Good read over at Salon

[Heathcliff]

Selected quotes:

All we're able to elect are these telegenic, photogenic crypto-Nazis. As long as they look good.

You've got Ronald Reagan -- the much eulogized, recently deceased former president -- who everyone seems to have forgotten was regarded as one of the most low and treacherous individuals by those in Hollywood that he sold out to the McCarthy hearings. This is someone whose response to the AIDS epidemic was probably responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide. This is someone who created Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, or at least set in motion the policies that would create these creatures. This was the architect of much of the world's present misery.

What is it with California? They keep doing it! Who's next? Is Robert Downey Jr. going to be the governor of California after Schwarzenegger? This is ridiculous. Television and movies have short-circuited reality. I don't think a lot of people are entirely clear on what is real and what is on the screen. They will take what they perceive as qualities of fictional characters and attribute them to the actor called upon to play them, and then disastrously elect those actors to higher office. I think television and movies have a lot to answer for. It's when they start to have an impact on our politics that we should become anxious about it. I used to joke a lot after Ronald Reagan was elected that the future probably promised a President Springsteen. Or a President T; you know, "I pity the fool!" Who knows? Unless we get our democratic system overhauled fairly urgently, there is really no telling what manner of monsters or buffoons we'll have steering us into this still-young century.

If there's anything that makes America a laughingstock, it's those people [religious fundamentalists] America is a huge, surging, relentlessly modern country that will nevertheless send Oral Roberts millions when he tells them that if they don't, the Lord will send him home. They'll actually give credence to people who -- in any other country of the world except perhaps some of the equally addled fundamentalist Muslim countries -- would be laughed at. At the same time, since it's a crusading religion, it's difficult for them to accept that some might possibly reject their frankly retarded values. It's certainly dangerous that you've got a president who's playing pope to all these frightening, God-struck rednecks, which is probably a bit sweeping. But what the hell, I'm in the mood for it.

Alan Moore

http://www.salon.com/books/int/2004/.../index_np.html