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The Dixie Chicks took home no less than five Grammies last night. I was rooting for them for nearly every category. It was nice to see the reality distortion field of millions of rednecks collapsing in plain sight on national TV.

The finer points of hypocrisy are clearly lost on this population of "music lovers" who spend $15 on a CD good enough to listen to, so long as the artists maintain a brainless view of our foreign policy. (Never mind the hypocrisy that this policy is supposedly to protect the freedoms we hold dear such as, say, the freedom of speech)

Perhaps this explains why some people like this genre: it's more about posturing self-identity bolstering rhetoric than it is about the music or substance of the album. You know, "and I'm proud to be an American.... Where at least I know I'm free."

Yes, "at least", indeed.

I think I'm onto something here with this "posturing" bit. A friend of mine (let's call him Dick) was dating a (supposedly) ultra-conservative single mom (let's call her Jane). Dick moved into Jane's house with her and her daughter, and quite unmarried. It was a veritable picture of modern domestic partnership, sans, of course, holy matrimony.

Until, of course, this idyllic picture was shattered every so often when Jane's mom was in town to visit for the weekend. Then, so as to keep up appearances, Dick had to move out and stay with his parents for the weekend because Jane couldn't be so bold as to tell mom that she and Dick were an item and were sharing a bed (gasp!) outside of wedlock.

Now, it's not that she felt guilty for sharing her bed with a man as an unmarried woman (it's all good 51 weeks out of the year). And it's not because such activity would corrupt the morals of her eight year old daughter (who has been instructed to "don't tell gramma").

It's because the illusion of propriety is more important than the propriety itself. One must be "holier than thou", one must be more indignant than the others at the "corruption of moral values", because coming across as being as tolerant as you actually are might make you look like a softie to the other church ladies who are probably putting up the illusion of giving a damn about whether your daughter is having unwed sex, even though, chances are, their daughters are doing the exact same thing.

So it has nothing to do with intrinsic moral values, intrinsic artistic values, or intrinsic political disagreement. So long as the turd has been polished to a sufficient sheen, these people will buy it, just like they buy nutjobs like Falwell, Haggard, and Robertson.

And now for the final exhibit du jour, and I've saved the best for last. It's an astonishing episode of the BBC's "Top Gear". Here's the setup: Take 3 british "lads". Plant them on the Florida/Alabama border. Give them an "impossible mission", and see who comes out alive. Warning: Don't Try This At Home.

Now, you tell me why Alabama is crawling with insecure homophobic nutjobs... I'm convinced these people can't separate their politics from their religion. See, when Borat did the same thing, he was hiding behind the opaque cloud of an ignorance that "he clearly doesn't know what he's saying". Three well-spoken British guys who clearly should know better? Not so much.

Every so often, I run across the most outrageous legislation, and I realize what criminals we have sent to Washington to run our country.

I was reminded of this in reading this article about Senator Coburn who engaged Senator Stevens ("it's a series of tubes!") regarding the "Bridge to Nowhere", which I first heard about on (of course) the Daily Show.

So, reading about Coburn, I wanted to know, what rat bastards voted with Stevens to spend over $200M on a bridge to serve 50 people when that money could have been earmarked to rebuild bridges damaged by Katrina?

Well, the list isn't flattering. Sure you'll see Brownback, Frist, Hatch, Lott, and Santorum voting with Stevens-- and I suppose career politicians like Kennedy, Kerry, and Lieberman aren't too surprising either. But does it stop there? Sadly, no. Biden. Clinton. Dodd. Feinstein. Durbin. Harkin. Obama. All of them (sadly, Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell too!) voted against the amendment that Coburn put forth.

Now this wasn't some omnibus bill that "does more good than bad" to feed starving children, that happens to have some pork-barrel rider on it. No, this vote was solely to accept or deny the specific proposition to build a $200+ million bridge to serve a community of 50 people.

Why? So when the time comes for Cantwell or Murray to lobby for some pork-barrel initiative for Boeing or Microsoft, they'll have a community of 82 people they can rest assured will also look out for their interests. You scratch my back, and together we'll mis-appropriate the taxpayers' money.

Given this vote is over a year old, why make an issue of it now?

Well, maybe I'm finally "sick as hell and not going to take it anymore". There are a handful of issues that make me very angry. One of them is the culture of cynical politics, which is to say, that we need substantial campaign finance reform, we need to eliminate the impact the special interests have on our politicians. And the other is the outrageous and irresponsible actions of the US Congress to cede it's oversight powers over the ability of the President to wage war.

If any of those candidates, Democrat or Republican (pshaw, as if) were counting on my vote, sorry, I'll pass.

Yes, I'm a registered Democrat. Yes, I'll vote Democrat before I'll vote Green or Libertarian because I don't want to "throw away my vote". So I'll be participating in the primary process, and given that the union of these two bellweather votes distills it down to only Senators Russ Feingold and Kent Conrad, I'll be looking into other Democratic leaders, such as Gov's Richardson, Vilsack, Representatives Kucinich, Senator Mike Gravel, and General Wesley Clark.

And if they don't end up with the Democratic nomination, then I guess I'll see if the Greens, the Libertarians or (snowballs in hell!) Republicans manage to present a candidate better than the sellouts like Clinton or Edwards.