Buried in the New Yorker and yet uncovered by Paul Joseph Watson is an item by George Packer about “instructions” handed-down from on-high by Cheney’s office — call it Neocon Central — to sell the attack of Iran to the American people. Packer quotes Barnett Rubin, described as having “connections to someone at a neoconservative institution in Washington,” and this institution, likely the American Enterprise Institute, where Bush gets his criminal “minds,” has instructed the complaisant corporate media to sell the attack.

“They [the source’s institution] have ‘instructions’ (yes, that was the word used) from the Office of the Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day,” Packer quotes Rubin, “it will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects. It will be heavy sustained assault on the airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which a war can be maintained. Evidently they don’t think they’ll ever get majority support for this—they want something like 35-40 percent support, which in their book is ‘plenty.’”

Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich is alive, well, and free to move about as he pleases. Yet corporate media treat him like brutal dictators disappearing the opposition. They don't want voters to know that a Democratic presidential candidate will defend the citizenship rights of Americans and human rights around the world.

Kucinich was mayor of a major city, Cleveland, Ohio. He is now a six-term member of Congress and a Democratic presidential candidate for the second time. His progressive views are firmly in the mainstream, but right wing propaganda labels them unpopular. Kucinich's demand for ethical corporate behavior makes the media nervous. If he became president their bosses would have to accept a government serving the needs of citizens instead of being only at the beck and call of corporate power. Like good minions everywhere, reporters make sure the higher ups remain happy.

Two visions of mind and brain have dominated contemporary American politics. One is a dispassionate vision, which suggests that voters choose candidates by examining their positions on the issues and coolly calculating their relative costs and benefits. The other, a passionate vision, suggests that voters are moved by the feelings that candidates and parties elicit in them and are guided by their shared values and goals.

The dispassionate vision has guided much of the strategy that has reliably cost Democrats winnable elections over the past four decades, and it could do so again in 2008. It suggests that the way to convince voters is to offer them the portfolio of issues, policies, facts and figures that most appeals to their self-interest.

But this vision flies in the face of everything we know about how the mind and brain actually work. It flies in the face of 40 years of social science research. And it flies in the face of modern American political history.

Let's just say that even the hapless Mr. Buchanan of antebellum infamy would have recalled having officially disbanded a vanquished army of hundreds of thousands, and sending it home penniless, jobless, well armed and full of resentment. And had he chosen to fudge his memory of such a strategic error, he almost certainly would have come up with something more inventive, more original and far less imbecilic than, "Yeah, I can't remember."

According to The Washington Post, there are 33 names on Rogers' list of Congressional charlatans - 30 of them Republicans. If only one-third of these scoundrels get outed in the next two years, the earthquake on Capitol Hill will be so large that it may cause a war between GOP moderates and social conservatives. There is no way the Party can absorb, justify or explain an additional 10-30 closeted gay politicians and still claim to be the party of conservative "family values."