In the foreign policy context at least, I have always understood modern (last 15 years or so) neoconservatism as an extension of neoliberalism, the essence of which I understand to be that the U.S. had to expend massive resources on propoganda and more, shall we say, "direct" interventions throughout the world in order to stop the spread of Communism, that ultimate evil (substitute Islamofascism or whoever the boogeyman is in another decade or so). This led to a number of great ideas like operational support for Pinochet's coup, the Bay of Pigs disaster, and 99% of our current middle east policy, which has also turned out swimmingly of course. For some reason, this all needed to be done in secret by our intelligence services, despite the fact that apparently it's all come to light now and everybody involved knew exactly what was going on then. Except the neoconservatives who apparently didn't know their magazine was funded by the CIA.

Am I accurate here? This is my once-per-decade sincere, completely non-rhetorical question. Somebody older and wiser than me drop some knowledge.

From the AUMF:

"The President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons."

If courts are going to actually take the statutory language seriously, I think an argument could be made that the AUMF's authorization will eventually run out. The only "nation" I can think of that has actively harbored al Qaeda is Afghanistan, and the Taliban is no longer in power there (although apparently they still control most of the country). Clearly the invasion of Iraq was contrary to the AUMF, unless the president is allowed to "determine" things that are plainly untrue. OBL is dead or dying (in the interest of not sounding like a conspiracy theorist, I will go with "dying"), and it seems to me that everybody directly involved in the 9/11 attacks will have been killed, detained, or otherwise no longer with us in the near future.

At that point the AUMF should expire, along with these supposed detention powers (detention is a necessary incident of armed conflict, so as long as the AUMF is valid the claimed detention powers are as well, at least among courts that agree they exist in the first place). I'm sure that won't actually happen--as long as al Qaeda exists in any form presidents will claim the AUMF authorizes action against it--but it should.

"Why don't they respect my right to be free from religion?"

Because you don't have a right to be free from religion, any more than I have a right to be free from atheists. We live in a fucking pluralistic society, and that is apparently anathema to both sides of the debate. As a Christian (albeit one who occasionally says "fuck"), I am not in favor of forced prayer in public schools, or Christian teaching in public schools, or other intrusions of the spiritual into public life. Why? Because I want to set a precedent for being sensitive to those whose beliefs are different from mine, in the hopes that one day be that sensitivity will be reciprocated. The anti-Christians around here rightly point out how screwed up and coercive it is for Christians to expect their beliefs to be institutionalized in all areas of public life. And then they turn around and demand that atheism be institutionalized. Clearly Christianity hasn't cornered the market on irrational thought.

Obviously, if a Christian came up and said to you: "God is unhappy with the way you live your life and you're going to hell," you would be offended and think him an asshole. But you can scream "There is no god and you're ignorant / stupid for thinking so," and that's just perfectly acceptable. And I know the rationalization: they did it first. It's a great ethical system for 3-year-olds.

@florida9: "Where is this kind of behavior tolerable?" Well here, obviously. we got the unbannable bastard apparently attempting to sodomize god (there's layers of irony there, i think), we got people saying christianity is the greatest evil in the world (really? nobody did anything nasty to anyone else before Jesus showed up?), and the whole "god is dead and/or man-made" example in my original post was in response to another letter as well. The author of the article even said something to the effect of "i think we can all agree that the beliefs of Christians are silly."

Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that we can dismiss 2000 years of history, theology, philosophy, whatever else (5000 if you count all of the "Judeo-Christian" world view) as a "little silly." It shows that clearly we've confronted big questions about our place in the universe and the meaning of our lives, and decided that millions of other people who thought on similar things are a "little silly." I'm really glad to see we got it all figured out.

@discoursian: "Who is trying to institutionalize atheism?" Are you trying to say that freedom from religion is not institutionalized atheism?