Today's GOP seems designed to take advantage of every blind spot in the human brain.

Their mastery of the motherhood-and-apple-pie facade is just the beginning. Bush loves Jesus, and he's commanding our patriotic troops. I must support him.

The Bushies use The Big Lie, the untruth so brazen it makes incredulity incredible. Of course they wouldn't start a war for no reason and without a plan.

They use the Overton Window: promoting extreme (and often distasteful) positions to shift "the middle," making slightly less disturbing variants seem palatable. OK, killing all the Muslims might be extreme, but a couple of tactical nukes would put Iran in its place, doncha think?

They use "scandalysis paralysis," setting off so many fires that we can't focus on any one of them. I don't have time to worry about the Abramoff scandal, secret prisons, pallets of cash disappearing in Iraq, the Katrina fiasco, Foleygate, Abu Ghraib, sweetheart deals for Halliburton, falsified Iraq War evidence, the Pat Tillman coverup, secret clauses in the Patriot Act, misleading robocalls, Plamegate, more signing statements than all previous administrations put together, turning the Justice Department into a political wing, and blah blah blah blah blah.

Perhaps the most vexing, vis-a-vis the media's inattention, is the GOP's perfection of the Elephant in the Room. Crisis? What Crisis?

They have created a room-tone of disreputable behavior that is regularly and miraculously ignored. An apt party slogan would be "An elephant in every room!"

Six years of nonstop lying, incompetence, corruption, and exploitative behavior (or "LICE" for short) somehow don't stick to them, when they step up to the dais.

Their words and deeds are routinely reported as if they came from respectable people.

What's the matter, MSM, can't you smell that smell? As Glenn Greenwald notes, it's inconceivable that you don't.

In light of how quickly and powerfully evidence of wrongdoing and deceit is spewing forth with minimal amounts of prodding, it is just inconceivable that our Beltway stars -- including alleged journalists -- would be more worried about the unpleasantness and disruption that comes from uncovering corruption and illegality than they are about the corruption and illegality itself. But that is exactly the message they are conveying.

And none of that should be surprising, even though it is so destructive. After all, our government would not have been able to spend the last six years blocking all forms of accountability and checks if not for the support of our national media. So it should hardly come as a surprise that so many of them do not believe in that which lies at the core of our political system since its founding -- namely, a belief that all political leaders must constantly be subjected to rigorous scrutiny and compelled disclosure of their conduct.

The niceties (and not-so-niceties) of modern journalism demand that the context of pervasively unscrupulous governance be ignored.

Does one refer to "Adolph Hitler, the German statesman," or "Osama Bin-Laden, son of a wealthy industrialist"?

Why must we persist in describing Bush administration figures in any way that ignores the LICE? It's got me scratching my head.