I know Broder only from Sunday morning talk shows, but it seems to me that he is the "dean" by virtue of his being, like George Will and Cokie Roberts, among the last of an old-line establishment press corps for whom the Bushes of Kennebunkport, regardless how badly they screw up, are still "people like us." Bill Clinton, on the other hand, wasn't entitled to be president no matter how many times he was elected by the lower classes. Fitzgerald warned us about these people and their reckless values. Like Gatsby and the poor woman run over with his car, the half-million dead on the other side of the world, in the end, simply have nothing to do with the Broders or the Bushes or their class mates.

For better or worse, the Dean's old clique already has been elbowed aside by a rougher crowd of O'Reillys and O'Donnells, Hannitys and Limbaughs, Matthewses and Russerts. For very different reasons, this crowd savored the impeachment of a popular pro-choice president and lustily cheered the neo-con crusade against the Muslim infidels. (Oral sex, we now know, is an impeachable offense; but is it a mortal or merely a venal sin?)

In re "it" happening here: anyone who has read his or her Gibbon knows exactly what has happened here since 2000. Even if by some miracle the so-called republicans are forced to surrender the White House in 2009 and America is allowed a short respite of normalcy, the Bush-Cheney "unitary executive" and their various other precedents have paved the way for all future tyrants who would subvert the Republic.

In re guns and freedom: I would note that America is already awash in guns, yet red-state gun owners did not stop Bush-Cheney from repealing the Constitution, and are in fact the most reliable cornerstone of the GOP's modern electoral base. Nor are they very likely to prevent any future tyrants, as long as their idea of freedom begins and ends with owning guns. Gun nuts won't stop the right-wing threat, because they ARE the right-wing threat.

The president has the power of decree. [check]

Full control of the legislature. [check]

A packed supreme court. [check]

Control of the military. [check]

Control of the state oil company. [creature of the oil industry -- check]

Workers' savings disappeared as the economy grew. [check]

Add in "invades foreign countries over jinned-up threats" and I'd say you have a fair and accurate description of the first six years of Bush-Cheney. Under your definition the only thing now keeping the U.S. from banana republic status is that inflation has somehow so far been kept in check, despite their cutting taxes for the rich in a time of huge deficits.

1. Married to a Venezuelan also listed among the criteria defining an authoritarian regime: must support the president to get a job. Check: that is also the case in corporate America; and although authoritarianism is (thus far) more subtle in the U.S., Bush v. Gore was as much a coup d'etat as any other in history. This subtlety is however sufficient to fool the red-state dummies, who stand armed and ready to oppose any communist-left takeover attempt -- facing the wrong way, as it were, like the British guns at Singapore in 1942.

2. Jim LaPeer, in decrying the left-wing "threat", claims the Libby case involves no "real" crime, just hatred of Bush-Cheney. However, surely even the red-state dummies can see the irony of their fetid impeachment of America's last democratically-elected president (can't they? Or was Bill Clinton charged with the "crime" of adultery?). And why does it occur to no one that, had Libby not lied in order to obstruct the investigation (and had Rove or Cheney dared testify under oath) a "real" crime might have been uncovered?

America's problems didn't begin with Junior Bush and Dick "Cakewalk" Cheney. What radicalized me (relatively late in life) was the shockingly shabby way in which a twice duly-elected American president, Bill Clinton, was savaged every day for eight years by the corporate media and the so-called republican party, and finally impeached over a psuedo-scandal that seemed ridiculous then and seems even more ridiculous now.

America has gone terribly, horribly wrong; but the reasons for this -- the concentration of mass media ownership in a handful of corporations, and a flawed electoral system that allows the world's fate to be decided by the poorly educated, superstitious voters of the rural red states -- didn't begin with Bush-Cheney, and won't end with them, either. Plus, they still have nearly two more years in office; so I wouldn't decant the Petrus just yet.

I can guarantee the so-called republicans right now are focused on the one or two states and the handful of precincts that will decide the '08 vote; and when I say "focused" I mean "figuring out how to steal the next election." What the hell are the Dems doing these days, besides begging their GOP colleagues for permission to pass a non-binding resolution expressing their really, really concerned feelings, and taking stock of their wine cellars?