"insurrectionary". Maybe I need reading-glasses.

Most of these folks are good people.

A surprising number of them have top flight educations and are very intelligent.

Most of them have never studie exonomics. If they know anything about economics, for reasons of their own, they ignore the real ground breaking and common sense and reality based economics of Nobels like Hayek, Friedman and Becker.

They havn't really thought about it all that much, but they want to still believe that some kind of top down, command economic system can be run by people they know and trust, and that this kind of system would be far more egalitarian and rational than what they see as chaos. Talk to them about "the invisible hand" of the market all you want, but they would rather have their very visible hands in our pockets so they can create a new untopian world, where everyone can have plenty of leisure time hanging out at cafes and bistros sipping wine and espressos while reading Le Monde.

Since these people may never care to look at the actual hiustory of various command and semi command economies run by supposedly well read, intelligent people like themselves, they will probably continue to believe in some form of collecivism or redistribution or socialism until they die their natural deaths or until the real soldiers of change line them up and shoot them because they were 'useful idiots' who are now getting in the way of true progress.

So these people have projected all their hopes and wishes onto Barrack Obama.

If you really knew your history, you would realize that this entire country was built on slavery. Who do you think used the cotton grown in the South?--Northern textile millls! Slaves built the Washington Monument. (There were slave auctions in front of the Capital.) In the 1700s, New York State had as many black slaves as South Carolina and a form of post-reconstruction black slavery thrived up until World War II with the full complicity of the Federal Government. So, tone down the Yankee smugness. The North benefitted from all that free labor as much as the South did.

elwin9: The Alaska Independece Party isa TERRORIST organization whose founder would want the Federals to "come in here dressed in red so that they would be easier targets."

Let me get this straight. You interview two guys and somehow this is evidence of "Palin's right-wing pals"? Grow up won't you? this is pathetic stuff here.

Sorry, mate, I thought your 'name' was "PALS"

So, reality doesn't really matter to these people who are pinning their hopes and wishes onto Obama.

We are not talking reality we are talking about hopes and wishes, things which people hold very dear, like the virgin birth, resurrection and Moses parting the sea.

It does not matter that these hopes and wishes are illusions and delusions, this isn't about logic, it is about faith.

It doesn't matter that this stuff they believe has not worked in the past. This is about the future.

They know about the past. They know about Stalin starving all of those Ukranians to death. They know about the gulags too. Some of them even had to read "One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich." Especially if they had some emigree professors like I did at Lotus Feet College at Oxford. They know about Pol Pot too. They also may know that during Mao's long march, thousands of people died, but Mao was actually getting carried up and down those mountains in a cozy little litter by coolies, and eating delicacies prepared by his private chef. Some of them even know that Che Guevarra loved sending people off to the firing squads in the early years of the Cuban Revolution.

So, the thing is, when people bring up Obama's angry wife, Ayers, Dohrn, Edward Said, Jeremiah Wright, ACORN and all of those guys, these very intelligent progressive people get extremely upset. They must banish the thought that Obama could be another Lenin or any other opportunuistic and murderous sociopath who would say whatever it takes to get power and do whatever it takes to keep power.

That's the problem with these people. You want to warn them about something very bad which might be happening.

They just don't want to hear it. It gives them the willies. And they'd rather get mad at you and call you a fascist or a racist. That's much easier for them (getting so mad they are borderline deranged) than trying to fathom the unfathomable.

The unsurprising results of your "reality based economics of Nobels like Hayek, Friedman and Becker" have been getting some press lately. Perhaps you may have noticed it: a worldwide economic crisis.

Troopergate is now being reported in the New York Times. It must be followed with the Palin's long association with the Alaskan Independence Party. Sarah Palin is an out-and-out slimy hypocrite. If she wants to talk terrorism and anti-Americanism, she needs to explain her "shout out" to AIP.

McCain has lost all integrity. He needs to be Dishonorably Discharged from American politics.

They can have Sarah as their queen. I think she would make a much better Queen of Alaska than Anything of the U.S.

I have a few other states she and her ilk can take with her too. Good luck to 'em all. They won't know anything about science or math -- they'll barely be able to read -- but they'll be able to shoot, pray and drink.

Let them go. God bless 'em. You betcha.

should be more highly-taxed than married couples because they weren't producing enough "bambini" for the motherland. It was the Mediterranean countries that produced the first fascist governments although, thanks to Hollywood and an inadequate grasp of history, many people think that Hitler was the progenitor of fascism. The Spanish Civil War doesn't seem to have made any impact on those with Nordic preoccupations, although huge numbers died in the brutal conflict between Falangists and Republicans. One of the world's most famous paintings is Picasso's "Guernica" which shows the destruction caused by German Luftwaffe on a Spanish town several years before Hitler decided on Germany's right to the lands of eastern Europe.

There was an election in Austria last month and the Far Right made considerable gains so that it's possible that the meaning of "fascist" will become clearer to all those who use such words so casually. As for Mussolini and his Blackshirts, he's said to have got the Italian trains to run on time so that every cloud has a silver lining.