I started my morning by examining some of the recent polls. And what of course stood out was the unusual degree of support that he still has among the self-identified Republican base.

Of course that figure is contaminated in that it does not reflect the many of us who deserted the party over Bush and his ilk. It used to be that people like me stayed within the GOP and grumbled during things like recessions, wars, Iran-Contra, and even Watergate. Back then, we'd show up in the polls as an unhappy base. But it has become impossible for many of us to remain within the party. I, a lifelong Republican (albiet the kind that I'm sure would be labeled a lifelong RINO these days), gave up working to save the national party from extremism, as a lost cause, at the time of Newt Gingrich's Contract On America. But I remained active in local Republican politics until 1998 or so when I moved away from my little enclave of traditional NY Republicans to PA and the greater world of irredeemably irrational mutant Republicanism (hereinafter to be referred to as the mGOP). My last act as a Republican was to vote against GWB in the 2000 primaries.

The mGOP, minus a small and vocal band of fascists, should hate Bush. They really should. This is for all practical purposes a board for Democrats, and I'm the last one to be defending the mGOP right now, but I do think many people here mischaracterize Republicans as motivated entirely by hate and greed. Even now, the majority of the mGOP rank and file share the same fundamental American values as most of the people here.

I'm prepared to be flamed half to death for defending the character, though not the point of view, of my former friend Tom Tancredo (a figure who is a "maverick" in the eyes of the Bushites, but who I think is solidly representative of the mainstream mGOP rank-and-file). He is not a racist or xenophobe even if he has become useful to racists and xenophobes. He is a man of extraordinary courage and principle (I've witnessed this firsthand), and he really does share with us many of the same fundamental values, including a genuine concern for the middle class and the poor. He sincerely believes that free market economic policies benefit ordinary Americans, and he has concluded, mistakenly, that the reason the market hasn't actually worked that way has been an artificial excess of labor (i.e., illegal immigrants). This is not a point of view that the vast majority of us here would agree with, and not one that, I think, has any historical support. I think most of us here agree that capitalism needs to be regulated in the interest of society, and that falling wages and increasing poverty are the natural result of too few checks on capitalism. This is a pretty big point of disagreement, with some pretty big consequences, and I do think that Tom can often be, for a smart guy, astoundingly dumb. But this disagreement is not a disagreement over whether government exists to serve the interests of ordinary Americans. Tom Tancredo is not a fascist, and neither is most of the mGOP.

So if all of us but a handful of vocal radical extremists agree on basic American values, and those values are repudiated daily by this Administration, why does the remaining mGOP cling to Bush? I think that, thanks to the hard right propaganda machine, they believe that a very different set of facts are in play in the world, "facts" that rationalize the Administration's conduct.

The liberal vs. conservative difference is eternal and valid. Making up your own facts is not.

I believe that Bush has collapsed in the polls with everyone else but the mGOP rank and file because he is understood to be a liar of the worst sort, someone who cannot be trusted. Right now, if Bush said the sun rose in the east, a third of the country would wonder what deception he was trying to support with that fact, and another third would refuse to believe it without independent confirmation. I believe the rank and file of the mGOP would desert him and his ilk, too, if they saw the lies. But they can't see the lies until they see that Fox, et. al., are lying to them, too. In order to crack the support of the base, then, I think it's necessary to crack the credibility of the propaganda machine.

So how does one get Republicans to question the veracity of their media? That's a real question, not a rhetorical one. Where are the points of vulnerability? How can one hammer on those points till that rock-hard crust of ignorance fissures?

I'm sure there's some useful information that can be squeezed from polls and studies showing the differences between Fox viewers and the rest of us, and the stream of defections of Republicans from the mGOP.

And anecdotal accounts from defectors, too, can shed some light. I'm not sure my personal account is informative since I never partook of the poisonous propaganda and was among the first wave of Republicans to be driven out of the mGOP. If there are any DUers reading this who are more recent defectors from that most defective of political parties, or who know defectors, or who are witnessing a defection in progress, I'd like to hear your observations.