THIS MODERN WORLD

James O’Keefe, the filmmaker behind the notorious ACORN videos, has been arrested by the FBI and charged in a plot to wiretap Sen. Mary Landrieu’s phone tamper with phone lines.

I’m sure that all the conservatives who took those videos & jumped immediately to every conclusion will now be telling us we should not jump to conclusions. And of course we should not, for who among us has not been arrested by the FBI while attempting to wiretap a US Senator? Oh the crazy things you do when you’re a kid.

Or maybe the FBI is controlled by ACORN. They are all-powerful, as I tried to warn you all in this cartoon.

More seriously, though: WTF?

… TPM has the affidavit.

As Haiti continues to make painfully clear, some people have real problems, and I don’t really want to make too much of personal transient difficulties. Suffice it to say that any week encompassing a root canal, a death in the family and a surprise stay in the hospital is mostly a week I would have rather avoided, if given the option. Which oddly, I was not.

But the only real reason I mention any of this is by way of explanation and apology: as a result, the next cartoon up will be a rerun from 2001. (There aren’t that many people who have my entire life’s work committed to memory, right?) After that, not sure — hoping to once again start providing the cartoons you have come to expect, cartoons so timely they seem to have been ripped from, you know, relatively recent headlines. But things are a little bit up in the air for now, so bear with me.

Adding: new (old) cartoon here.

And so blogging mostly won’t, for the next week or two.

… adding: new cartoon here, of course.

Special tangentially-related song title edition.

(… and a reminder: free TMW stickers here!)

You can sneer all you want at Pat Robertson. You can condemn him all you want. And I’ll join right in. He deserves everything you care to say about him, and much, much more. He is a seriously disturbed man.

But you dismiss and ignore him at your peril. Remember: this man used to call up the fucking president of the United States. And he got through. And the president listened to him.

You ever had that kind of access to power? Got it now? Thought not. Me, neither. You got his hundreds of millions of dollars? Got millions of fans giving you hard-earned- bucks? Nope, I don’t have them either.

Sure, go ahead: Repeat the obvious: Of course, it’s a sad state of affairs when an ignorant, moral degenerate like Pat Robertson is so influential to the most powerful men – and yeah, it’s basically men – in the world.So what? Don’t ever forget he had that access, and still has access, to far more powerful men (and the occasional woman) than you can even imagine. So…

Until that changes, you should never, ever, underestimate him, or his unbelievable power – not only in the public discourse, but in the direction of American governance, jurisprudence, and culture.

The rest. Read it and ingest. I’ve never understood the mindset that suggests the crazies should be ignored because they are momentarily out of power. To put it in terms to which Pat Roberston might relate, the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.