It's been awhile since we had:

Fun With Captain Obvious.

Friedman is right in his Friday column when he mounts up on his NYT Rocinante and takes to the field of honor to joust with those who don’t believe the Israel-Palestine-Lebanon troika is utterly clusterfucked, and that elected thugs are just-as-bad-if-not-worse than store-bought thugs.

Of course, outside of my gato, my ceramic-Buddah-in-shades and the oddly-toothed guy on the “el” who very much wants to introduce everyone to the friend in his pocket I don’t know anyone, anywhere who actually espouses the opinions against which the Captain so fearlessly inveighs.

Because, unsurprisingly, he didn’t exactly have to strap on the ol’ tungsten carbides and bore into the Earth’s mantle to hew this vein of veracity from the inscrutable stone.

No he did what he almost always does; wandered out onto the sidewalk, bought a polish and an orange drink and, at seven minutes to deadline, scooped up the biggest, most anaconda-in-a-kiddie-pool self-evident object within arm's reach.

Took it back to the office.

Slipped off his shoes, and absently toe-typed it up in 750 flaccid words while watching “The Big Chill” for the 322nd time.

Which I have to admit kinda pisses me off, considering that I don’t have a fat NYT paycheck to tent-pole my financial picture, subsidized my musings and abet my lucrative Real Job cranking out book after book that breathlessly reveal to CEOs various Shocking Truths!!! that were blindingly clear to your average code monkey 10 years ago.

So pardon me while I play my little game with Himself’s column, “The Kidnapping of Democracy” and ask, again, if the castor oil he is hawking is so vital to the good cultural health of people safely 10,000 miles away...why is it Captain Obvious cannot ever quite bring himself to use his sacred column inches to administer the same bitter curative in the same dosages to the sick fuckers who run this country?

His country.

But then again, one can only irresponsibly speculate on what expending his efforts writing a column like the one below would cost him.

How much longer he could retain his Times paycheck and book contracts if he ever swung his teeny guns around and starting firing into the wheelhouse by Acting Locally?

That being said, onward...

This has been very minimally edited.

I kept the music but lightly changed the lyrics to answer the burning question – what would the Universe be like if Tom Friedman stopped worrying about his wallet, embraced the principles he self-righteously tosses all over everyone else in the world like Mardi Gras beads, and directly confronted the beam in his own eye?

“The Bushnapping of Democracy”

“When you watch the criminal incompetence unfolding in the White House today it is easy to feel that you’ve been to this movie before and that you know how it ends — badly. But we actually have not seen this movie before. Something new is unfolding, and we’d better understand it.

What we are seeing in the Republican Party is an effort by hard-core Dominionist groups to use elections to pursue their long-term aim of a Conservative Christianized America. This is not a conflict about genuine nation problems within the United States. This is a power struggle within theocrats, fascists and corporatists over who will call the shots in their newly elected “democratic’’ governments and whether they will be real democracies.

The majority militant wing of GOP today is pulling all the strings of Republican politics, the Dobson-backed Christopaths are doing it in the Senate, even in the House, in the Media and in the courts. They are not only showing who is boss inside each institution of American democracy, but they are also competing with one another for overall influence.

As a result, the post-9/11 American political dialogue in America has been hijacked. Yes, basically free and fair elections were held in States, including and Ohio. Yes, millions turned out to vote because the American people really do want to shape their own futures.

But thanks to thirty years of Hate Radio, Southern Strategy and pandering to the most radical elements of the Evangelical movement, the roots of democracy are so shallow in the Red States and the moderate majorities so weak and intimidated that we are getting the worst of all worlds.

We are getting anti-government incompetents and theocrats who are elected to power, but who insist refuse to assume all the responsibilities of a sovereign government. They refuse to let their governments have gun control. They refuse to be accountable to international law, and they refuse to submit to the principle that one party in power cannot drag a whole country into war, and raze its democratic institutions unchecked.

“Fuck you, we won,’’ said every Rightwing pundit, blogger, Fox spin weasel and Bush apologist in 2004. “The 49% of this country that lost all need to shut the fuck up. Because they lost, their interest and concerns are irrelevant. Their warnings that we’re roaring off a cliff are just the yapping of losers. We need not share one iota of the decision making process with them. We’re right because we won, so they can blow all this traitor-talk that we are fucking the country to death right our their asses. No one on the Christian Right cares about their elitist “math” and their devil “science”. Their “history” or “causality”. History is what we decide it was. Our steely resolve will bend and reconstitute Reality itself, and these treason-o-crats better get used to it. Hell, they should be grateful that we don’t round them up and have them shot for thinking bad thoughts about the Dear Leader!”

Then why do parties like White Bigots for Christ get elected? Often because they effectively run against old secular parties, but once these Dominionists are in office they revert to serving their own factional interests, not those of the broad community.

“We must decide who has the right to make decisions on war and peace, freedom and torture in America. Is that right reserved for an informed populace and its legal institutions acting in the open, or is the choice in the hands of a small minority of neocons and Armageddonists acting in secret?”

When the Executive Branch can maintain can run secret prisons, torture and kill people, tap phones and leak state secrets for partisan reasons without check or balance authority, you’re left with a “meaningless exercise’’ in democracy/state building.

Why don’t the silent majorities punish these elected authoritarian parties for working against the real interests of their people? Because those who speak against the GOP are either delegitimized or ignored by the press as “crazy Liberals” or Swiftboated, like John Kerry, the Democratic candidate for President and war hero.

The world needs to understand what is going on here: the little flowers of democracy that were planted 230 years ago are being crushed by the boots outright fascists who are desperate to keep real accountability from taking hold in this region, and Dominionist fanatics desperate to beat the world back to the Dark Ages and keep modernism from taking hold.

It may be the skeptics are right: maybe democracy, while it is the most powerful form of legitimate government, simply can’t be implemented everywhere. It certainly is never going to work in America world if no one in the press takes a stand on its behalf, if the likes of Thomas Friedman dithers on the fence, if the moderate Republicans refuse to pull their heads out of their asses and fight against the monsters that have stolen their Party, and if hate-spewing lunatics like Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, Tom DeLay, Ann Counter and Pat Robertson are allowed to control parties, to sit in governments and be treated with respect — while deliberately poisoning the well of public dialogue and sowing fear, divisiveness and ignorance to advance their despicable political agendas.

The whole democracy experiment in America is at stake here, and right now it’s going up in smoke.

It’s nice in the Bizarro Universe.

There, Ann Coulter vends $2 handjobs to self-hating, closet-bound gay men in the alley behind Whole Foods to feed her raging meth habit.

Rick Santorum is a crank with a “Kristian Konspiracy Kavalcade” show at 2:00 a.m. on public access cable. His sidekick is a fetus-in-a-jug named Mr. Snubbles, watched only by stoned teenagers who cop a few, cheap laughs at his high good-hair-to-bugfuck-crazy ratio.

And Tom Friedman regularly writes columns that do what good journalism is supposed to do: comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.