Juicy progress has occurred, despite Dubya and his ilk. Hell, in 1942 you couldn't buy a vibrator to save your life, much less your marriage. People were playing scratchy 78s on their steam-powered turntables and danced in heavy girdles made of bailing wire and lost hopes. Merely uttering the words "double soy mocha latte" in some states would get you shot for being some sort of Communist. Life was brutal. Thongs had yet to be invented. Radiohead didn't exist. Telephones were made of wood and string and lots of yelling. People ate meat from a can. Power steering was science fiction...

A sort of chaotic, forward-lurching equilibrium prevails. Even powerful, seemingly ironclad secrets cannot hold. The Bush administration is the cagiest and most morally abusive in decades, and we've worked like paranoid ferrets to narrow the extent and application of America's landmark laws regarding open government, including the Freedom of Information Act, the Federal Advisory Committee Act and the Presidential Records Act. In other words, they don't want you to know crap about how deep their lies go.

But look. In one short year, the sneering, all-consuming GOP has gone from master of all domains, from owning every aspect of the federal government and launching multiple failed wars and abusing all laws and spying and wiretapping and torturing and lying, to one of the least stable parties in ages. Scandals, indictments, arrests, Abramoff, Enron, DeLay, thousands of dead U.S. soldiers and nothing to show for it but more enraged terrorists, an economy running on fumes. Regimes built on lies and religious fearmongering never last. It's like a genital rash -- it just seems to take forever to heal.