Letters, we get letters.

Captain Obvious Part II: the Refractory Period *

In which we can relax, remember hungrily what it was like to light up a smoke, and try not to fall asleep and roll into the wet spot.

* (“…in physiology, is a period of time during which an organ or cell is incapable of performing a particular action. ” You’re all big kids and I don’t really have to spell out which organ or what act precipitates its need for downtime, right?)

First, Big Thanqueues (That’s when you line up to say “thanks”. Which should be a Goolglewhack by the end of the weekend. Which will be my Googlewhack #5 or 6, so look out ladies!) to C&L -- our indispensable Liberal Elitist one-stop Costco warehouse of video goodness -- for the link today.

Had I known id’a cleaned the place up a little and worn actual pants.

Second, thanks to an enterprising lass with a “Times Select” slim-jim, the reflexes of a cougar and, I’m sure, deep, soulful eyes that can penetrate a man’s soul like pitons going into brie, for scaling the Dark Tower and slipping the comments below to me.

It seems that this little outpost of libertines, freebooters, fatalists, blues hounds, docs, charlemagnes and assorted other lunatics perceptive citizens is not the only place where people gather to wonder (in softer, nicer tones and very implicitly. very subtextually.) why in the fuck the Good Captain can’t seem to recalibrate his theocracy-targeting software and prosebots to focus on the forces of Fundamentalist-powered intolerance, barbarity and rampant hubrignorance (Lucky Googlewhack #7!) that have dragooned a certain political Party and are diligently working to drag it into the Middle Ages.

You know, that certain Party that currently rules a certain "America" from sea to shining sea?

Especially since Friedman dances such a huge, flaming tarantella about this very subject just about once a month, every month...but only as long as the armies of intolerance that advocate chaining democracy to the bumper and dragging it around the block a few times are safely swarthy and waaay the hell over the horizon.

Only as long as those champions of God’s Love beating God's Mercy into Liberty’s heart with a claw hammer are spouting the Quran and not Leviticus.

But when it comes to his own fucking country and his preferred Party, suddenly the Captain lapses into a vast and conspicuous silence. Or when he musters the snuff to critique the collapse of the American political system and threats to democracy in his own sandbox, he will reliably elide over Falwell and Reed, Weyrich and Limbaugh, Coulter and Robertson, Frist and DeLay and focus right in on his first and favorite target: Evil Liberals.

Like the drunk who searches for his keys a block from where he actually lost them because the light is better, Friedman can always be depended upon to go Full Metal Truffle Hog hunting down America’s Enemies Within about million miles to the Left of their actual location.

Because the light and the compensation package are both is soooo much better over there.

(For those who are interested, this essay by me from 13 months ago explains the reason for my disdain in greater detail. I also use some potty words, so be careful.)

But a few of his readers have twigged to the striking similarities between the ideologies of the Intolerant Arabs and the Intolerant Dobsons and have decided to call that insightful observation to the attention of the intrepid Captain.

Chris Randol, Boulder, Colo notes:

As I was reading about Mideast democracy, I realized you could have been speaking of the U.S. and how Bush has hijacked democracy here, exporting war thru manipulation of facts and demagoguery, purging voter lists, etc. And then he purports to export democracy, and you get a Bush version of democracy. Garbage in, garbage out.

Geoff DiMeglio from San Francisco begins as follows:

Perhaps it is time that we learn the lesson that democracy is not simply the structure of elections and votes, but actually an idea that requires participation from people who believe in what it stands for…

Now seriously, just as a thought experiment, without peeking at the answer, based only on that snip can anyone honestly tell whether Mr. DiMeglio is talking about Hamas or the GOP?

Maureen Morell, Orlando Fla. says:

I read your column today and appreciated the clarity. Then I read back through it again and in my mind replaced references to Islamic extremists — Hezbollah, Hamas, etc. — with the American Republican right-wing extremists, and replaced the countries of Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq with the United States, and got a very clear picture of what's happened to our own democracy with George W. Bush in the White House. Thankfully ours is absent the violence; however, our democracy has been significantly weakened under his watch.

And then suggests, very reasonably,

...
Maybe you could write a column about that.

And Matthew Saks, Princeton, N.J. brings it on home with a little travelin’ music that goes something like this:

I find that a preponderance of your columns address the fate of democratic institutions in currently autocratic countries. But I wonder: instead of determining how well America is doing in exporting this product, is it not even more urgent to deal with the fact that democracy is failing badly here, in America? We have good reason to believe that the 2004 election was stolen in Ohio — see Robert Kennedy's celebrated Rolling Stone article — and that the next election will be equally fraudulent — see Andrew Gumbel's latest piece in The Nation.

But even beyond this shocking electoral rigging, we have reached a point where ordinary people — who do not happen to be millionaires — have no faith that they can play a part in the political decision-making process that shapes the world they live in. The common man the lowly demos that the Greeks spoke of has never felt more disenfranchised.

Call America anything you like: an oligarchy, a den of burgeoning fascism, an aristocracy. But I daresay that we have no right to call ourselves a democracy. It is an act of breathtaking hypocrisy to anoint ourselves the torch-bearer of democracy when we are far from attaining that goal ourselves. Re-inventing democracy, both re-thinking what that word might mean and re-dedicating ourselves to its practice, is our most urgent task at the present moment. I hope you will help be part of the solution

Now would anyone care to make a wager on the exact date and time that the Captain will take up Ms. Morell’s terrific suggestion and, “...write a column about that”?