It HAS happened here

As I write, the debates are just about to start. As soon as I'm done here, I'm going to spend the next couple of hours reading a good book on a non-political subject. The rules do not allow Kerry to score better than a draw, which will be transformed into a massive loss by the post-debate spinners. He could, of course, make a mistake and fail miserably. Either way, the process is too painful to watch.

A number of people have compared present times to the worst days of McCarthyism. If only matters were so pleasant: What faces us now is far worse, as this fine piece in Salon and this column on AlterNet make clear.

Remember the old analogy of the frog? How it would hop out of a boiling pot, but stay inside the pot if the water, initially lukewarm, were slowly heated? Fascism, we were told, would come to America in just that fashion. And so it has.

Political discourse has become increasingly vile since Reagan's first run. Now we have Democrats being called fags, "French," terrorists, and Bible-banners. Not even the fiercest partisan would have contemplated using such terminology when I was young. No-one in a cowed media has the guts to ask for a return to decency -- and even if someone did make such a call, legions of Jesus-addled ninnies would categorize the complaint as liberal whining.

Speaking of the French, our current crisis has sent me re-reading books on the internal battles of Third Republic, not least because Murdoch is an infinitely better-financed version of Edouard Drumont who has targeted liberals instead of Jews. Rightists call the French "surrender monkeys." In fact, many French soldiers fought valiantly as the Nazis rolled into their country. They were betrayed by conservative generals and politicians whose politics can be called "Republican" in the modern American sense, though certainly not in the "Third Republic" sense. In short, the conservatives sympathized with Hitler. They viewed France's capitulation not as a surrender but as a liberation from the modern world, from the leash that kept in check the beast within.