Eight days ago, a Georgia newspaper broke the happy news about big doings in a small town. Some new federal largesse was on the way; thanks to this money, which totals $625,000, the citizens of Cedartown will soon have new sidewalks, new landscaping, and other improvements in their business district. As one town commissioner exulted in The Cedartown Standard, "This will be a big boost for the historic downtown area and for the whole city."

This new money comes from the $780-billion federal stimulus package, enacted last February on Capitol Hill and signed by the guy who sought it most, President Obama. Everybody in Cedartown was so excited that they all posed for a newspaper photo op, holding a giant facsmile of the check. Front and center, and smiling proudly, is the U.S. congressman who flexed muscle to make it happen. His name is Phil Gingrey. The folks in Cedartown have nothing but praise for Gingrey; as the aforementioned town commissioner puts it, "Rep. Gingrey is our point man when we need action from the federal government."

But hang on, something's wrong with this picture.

Here's Phil Gingrey, a House Republican, flashing his chops and triumphantly brandishing the stimulus bucks that he won for his local town...but isn't this the same Phil Gingrey who voted against the stimulus package - along with every single other House Republican?

»  More Hypocrites bearing gifts

To really understand how far we as Americans have traveled on the long road to racial progress, consider the case of Keith Bardwell.

A mere 50 years ago, public servants like Bardwell were everywhere, infesting government at all levels - particularly, but by no means exclusively, in the South. When they behaved as ignorant racists, it was deemed to be no big deal because their racism was deemed culturally and institutionally appropriate. If a white woman and a black man in that era had asked a justice of the peace to marry them, and the justice of the peace had naturally refused, who would even have considered that refusal to be newsworthy, given the temper of the times and the laws on the books?

Yet today such a refusal is newsworthy.

Bardwell, a justice of the peace in a Louisiana parish, stands exposed for his aberrant behavior because the society in which he lives has markedly changed during the past 50 years; and because the laws he was supposedly sworn to obey have changed as well. Bardwell, who earlier this month refused to marry Beth Humphrey (a white woman) and Terence McKay (a black man), is now seen by society not as a practitioner of business as usual, but as an anomoly, a discredited relic of a racist past.

»  More A relic of the racist past

For those of you not mesmerized by the faux balloon boy story, here's my tweaked and expanded Sunday print column:

Ever so slowly, sensible Republicans and conservatives are finally marshaling the courage to confront the unhinged broadcasters in their midst – and not a moment too soon, given the fact that these loons now seem to be running the asylum.
 
The GOP has lately made gains with its anti-Obama incantations, but the fact remains that the party has no affirmative unifying message and no national leader. As a result, various warlords – Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Michael Savage, and other marketers of venom – continue to fill the breach, in ways that are profoundly unhelpful to the Republican image.

How helpful is Beck, after all, when he morphs into Joe McCarthy on Fox News, and attempts to red-bait a top Obama aide by painting her as a communist sympathizer in thrall to Mao Zedong? Last week, Beck characterized Anita Dunn as a “fan of a guy who killed millions of people.” He then aired a video clip that showed Dunn quoting Mao during a June speech. Shocking! What Beck naturally neglected to tell his credulous viewers is that politicians of all stripes have been quoting Mao for years. Such as: “In the words of Chairman Mao, it’s always darkest before it’s totally black.” (That was John McCain). Such as: “Mao said politics is war without bloodshed. Clearly there are some metaphors that sit nicely with politics.” (That was Christian conservative leader Ralph Reed.) 
 
Most prominent Republicans are still too cowed to call out Beck for what he truly is – a demagogue who is nurturing paranoia - because they confuse microphone power with political power. (Can the talk jocks deliver votes? They probably can’t deliver a pizza.) Nevertheless, some are finally speaking out. They don’t want the conservative cause to be hijacked by tinfoil-hatted broadcasters who believe, for instance, that the symbol on the back of the dime was a fascist plot hatched by Democrat Woodrow Wilson in 1916.
 
David Frum, the ex-Bush speechwriter who helped coin the term “Axis of Evil,” got fed up with Beck not long ago when the Fox News superstar sought to defame an Obama nominee by insisting on the air that this nominee – in real life, a free-market economist – favors the execution of retarded children and wants to give monkeys the right to sue. (I kid you not.) Frum assailed Beck for “recklessness and political cowardice,” but he was only warming up.

“We conservatives are submitting our movement to some of the most unscrupulous people in American life,” Frum wrote on his blog. “This submission disgraces conservatism, discredits Republicans, and damages the country. It’s beyond time for conservatives who know better to…emancipate ourselves from leadership by the most stupid, the most cynical, and the most truthless.”

»  More "Often embarrassingly ignorant"

In brief, at week's end...

The winner of this week's Homer Simpson Award is our old friend Karl Rove, the architect of George W. Bush's stellar career. In a guest appearance the other morning on ABC, Rove insisted that President Obama should march in lockstep with his Afghanistan commander, General Stanley McChrystal, and promptly approve McChrystal's plea for 40,000 new troops - because, after all, the commander in the field knows best. But host Diane Sawyer pointed out that top military people have complained that the Afghanistan troop hike is needed now precisely because the Bush administration under-resourced the war. Rove didn't like that at all. His response: "I don’t believe that at the time, the military was saying we need significantly more (troops). If there had been that cry, I suspect the previous administration would have been very responsive to it...The United States had what, at the time, the military felt was an appropriate level of resources."

Wow. Even now, the Bush team can't stop lying.

Two months ago, McChrystal's predecessor, Gen. David McKiernan, complained to The Washington Post that he could not get what he needed from the Bush team, with respect to troop levels, because the White House was so focused on Iraq. McKiernan said, "There was a saying when I got (to Afghanistan): 'If you’re in Iraq and you need something, you ask for it. If you’re in Afghanistan and you need it, you figure out how to do without it.'" He then recounted that, during the late summer of 2008, he had asked Bush for 30,000 more troops - because, after all, the commander in the field knows best...but his request was refused.

»  More Friday snapshots

Let us briefly escape these shores and touch down in France. The novelist L. P. Hartley once said about foreign countries, "they do things differently there," and what follows is certainly a worthy illustration.

Perhaps you've heard about this one. The French culture minister - Frederic Mitterrand, nephew of the late President Francois Mitterrand - has repeatedly 'fessed up to having sex with young male prostitutes while traveling as a tourist in Southeast Asia. As he put it in a TV interview last week, "Yes, I had relations with boys."

Mitterrand, a member of President Nicolas Sarkozy's cabinet, has been trying to explain certain passages that appear in his published memoir, entitled The Bad Life. Referring to his sex adventures in Thailand, he wrote: "We could say that such a spectacle is abominable from a certain moral point of view, but it pleased me beyond reason. The profusion of attractive young boys who are immediately available puts me in a state of desire and I do not need to restrain or hide myself."

Asked about this in the TV interview, the culture minister replied: "In no way is it an apology of sex tourism...even if one of the chapters is a journey through that hell, with the fascination that hell can provoke." He was a tad vague about whether his paid partners were actually minors; although he used the French word for "boys," the French often use that word as a general synonym for gay men.

»  More Oh those French

When Republican Senator Olympia Snowe voted yesterday with the Democrats in favor of health care reform - thus defying her Republican brethren, who are united in their determination to do absolutely squat - she basically upheld a venerable Maine tradition.

Way back in 1950, another independent-minded Republican woman from Maine, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, defied her cowed Republican brethren by publicly assailing a Senate colleague, right-wing demagogue Joe McCarthy. (Virtually alone in her party, she warned, "Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism - the right to hold unpopular beliefs, the right of independent thought.") And 14 years later, in the '64 Republican presidential primaries, Smith defied the party's ascendent conservatives, who were united behind Barry Goldwater, by flying the moderate banner and running for president herself.

But the difference between then and now, of course, is that Smith had plenty of company; in those days, the Republican party was teeming with moderates, especially in the Northeast. Not so anymore. The GOP is now in hock to its conservative wing, where the agenda basically decrees that uninsured Americans should be left to fend for themselves, and that the profit-maximizing insurance companies should remain free - under the tenent of free enterprise - to cancel sick people's coverage and freeze out those who have pre-existing health problems.

As Olympia Snowe wrote six months ago in a newspaper guest column, "being a Republican moderate sometimes feels like being a cast member of Survivor - you are presented with multiple challenges, and you often get the distinct feeling that you're no longer welcome in the tribe."

»  More One is the loneliest number

In the wee small hours of the morning, in a palatial Florida manse, a prospective National Football League owner is dreaming fitfully about the future (sometimes in his own actual words)....

"Afternoon, folks, I'm Rush Limbaugh, and welcome to today's game featuring my very own St. Louis Rams. Soon to be renamed the Rushes. We're on the road today, in one of those godforsaken un-American cities, whose team is called the Eagles, which is just outrageous when you think about it, appropriating a patriotic icon like the American eagle, in a city that went belly up for the Messiah in the last election, I look around this stadium and I swear there are socialists up and down the aisles, like one of those newsreels of the crowd in Red Square - "

"Rush, can I interrupt?"

"Oh, mercy, where are my manners. Folks, I may have taken over the broadcasting duties for the Rushes, but not even I can do it alone. So I'm joined today by my color commentator, Sean Hannity. Sean, you wanna set the stage for today's tilt? I know my guys are pumped up, ready to prove that an all-white squad can win big even with the liberal media against it."

»  More Rush Limbaugh, sports mogul

Another Sunday morning, and lo and behold, there he was again: John McCain.

It's amazing, the kind of air time this guy still gets. Yesterday marked his fourteenth Sunday chat show gig of 2009 - this, despite the fact that (a) he is not part of the Senate Republican leadership, (b) he therefore is basically a rank-and-file member of a 40-seat minority, (c) he's not a major player on any significant pending legislation, (d) he led his party last autumn to its worst presidential election defeat since 1964, (e) he therefore can't presume to speak for the party, given the fact that he is detested by much of the conservative base, and (f), most importantly, during the past seven years he has been repeatedly, consistently wrong on the crucial issues of war and peace.

Rather than ponder why the mainstream media continues to beat a path to his door - that's a larger discussion, which I have conducted in the past - I want only to focus on his latest alleged wisdom about Afghanistan, which he shared yesterday morning on CNN. Because this episode was a classic illustration of the celebrity seer syndrome.

McCain believes that President Obama should escalate as swiftly as possible ("he needs to use deliberate speed"), by signing off on the military recommendation for an additional 40,000 American troops. No surprise there. I was more intrigued by a separate exchange with host John King.

»  More The celebrity seer

When the news broke on my phone this morning that President Obama had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, my first thought was that the satirists at The Onion must have hacked into ATT just to make mischief.

My second thought was, "He won the whaaaaat?"

My third thought was that Glenn Beck must be spontaneously combusting.

My fourth and arguably most coherent thought was that this peace prize seems a tad premature, roughly akin to the Oscars crowd giving Dakota Fanning a lifetime achievement award.

Actually, the Nobel committee seems to have adopted the philosophy of Little League Baseball, where every kid on the team gets a trophy, regardless of whether he or she hits .500 or zip. The trophy is awarded not for actual achievement, but for the mere act of trying.

Obama is clearly aspiring to usher in an era of peace, but he hasn't achieved anything yet; it's fair to say that no president at the nine-month mark ever will. It's way too early to know whether his initial outreach efforts will bring peace (or, more realistically, a modicum of peace) to the Middle East, Iran, or Afghanistan. Indeed, Obama has yet to indicate how he even wants to proceed in Afghanistan. It's way too early to know whether he can bond the West and the Muslim world, or reduce the nuclear arsenals of major powers. Heck, he ordered the closure of Guantanamo, and the place is still open.

The Nobel rules stipulate that the peace prize should go "to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations and the abolition or reduction of standing armies and the formation and spreading of peace congresses." The language appears to require that a recipient do something concrete ("shall have done the most or the best work"), but clearly the Norwegians have opted to honor Obama for his silver tongue and conciliatory tone - as if words are synonymous with achievement.

I assume that the Fox News talking heads will be exploding all weekend (Norway has a public option for health care!). And perhaps conservatives will demand that all Americans boycott Norwegian furniture; who knows, maybe they'll even demand that the Beatles' song title "Norwegian Wood" be changed to "Freedom Wood."

The rest of us can simply shake our heads and wonder, what's next? Dan Brown winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction?

»  More A trophy for trying