"I think that you need to read up on some American history, because I don't know where you get the idea that the US has, until recently been a paragon of virtue and human rights."

You are, of course, correct. I didn't mean to convey that I thought the US has been a paragon of virtue and human rights. I do feel that I grew up in a halcyon world, calm and peaceful, where people treated each other kindly, were polite and helpful. That camaraderie, in my opinion, has disappeared. Whenever I go out now, I wonder who is going to break in line in front of me, cut me off in my car and give me the finger, tailgate me because I am only going 20 miles an hour over the speed limit and on and on. Whatever I do, I anticipate a confrontation.

In 1956 I was in the Navy, a Korean war veteran, and my ship was in Gitmo for exercises, Castro was in the hills. We visited Havana and Santiago and I never saw a country more ready for a revolution. There were the very wealthy Battista-ites and the extremely poor. Battista was a puppet of the CIA. I still haven't figured out what Castro did that was so wrong except screw with the CIA.

In the '70s I lived in Tehran and the Shah's government was a client of the firm. The late 70s were no picnic. I lived for many years in the Middle East. It was easy good living after Tehran.

I lived last year in New Mexico near Las Cruces and studied the history of the Apache. After their fights they went to the same mineral baths that I went to. They were obliterated by the US. I never realized that Kit Carson and Fremont were so terrible. Back then, the US built forts in the southwest, in the same manner as we are doing in Iraq today.

After I retired, I lived in Costa Rica for 6 years and explored the Central American countries. To read the American press about the Contras, et al they are mean and cruel and blood-thirsty. Nothing could be further from the truth. I visited a village named San Diego, on Lake Atitlin in Guatemala. The Government army, under the direction of the CIA, came down on the village to persecute the poor Mayan Indians, who had no idea what was going on. They killed 10,000 of the clueless Mayans, trying to find the Che Guevera type guerrillas in the mountains. To this day, no one knows that there were any guerrillas in the mountains. The are memorials and crude statutes where the slaughter of the innocents took place.

What a legacy for the CIA. And we truly know very little about what the CIA does.

'Go to a football game and you see a football game.

Go to your local god-center and you will not see god."

And you will only hear prattle!

A kid is not going to get screwed up by not believing in God. I spent 30 years getting over the crap handed to me by my mother about God. The time totally wasted in church could have been used in a worthwhile manner.

As someone said, you are well within your rights to take her to a unitarian church and explore the possibilities.

Do her a favor, give her a copy of the "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins and have her understand it. If I had read it I would never have majored in Theology.

What a waste of time! Life is short and fun and challenging without deluding yourself!

I am aware that the neocons have been planning an overthrow of the existing situation (influence of liberalism) for some time, including control of the government and the media as you summarized. I recall Lewis Lapham writing in Harpers that Irving Kristol, Bill's father, was offering journalists and columnists in the 1980's money to present the neoconservative point of view. Lewis did not take the offer which was considerable. Irving Kristol once remarked that a neoconservative is a "liberal mugged by reality," one who became more conservative after seeing the results of liberal policies.

Amazing how the sons of those prominent neocons of the eighties are the main protagonists of the movement today. I think of Podhoretz and Kagan. So your point is well taken.

They have been around a long time and were known within the "Beltway Village" as the "crazies."

OK, so they spent years and years preparing the plan. That doesn't take away from the fact that they implemented it overnight.

Or so it seemed.

And it seems to me that they are still winning. If their goal is to protect Israel, it's working. They have nothing to lose and if the U.S.A. attacks Iran, then all the better for Israel. It took many years of planning, I agree. But it was an almost flawless implementation with the desired results.

They expect the nation, and I think correctly, to be as Britney declared. "The President was voted in so we have to trust him and do what he says."