Facilitated by instant message, edited by (and posted with permission of) Mary Anne.
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Mary Anne: Reading the Seattle Times article.
Mary Anne: Finished
Mary Anne: This is sad.
Fox: Isn't it?
Mary Anne: And they will persist in spinning.
Mary Anne: Don must feel like Cassandra.
Fox: It's not spin, it's flat-out denial.
Mary Anne: Denial is spin, but not all spin is denial.
Fox: True.
Mary Anne: We move from "there are weapons" to "there were weapons" to "who cares if there were weapons?"
Fox: Big Lie - Big Excuse - Big Deal
Mary Anne: Retrofitting the justifications to fit the critics.
Fox: They've been doing that since last year.
Mary Anne: This is such a cynical manipulation of the nation's voters. It's worse than anything I've seen in a long time.
Fox: Dare I say, since Nixon?
Mary Anne: I'm so disgusted.
Mary Anne: No.
Mary Anne: Nixon broke the law, but he was just trying to choose his opponent.
Mary Anne: These people are not only going after the elections, they are trying to dominate a distant region of the world in which many of their friends have substantial business interests.
Fox: I was thinking less about Watergate than I was about his conduct of the Vietnam War and the opposition at home.
Fox: See also Spiro Agnew
Mary Anne: Well, sorta. But he just exploited a situation that he was already handed.
Mary Anne: I'm thinking of McCarthy.
Fox: Ah, yes.
Mary Anne: The use of fear and misinformation to inflame public opinion...
Mary Anne: And then put imperial pretensions on top of it.
Mary Anne: This is disgusting.
Mary Anne: I'm beginning to hate these people.
Fox: Only beginning to?
Mary Anne: I've got a political heart, Fox.
Mary Anne: I understand the urge, the need to play the game.
Mary Anne: I have disliked their politics, and distrusted their methods, and disdained their "ethics".
Mary Anne: But still recognize it as a craft.
Mary Anne: We are now getting into the area in which the craftsmen are using their skill to build corrupting and repulsive machines.
Mary Anne: As opposed to merely playing hardball.
Fox: I guess the proof of that pudding will come in 2008
Mary Anne: They are undermining the organism that supports them.
Mary Anne: 2008 is a long time from now.
Fox: [undermining] Yes - which also makes me think of Nixon. The Constitution won that one
Mary Anne: Because the nation has never fallen, people tend to take for granted that it won't.
Fox: Well, sure.
Mary Anne: I find the combination of incipient economic crash, domestic attack on civil liberties, and imperial foreign adventuring by a group of business-savvy, intelligent, but morally shallow people to be frightening.
Fox: I used 2008 because 2004 may not be time enough for the truth to overwhelm the wagging dog. If a hand-picked successor to Bush wins in 2008 - then you've got machine politics.
Mary Anne: Couple that with an American public whose grasp on reality has been fuzzed by the bleed-over known as "infotainment", and whose attention span is about half an hour, and the impending crisis trifecta looks to become grave.
Fox: Are you reminded of the Gilded Age? I have been
Mary Anne: A little.
Fox: Even Davin seems to be reaching toward despair.
Mary Anne: I'm reminded more of the end of the Roman Republic, which bothers me.
Fox: Um, yes - because it was replaced with Empire.
Fox: And deification of the Emperor
Mary Anne: When my thoughts stray inordinately in a particular direction without specific factual underpinnings, it's because the smarter, but less articulate part of my brain has noticed something.
Fox: Yes.
Mary Anne: One thing is hopeful, though: When I think of George II, and then I think of Julius Caesar, the comparison makes me laugh.
Fox: Well, yeah.
Mary Anne: George II is far too callow. Caesar was a genius. There are no geniuses in this group.
Fox: Caesar fought his own wars, too
Fox: I think Powell may qualify for genius, at least raw material - his years in the Army spoiled him, made him too much of a team player.
Mary Anne: Our big problem isn't the war, though that is a tragedy and an abandonment of our tradition of fair play. It's not the first time we've behaved like beasts, though, and we've come out of those things chastened in the past.
Fox: ...and then we forget
Mary Anne: It's the other two combined: the economic crisis is promising to destabilize upward mobility. My contact, through inlaws, with the upper classes has taught me that they are different than the tough entrepreneurs that the Zone conservatives tout as the strong bones of our body politic.
Fox: [behaved like beasts] you ought to try some history of this region from, say 1850 to 1865. "General Order Number 11", for instance, as an analog to this century's "War on Terrorism"
Mary Anne: That class, not the hard workers, are the ones who are reaping the benefits of class calcification.
Fox: Yes - but they always have
Mary Anne: Add to that, the erosion of civil rights, and the erosion of support for civil rights, and we have the makings of a right collapse. The real reasons that people come here, the dual promise of a shot at prosperity and the right to be left alone, are under attack.
Mary Anne: I ought to be posting this, but I'm tired of arguing.
Mary Anne: They don't listen.
Fox: From my former viewpoint in Appalachia, I have to say that the 'class calcification' has been going on for longer than the current Administration.
Mary Anne: Yes.
Fox: [posting] Yes, you should - and no, they don't listen.
Fox: Have you considered the idea that perhaps a collapse is overdue?
Fox: That's cynically Jeffersonian of me, I know....
Fox: ...and I don't want to see one, either.
Mary Anne: -sigh-
Mary Anne: I think of this country as something of a miracle.
Mary Anne: We learch ahead, improvising as we go.
Mary Anne: My son has said that the American genius for self-organizing will save us.
Fox: I'd be inclined to listen to him.
Mary Anne: This administration is doing its very best to shut up all the voices that oppose it.
Fox: Yes, it has
Mary Anne: This shuts down a very important engine in this process.
Fox: And that's intentional, too
Mary Anne: On the other hand, we may wind up with an entirely new group as a result of these efforts: liberal moderates who think that private gun ownership is a very good thing.
Fox: Like you, for instance?
Mary Anne: When the people in power think they can shut everyone else up, sometimes merely retaining the threat of rebellion is enough to give people the courage to speak up.
Fox: Or me, for that matter - not that I would own one myself, but...
Mary Anne: And you know, retaining the moral high ground only works as long as the people in power have enough morality to be embarrassed. I think we've passed that point.
Fox: Yes
Mary Anne: They lie, and lie and lie.
Fox: They even lie about being moral.
Mary Anne: They actually are quite moral, as long as one gives them leave to write the rules. So were the Pharisees and the Sadducees. They wrote the glosses on the rule book, forgot the rules, and followed the glosses. This is what we have.
Fox: Very perceptive!
Fox: (don't forget the Money Changers)
Mary Anne: They not only don't look outside the box, they have furnished its interior and declared it the center of the universe.
Fox: worse: They have declared it to BE the Universe.
Mary Anne: Oh, not yet. There are those of us who live outside.
Mary Anne: We are lesser creatures, or devils, depending on the mood of the day.
Fox: ...or traitors
Mary Anne: devils
Fox: right
Fox: demonized
Mary Anne: yup

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We went on from there to talk about religion.