It was inevitable and unavoidable that the Dean campaign, which came out of nowhere to wow the world with its Internet strategy, would, in the wake of its precipitous fall in the polls (and the emptying of its coffers), face being likened to a bankrupt dot-com.

The comparison isn’t entirely unreasonable. Dean raised a lot of hopes and inspired a lot of idealistic enthusiasm; his failure to carry Iowa or New Hampshire — like so many dot-com companies’ failure to deliver financial results — burst that bubble and led to the cascading problems his presidential bid now faces.

But the at least partial validity of this comparison should not be taken by Dean’s enemies as a cue to dance on the grave of his campaign. The collapse of the dot-com stock bubble was a disaster for many investors, but it never invalidated the fundamental accuracy of the insight that fueled it — that the Internet would spark powerful changes in the way the world does business. Those changes have proceeded apace, even as the dot-com era recedes into memory as a spasmodic folly: Online sales boom. Internet use eats away at network TV viewing. Broadband and wireless extend their reach. New possibilities for self-expression beckon. Many dot-coms flamed out — but the Internet is still reshaping the world.

Similarly, whatever happens now to the Dean campaign, it already achieved a great purpose — and no, I don’t mean that it taught a new generation of political operatives how to raise money online. Anyone could have done that. The real achievement of Dean’s movement was something different and more radical.

At a time when too much of the Democratic party, and too many of its candidates, lay supine before the travesty of President Bush’s policies, Dean used the Internet to punch a hole through the big-media blockade and get the true opposition message out: That Bush and his administration lied to America to start an unnecessary war, a war that has hurt rather then enhanced the nation’s security. While other candidates hedged their bets, Dean spoke the truth, and when the mainstream media tried to marginalize his voice, the Net allowed the breadth and depth of the support for his message to be felt. Today, every Democratic candidate, including frontrunner John Kerry, embraces this position: They are all Deaniacs now.

Internet enthusiasts had long theorized that the Net could help route around the broadcast media’s headlock on both the electoral process and the broader definition of the acceptable boundaries of political discourse; Dean and his supporters made it happen. Whether Dean’s campaign somehow manages a comeback or, more likely, fades in coming weeks is utterly irrelevant to this accomplishment.

Dean supporters, like dot-com true believers, can take solace in this: The horse they backed may lose the race, but thanks to their efforts, it’s a whole different race, on a transformed track.

First we had Grover Norquist insisting that if you’re opposed to repeal of the estate tax, you’re thinking like a Nazi. Now we have Paul Craig Roberts (former Reagan Treasury Department official) telling us that the slaves of the Old South had it easy compared with those of us living today under the savage whip of the Internal Revenue Service. Roberts’ argument is wacky enough to deserve extensive quotation:

Compare an American taxpayer’s situation today with that of a 19th century American slave. Not all slaves worked on cotton plantations. Some with marketable skills were leased to businesses or released to labor markets, where they worked for money wages. Just like the wages of today’s taxpayer, a portion of the slave’s money wages was withheld. In those days the private owner, not the government, received the withheld portion of the slave’s wages. Slaves in that situation were as free as today’s American taxpayer to choose their housing from the available stock, purchase their food and clothing, and entertain themselves. In fact, they were freer than today’s American taxpayer. By hard work and thrift, they could save enough to purchase their freedom. No American today can purchase his freedom from the IRS. Slaves could also run away. Today, Americans who run away are pursued to the far ends of the earth.

One’s first impulse is to drive a rhetorical truck through the many vast logical and historical lapses in Roberts’ thinking. But I’ll leave that to the reader (or to Eugene Volokh, who does a fine job), and simply marvel at the expansive chutzpah of today’s extremist right.

Let’s see: We’ve now heard taxation likened to Nazism and slavery; what other provocative and tasteless comparisons await us? Is the IRS commissioner more vicious than Charles Manson? Do you feel raped every April 15? Is the form 1040 more repugnant than child pornography?

Economist Brad DeLong has been a consistent voice of reason as the insanity of Bush administration fiscal policy has mounted. Today he justifiably allows himself to get just a little less reasonable, summing things up in an impassioned, must-read post:

Why do so many of us who worked so hard on economic policy for the Clinton administration, and who think of ourselves as mostly part of a sane and bipartisan center, find the Bush administration and its Republican congressional lapdogs so… disgusting, loathsome, contemptible? Why are we so bitter? After introspection, the answer for me at least as clear. We worked very hard for years to repair the damage that Ronald Reagan and company had done to America’s fisc. We strained every nerve and muscle to find politically-possible and popularly-palatable ways to close the deficit, and put us in a position in which we can at least begin to think about the generational long-run problems of financing the retirement of the baby-boom generation and dealing with the rapidly-rising capabilities and costs of medicine. We saw a potential fiscal train wreck far off in the future, and didn’t ignore it, didn’t shrug our shoulders, didn’t assume that it would be someone else’s problem, but rolled up our sleeves and set to work. Then the Bush people come in. And in two and a half years they trash the place. They trash the place deliberately. They trash the place casually. They trash the place gleefully. They undo our work for no reason at all–just for the hell of it.

The ad entries in MoveOn’s Bush in 30 Seconds contest that likened Bush to Hitler sparked a national campaign by the Republican party, evoking pained expressions of outrage and horror that anyone would dare liken the perpetrator of the Florida putsch to the perpetrator of the Beer Hall Putsch.

Meanwhile, the arch-conservative anti-tax lobbyist (and close ally of the RNC) Grover Norquist gleefully continues his absurd campaign arguing that opponents of the Bush estate-tax-repeal giveaway are motivated by the same thinking that motivated the Holocaust. The full account in the Forward is here. (Thanks to Dan Gillmor for the link.) Read it — it’s hilarious. To Norquist, it seems that anyone who believes in fair taxation is a socialist, and anyone who is a socialist might as well be labeled a national socialist (never mind that the Nazis rounded up the real socialists when they rounded up the Jews, the gypsies, the gays and everyone else they didn’t like).

Norquist’s philosophy is, “kill the taxes and you kill the government” — so why don’t we all shut up and stand aside so he and his allies can “starve the [government] beast” until it is small enough “that it could be drowned in a bathtub”? (These are all actual quotes.)

I don’t think Norquist, any more than Bush, is a Nazi. But I’ll tell you: the guy’s rhetoric suggests a seriously disturbed mind. You’d think the Secret Service might want to haul him in for making threats against the government. Unfortunately, in today’s Washington, he practically is the government.

Some posters in the comments have raised questions about the video link I posted on Friday, suggesting that it was somehow doctored. I think they’re wrong.

I just compared an “official” video (this one, from the L.A. Times) to the amateur, “from the crowd” video, and there’s no sign of any difference betwen the two. It’s the same exact speech, viewed and heard from a different vantage point. Of course, from the second vantage, the picture looks different; the audio sounds different, too — such that Dean’s famous scream seemed like an almost inaudible coda, not a Yawp Heard Round the World. But there’s no difference in the text of what Dean says, contrary to what one comment suggests.

You want to argue that this audio has been tampered with to “underplay” the scream? Go ahead. You could just as easily argue that the “original” audio that Drudge linked to was tampered with to crank up the volume on the scream.

In fact, what all this most likely represents is the difference between the TV networks’ audio feed, direct from the mike onstage, and the in-the-room PA system. I’m going to assume that no one is doctoring anything here until someone can offer some actual evidence.

Can we, uh, move on now?

Obviously President Bush was not prepared for the cheers that greeted his statement that “Key provisions of the PATRIOT Act are set to expire next year.” Amazing: you’ll find civil libertarians in the darndest places — even the U.S. Congress!

What was really strange was what happened next. PATRIOT Act supporters were clearly itching to counter this act of lese majeste by showing their support for the president. What did they do? They cheered his next line: “The terrorist threat will not expire on that schedule.”

Unfortunately, every single senator, congressmen and dignitary who clapped at that moment was applauding the continued existence of the terrorist threat. “Hurray! The terrorists are here to stay!” Not too bright.

Then again, since so many of our leaders, right up to the president, found their political lives salvaged by 9/11, maybe they understood exactly what they were doing.

A straw-man argument is one that “simply ignores a person’s actual position and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated or misrepresented version of that position.” President Bush’s State of the Union address hinged on the construction of a towering straw man designed to intimidate his opponents by absurdly misrepresenting them.

In a piece of rhetoric that displayed immense tactical skill — and profound depths of calculated deception — Bush declared, before the assembled U.S. Congress and the American people, that only he can be trusted to fight the war on terror because his opponents don’t believe there’s anything to worry about:

“We have faced serious challenges together — and now we face a choice. We can go forward with confidence and resolve — or we can turn back to the dangerous illusion that terrorists are not plotting and outlaw regimes are no threat to us.”

After 9/11, that would be a “dangerous illusion” indeed. But who could Bush be talking about? If you look at the positions of every single credible Democratic candidate, of the great majority of Democratic officeholders and indeed the vast majority of Democratic voters, you will search in vain for anyone who argues that “terrorists are not plotting.” The debate is over means, not ends — over whether we should reelect a government that has failed in two and a half years since Sept. 11 to apprehend the masterminds of the 9/11 attack, that has distracted the nation with an elective war in Iraq and that has thrown wrenches in the works of serious efforts to analyze the failures that led to 9/11.

Then there’s the charge that opponents say “outlaw regimes are no threat to us.” Notice the seamless expansion of the “war on terror,” which has now also become a “war on outlaw regimes.” Even if you accept that bit of war-aims inflation, though, you will again search in vain for a single serious Democrat who maintains that “outlaw regimes are no threat to us.” Howard Dean said — accurately, though he was vilified for it — that the U.S. was no safer after the capture of Saddam Hussein than it was before. (He also said, accurately, that the U.S. troops in Iraq probably were safer, but that part doesn’t get quoted as much.) That’s very different from saying “outlaw regimes are no threat.”

Many of us who felt the invasion of Iraq was ill-advised believed, and still believe, that the war on terror should foremost be a war on al-Qaida. That there was and is no credible evidence that Saddam and al-Qaida were in cahoots. That the invasion of Iraq would serve as a distraction from the war on al-Qaida. That the evidence Saddam posed an immediate threat to the U.S. was and is nonexistent. That a process of confronting Saddam that relied more on our allies would be more geopolitically effective, more cost-effective and less careless with American soldiers’ lives. And that the failure of U.S. intelligence and policy-making in assessing the pre-war threat was of a piece with the failure of the Bush administration to plan for the post-war “nation-building” phase.

No one is saying “outlaw regimes are no threat.” What a lot of us are saying is, the Bush regime is doing a poor job of handling the real threats. While we finally pack in the inspectors and admit (despite Bush’s desperate parsing of the word “program”) that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, we face a regime in North Korea that clearly does have such weapons. Does Kim Jong Il look at Iraq and think, “Oh no, look at how quickly Bush toppled Saddam, I’m in trouble”? Or does he think, “I’m glad the U.S. is so busy trying to protect its helicopters in Baghdad — that gives me a chance to stockpile more nukes”?

To review an accurate scorecard of the nation’s wins and losses in the war on terror so far would be too damning of the president’s performance. So instead his State of the Union lunged for the crudest advantage: “If you don’t support me and my policies, you must think there’s no threat at all.”

Even when reviewing his real policy achievements, like Libya’s new willingness to renounce its nuclear program, Bush couldn’t help overreaching. According to Bush, Qaddafi’s cave-in demonstrates that, “For diplomacy to be effective, words must be credible — and no one can now doubt the word of America.”

Unfortunately, thanks to the distortions and lies the Bush administration used to justify the war in Iraq and still defends in the face of the most implacable facts, most of the globe now does doubt the word of America. And anyone following the political fray now has further reason to doubt Bush’s own word. His State of the Union straw-man represents the current nadir in the rhetorical fallout of the war on terror. But the election is still far off: If this is how low Bush is willing to stoop even while he’s riding high, wait till his poll numbers sink.