We're being worked, but the Right is being worked more.

All is abuzz about a Conservative's epiphany (or apostasy, depending): Rod Dreher has awakened to the chill fact of Bushco's fucktaculartude. And this is Bushco's worst propaganda scenario. They will always have the insect-torturers and the basement-warriors and the shit-for-profit oinkers, but when they start losing relatively principled Conservatives who've held their noses and la-la-la-ed away their dawning awareness of just how disastrous things are and are going to be, that's when the tried and true demagoguery of smearing all dissent as treasonous turns cannibalistic. It's all good fun for Conservatives to call me a traitor. It's long-knife time when Conservatives start calling each other traitors.

Here it comes.

I don't doubt that the White House will provoke a greater war against Iran and is building the farcical scafolding of justification as I type, but I also don't doubt that the White House's sudden lack of (what they perceive to be) subtlety is meant to whack their hornets' nests. A glance at the Media Matters banner down at the right and a glance at the Right side of the Daou Report shows an increase in the rabid fetidness in Piglandia.

Dreher is just one Conservative; Jat Fonah ain't converting, or Kill Brystol. I'm sure Dreher has had many phone calls and emails demanding he not just mute his treason but recant it. We'll see what he does, but the war tom-toms are being beaten for more than rallying the mouth-breather base against the Left. This is about loyalty. They are warning their own.

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That story about opening your mail came and went without a fart's notice. Let's see how much traction this one gets:

The Pentagon has been using a little-known power to obtain banking and credit records of hundreds of Americans and others suspected of terrorism or espionage inside the United States, part of an aggressive expansion by the military into domestic intelligence gathering...

But it was not previously known, even to some senior counterterrorism officials, that the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency have been using their own “noncompulsory” versions of the letters. Congress has rejected several attempts by the two agencies since 2001 for authority to issue mandatory letters, in part because of concerns about the dangers of expanding their role in domestic spying.

Can I again state the obvious? The Right ruling elite disdains Democracy, disdains the Rule of Law, disdains the masses, and hankers for unchallengeable authoritarian rule. OK? If you think for a second information isn't being collected on Americans for the day it might be used against them, you're a fool.

UPDATE: Cheney, on Fox News Sunday, has just assured us it's all quite legal, so please to shut up you or else. Whew.

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But it's all your fault anyway. So says Dinesh D'Souza who's written

(T)he worst nonfiction book about terrorism published by a major house since 9/11...

Why has al-Qaeda targeted America? "Not because of U.S. troops in Mecca," D'Souza writes. "Not even because of Israel. . . . The suicide bombers of radical Islam are not blowing themselves up because they are distressed over the Gulf War of 1991 or because they are in solidarity with the Palestinians." Rather, "what bin Laden objected to was America staying in the Middle East, importing with it the immoral ingredients of American values and culture." That makes the left "responsible for 9/11" because it "has fostered a decadent American culture that angers and repulses traditional societies" and has waged "an aggressive global campaign to undermine the traditional patriarchal family and to promote secular values in non-Western cultures." In sum, "the cultural left and its allies in Congress, the media, Hollywood, the nonprofit sector, and the universities are the primary cause of the volcano of anger toward America that is erupting from the Islamic world."

No, moron.

Of course, the ascetic bin Laden doesn't like American culture or values, including such far-left ideas as democracy or educating women, but he has a clear politico-religious agenda that's important to take seriously. You'd never know it from reading D'Souza, but bin Laden's February 1998 "Declaration of the World Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and the Crusaders" -- the most considered summation of his casus belli -- laid out three main grievances for which al-Qaeda kills. First and foremost comes the post-Gulf crisis deployment of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, which are "occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of its territories" and "using its bases in the peninsula as a spearhead to fight against the neighboring Islamic peoples." Second comes the supposed Crusader-Jewish alliance's "long blockade" of the Iraqis, designed "to destroy what remains of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors." Finally, America's anti-Muslim wars "also serve the petty state of the Jews, to divert attention from their occupation of Jerusalem and their killing of Muslims in it."

Jeebus. And these midgets imagine themselves the deep thinkers of the moronocracy.

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Literally from the ridiculous to the sublime: JOHN ASHBERY interviewed in today's NYT Magazine.

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David Byrne profile in NYT. The history of the failure to produce Conservative porn. Quiet Bubble's list of best non-fiction last year. Eight political books well-reviewed.