(originally posted at my blog Nothing New Under The Sun)

There has been alas too much personal stress (code for my family and coworkers have driven me round the bend again) as well as the dauntingness of all the awfulness of the news, how to comment on any of it? the sorrowful are mute - but one small aspect of all the headdesking quality (or huddled-under-the-desk quality) of it all has galled my history-buff brain into banging on the desk, because words matter, ideas matter and sloppy language --> sloppy thinking --> grossly-stupid action (or inaction), and this way, way, too common bad habit is something this first-hand-sources junkie knows a little about.

I'm speaking of all the whinging Deploring of the Vitriol-Slinging in the Political Discourse in Online Communities Today, Undoubtedly Brought About By the Slacking Moral Standards Caused By The Anonymity Of The Internet - using perhaps not all those exact words in every instance, but inevitably* using the word "vitriol", along with these memes--

People, do you know what vitriol-slinging really IS? Do you know what vitriol is, either? It has NOTHING to do with harsh language, at all.

(Also posted at my own blog, Nothing New Under The Sun)

A while ago, looking in my old Merriam-Webster dictionary for something, I stumbled over the word "spoilsman" - something which I don't recall ever hearing used, in political blogging, during all these years. It's a curious thing that this concept has gone from modern political discourse, and that the rediscovery of the thing itself - "OMG! Look at all these fiscal connections to various industry! Look at these paybacks! How the hell do they get away with this!" has come as such a shock. But that loss does explain a great deal how corporatism has been allowed to creep in and control politics unchecked for so long, before and since Nixon took undisclosed donations from Democrat tycoons in exchange for promises to make sure the EPA was toothless...

So how does this affect today's landscape? (Call me cynical if you like, but prove me wrong.)

I don't know how many dKos readers have heard about the Rapleaf/Upscoop/Trustfuse scandal, or the similar but not-connected Quechup/iDate scandal, but for those who have and those who haven't, here is something interesting which may tie into Granny Doc's recent post, "Big Brother IS Watching You" and also the documented efforts by the PTB to protect their civilian corporate subcontractors of unconstitutionality.

Auren Hoffman, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has been playing the wide-eyed ingenue ever since his Rapleaf/Upscoop/Trustfuse project blew up in a cloud of flying spam mails, is an old Young Republican.

What is Rapleaf, and why should you worry about it? I'll tell you - it begins with an email I got last week that I first marked as "spam" and ignored, until I ran across a blog post warning against this outfit.

...Listen through the rubble for a rescue team;
Six hundred feet of coal and slag--
Hope imprisoned in a three foot seam,
Hope imprisoned in a three foot seam.

Eight days passed and some were rescued,
Leaving the dead to lie alone--
Through all their lives they dug their grave:
Two miles of earth for a marking stone,
Two miles of earth for a marking stone.

I had to wait out the rest of the set in the driveway, listening for the host to identify it, so that I could find out the rest of it - "Springhill Disaster" by Peggy Seeger.

I didn't learn this in school, not even in our mandatory AmGov and US history classes that dealt with the Constitution. I found it out for myself, out of a nagging curiosity as to the origin of the memes of the Bill of Rights, which I had recently discovered were older than the national constitution itself, by virtue of them being incorporated (sometimes word for word) in the New Hampshire state constitution, which was signed into law in 1784.

A question of causality thus arose: where did NH get them from? And did the US constitution get it from which states, or did they all share a common origin?

Eventually he died of his injuries, kicked to death and left to bleed internally - even though by that time most of his captors thought he was innocent. At least one other man was killed by the same group in a similar fashion, a few weeks earlier. Four were eventually charged, although it is probable that more were involved in the "recreational" abuse.

Do they deserve the death penalty for these murders?

--A graph of Abramoff donation recipients from the ambivalent WaPo (are we watercarriers for the Establishment or Fourth Estate rebels? Decisions, decisions!) which lends credence to the TPM argument that the reason for the "Ethics Truce" between Democratic and Republican congresscritters has been mutual shared guilt, a Mexican Standoff of hands in the till--

And yes, Harry Reid is implicated. And a Kennedy - one of the Kennedys? - is the biggest beneficiary.

Article 6.

[...]The following acts, or any of them, are crimes coming within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal for which there shall be individual responsibility:

(a) CRIMES AGAINST PEACE: namely, planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing;

In light of these diaries, and a related story from Crooked Timber-

This is a thought experiment I have asked of those who keep saying "we could have won the Vietnam war if only" - what, specifically and exactly, would a win have looked like? What, quantitatively and specifically, would have been required to accomplish each of these various definitions of "win"--? And, for whom is it a win?

Usually, if you're not familiar with the show, it's a gentle, wry take on human foibles and quirks, not at all savage even when satirical, nor terribly socially conscious - or rather, it is, but in a low-key, leave-the-moral-to-the-listener way.

So for "This American Life" and its gently-wry host Ira Glass to go radical is almost like Kermit storming the Student Union and organizing a sit-in. Since I couldn't convince enough people to listen to it, just by telling them, and because I thought this was important enough to get out there, I worked for several days in my copious free time to transcribe the interviews.

One of these stories was already circulating on the 'net, but this is it firsthand, corroborated, and with more detail.

There is a great national protest march planned for Washington on Sept. 24th, to demand an end to the war again.

Some of us cannot afford to go - perhaps most of us, who are against it, but who have not been heard because we do not exist in the eyes of Middle America, the people who live paycheck to paycheck often without cars.

And in any case, that is too long to wait.

Keep reading...it gets better:

Haven't we learned not to trust the media, the govt, the mid-level officialdom, that they will lie and lie and lie to create a narrative that will cover their butts - and that the narrative is always that of the Unworthy Victim.

Why do we so easily believe, without being there, that the majority of the looters were taking wasteful, extravagant, not survival-needful things?

Because FOX tells us so, with selected photos and captions? Or for gods sake, MSNBC or CNN? Those corporate toady bootlickers of the Masters of War and Oil Barons?

At the beginning of this I compared this to the Famine in Ireland. Several people missed the point, saying "well Ireland wasn't a democracy" and even denying that the UK was a democracy in the 1800s bcause of the limits to landed males.

Well, if that's so, then America was never a democracy and it isn't one now. Remember? Landed white males only had the vote, first in law and then in practice. And yah right it's different now - just ask the black citizens whose votes are still stolen from them by "bureaucratic inefficiency."

It's possible to be a democracy and an Empire. And that is what we have had for most of our history.

Two years ago come Independence Day, my first timid forays into political commentary at a page on my site called Orrery, I posted "On Liberty" with my commentary.

It was a very pointed message, and a deliberate choice, because Mill was one of the major shapers of my admission of cryptoliberalism, and a shaker-up of my ideas circa '98, and I saw him only becoming more relevant after five years. It's partly his feminism, partly his theological honesty, and mostly everything else about him which led to his feminist & theological rantings. Here's what I said in 2003:

Have you all been asleep?

It was in the LA Times.

Here we see some of the mysticism that is often spoken of by historians describing the White Rose, along with their liberal reclaiming of the Judeo-Christian tradition to follow the subversion of the classical Graeco-Roman political philosophers. I suspect that Probst's influence is strong in this one, and also that of the Gray Order to which Graf belonged, the anti-hierarchical youth reformers who believed that the Church was called to break down boundaries and grow--