For years it seems as if our grandparents, our parents and we current civic-duty-bound voters have traditionally and habitually assumed the wisdom, statesman-like knowledge and experience of officials elected by our voices.

Except of course the vainglorious ramblings of Fox-supported celebrity like William Kristol.

While Maher attempted to be somewhat merciful, and diplomatic with Frum, the audience repeatedly and without hesitation reacted to his blather with open ridicule and contempt.

(Which also demosntrates - BTW - that a Maher audience is not a congregation of dumb dittoheads on a California vacation unlike other congregations I could name.)

Maher's audience is precisely what citizens should be doing more actively, directly and with a unified voice to elected officials, broadcast and print organizations and directly to the buffoons themselves.

Right now, we're like polite members of a small community who suffer through the ravings of a local blowhard who tries to opine with meaningful declarations but whose conclusions and declarations are pure BS. The time comes when enough members of the community awaken and realize that the blowhard's hard blows are literally harming memebers as well as the community itself.

That's point the message to shut the F*** up become necessary and critical.

That's when the ants need to stop tolerating the foolishness of the grass hopper and call his behavior.

That's when mild-mannered folks need to stop the politeness and bluntly send the cease & desist message as rudely and crudely as necessary.

Calls to call and email Congress are a dime a dozen ... but perhaps constitute the best way to get citizens of their duffs and to let go the clicker long enough to say something.

If all we have is time to email congress, then if nothing more, cc's to the White House email addy are in order.

Dick Cheney is not an intellectual giant. He never was one.

Read the Rumsfeld biographies. He never was an intellectual giant nor an economic, corporate CEO genius. There is in fact - if you read the new Rumsfeld biography you'll understand that his CEO tenure at pharmaceutical failure G.D. Searle was not unlike G.W. Bush's actual failure to significantly participate in managing the Texas Ranger Franchise.

Wolfowitz, Perle, Frum - all of the neocons are revealed as shallow academics enraptured by an ideology created as the Israel-supporting interpretation of John Wayne-type Hollywood mythology about America existing as a bastion of powerfully benevolent force from which might come a wonderful Pax Americana. But of course a Pax American defined with severe ideological limitation (thanks Levi Strauss and Scoop, right?)

For ten of those clowns we saw maybe one Francis Fukuyama who admitted his error.

So email away with blunt and tactless cc'ing to the other party. Well, perhaps a better tactic would be to directly email the White House and Mr. Cheney with the cc going to Congress.

Congress might get courage from their own constitutents who are talking to presidents and vice presidents bluntly, honestly and without timidity ... or maybe shamed into doing something they should have done a long time ago.

And this from the Common Dreams article from a more credible voice that WAS years ago in the same driver's seat that the incompetents now sit on:

The angry debate added a new wrinkle Sunday, when a leading US foreign policy expert, former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, delivered a stinging rebuke to the whole concept of the war on terror, arguing it was promoting "a culture of fear" that was being exploited for political and financial gain.

"The sense of a pervasive but otherwise imprecise danger was thus channeled in a politically expedient direction by the mobilizing appeal of being `at war'," he wrote in The Washington Post.

The fear, Brzezinski argued, was also being exploited by so-called "terror entrepreneurs."

This administration has never established nor justified a need for a global "war on terrorism" at a scale on par with a World War - which is what we supposedly have bought into by silently consenting to their constant terror entrepreneurship.

If it were not so, if a global war on terror was a s really big as they'd like us to believe, our global neighbors would be bandying the same fears and tactics in their countries that we see from the Keystone Cops at the head of our government.

© Arthur Ruger 2007