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I kind of just want to record these comments, here, for myself as much as anything.

The context of the following quotes is America’s latest useless, brainless, hysterical hissyfit, that over the Cordoba center. The Cordoba center will be more familiar to most people, unfortunately, by its condensed and intentionally-charged, as well as critically-misleading name, “the Ground Zero mosque.” As usual, thanks to our “liberal media” for sacrificing both accuracy and objectivity in favor of attention-getting and, not coincidentally, inflammatory phrasing.

I should offer a gold star to The Economist, however, for not only its reasoned and mature perspective on the matter, but for absolutely piling on. A praiseworthy effort.

Sadly, many of America’s so-called “leaders,” have unfortunately been lacking any similar commitment to those national ideals (not to mention the plain, old-fashioned concept of “standing up for what’s right”) which are apparently inconvenient just now.

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I generally can’t bring myself to write much about climate change any more, these days. It just seems pretty much hopeless. I don’t want to dwell on it (which is what I just said, I guess), but I basically see two big problems.

One: Preventing dangerous climate change has, for whatever reason, become as pure a “wedge” issue as any; the reactionaries are 100% set against anything of the sort. Which leaves… us. But liberals/Democrats and our causes seem to have hit our high water mark, with the White House, the House of Representatives and (at one point, allegedly) a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate. And we still can’t seem to do much of anything. This is as good as it seems likely to get in the foreseeable future (which depresses me more deeply than I can really describe) and it seems very unlikely that any kind of adequate climate change legislation will be passed. Even if it were, the GOP would very likely swear up and down their determination to repeal it and, unlike health care reform, I think that would be a very real prospect.

Second, however much one feels that the United States and other first-world industrialized nations should bear the bulk of the responsibility for containing greenhouse warming—and I’m personally willing to go along with that argument fairly far—we simply can’t do it alone.

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In the same “non-news” category as “oil still leaking,” “U.S. economic recovery still unconvincing,” and “corporate executives still douchebags,” let’s not forget to include “United States Senate still ‘unfit for purpose,’” as our British friends might express it.

I mean, mother FUCK, can I some day maybe not have to read headlines like “legislation defeated in Senate by MINUS SIXTEEN VOTE MARGIN?” Because it isn’t funny anymore. Not ironically, not as black humor. It’s just FUCKING RETARDED, and yes, I don’t care; it’s actually so appalling that I’m going to go ahead and use the word “retarded” because however bad it may be to do so, this is an order of magnitude WORSE.

But, of course, aside from the fact that some day I’ll be dead, long before then I’ll probably get a break from this farce… once Democrats are back in the minority in the Senate, and the filibuster goes back to being a purely hypothetical right that the GOP will threaten to take away should it ever be used, and that the Democrats will actually be chickenshit enough to forego, completely ignoring the fact that had they challenged the “nuclear option” threat back in, say, 2005, and actually put an end the fucking thing assuming that the GOP wasn’t just bluffing, then “my” party might have been able to actually PASS GODDAMN LEGISLATION during those few years when they had both the presidency and majorities in the House and Senate, and just might have been able to avoid the clobbering which is likely return the assholes to the majority party in the Senate in the first place and oh, fuck it.