Of course, Dick’s mini-me is a piker of projection compared to the global warming deniers.  Pockets bulging with checks from the astroturf sock puppets of Big Carbon, these typical ne’er-do-wells of dubious credentials fill the airwaves with accusations that the world’s scientists who have actively raised the alarm about a melting planet are in it for the money.  This particular projection I actually  find more sad than merely revolting.  Such desperate types literally find it unfathomable that anyone could possibly care about something other than their bank balance, so rather than a lie, this may just be their best guess.  They move into pants-on-fire territory, though, when they elaborate this ludicrous claim to include a concocted desire for one-world government, ludicrously claiming that they are defending “freedom,” for such salt of the earth, mom and pop outfits as Exxon-Mobil against ruthless predation by a cabal of scheming hippies and academics, as though $45 billion in profits leaves that poor little corporation, larger than many nations, powerless and voiceless amid the roar of crunching granola and Melissa Etheridge.

Which brings me to my favorite projectors, the various and multitudinous loudmouths who relentlessly blanket the airwaves lamenting their (somewhat hypothetical) loss of “free speech.”  The Mormon and Catholic Churches, wealthy multinationals who have chosen to, like Scientology, call themselves “religions” for tax purposes, are a perfect example.  They muscle their way into nearly every political debate regarding civil rights with overwhelming money and manpower, always against some minority or other they’ve taught their followers to hate, and then reflexively whine about the negative publicity such unwanted and un-Christian endeavors create.  Blinded by the reflection in the mirror, the Mormons seek to lecture the unsaved about marriage, despite their rather blemished record on the subject, and the Catholics threaten politicians about all matters of sexuality, even up to scuttling health care reform in so doing, despite their hypocritical silence about war, capital punishment, and their own horrendous and still unfolding coverups of worldwide sexual abuse in their ranks.  Some lives are more equal than others, you know.   But yet, they somehow see their First Amendment rights as constantly under threat, naturally through no fault of their own, and unlike their victims, they have plenty of tax-free dollars to spend on trial lawyers, and politicians to match.  Jesus was evidently only kidding when he talked about casting the first stone, or so it would seem.

Here in Little Beirut, we have our own home-grown mirror-gazer, because something called the Cascade Policy Institute has generously dedicated its existence to protect its corporate welfare recipient in chief, John Charles, from ever having to work for a living.  What Charles, rather unnecessarily but with numbing repetition, “defends” is the “free market,” defined by his corporate benefactors as unchecked sprawl, pollution, and four cars in every garage.  Even as Portland has led the nation in mass transit, carbon reduction, and not incidentally, livability, he rotely decries every expansion of streetcars and light rail as wasteful boondoggles, despite the fact that our stringent land-use laws and transit-oriented development incentives he insistently derides are an important factor in the relative lack of a real estate collapse here.  Across the Columbia in Vancouver, Washington, where land use laws are considerably less strict, sprawl and overdevelopment have drastically increased traffic on the six-lane Interstate bridge to the point where a $4 billion, 12-lane bridge replacement is now deemed necessary, but unfortunately no “free market” has stepped up to provide it.  Quelle surprise.  But thanks to the brainwashing bleatings of the likes of Charles, otherwise sentient Vancouverites now insist that charging tolls would be tantamount to communism, whereas getting their 12-lane behemoth for free from the government so they can shop here and avoid sales tax without annoying congestion is just how Ayn Rand would have wanted it.  They tossed out longtime Mayor Royce Pollard in the last election in favor of a male Sarah Palin chanting “No Tolls” instead of “Drill, Baby, Drill.”   What they’ll get, of course, is no bridge at all, at least for a long time, because without local matching funds that can only be raised by tolls, the federal boat will have sailed, and of course the creaking drawbridges of the aging bridge will have to open for it, causing a two-hour fiasco.  I find it hard to be sad about this.  For righties, arithmetic is the new evolution.

It does make it easier, though, to understand what righties are saying once you realize they are almost always speaking to the almighty mirror.   When they speak of “racism,” “political correctness,” ‘cowardice,” or some thinly veiled euphemism for treachery, you can be fairly certain you’re hearing it from a racist, a martinet, a chickenhawk, or a traitor…  the rest is just details.

They’re still the fairest of them all.

Of course, the largest mistake that can only be papered over with massive doses of Guilt Money is Afghanistan.  Shocked into a futile “war” by an act of terrorism rooted elsewhere, here it is eight years later, and the American people are rightly asking the nincompoops whose stupid idea this was, “Well?”  ”Well, what?” they say.  The answer is inevitably that the reason Afghanistan looks like a waste and a defeat is that we simply haven’t spent enough on it yet; this curious logic is based on the new axiom that it isn’t what you got that counts, but what you paid.  Accomplishing nothing except temporarily making Americans think war was was not only fun but easy was the point…  A great pep rally for the big game to come, not some boring, endless quagmire that drags on and on for no apparent purpose.  And now the bait and switch is being dragged out again, with a nagging whiff of desperation that escapes no one.

Then came the big game, Iraq.  This time, we wouldn’t just win, we’d kick their ass and take their gas!  The dang thing would not only pay for itself, but be a lot more exciting to those watching at home because, as Rumsfeld noticed, their were many more picturesque targets there.   They’d show those video game makers how it was done, whether or not the extras posing for this spectacle might have preferred a different approach.  Nearly six years later the balance of the region has tipped further against us, oil prices have risen and remain high, nearly 5000 Americans have been killed, and a trillion or so has gone down the toilet.  Never mind about that.  We’re told, lamely, that as disheartening and frustrating as it all is, it would have been much worse without the surge, and thus we need to… wait for it:  Spend More Money.  Nothing covers up a genocidal blunder like bricks and bricks of greenbacks.

This mentality has trickled down to the local level as well….  Just because some busy beaver at the Army Corps of Engineers once got the neat idea that Lewiston, Idaho ought to be a seaport, we’re now saddled with four dams on the lower Snake River that have fully converted the Columbia River and one of its largest tributaries into a slackwater barge canal that can literally be raised and lowered like a bathtub, and not incidentally, several iconic species of salmon and other anadromous fish are rapidly going extinct, rail traffic in the corridor has collapsed, and with it maintenance and improvements, and factory farms growing export crops have blossomed on the free federal water.  Kind of a mess, right?  So big, even, that the only answer is more money?  You’re catching on.  A billion dollars and more have been spent on such innovative ideas as trucking the fish back and forth on the freeway (I swear I am not making this up…), predator control (PETA loves it when you blame the seals…), fine tuning the level of the bathtub here and there, and just as with the wars, avoiding the elephant in the room, which is that wasteful, delusional, and predictably disastrous “mistakes were made” that have led us to this pass, and reversal of said mistake, in this case dam removal, can’t be considered because it would force us to admit such a heresy.  The only mistakes made are the ones admitted to, you know.  Now we are being told, by the usually rational Rep. Peter DeFazio that the dams are, get this, crucial providers of “green power” that can help fight Climate Change, evidently by getting a few extinctions out of the way early.

Sometimes it works out differently, though.  For several years, we’ve been listening to politicians talk about what has of late been named the “Columbia Crossing,” an envisioned replacement for the I-5 bridges between Portland and Vancouver, the only drawbridges in the Interstate system, whose homely green trusswork spans carry a mere six lanes of traffic.  Federal dollars provided the catnip for local politicians to quickly begin rolling around on the carpet crazily, and pretty soon the thing had blossomed into a 12-lane behemoth carrying light rail, bike lanes, and some fetching concrete plinths at a bargain price tag of at least $4 billion.  Trouble is, that’s a heck of a lot of money, requiring high tolls, both to Portlanders who wouldn’t be caught dead in “Vantucky,” and Vancouverites who only visit Portland to avoid the sales tax in Washington.  Of course, it was the Vancouverites who wanted all those lanes, and Portland that wanted the light rail it had generously extended almost to the bridgehead, only to be repeatedly spurned by Clark County voters, who reliably voted down light rail whenever it came up.

Now, a right winger is opposing Vancouver Mayor Royce Pollard in the next election on the issue of the bridge and its proposed tolls, and as a result, the bridge will be drastically scaled back, Portland Mayor Sam Adams has belatedly said we’ll have to cut lanes, and we’ve averted a $4 billion, obsolete disaster, basically because one city wants everything for free and the other simply doesn’t give a damn.  Think of the money we’ll save later, when this thing starts making its predictable mess.

Thanks (for once), Vancouver.  Maybe if somebody had proposed tolls to pay for the wars…..