To Congress (except MAYBE Minnesota’s delegation) the bridge disaster is pretty much meaningless. How do/will we know this? Because when all the rhetoric has been spun and all the noise been made about who was to blame and how everyone was responsible, Congress will continue to fill bills with spending that has only meaning to the campaign contributors. Meanwhile, our guvmint will continue to rationalize incompetence by designating billions more for infrastructure maintainence and care less about how the money is actually spent.

Hence, more political payoffs, more bike paths, and more land taken out of the private sector to “preserve” nature while land prices spiral upwards, all in the name of helping nature.

And no matter who is technically in power, until the thieves of both parties are removed there will continue to be disasters like this. The Katrina disaster wasn’t GW’s fault. It was the fault of decades of misappropriation of funds designated for dike repair. The failed bridge will turn out to be no different, as will the next disaster, too.

But I watched Markos on MTP, and am stating here, for the record, you are mischaracterizing his remarks regarding “semantics,” plain and simple. What he clearly said was that the specific timeframe is merely semantics; the thrust of what he said was that most — and 80% of the American people certainly qualifies as most — want the US out of Iraq. Americans are not so stupid as to think that this can happen overnight; but in 3 months, maybe 6 months and a year at the outside.

It would be nice if conservatives could argue the merits and not nit-pick the semantics, but that would mean that 1) they understand the merits and the way that most of the populace feels (rather than how conservatives wished they felt, which in the conservative world is, as Turd Blossum says, how you make your “own reality”); and, 2) conservatives actually had a cohesive rationale for their argument. But the reality is that conservativethink is wrong.

However…

How you characterize Fox Noise is correct. The baiting, the libel, the clear bias towards conservatives on Fox is clear. At this point, they don’t even try to be “fair and balanced.” Any democrat who goes on Fox is taking their chances. If you make your point and it is incontrovertible, no problem, they’ll just cut off your mic and shout you down. Markos wasn’t saying good democrats can’t go on Fox; think of it in simpler terms, like if you want to deliver a serious message, the circus is not the appropriate environment.

Smart, literate and motivated people like Markos drive conservatives nuts. Its easy to see why; they are the future of the party. Markos’ opinions of Harold Ford, who lost his election in large part to conservative dirty tricks, were spot-on. The Democrats tried to play the centrists for far too long, especially in the face of ultra-right-wing conservatives. When Ford was attacked by slimy conservatives using the most base of tactics, he thought that his constituents would see through it for what it was. He was wrong, just as wrong as Democrats have been when faced with similar issues in other campaigns. He didn’t fight back, and instead, now tries to appease conservatives by going on Fox Noise. Its a tactic that has proven wrong time and again, and that is the point that Markos was making.