Times, “[t]he Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency’s director, Leon E. Panetta, has told the Senate and House intelligence committees….” As the posturing about investigations and culpability began on the Sunday morning talk shows, the Times hadn’t yet been able to track Cheney down for a quote. This is, of course, nothing more than par for the veteran pol, whose resume includes less snarly stints in the Ford and Bush senior administrations, before he grimaced his way to that undisclosed location on September 11, 2001 — and who seemed to treat every interview like a hostile interrogation. And while we’d love (for entertainment’s sake) for him to return to the public eye with some sort of grand vinegar-y denial, the man is probably more interested in playing out the string in friendly Wyoming than returning to his position as Bush administration fall guy. Besides, despite the occasional jab at the current administration, he’s got no motivation for a comeback tour: His play — returning what he deems to be adequate executive power to the office of the president, what seems to be his singular political motivation for his actions from 2001-2008 — has already been made. And maybe we should stop busting on him for it.

In 2005, the Washington Post offered up a piece that discussed the history of Cheney’s efforts to strengthen the power of the Executive Branch of the U.S. Government. According to reporters Peter Baker and Jim VandeHei, he told the Air Force Two press gang that “the period after the Watergate scandal and Vietnam War proved to be ‘the nadir of the modern presidency in terms of authority and legitimacy’ and harmed the chief executive’s ability to lead in a complicated, dangerous era.” Given the chance by Bush to affect some sort of change in the way the U.S. bureaucracy functions, he snapped it up, taking multiple opportunites to find legal conflicts where the Bush administration could broaden the scope of the President’s power. So successful had these efforts been that Cheney could, four years before Barack Obama would take the oath of office, claim to Baker and VandeHei that  “I do think that to some extent now we’ve been able to restore the legitimate authority of the presidency.”

The statement turned out to be somewhat premature. Scandals over wire-tapping, torture, and other abuses of power would cloud the rest of the Bush presidency and perhaps help pave the way for the massive GOP failure this past November. Among Obama’s first acts was the symbolic rejection of the Bush/Cheney core philosophy. And though the shuttering of Guantanamo may never quite take effect, the new administration deemed the issue important enough to the nation’s psyche that it tried its best to close the facility within hours of taking office. But then it seemed to take a breath. And as it did it seemed to realize the benefits of the Cheney era: Attorney General Eric Holder invoked the State Secrets provision in a law suit against the Boeing corporation, which may have participated in the Bush/Cheney extraordinary rendition program — an action that seemed to defend the removal of terrorism suspects to countries where they might be better … interrogated. The administration’s lawyers also sought to dismiss a law suit against the telecommunications companies that had participated in the secret NSA wire-tapping program – a seeming nod to the idea that it was okay for their predecessors to demand data in a way that was eventually ruled to be unconstitutional. And they further received a friendly judicial ruling which allowed it to, according to the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder, “indefinitely detain several classes of belligerents,” a seemingly Cheney-ian violation of Habeas Corpus – and a convenient way to avoid dealing with the issues of what to do with some hardcore detainees who can’t be tried under normal U.S. law.

Indeed, though the current administration has yet to publicly produce any John Yoo-type interpretations of executive power, they seem to be benefiting from the same sort of thinking that Cheney is being so lambasted for. So why not ride this sucker as far as it’ll take them? Why not find a lawyer (maybe David Addington?) who might be willing to draft a few memos about how poverty in the United States is a threat to national security? Have him cite the Cheney doctrine — that in such times as the President deems necessary, he can take extraordinary steps to protect his country. Have him find a reason for the President to, say, nationalize health care or raise taxes without the consent of Congress. Offer a year’s worth of amnesty to delinquent mortgage payers. Legalize drugs.

The fact is that this is an opprotunity. So drop the Cheney hate — the man (and his lawyers) found a way to streamline the policy-making process, and instead of taking heaps of abuse from the so-called left, he should be receiving flowers and cupcakes. Better yet, should the Obama administration tack in this direction, Cheney just might be remembered as the man who saved the United States.