Yeah, I know. It's been a few days. But with Bush out of the White House and not producing a new outrage every couple of days, there seems to be less immediacy to the Ranting©.

Then, OTOH, there are the "Still Bushed" scandals to "Scrub. Rinse. Repeat.", to quote Keith and Rachel. Such as the recent revelations about the 2001 Bush Justice Dept. memos. If someone has a link to the texts I would be much obliged to be able to see just how bad they were.

Wasn't this the reason we were forced to read 1984 in high school? I'll admit that the immediate relevance at first glance became much less if it was assigned to you after 1984. (Me, I read it in the late 60s.) But shit, Orwell was only off by 20 years, if the implications of those memos are the ones I've heard.

Some of our more alarmist blogotopia (Y! Sctp!) colleagues were right, it seems. The only things which may have stopped Darth and his colleagues from declaring martial law before the elections, on the basis that we were still "at war", and then making the "war" permanent, were the economic handwriting on the wall, the fact that anyone they really saw as an acceptable candidate was at least four years from viability, charismatic Democratic candidates who knew how to use the Web...and the realization among some that there would be a second American Revolution. I hope.

We read 1984 as a cautionary tale. They read it as a blueprint.

Our salvation: the 'net is too big, too essential, too decentralized. I do believe that if it had been really possible to shut it and the cell phone networks down and take over, they would have done so.

Let's keep it that way. "You can't stop the signal, Mal."

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