I smoked for a number of years.

Now I don’t. Haven't for a long while, but I still light up in my dreams.

Don't let anyone kid you: you can buffer it, but quitting for me was every bit as much the sweaty, hellbitch of a nightmare that everyone says it is, and I failed at it many times.

Many, many times.

Then I succeeded, and to be perfectly honest it was mostly because the day came when I decided I didn’t want to die of something stupid.

I was a considerate smoker -- didn’t blow it in your face, took it outside if it bothered you, and (almost) never used the world as my ashtray. I figured if you smoke, you should at least not shit things up for others.

If you smoke, you should quit. Thus endeth the sermon.

There is no sermon, and I didn’t become an Evangelical Ex-Smoker, because I despised those people when I was hooked. However, it is also true that the ambient pressure of living in a world where smoking was considered a dirty, stupid habit helped me stop.

Why bring this up?

Because political affiliation is a lot like smoking, and the Moderates I know are a helluva lot like the addict who simultaneously knows better at some level...and yet doesn’t want to believe that the blood they cough up into the sink has anything to do with the poison with which they fill their lungs.

They want to climb up on the laps of the likes of Limbaugh and Hannity and Coulter and O’Reilly -- the Political equivalents of the Assassin Executives of Big Tobacco – who assure them that it’s really OK. That their product isn’t really dangerous. Isn’t lethal. Isn’t killing them and everyone around them.

The rationalizing of the Moderates I know is also identical to the rationalizing of a smoker.

“Everything’s fine – I don’t need to quit.”
“You’re full of shit – I don’t need to quit.”
“I have things under control – I don’t need to quit.”
“I feel great – I don’t need to quit.”
“Get offa my achin' back, dickhed. There is nothing wrong here. I don’t need to quit.”

And after many years of this call-and-response, the smoker coughs up a lung...and the Moderate finds that his Party has been completely consumed by a metastasizing Christopathic Cult.

And then comes...

“Well, since it’s too late now, I might as well keep smoking!”

This same perverse fractal repeats itself again and again most noticeably in the Republican Party Line on Iraq:

““Everything’s fine! Everything’s Great! Greeted as Liberators! Mission Accomplished! What resistance? Just a few Regime Dead-Enders! Bring ‘Em On.”

And now that the Administration’s lies are bleeding out right and left...

“Well, OK, maybe we’re fucked, but Bwahahaha! It’s Too Late Now! So let’s just Keep On Smoking!”

I’m a pretty bright guy and getting right up in my grill was never going to work on me: I was too facile a debater and too quick a counterpuncher to let any Evangelizing Ex-Smoker land any blows, even though they were right, and I was dead wrong.

What did work -- what did gnaw at me -- was raising the ambient temperature. Creating a pervasive atmosphere where it was just a given that smoking was stupid.

And while I will continue to joyfully pimpwhip asshats like Brooks and Hume and Malkin, I do not expect them to change their deeply entrenched and deeply dishonorable positions one little bit, which ironically is precisely why I continue to have great hopes for the future.

Because the more they blather arrant idiocy that is shown to be arrant idiocy by the headlines every morning, the more the ambient temperature climbs.

The more Scotty McClellan tries to dirty-dance Bush out of his own words as those words putrefy right before our eyes, the more they look exactly like Tobacco Executives – standing before a veritable Everest of documents showing them to be liars – still swearing that they had no idea that those coffin nails they’d gotten rich selling to children were any more dangerous that mother’s milk.

And somewhere out there it’s 2:00 a.m. and a Moderate lies awake, watching this unfold. Having spent years smoking down Republican lies by day, he is reaching the point where all of the pretty dogma he has been trained to believe is no longer sufficient to explain away the blood he coughs up at night.

Not in great numbers yet, but by one's and two's, they look at their Party and what a monstrous thing it has become at the hand of the liars who have seized it, gutted it and dance on it’s grave, and they ask themselves:

“Do I really want to die from something this stupid?”