Some hope and a good Tom Lehrer image from TPMCafe this morning:

If the public at large turned angrily on the White House, though, a fair number of swing-district Republicans would manage to find -- or create -- their voices of outrage. Most Republicans,though, would be glancing back and forth between angry voters and Karl Rove's cornered-rat White House, feeling , in Tom Lehrer's immortal words, "like a Christian Scientist with appendicitis," and trying to fend off commitment for as long as humanly possible.

It couldn't be said better than "Light of Reason" blog of Arthur Silber:
CRAP

You can’t try to change the administration’s course by appealing to facts and argument: they’ve rejected facts and argument, on principle.

Most people seem not to understand that when we deal with the Bush administration, we are dealing with something unique, and uniquely dangerous: an administration which is fully committed to an ideology—an ideology that is entirely self-contained and completely self-referencing. It is not concerned with facts, evidence, logic and argument. It is concerned only with its own internal vision of the world, and how that world should be constructed and how it should operate.

So even if there are many utterly compelling arguments against the Bolton appointment, or against attacking Iran, none of that matters.

Again today I cringe listening to Bush appoint Bolton to the UN...

From the ether...

The decision to go forward with the Bolton appointment, without Senate approval and despite his demonstrable, monumental lack of qualifications, is the Bush-Cheney way.
It’s macho, in your face, unilateral, we don’t give a damn, we’re doing it our way, and if you don’t like it, tough.
That’s the style that got the United States into Iraq and into the torture scandal.
And that same style will now be on display for 18 months in the detestable person of John Bolton.
This is the America of George Bush.
Let the world, and the citizens of this country, see it for what it is.

Matthew Rothchild - The Progressive

There’s the religion of Pharisees and Inquisitors, and there’s the religion of Prophets and Healers. The two, although rooted in the same heritage, have nothing to do with one another. The leaders of the religious right in this country are too often led by the first group. What we need badly is for leaders to emerge from the second. I’m not at all sure that will happen, but I fear it’s our only hope.

Jack Whelan

From article by Paul Loeb...

Eloquence, however, is not as important as kindness, concern, and a straightforward declaration of belief. Will Campbell has been a Baptist preacher, civil rights activist, farmer, writer, and volunteer cook for his friend Waylon Jennings. Years ago, he was invited to participate in a student conference on capital punishment at Florida State University. At the last minute he discovered that he was supposed to formally debate an erudite scholar, who delivered a long philosophical argument in favor of the death penalty as a means of buttressing the legitimacy of the state. When Campbell got up to present the opposing view, nothing equally weighty came to mind. So he said, slowly and deliberately, "I just think it's tacky," and sat down.

The audience laughed.

"Tacky?" the moderator asked.

"Yessir," Campbell repeated. "I just think it's tacky."

"Now, come on," the moderator said, "tacky is an old Southern word, and it means uncouth, ugly, lack of class."

"Yessir. I know what it means," said Campbell. "And if a thing is ugly, well, ugly means there's no beauty there. And if there is no beauty in it, there is no truth in it. And if there is no truth in it, there is no good in it. Not for the victim of the crime. Certainly not for the one being executed. Not for the executioner, the jury, the judge, the state. For no one. And we were enjoined by a well-known Jewish prophet to love them all."

I'm not lobbying for disdaining reasoned arguments. But modern society, by virtue of its complexity and sophistication, makes moral engagement difficult; we don't need to compound the problem by demanding perfection. Simple can still be forceful and eloquent.

Is there no bottom to the depths of "low" the Bush dynasty will sink.
This from the Miami Herald:

BY GARY FINEOUT Miami Herald

One day after an exhaustive autopsy sought to end much of the controversy over Terri Schiavo's life, and eventual death, Gov. Jeb Bush said he plans to ask prosecutors to investigate whether her husband took too long to call for help on the night she collapsed in 1990. A lawyer for Michael Schiavo called the governor's comments ''disgusting'' and said there was no delay in the husband's call for help.

A friend of mine recently asked me if I believed in "evil" and the answer is YES I do and the behavior of the Bush brothers confirms it.