For years we've been horrified by what's been coming out of the Republican camp, but now we can take a laugh break.

I found the first of these four videos through the New York magazine blog site while searching Google for results on Levi Johnston/"sex on skates" after reading Maureen Dowd's "Too Much Life?" [print edition title], in the NYTimes this morning. I usually skip her rants, but today I found it somewhat compelling, not least because jumping out of the page was the phrase:

wild soap opera storylines erupting from the Palin family and the Alaskan wilderness [my italics]

The videos are by Sara Benincasa. The one I saw was incredibly cute (and I mean that in the best way), but most important it was a truly hysterical parody, and not the least bit mean. Yes, I know the real story isn't this family, but rather McCain's misjudgment and his cynicism.

Now excuse me while I go off to look at the other three videos.

[image from youtube]

an early image of the "Me Worry?" kid, possibly from the 1920s according to Wikipedia

Going back at least as far as The Yellow Kid, we've always had our Alfred E. Neumans, but we never used to make them emperors.

The upshot of telling a citizenry over and over again for two hundred years that anyone can become president is today's reality that anyone can become president - unless of course they're smart or work hard to deserve the honor and responsibility.

Mournful thoughts about the current occupant of the White House and the two cyphers whom the corporations are about to nominate to succeed him are the occasion for my reflection on this baleful subject.

We now know that Bush clearly wasn't an accident, and McCain and Palin scare me perhaps more - if that's even possible.

[image from wikipedia]

The Minnesota September 1st "March on the RNC and Stop the War" began in St. Paul at 11am local time today (CDT is one hour earlier than New York). Marchers planned to start with a rally at the state capitol, go to the Xcel Center in a "permitted" march and return to the capital, but things are already getting interesting as I write this. For more information see marchonrnc.org.

For continuous updates, go to this page on the Twin Cities Indymedia site or check out the MnIndyLIVE twitter feed.

Should you need more context for this, see my earlier posts from August 28 and August 30, and this Salon.com piece by Glenn Greenwald published just 24 hours ago. It's excerpted here:

So here we have a massive assault led by Federal Government law enforcement agencies on left-wing dissidents and protesters who have committed no acts of violence or illegality whatsoever, preceded by months-long espionage efforts to track what they do. And as extraordinary as that conduct is, more extraordinary is the fact that they have received virtually no attention from the national media and little outcry from anyone. And it's not difficult to see why. As the recent "overhaul" of the 30-year-old FISA law illustrated -- preceded by the endless expansion of surveillance state powers, justified first by the War on Drugs and then the War on Terror -- we've essentially decided that we want our Government to spy on us without limits. There is literally no police power that the state can exercise that will cause much protest from the political and media class and, therefore, from the citizenry.

Beyond that, there is a widespread sense that the targets of these raids deserve what they get, even if nothing they've done is remotely illegal. We love to proclaim how much we cherish our "freedoms" in the abstract, but we despise those who actually exercise them. The Constitution, right in the very First Amendment, protects free speech and free assembly precisely because those liberties are central to a healthy republic -- but we've decided that anyone who would actually express truly dissident views or do anything other than sit meekly and quietly in their homes are dirty trouble-makers up to no good, and it's therefore probably for the best if our Government keeps them in check, spies on them, even gets a little rough with them.

It seems we're now leaving it up to the kids to defend liberties we all used to pretend were ours. I hope that somehow both they and the genuine patriotism which inspires them survives. At the moment they aren't being given much support, or even the recognition which a real media would owe them, the rest of us, and the entire world.

[image from marchonrnc]