When government promises to defend our freedom by trampling upon it's very foundations WE THE PEOPLE have been locked out of our responsiblility to maintain our freedom. Our responsibility to defend and maintain our freedom often comes at the risk of life, both civilian and military. We suffer the most aggregious assult to our freedom when called into a kneejerk reaction to trust government alone and at any cost to defend that freedom. How many levels removed from governing must happen before we are removed from the freedom we once thought we had. Great leaders lead with vision not fearmongering. Great leaders call unpon the greatness of the people to defend freedom with integrity and honor.

I have read quite a few of these letters now. I have'nt seen any that support the current administration. It's interesting to say that these letters are faily well thought out. Far more thought out and directed than the nonsence I see on Yahoo message boards - a free for all of insanity. It's surprising to see how bigoted and mean spirted things get on both sides of the fence.

But here I see well thought out letters without the four letter words. And they all (what I've seen) say something is wrong with this administration. It's good to see that some of us are still thinking clearly.

I remember seeing an expression somewhere:

It's the truly parnoid people that know what's really going on.

Funny, bad sadly there's a bit of truth to it.

It was the day after the 2004 elections when someone told me Bush had won again. I felt like it was 9-11 all over again. Maybe it was worse because this time we did to ourselves.

Not too many people were paying attention then. Not long before that, I was'nt paying attention either. I figured the world would take care of itself. At the time Bush was elected the first time I did'nt pay much attention to politics - I did'nt even vote.

For me George Bush has changed all that.

After reading these letters in toto, most of which are very considered and some of which sound a dire warning of the Orwellianization of our society, I am, ironically, heartened. That so many individuals clearly recognize our ominous drift toward facisism lends hope for its reversal. Mr. Kamiya's article was excellent; the letters ain't half bad neither!

According to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, the primary definition of the above word is:

n. "A philosophy or system of government that advocates or excercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with an ideology of belligerent nationalism."

Looking at the last 26 years of U.S. history, and especially at the last 5 1/2 years, we can find numerous examples that emphatically support a connection between this definition and our current method of governing, and many examples have been cited in this thread alone. The only question is was constitutes "a dictatorship of the extreme right." Does it have to be an individual or does a cabal of people loyal to an ideology count?

An even scarier connection involves about half of the citizens. Some are people who have decided they are the greatest of patriots even though they have no concept of the founders' intents for our government, disagree with it when they hear it, and don't even know anything about the Bill of Rights except for the 2nd Amendment [and maybe the 1st]. The rest don't care what goes on as long as they have superficial diversions [again, as a number of letters here have stated].

Drivers need to demonstrate a basic understanding of cars and the laws of the road to obtain a license. Too bad we don't have to demonstrate some basic knowledge about our system of government in order to vote.

I agree with the LW that our troubles began before this administration. The theocrats and the neocons and the plutocrats didn't always fly under the radar, but as long as we had a working system of checks and balances, we had faith that their excesses could and would be curtailed.

We have a touching faith in our Constitution and its laws, and as each bad thing has happened, we have assumed that any minute the pendulum would swing back. We see ourselves as good people, not people who would deliberately drug and torture captives, massacre innocent children, imprison or economically exploit large percentages of our own people, allow our precious system of public education to be gutted, or sacrifice the polar bear to the SUV. It is difficult to acknowledge that our system was vulnerable and has been coopted. But there are many of us who are not in denial, not distracted by Shiloh Jolie Pitt and not lulled into complacancy by our continuing paychecks and trips to the store. We call and write our Congresspeople. It does no apparent good. We campaign for alternative representation. We read the many wise warnings and analyses of the situation. Surely we must be at the tipping point, at critical mass, at the time the pendulum begins its blessed swing back toward sanity. Surely at any second our friends and neighbors will shake the spell off and recognize that empire-building, a police state, unimaginable levels of debt, deregulation, privatization, huge multinational corporations with mercenary armies, grossly disproportionate resource allocation, environmental suicide and fantasies of Armageddon are really, really bad things. But nothing changes. If we cannot make a significant difference in 2006, how much longer can we wait, and what else can we do?

While there is no danger that America will become a fascist, totalitarian or theocratic state...

I'd say we're just one major terrorist attack in the US away from it. I'm quite sure al Qaida knows it, too.

Suskind lays out an alternative to the Cheney-Bush doctrine: George Kennan's "containment" policy for the Soviet Union, which rejected calls for military confrontation. Suskind admits that Kennan's policy might not be embraced by those who had to live under communism -- but it helped prevent World War III for half a century, it avoided the moral horror of a nuclear attack, and in the end the Soviet empire fell.

The Kennan doctrine, of course, is rejected--with great contempt--by the Cheney administration. That's why Edgar and the puppet both make a point of speechifying in former Warsaw Pact countries whenever they go to Europe and more or less explicitly repudiating the trepidatious policies that kept us from "defending freedom" there during the Cold War.

These guys wanted WWWIII, and they still want it. And are finally getting to have it. They and their intellectual forebears have always been pushing the US to become an authoritarian national-security state. There isn't any "why" about it; it's just what they've always wanted and they will always mold any "problem" to require that "solution." Read the posts of the wingers on these threads and elsewhere. They dress this desire up as a necessary response to the supposedly unprecedented danger we face, but that's what they want, and they and their intellectual compatriots have always wanted it. It's what McCarthyism was about, it's what the Bundists were about. There's always some "necessity" for it in their rhetoric. But the fact is that they want it for its own sake--it has been a constant in their political p.o.v. for decades, irrespective of who the enemy happens to be. It just IS the America that they dream about, and are always pushing to bring into existence.

I find such desires utterly baffling. But it is what they want. It bleeds out of every speech or blogpost they make.