Just a reminder of what was going on four years ago, when it was the Democrats deriding an all-night debate session as political theater while the GOP insisted that they were doing the right thing.

And then, back to today, where the positions are reversed.

Seriously, folks, why do we take these lunkheads so seriously? It’s clear that they think this whole political thing is a great big joke. The only issues they have a consistent stance on from one year to another is that they are in favor of getting elected.

Lee at Right-Thinking — a conservative, BTW — has a great post on impeaching the President. He’s getting the usual “you’re just a Leftist; you want to impeach him for invading Iraq” non-sequitur responses from the Right. And I’m not sure he actually supports impeachement. Nor do I.

But it’s worth a read.

Did Arafat die of AIDS? Color me skeptical. This is appearing in an Israeli newspaper and is fairly unsourced. Still, if true, it will be a bombshell in the muslim world. Imagine if one of their “greatest leaders” was also engaged in evil practices. Methinks some heads in the middle east are ‘sploding right now.

So, I wonder what the GOP think of the filibuster rule now? Remember when they had power and the filibuster was pure unadulterated evil that was destroying our country? Remember how the Gang of 14 were evil monsters for working out a compromise?

Real conservatives like me were warning that the filibuster needed to be preserved in case the Dems got power. And we were mocked. Now we’re warning about the need to restrain Presidential power. Will we be ignored again?

Seems in our haste to get our britches in a bunch over the first Muslim in Congress, we forgot to ask whether or not he was nut.

Addressing a gathering of atheists in his home state of Minnesota, Keith Ellison, a Democrat, compared the 9/11 atrocities to the destruction of the Reichstag, the German parliament, in 1933. This was probably burned down by the Nazis in order to justify Hitler’s later seizure of emergency powers.

“It’s almost like the Reichstag fire, kind of reminds me of that,” Mr Ellison said. “After the Reichstag was burned, they blamed the Communists for it, and it put the leader [Hitler] of that country in a position where he could basically have authority to do whatever he wanted.”

To applause from his audience of 300 members of Atheists for Human Rights, Mr Ellison said he would not accuse the Bush administration of planning 9/11 because “you know, that’s how they put you in the nut-ball box – dismiss you”.

See, here’s the thing. Jerks like Ellison are poisoning the well for everyone. Now if I say that I think the Bush Administration used 9/11 to empower themselves, I’m in that nutbag group. It provides the Right an easy response: “So you think Bush is Hitler? You think 9/11 was the Reichstag?”

Memo to the left: cut it out. As Jon Stewart said, the comparisons to Hitler are demeaning to Hitler – he worked too hard being a psychotic murdering monster to be used as the comparison for every Tom, Dick and Harriet Myers that comes down the pipe. What are we going to compare someone to when he’s a real Hitler? For Chrissake, we have genocides going on in Darfur and Congo. What do we say about them?

And try to learn something of history beyond World War II movies. For example, read about the Zimmerman Telegram, which would make an excellent discussion point for Iraq.

Brink Lindsey argues that it is our destiny. I would agree, but only when our government is divided so that Democrats can block stupid GOP social meddling and Republicans can block stupid Dem economic meddling.