The single most important issue of the presidential elections next year: Who is going to bring me the the biggest pile of dead terrorist carcasses over the next four years?

Among the sensible people who agree with me on that, many will argue there is no close-second; this is a far-and-away thing. I respectfully admonish them to reconsider, because the second-most-important issue is very important indeed, and it is breathing hotly on the neck of the first.

Coming in at a close second, and I do mean a close one, is a big package of interrelated sub-issues all knotted together. They have to do with the people who are actually proud to call themselves “liberals,” not in the classic sense, but in the post-modern sense. Can we be fooled into thinking they are really champions of our freedoms, when they’re forcing us to think that, and coercing us into silence on any other viewpoint? Are we really so dense that we fail to see, or we can be distracted from seeing, the irony in that simple contradiction? Are liberals crazy, or just stupid? Do we really have to let them vote even when they so obviously lack the level of maturity one would be expected to achieve by age eighteen?

Is it really being “centrist” or “moderate” when you let grown-ups run the government half the time, and a bunch of attention-starved spoiled brats run it the rest of the time? Are we really so desperate to put a woman in the White House that we’ll put one in who is barely even a woman, and is such a toxic candidate that she can’t voice a position on any issue, without inserting a villain into it, should one be missing?

Are we going to let our print-media journalists decide for us which scandals end public-service careers and which ones do not — knowing full well they’re in the business of selling bad news, and have no financial stake in seeing things run sensibly so that bad news is a more the occasional happenstance the rest of us wish it to be?

What exactly is this well-funded advocacy group that I continue to call “Move On From Some Things And Dwell Endlessly On Other Things Dot Org”? For whom do they speak? Now that we all understand they’re a bunch of all-but-certified nutcases, when they tell us their nutcase things are they speaking on behalf of Hillary? Obama? Edwards? Kerry? Kennedy? Anybody else who will be invested with the authority to decide important, life-altering things, should we opt to put the kiddies from the kiddie-table in charge again next year?

What about Michael Moore, does he speak for anybody? How cozy is his relationship with the “Inmates Should Run The Asylum” party?

Ah, if you’re smart, you probably know where this is headed. That ad. That horrible, wonderful, self-disgracing, gloriously-backfiring ad. And more precisely, the vote about the ad.

I have been instructed to believe…by those who endlessly instruct me to believe that they are laboring tirelessly for my right to think whatever I want to think, without so much of a hint of awareness of their irony…that the vote was a waste of time.

With all due respect, kiddies, I think not. The issue that faces us next year, right behind that whole dead-terrorist-bodies thing, is whether the donks benefit from a frayed, fragile, threadbare tethering to reality or whether that tethering has snapped altogether. The donks are pretty emphatic that the real issue is whether or not the current President is a dumbass, which seems to me a peripheral article of history at best. We disagree; should we debate the question, it would be a pretty quick debate but it might get a little messy, gentle as I would try to be. It’s the facts, you see; they are not on their side. Next year, they are running — the “moron” is not. That’s just the way things are. We don’t get to vote on George Bush’s intellect or lack thereof — we are obliged to vote on the sanity of the donks, or lack thereof.

We have a right to know.

We have a duty to know.

And now we know. There is a deep split in the donk party about whether they want to approach the brink of sanity, or go toppling over the edge. The “useless” matter about whether to condemn the ad, or not, is put to a vote. Yea, 72; Nay, 25; Not Voting, 3.

Members of the grown-up party voted unanimously in a grown-up way. You’ll notice, this has been the catalyst of every major disagreement in foreign and domestic issues in modern history, once you cut through the B.S. about whether an election was stolen just because it didn’t turn out the way someone wanted: Should bad behavior get a spanking or not? It all comes down to that. Some of us believe if we’d paddle the rear ends of our own flesh and blood for doing the same thing, there should be consequences for others for doing it. Others think everything comes down to a “civil rights” issue, and civil rights is somehow measured in your ability to get away with things that common sense says demand censure. I see it in illegal immigration, repealing the death penalty, the tasering of whoosee-whatsit, the invasion of you-know-what…it’s in everything about which we choose to argue, or just about.

And you see it in the ad. Everybody either agrees the ad was stupid, or else “feels” that it should be defended but understands this is impossible to do on an intellectual level, so they might as well keep their silence. It’s an indefensible message. The question is whether to point it out. And as usual, the wildest and craziest kiddie-table people have squeezed together some kind of passion on that issue, based on cynical knowledge of the political consequences but on no higher ideal. In short, they understand it was dumb, and they understand why the rest of us think it worthy of comment and inspection. They just don’t want us to do it because it interferes with agendas they have on other things.

Into this hot-button issue wades Becky, a.k.a. Just a Girl in Short Shorts Talking About Whatever. Do try to contain yourselves, fellas…the blog title isn’t just about what she is, it also describes what she likes, and she’s not preferentially inclined toward you. But it’s always a visually rewarding experience to give her a hit now and then, since she can be counted on to put up pictures of what she likes. And who doesn’t like that?

She’s a lot like Bacon Eating Atheist Jew. Just a whole lot easier on the eye (no offense intended, Bacon). Strong capital-L Libertarian leanings with a healthy ability to detect crap from miles away…except when it comes to bashing conservatives, and then, from my point of view, she pretty much falls for whatever crap she’s fed. In summary, she’s got great cognitive thinking skills when she agrees with me, and doesn’t when she doesn’t. And when people comment they treat her with kid gloves, even when she’s wrong, because hey — she’s a good looking girl in short shorts. And I freely admit I’m in that crowd too. If it was “Just An Ugly Dude in Shabby Clothes Talking About Stuff” I’d probably haul out all kinds of whoopass I’m keeping bottled up.

But meanwhile, back to the subject at hand. The vote on the stupid ad was a tactical maneuver by Republicans, seeking to highlight the schism in the donk party. Becky has the wisdom and insight to penetrate this, but is sufficiently myopic to settle into the idea that since it’s political, and poised to benefit people who disagree with her on some issues such as gay marriage, there can be nothing good about it.

I personally have no use for MoveOn. They are a left wing socialist cadre of Internet whiners. But, they have become a financial powerhouse in the Democratic Party.

I also think their ad was in poor taste. But no more so than when George Bush made John Mcain’s daughter cry by announcing during the South Carolina primary campaign that she was the bastard daughter of McCain, conceived with some Asian wench. The girl still asks her Mom why the president hates her so much. Of course, Daddy eventually sucked up to Sonny.

But the record is replete with volumes of Republican crap at least as vile as the MoveOn ad.

So the Neo-con Republican Warhawks jumped all over the ad , as is to be expected. It detracts from talking about the war and how to get the fuck out, how stupid the president is and etc. [emphasis mine]

Ah, ugh. Darling…you fail. You fail big. The vote detracted from talking about President Bush being a raging clueless assbag one more time? Congress has some important business before it involving calling him a few more names? What is this, the third grade?

I’m sympathetic to the notion that resolutions are wastes of time, or at least, can be. House condemns this, Senate censures that, United Nations deplores some other damn silly thing…what’s the point? And yet, through the lens of history, I see when resolutions are offered with a maximum saturation of partisan political cynicism, this is when they are at the most useful to the public at large. It should not by now be a secret to anyone that when we vote, most of us are taking a calculated gamble on whoever is going to do the least harm. Genuine “confidence” in our leadership, to the extent it actually ever existed at all, is with us no longer. We vote for candidates who are going to bring the messages and priorities to the forefront we want at that forefront, and those of us who think critically always have reservations about it.

So since all the “smart” people are projecting the donks will win next year, I see this vote as in inspection of a new and shiny car that is all-but-bought, with the papers not quite signed yet. Turns out, it is poorly put-together and falls apart quickly. It’s subject to overheating and burnout. That, and nobody is really too sure how it works. Useful information to have just about now, right?

Compare this to some of the “resolutions” passed by cities, unions and colleges against the War in Iraq. Becky speaks for many. I hope everyone who finds fault with the Senate for taking time to condemn the “Move On From What We Tell You To Move On From Dot Org” ad — or more precisely, to figure out who among those seated for the vote, has the stones to condemn it — will find fault with those other resolutions as well. The Senate vote tells us something we, regardless of our ideological prejudices, desperately need to know. Come to think of it, Move On’s insanity itself has been doing that…probably the only useful thing they’ve managed to do in nine years and Lord knows how many millions of dollars.

Those other three examples, and many others like them, achieve no such thing. How do they stand as specimens of wasted time and energy?

Thanks to the vote, now we know who lacks the readiness, willingness, ability, and/or just plain balls to call out stupid crap, falling well beneath, but pretending to be on par with, the national discourse — when they see it. When means whenever they see it. That means we have twenty-five people voting in our legislative chambers upper house, who, by rights, ought to be sent right back to Kindergarten again so they can learn to play nice, right before snack time and nap time. I like that we know this, that we now have a list. We can debate to some extent what it means, but it’s established beyond any disagreement what the list is. The names are:

Akaka, Bingaman, Boxer, Brown, Byrd,
Clinton, Dodd, Durbin, Feingold, Harkin,
Inouye, Kennedy, Kerry, Lautenberg, Levin,
Menendez, Murray, Reed, Reid, Rockefeller,
Sanders, Schumer, Stabenow, Whitehouse, Wyden.

Remember: When we get a new President, over the last several generations it is nearly always either a Governor, or someone from this legislative body. One fourth of those seated therein, as I type this, are virtual children.

So I’m happy — thrilled, actually — that we got some valuable insight this week, on what is the second-most important issue of next year’s elections. When you vote for a donk…what do you get in return? Harmless resistance against a theocracy, in which nobody with any power has seriously proposed we should live, and in which we have never once even come close to living…or a bunch of slobbering childish fools intoxicated with power, who can’t communicate a thought with even a moderate level of complexity to it, without regurgitating gallon after gallon of instructions about what everyone should be doing and thinking?

Besides who’s going to kill the most terrorists, that is what we really need to know. We on the right wing, on the left, everything in between. We desperately need to figure out the answer to this question, and we have less than fourteen months to do it.