I completely agree. A lot of this is about having some spine and standing up to these blustering idiots... It seems like something has happened with movement conservatism and cable news. Somehow they've been able to dictate whole cloth what is and is not respectable. And they still do, just look at the yakkers on TV. This is a problem.

And as you say it's ongoing. If you look at recent history, they should be the ones who aren't respectable. The recent war has been a prime example. The whole war effort was practically an empty shell as far as planning goes. If you read any of the books about it-- George Packer's Assassin's Gate, or Ricks' Fiasco. The whole thing was, as you said, a complete clusterfuck. It's really quite shocking when your read the books. And the media went along for the ride. (I know the MSM thinks us bloggers are so rude for swearing blah blah blah, but whatever.)

So there was no sane planning, but of course there was a phalanx of PR and media. I think this mirrors what we're seeing on other issues, including our own.  

My feeling is that people have had enough and that's what the recent elections were about. I think Sidney Blumenthal in this Salon essay got it right. (I've also been spreading around this Jay Rosen post, which I think says a lot about the way the media has been sleepwalking through all this...)

"The dirty hippies -- the great masses of the public and the very few public figures (Feingold, Gore, Kucinich)..."

Yeah, dirty hippies!  Like Ron Paul:

(In)famous dirty hippie

Ron Paul, dirty hippie

Mark Bahner

If a bit hysterically made.

Us and Juan Williams on Fox News:

Sometimes I just want to scream. You guys have been going on since this thing began. I mean, you don't give credit to people, Nancy Pelosi, Howard Dean, Barbara Lee, people who said from the start this is a mistake...

that was cathartic even vicariously.

Get Some Sun: http://www.votesolar.org

By the way, some suggested reading on the culture wars: Richard Hofstadter's classic, The Paranoid Style of American Politics, and Jay Rosen's update, Bill O'Reilly and the Paranoid Style in News. Then David Brock's essay, "The right captures the tube" on the subject of the Mclaughlin Group (which I found really interesting). If you really want to get deep into it, read David Brock's whole The Republican Noise Machine. It's a bit too long on the details, and sometimes it reads too much like a screed for my tastes, but it really does capture the whole "whoever makes the most noise wins" scene pretty effectively...

ECONOMICS. There is no left without anti-capitalist economic. All there is absent that discussion is a menu of lifestyle choices masquerading as politics.

To Wit:

The Gaia Hypothesis is anything but New Age: Gaia describes a universe in which individuals are twigs on an exquisitely branchy tree, implicitly therefore with a consciousness (though the Gaia Hypothesis does not address this question) that is but the pinpoint of the greater tree-consciousness -- or as our pagan ancestors believed, the extended consciousness of our mother the goddess focused to an infinity of individual pinpoints whether inanimate or animate: Ed Sander's "tiny sparks of the universe." Hence Taliesin's "there is nothing in which I have not been"; hence too the formidable logic behind the central chant of the Ghost Dance: "we shall live again." And -- if I may return once more to the analogy of the branchy tree -- beyond this there is the greater community of treeness, what Gary Snyder aptly calls "Earth Household," the implicitly socialist, implicitly communalist realm of being that was instinctively recognized by most of humanity throughout most of its history -- that is, until the advent of patriarchy spawned the absolutism of Abrahamic separatism which in turn produced capitalism and is now predictably metastasizing into fascism: its ultimate form -- of which New Age is a vital support-element.

Indeed New Age is the diametrical opposite of Gaian community and solidarity. New Age is the quintessence of existential isolationism, the ultimate (and ultimately selfish) exclamation of the fascist concept of ubermenschen und untermenschen, man and superman -- and thus absolute self-centeredness rationalized as maximum virtue -- in exactly the same way capitalism is absolute greed rationalized as maximum virtue.

To enlarge slightly on something I recently wrote (in a New-Age-infested venue from which I was ousted for daring to express these very observations): never mind that the core of New Age doctrine is a fuck-you-I-am-god belief that can only further defiance of the environmental mandates of Earth Household; the fascism implicit in the New Age credo lies in the fact that -- even more than the doctrines of Abrahamic religion (which divide all the word into the ubermenschen of the "saved" and the untermenschen of the "damned") -- the mind-over-matter dogma of the New Age cleaves humanity into the "evolved souls" of the "fully conscious" or "enlightened" elite (those "spiritually progressed beings" -- hence "progressives" -- allegedly able to control their own fates merely by the power of their own thoughts), and the dunce-cap proletariat of the "un-evolved" masses, (all the rest of us who for whatever reason refuse to accept the New Age gospel). And just as the Christians elevate wealth to proof of divine favor, denounce the poor as "sinners" and rail that our poverty is proof of our "sin," so do the New Agers exalt riches as proof of enlightenment, dismiss poverty as nothing more than a "self-destructive lifestyle choice" and sneer at us poor as "hopelessly un-evolved." In either case, what is deftly ignored is the fact that capitalism is a slave ideology -- a giant pyramid scam fueled by the ever-worsening survival struggles of an ever-expanding underclass increasingly condemned to inescapable wretchedness.

Thus we see the true function of New Age dogma: to replace the dying dogmas of Abrahamic religion and thereby reinforce the genuinely Nazi ethos at the core of capitalism. Just as Christian capitalists relentlessly savage their workers but find reassurance of their righteousness in church on Sunday, so now New Age executives do likewise in the privacy of their own posh dwellings: they chant some self-affirming mantra and assure themselves of their superiority merely by believing they can "visualize peace." Thus too the so-called New Age is merely the latest attempt to rationalize capitalism -- the most ecocidally parasitic, genocidally selfish ethos in human experience -- a fact proven beyond a scintilla of doubt by the huge corporate beneficence that finances the propagation of New Age beliefs. By contrast, the Gaia Hypothesis is positively subversive: it is the missing link that harmonizes ecology with socialism and -- by implication -- bonds spirituality and science in a mutually supportive manner unknown since the rise of patriarchy. It does all this because it brings us back, via science, to the ecological interdependence of all being -- the ancient knowledge that if one part of Earth Household becomes so predatory it jeopardizes the whole, the entirety of the household is programmed to rise against it and kill it: precisely the self-inflicted apocalypse we now euphemistically describe as global warming. To which adherents of the New Age -- defiantly self-centered to the pollution-bitter end -- will no doubt respond with yet another bumper-sticker: "visualize global cooling."
http://blog.mu.nu/cgi/blup.cgi?entry_id=210748

are no better than Republicans, being corpwhorate minions and warmongers of the EXACT same ilk.

NOTHING will be done by Democrats to stop the American Holocaust that has been going on across the planet for the last sixty years since the end of WW2 and the nazi-infested CIA was created.

Nazi-infested CIA?

Why yes indeed.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB146/index.htm

in the post to be breaking Godwin's Law, but hey, I'm just a dirty hippie.  What do I know?

Personally, as I can see the direction the MSM are heading, I suggest we start soliciting right now to cover Dave's medical bills.  

http://www.savedaveshead.org

"Beware the dirty hippies. They're immature and irresponsible. They're utopians and dreamers. They want free sex and legalized drugs and mandatory abortion."
Plus cool music and permanent euphoria from freedom feeling. Great life-style and quite eco-friendly! I'm for hippie, free love with condoms and variable intimate life with sex toys. "You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one" (c)Lenon