Back in the deep, dark days of America – the late ‘80s to mid-90s – the “religious” right had a go-to image for their campaigns against gay rights: leather guy. Whenever the right went on one of its crusades against gay rights – things like treating gay people like humans and funding HIV research – they would use b-roll footage of some guy at a gay pride parade dressed in leather and dancing around.

The message of this was essentially: allow gay people to get an inch and they’ll be leather guy dancing all over you in no time.

Then a weird thing happened: gay people got boring. Take Ellen DeGeneres, for instance. There was so much tumult and hand-wringing over her coming out. She was the star of a hit network sitcom and suddenly her sexuality was an “issue.” It’s hard to communicate to people today but it was a big deal. Cover of Time magazine “big.”

And then Ellen came out. And she was… boring. She’s a talented comedian and an appealing personality, but she is not the caricature of an in your face lesbian the right had scared America about for years. In fact, Ellen is pretty inoffensive in the world of comedy. After her sitcom ended, she went on to host a perfectly inoffensive daytime talk show that has cute little kids singing, presidential candidates dancing, and a parade of celebrities doing goofy things for an audience of mostly straight women.

BORING.

Cut to 2008, and Obama has secured the Democratic nomination, and suddenly the right is very concerned with the far-left radical former college professor with supposed shady connections to all sorts of black radicals. Suddenly “black liberation theology” was all the buzz on right wing radio and Fox News and Americans were told they were effectively voting on whether they should have a Black Panther in the White House.

But Barack Obama is boring. Sure, he’s a little more savvy about pop culture, particularly urban pop culture, than your average pol, but I bet his wife and kids would roll their eyes at the idea that he’s some sort of black nationalist.

And America rolled their eyes too. Because this scary Obama (which continues to be the right’s preferred framing) has more in common with the sweater-wearing Bill Cosby than the gun-wielding Black Panthers.

Obama is a boring dad. He probably chides Sasha and Malia if they’re up too late on a school night.

HE’S BORING.

And that’s just it. Gay people and black presidents are no longer outliers in American life. They’re part of it. They’re not scary. They add to our ever-growing, ever changing melting pot, and in being just like us they are boring like us.

And that’s great.

UPDATE: It looks like immigrants are getting boring too.

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The gang at Freedomworks, the lobbyist group disguised as a conservative advocacy organization, has taken a break from making bestiality-themed videos in order to promote their latest event around tax day.

Freedomworks created one of the first Tea Party events, on April 15, 2009 just months after President Obama’s first inauguration when conservatives suddenly discovered their concerns about government spending that had been submerged for the Bush presidency.

I attended that event, which was bursting at the seams with tea-based revolutionary imagery. They went so far with it that one yahoo threw a bag of tea on to the White House lawn, which caused an alarm and required the Secret Service to clear out Lafayette Park as part of their security procedures.

Now, after a humiliating election year for the Tea Party candidates and a succession of public embarrassments for Freedomworks, revealing it as yet another ego-driven right-wing moneymaking machine and not an organization actually concerned with getting anything done for the rubes whose money they hoover in, a change is underway.

Freedomworks 2013 tax day event has gone left.

Specifically, it is branded as “The New Fair Deal.” The original Fair Deal, for those of you who didn’t sleep through history class like so many on the right, was a massive and wildly popular series of efforts by the FDR administration to put America’s economic house back in order. It was unabashedly left-wing and involved the sort of government spending that is required to fight downturns that even our modern Democrats shy away from.

And now Freedomworks has appeared to abandon the increasingly toxic Tea Party messaging (the Tea Party caucus in Congress is dead) in favor of something – on the surface at least – that echoes one of our most liberal leaders. Ever.

Winning.

UPDATE: I got this a little wrong. The New Deal was FDR, the Fair Deal was Truman. This is mushing them together, and both were liberal so my larger point stands.

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NBC’s Today has lost the morning news crown to Good Morning America, and if they have to get into the pedophile business, oh well.

It was already stomach turning to see NBC touting their “exclusive” jailhouse interview with Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State coach who was convicted on 45 charges of child sexual abuse. The evidence against Sandusky was so damning that the jury merely took 20 hours to come to their conclusion, resulting in a sentence that will keep Sandusky in prison for the rest of his life.

Sandusky used his children’s charity to give him access to young boys, including one child that he raped in a shower.

Now it turns out that the Sandusky footage NBC plans to use comes from a documentary called The Framing of Joe Paterno, which seeks to excuse the former Penn State’s coach enabling of Sandusky over years and years and years. The documentary is from John Ziegler, who was previously infamous for a 2009 documentary that attacked the media for their supposedly unfair coverage of Sarah Palin (that bit of nonsense ALSO debuted on Today).

Philadelphia Magazine described Ziegler and the other Paterno apologists as “Penn State Truthers.”

Morning news ceased being news almost from its inception — the Today Show used to count a chimpanzee as a member of its team — but it appears that NBC has taken its ratings losses so hard (its primetime programming was recently beaten by Spanish-language Telemundo) that if they can get a “get” by promoting a pedophile and his enablers, they’re all for it.

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On the 10^th anniversary of the Iraq War, some people are writing up mea culpas on their war support – some more honest than others – and the proper response is supposed to be an acknowledgement that we all make mistakes and it would have been an honest failure to support the Bush administration’s adventure in Iraq.

Bull.

In early 2003, I was a 25 year old college dropout who didn’t know a whole lot about politics working temp jobs in the suburbs of Boston. But I had the sense to know that the Iraq War was a bad idea, and other, more educated and smarter people should have known better.

Here’s what I wrote just a few weeks before the invasion:

There is no real argument that Saddam Hussein is a menace, and an entity that should not be allowed to have any weapons of mass destruction – nuclear or chemical.

The rhetorical leap our president makes is what should give rational people pause. By our president’s word, Saddam Hussein plans to (or already has) share his weapons with Islamic terrorists in their attacks against America or its allies. The evidence of this is scant, and quite simply conjecture without solid proof that has not been presented to American citizens or to the United Nations. If this evidence does exist, we must ask why it hasn’t seen the light of day. Since we cannot make foreign policy of this importance rely on “maybe”, this is vital.

Going back over my old writing, I am reminded that I often operated under the premise that maybe Hussein did have some sort of weapon of mass destruction. But even under that scenario, I argued that a war of invasion and occupation was a bad idea.

Why? Because at the time – as it is now – our major enemy was Al Qaeda and affiliated terrorism. Invading Iraq took our eye of the ball, and the administration’s case for connecting Iraq to Al Qaeda was filled with holes, and even 25-year-old Oliver could see this.

So it isn’t okay or permissible for people who should have been smarter about it to have supported the war anyway.

The Iraq War wasn’t just a policy position that didn’t work out. It was a conflict that killed thousands of human beings, including 4,000+ of our own citizens who put their lives in the hands of our leaders. It wasn’t a situation of government wasting money on hammers or space toilets, but the security of our nation and our allies that was on the line.

I wasn’t alone in my opposition to the war. There were millions of us across America and the entire planet. We were right. Our course of action would have saved lives and kept us safer.

If you supported the war, you were wrong. And even if you went on to be a great person or public servant, that is an eternal blot on your existence in this world and the next.

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Today is the 10^th anniversary of one of the dumbest decisions in the history of the world. George W. Bush – enabled by a compliant Congress of Democrats and Republicans – made the decision to invade and occupy Iraq, which posed no threat to the United States or its international allies.

As a result of this bad decision, thousands of American service people are dead, in addition to thousands of Iraqi citizens caught in the crossfire. As a result of this horrible choice, our country was more vulnerable and the perpetrators of the worst terrorist attack on America were allowed to flourish.

While most Americans now believe the war was wrong, there is still a significant minority, especially on the right, who still bitterly clings to the fairytale that Bush, Cheney, and company sold us.

I can kind of understand that. To repudiate the Iraq War, the rock that the modern right lashed itself to for almost a decade, is to admit that you ideologically fought for nothing for years. In that situation, it is far less psychologically damaging to continue wallowing in fiction.

But in the real world, those American soldiers and Iraqis are still very dead. They died for no good reason, a violation of the sacred oath of office and the reason why George W. Bush will go down in history as one of the world’s worst leaders.

Bush is ultimately responsible for the final decision to go to war, the failed strategy to secure the country, and the repeated disaster of the occupation (including torture). But he wouldn’t have been able to do those things without a spineless Congress – particularly the Democratic Party – enabling him. People like Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Harry Reid and Dick Gephardt have done good and will continue to do good, but Iraq will always be a permanent blood-stained blot on their records. Many of us knew at the time that the Iraq War was the wrong war at the wrong time, and our representatives in Congress (especially the Democrats) should have done better.

In this life, Bush will apparently wile away his twilight years doing infantile things like painting dogs (other ex-presidents of both parties again outshine this failure of a human being even in this endeavor), but in the next world I am certain that the souls of those he sacrificed at the altar of his political fortunes will haunt him for eternity.

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In retrospect, the 2010 election may have been the worst thing possible for the right. On the surface, it seemed like a good deal: they got rid of Nancy Pelosi and earned the House’s power of the purse and the power to investigate. But much like their predecessors in the 1994 GOP takeover of the House, they saw a midterm election triumph go up in smoke with the re-election of a Democratic president.

2010 gave the GOP a false sense of security. With the turnout of an older, whiter, more conservative Republican voter base (as is almost always the case in midterms as of late) they assumed that 2008 was an aberration, and that their imagined center-right nation had reasserted itself.

As we now know, that wasn’t the case. While the raw numbers of the 2012 election were closer than 2008, the results were more devastating to the right. They performed very well among white voters and independent voters – but they still lost. They also were unable to regain the Senate and lost 8 seats in the House.

The four months post-election have been even more chaotic. As someone who more or less came of age politically in the era of Bush, I am still astounded at the discord on the right. I’ve rarely seen anything like it in my adult life. The party that marched in lockstep with Bush, Cheney, and Rove for almost a decade is now publicly feuding with all the subtlety of Wrestlemania.

It’s even more shocking when you contrast it to the Democratic years in the wilderness post-Clinton. It was still bad for America that Bush beat Kerry in 2004, but I think it was the best outcome for the Democratic Party. Instead of an election validating the party’s core dysfunctions, a loss to what most on the left considered a morally unworthy opponent led to a lot of real work to go about repairing the core competencies of the organization. You had Howard Dean’s “50 state strategy,” and Democrats finally willing to oppose the Iraq War without peeing the bed about being called a traitor by Rove and company.

That helped lead to the 2006 victories in the House and Senate, followed by a a long, interminable public presidential primary that produced two candidates – Clinton and Obama – more than ready to take on the GOP.

The GOP’s problem today is that when you build a conservative movement designed around never really changing and an electorate who often still thinks of color television as a “new” thing, it makes it harder to change.

The orthodoxy of the right is so calcified, so resistant to change – even if the move is from the hard right to the center right – you’ve got conservatives like Chris Christie and Bob McDonnell being attacked as if they were Nancy Pelosi attending a Gay Pride parade in San Francisco.

A movement that wants to be serious about domestic affairs, national security, and foreign policy does not have a conference with speeches by Donald Trump and Sarah Palin – unserious grifters of the worst sort – rubbing shoulders with your former Presidential and Vice Presidential nominees.

The right hasn’t even settled its position on foreign policy – one faction talks about military waste while the other faction (the larger of the two) still can’t bring itself to admit that the Iraq War was one of the biggest foreign policy mistakes in U.S. history. The right is actually more willing to throw Bush and Cheney under the bus than the misguided immoral war those two leaders helped bring about.

It will be even worse for the GOP long term if they win seats in 2014, once again giving them a false sense of security for the next presidential election. It didn’t work out before and I doubt it will work again.

I don’t believe that we live in an era of electoral dominance, and I’ll believe lasting re-alignment and permanent majorities when I see them actually come into being. But if there is any movement capable and likely to resign itself to utter irrelevancy as a result of its own behavior, the modern right is in a very good position to go the way of the Whigs.

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It wasn’t supposed to go down this way. CPAC had prepared for the inevitable liberal comments about how CPAC was so old, so white, and had tossed in some black and latino speakers into the mix. There was Allen West! Tim Scott! Nikki Haley! All the conservatives of color, assembled in one location.

But because the Tea Party is going to do what the Tea Party does, they also had a session on how the right is totally not racist and then a racist went and showed up.

The modern conservative movement has been pretty good at saying they aren’t racist, while at the same time doing everything they can to stop minority voters while also giving a wink and nod to race based attacks on the right. Their ideological leader, Rush Limbaugh, does everything but a shuck and jive routine when he talks about blacks on the left like President Obama or Jesse Jackson (and apostates from the right, like Colin Powell).

But the establishment does its best to keep the movement’s festering racism down in the basement where it can chew on the raw meat and help power votes but without provoking unfriendly headlines.

Yet we know what they say about the best laid plans of mice and men. Because there really is a racist strain on the right – and while it is definitely dying out as America becomes a more inclusive nation every day – it is still around and serves a function on the right.

On Friday, it bit them in the butt. Maybe they’ll learn. I doubt it.

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For the bulk of my adult life (that is, 1995-present, more or less) it has been accepted wisdom that the Republican Party is the superior standard-bearer on the issue of national security. That isn’t true anymore, and even in the insulated fact-resistant confines of Washington, D.C. that is becoming clear.

The 2 ton gorilla in the room is, of course, the Iraq War. The Iraq War, was a disaster enabled by both parties and executed by one. Specifically, one man – George W. Bush. The American people and history already regard the Iraq War as a huge mistake, but the Republican party and the wider conservative movement still aren’t there yet. They invested so much of their time and especially their identity as a movement in Iraq that they still insist it was the right thing to do.

It wasn’t, and it never will be. The loss of American and Iraqi lives was not worth deposing Saddam Hussein, especially not when it allowed Al Qaeda to flourish and Bin Laden to live. Period.

I don’t pretend as if the left has perfect unity on national security issues. There are those of us who are more hawkish (people like myself, and more importantly, President Obama) and others who almost never support any sort of military action.

But the kneejerk conservative bump on national security is dead (for now at least). Frankly, it should never have been allowed to flourish. It was under Clinton that terrorist attacks were averted and we engaged in several successful military campaigns (the Balkans) with little to no American casualties. Under President Obama, we’ve continued to execute smart power and roll back the “Hulk smash” policies of the Bush years.

They have nobody to blame but themselves, but they still don’t even see a problem with Iraq, much less take responsibility for it. The same people who propped up the blood-soaked hands of Donald Rumsfeld attempted to derail Chuck Hagel’s nomination (with assistance from their klutzy media pals on Team Breitbart). The same people who insisted WMDs were all over Iraq are the same people who are obsessed not with the attack at Benghazi, but with the talking points about the attack in Benghazi – amazingly insipid.

The right is its own best argument against taking anyone in the movement seriously on matters of national security.

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Blinding, shocking pink covers the walls of the Taylorian compound in Coral Springs, Florida. According to my guide, the tone was scientifically matched to the exact color that Taylor Swift wore in a 2008 photo shoot.

This is how things operate in the world of the Taylorians, a group that claims 1 million “Taylor-strong” members in all 50 states and around the world. Their headquarters in Florida was built by a reclusive billionaire said to have connections to the international arms trade and an affinity to the young singer.

Taylorians bristle at even the suggestion that they are a cult, describing their group as “a way of being and seeing the world” that outsiders often don’t understand.

My guide tells me that her day has been “so Taylor.” They use this expression a lot.

The roots of the Taylorian faith are difficult to uncover. Its devotees insist that the popular myth – that it began as a fan club created by then 16 year old Jessica Winthrop in Tallahasee and spread virally via the web – is simply “the work of outsiders who want to devalue our work.”

The undisputed leader of the Taylorians is Marcia Swift, a 43 year old advertising executive who left her lucrative career in order to follow “the way of the Swift” as she puts it. Born Marcia Teegarden, she changed her last name to Swift after working her way up the Taylorian Elevation Scale (TES) to level 13. All level 13 Taylorians have had their last name changed to Swift, “in order to honor the Original” as Marcia tells me.

Marcia says she likes to think of Taylorianism like a religion, hinting that they believe that Taylor Swift has unearthly origins and was “placed with us on this plane for a reason.”

Pressed on the issue, none of the Taylorian leadership would tell me what that reason is, but Dr. Phillip Engle of Harvard’s Advanced Studies Of Religious Orders program told me that his study of the group believes that Swift “is a living god, on Earth to awaken us to a simpler time where the purest expression of love is a radio-friendly musical lyric.”

Engle insists that the darker side of Taylorianism is “seen as a necessary evil” in order for the world to achieve “full Taylor” as is described in the church’s literature.

Back at the Taylorian compound, where each room has Swift’s lucky number 13 etched into it at strategic, GPS-designated points, Marcia dismisses “biased” media accounts of the group’s activities.

“This is hard to understand,” she says as she sips a Diet Coke (the only beverage available on the compound after Swift signed an endorsement contract with the company), “but what Taylorians are able to do is – fix things in the world.”

“When I see someone hurting, or in a bad situation, I know that I have a special something inside of me that can heal it. I look at it, and I say one of The Original’s lyrics – depending on the situation – and it can fix it. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

There has never been any independent verification of this ability, but hundreds of Taylorians have testified that they have witnessed “Swiftacles.”

My tour guide took me to the compound’s “study room” where a team of devotees interprets and debates “messages from the Original” that are disseminated via Twitter, Facebook, and in her interviews.

One of the researchers, a young man named Gary, told me he found “a path” in the lyrics to We Are Never Getting Back Together. His voice grew increasingly animated as he walked me through the words.

“You see? It’s right there. Taylor’s telling us how the universe was born. It began, then it blew apart – and it’s never getting back together.” He turned to me and grabbed my shoulders and continued, “never ever.”

Despite Taylorianism’s peaceful appearance, several members of congress have expressed concern over the group’s activities. Online reports insist that the Taylorians have assembled hundreds of weapons in preparation for a “Tayloring of the planet,” a phrase found in documents stolen from the compound and posted online.

One member of the group, Ethan Johnson, was arrested in Texas after he tried to illegally import uranium from the Middle East. According to the Department of Homeland Security, Johnson admitted under oath that he was under direct orders to acquire material to assist in bringing about “the Tayloring,” insisting that it would be “as beautiful as the dress the Original wore to the 2009 Grammys.”

While Marcia admits that Johnson was a Taylorian, she insists he was a part of a breakaway sect. “Harries” are members of the Taylorians who believe that Swift is simply “on a break” from her relationship with One Direction’s Harry Styles.

Marcia claims that “the Tweets of Late 2012” are church doctrine, proving that any possible Swift-Styles reconciliation is “impossible.” She said they view the Harries as a splinter group without any church sanction, and that they disavow their activities.

The Taylorians also claim that their wealthier members are responsible for their opulent headquarters and the posh satellite offices found in twenty U.S. cities and in 7 European capitals. But Internet detractors again insist that the Taylorians operate an underground drug trafficking network, and rationalize it by insisting that “the greater Swift” is served by dabbling in illegal business.

The church denies these allegations and refuses to comment on them on the record.

Taylorianism continues to grow. The recent release of Swift’s Red album has reportedly increased their membership rolls by 9 percent, and despite the claims that at least two of the tracks contain a post-hypnotic suggestion brought on by repeat listening, parents continue to buy her albums (some, reportedly under threat of violence by their children).

As I leave the compound, my guide showed me the “13” tattooed on the back of her hands, and told me to “be well, be Taylor.”

This bit of absurdity inspired by this insane story.

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I caught a Ride-On driver talking on his cellphone while driving the bus yesterday. The bus was bus # 07-5312 at about 1:20PM headed in the direction of Takoma Station.

Here’s video of the guy on the phone:

And a photo.

In Maryland, it is illegal to drive and use a cell phone without using a hands-free device.

In my opinion, it’s even worse when you’re driving a bus and taking the life of the public in your hands.

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