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The War of the Words is an online mockumentary that tells “The Story of the 101^st Fighting Keyboarders,” in the style of Ken Burns’ documentary of the Civil War. (Warning: strong language.)

They came from across America. Theirs is a story of courage, determination, and, above all, typing. They were the conservative bloggers, pundits and commentators, whose loud and prolific support of Republican foreign policy goals helped change the course of history in ways that would be felt for many years to come. They are the men and women — mostly men, though — who would come to be known as the 101st Fighting Keyboarders. This is their story.

I’m thinking most of the people immortalized here would rather have obscurity.

If there’s anything John McCain hates, it’s a Democratic Senate:

Arizona Sen. John McCain, a likely Republican presidential contender in 2008, joked on Wednesday he would “commit suicide” if Democrats win the Senate in November.

Then the Democrats would have an even bigger majority! John, have you thought this thing through?

Oh, right. Republicans don’t do that.

Maryland Republicans get the vapors:

Maryland Republicans decried as “racist” a Democratic congressman’s comment that lieutenant governor and Republican Senate candidate Michael Steele “slavishly” supports the GOP.

Steele, a former chairman of the state Republican Party, is black.

Aw, baloney!

This country is infested with a class of active offense-takers.

It used to be that you’d see them mostly in the Letters to the Editor column in your local newspaper. They were people who combed the paper every day, looking for some word or phrase to which they could take offense, so they could write a letter to the editor and maybe get their name and their favorite rant in the paper. Some fun.

Now professional politicians have gotten into the game, acting like some Victorian lady who faints at the sight of an exposed piano leg — sorry, limb. And it’s all a crock of — uh — manure.

“Slavishly” is a perfectly good adverb to describe the way a politician might support every edict handed down from on high by his party’s political bosses. Whether it is a fair characterization of Michael Steele’s career, I don’t know.

Well, actually, I can make a pretty good guess. Considering how the Republicans started shrieking and swooning and taking offense in order to change the subject, I’m betting that the remark pretty much hit the nail on the head.

I’ve complained before about Keith Olbermann’s over-indulgence in “special comments,” but this one is good. From Countdown, Keith Olbermann on the Military Commission Act:

[T]onight have we truly become the inheritors of our American legacy.

For, on this first full day that the Military Commissions Act is in force, we now face what our ancestors faced, at other times of exaggerated crisis and melodramatic fear-mongering:

A government more dangerous to our liberty, than is the enemy it claims to protect us from.

We have been here before — and we have been here before led here — by men better and wiser and nobler than George W. Bush.

We have been here when President John Adams insisted that the Alien and Sedition Acts were necessary to save American lives, only to watch him use those acts to jail newspaper editors.

American newspaper editors, in American jails, for things they wrote about America.

We have been here when President Woodrow Wilson insisted that the Espionage Act was necessary to save American lives, only to watch him use that Act to prosecute 2,000 Americans, especially those he disparaged as “Hyphenated Americans,” most of whom were guilty only of advocating peace in a time of war.

American public speakers, in American jails, for things they said about America.

And we have been here when President Franklin D. Roosevelt insisted that Executive Order 9066 was necessary to save American lives, only to watch him use that order to imprison and pauperize 110,000 Americans while his man in charge, General DeWitt, told Congress: “It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen — he is still a Japanese.”

American citizens, in American camps, for something they neither wrote nor said nor did, but for the choices they or their ancestors had made about coming to America.

Each of these actions was undertaken for the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.

And each was a betrayal of that for which the president who advocated them claimed to be fighting.

…

We have let Roosevelt’s “fear of fear itself” overtake us.

We have listened to the little voice inside that has said, “the wolf is at the door; this will be temporary; this will be precise; this too shall pass.”

We have accepted that the only way to stop the terrorists is to let the government become just a little bit like the terrorists.

…

The most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.

And, always, always wrong.

…

This President now has his blank check.

He lied to get it.

He lied as he received it.

Is there any reason to even hope he has not lied about how he intends to use it nor who he intends to use it against?

Video and the complete transcript are at MSNBC.

Rolling Stone takes a look at the Worst Congress Ever:

But the 109th Congress is no mild departure from the norm, no slight deviation in an already-underwhelming history. No, this is nothing less than a historic shift in how our democracy is run. The Republicans who control this Congress are revolutionaries, and they have brought their revolutionary vision for the House and Senate quite unpleasantly to fruition. In the past six years they have castrated the political minority, abdicated their oversight responsibilities mandated by the Constitution, enacted a conscious policy of massive borrowing and unrestrained spending, and installed a host of semipermanent mechanisms for transferring legislative power to commercial interests. They aimed far lower than any other Congress has ever aimed, and they nailed their target.

“The 109th Congress is so bad that it makes you wonder if democracy is a failed experiment,” says Jonathan Turley, a noted constitutional scholar and the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington Law School. “I think that if the Framers went to Capitol Hill today, it would shake their confidence in the system they created. Congress has become an exercise of raw power with no principles — and in that environment corruption has flourished. The Republicans in Congress decided from the outset that their future would be inextricably tied to George Bush and his policies. It has become this sad session of members sitting down and drinking Kool-Aid delivered by Karl Rove. Congress became a mere extension of the White House.”

Unfortunately, the article is loaded with vicious characterizations of some Republicans that undermine its well-documented central point. House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner is called a “legendary Republican monster” and “an ever-sweating, fat-fingered beast” — not the kind of language that gives a fair-minded reader confidence. It’s important to give the reader confidence, because so much of the truth about this Congress defies belief:

Last year, Sensenbrenner became apoplectic when Democrats who wanted to hold a hearing on the Patriot Act invoked a little-known rule that required him to let them have one.

“Naturally, he scheduled it for something like 9 a.m. on a Friday when Congress wasn’t in session, hoping that no one would show,” recalls a Democratic staffer who attended the hearing. “But we got a pretty good turnout anyway.”

Sensenbrenner kept trying to gavel the hearing to a close, but Democrats again pointed to the rules, which said they had a certain amount of time to examine their witnesses. When they refused to stop the proceedings, the chairman did something unprecedented: He simply picked up his gavel and walked out.

“He was like a kid at the playground,” the staffer says. And just in case anyone missed the point, Sensenbrenner shut off the lights and cut the microphones on his way out of the room.

Or this story about House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas:

The lowlight of his reign took place just before midnight on July 17th, 2003, when Thomas dumped a “substitute” pension bill on Democrats — one that they had never read — and informed them they would be voting on it the next morning. Infuriated, Democrats stalled by demanding that the bill be read out line by line while they recessed to a side room to confer. But Thomas wanted to move forward — so he called the Capitol police to evict the Democrats.

These excerpts only scratch the surface. Read the whole article. Grit your teeth through the irrelevancies and the Nixon-strength expletives peppered throughout. It’s not hard to sort fact from opinion in this piece, although a better editor would have weeded out the stuff that sheds no light. There’s plenty of fact here, and voters should know about it.