It's about time someone sounded the alarm.

This is not a new recipe: aggressive foreign policy and an aggressive assault on domestic liberties.

I don't see you defending that, Joey.

It is an individual right, listed in the bill of rights and every bit as sacred as freedom of speech.

When you liberal hypocrites defend the second amendment to the fullest I may start to listen to you. Until then, fuck yourselves.

I definitely want to read this. I love Joe Conason's writing, and this is a topic that I find incredibly fascinating and important. I wish Salon had given us a few more pages, though.

He's wrong on the concentration camp thing, though. We have them; they're just not on American soil, [i]per se[/i]. They're definitely there.

Different sites, different coding. Guuuuuh!

Joe, I tried to send this as feedback, but there seems to be a glitch; the contact/feedback page comes up at "you do not have permission to view this page".

I don't know if you read these comments, but I hope so.

I wanted to point out something that you might find interesting, given the (admittedly fascinating) subject of your book: there was an extremely prescient movie made on that theme, the fall of democracy in America.

It was called "Shadow On The Land", and was made for television in 1968. The parallels to the Bush Administration are fascinating, as is the perversion of American symbolism into fascistic forms. For example, the new US flag features a two-headed bald eagle, with both claws clutching a brace not of arrows, but of nuclear missiles. The presentation of a near-future American dictatorship was stunning, and stuck in the head of everyone I know who ever saw it.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063589/

Unfortunately it's extremely rare now, even though it featured popular actors such as Gene Hackman, John Forsythe, and Jackie Cooper. Sony, the current owner of the film, does not plan to offer a DVD of it.

Call me naive, call me culturally ignorant and call me just plain facetious.

However, I've always wondered with some fear what type of regime-change might be possible in the United States. Our national values are not going to lead us to communism or true libertarianism. However, we've seen the seeds of a hyper-state tending on fascism that parallels themes from director Paul Verhoeven's vision of a military-led society in "Starship Troopers" (1997). The movie offered the only plausible alternative to our democracy.

All of the qualities are apparent. The gratuitous use of fear of the enemy and jingoism. The glorification of soldiers as the only true sources of patriotism. The relative blithe capitalism and materialism that leaves the rest of the population content.

We are not going into a type of fascism that destroys our economic system or general well-being. We're moving toward a state where only military folks are "citizens", while the rest of the population is content with making money and paying taxes. 'Liberals' will also contribute to the ideology of the new state. We will continue to expect the federal government to come to our aid for everything from social welfare to massive government projects. To alter a now-famous Chinese saying, it will be "fascism" with socialist characteristics.

As long as the rest of us have our Ipods and Oscars, most will be content. The fact is that both the left and right will have something they want from this new state. And it's also true that both the left and the right will have the values and ideas to PREVENT this type of state.

It is still too be seen whether we Salon-style readers can adopt some conservative ideals while maintaining some progressive agendas.

I've had an uneasy feeling for a while now...

Would the Bush cabal spend so much energy arrogating power to the Executive branch if they had any intention of giving it up when W's second term expires?

The damage being done to the economy to feather the nest of the Repubicans is far worse than any of their psuedo-military adventures. When the music is over on Wall Street, then turn out the lights for the Bush/Hoover administration.

Republican leadership has argued that the attacks...demand permanent changes in American government, society, and foreign policy.

I've written it before and again, but the GOP and the Right in general requires an Enemy, and has been relying on enemy imagery for a very long time. At the end of the 19th century, it was anarchists; then it was socialists; then communists; then (only reluctantly) fascists (in truth -- we were fine with fascism until WWII forced us to pick a side); then communists again; then secular humanists and liberals; and now terrorists (and, by extention, anybody who is not a reactionary).

The Right is utterly dependent on some nefarious, shadowy, all-powerful Enemy out to destroy Our Way Of Life(tm). Of course, to save the country, they must destroy it, but that's just water over the waterboard.

They're shrill, they're fearful, and they've been doing it for over a century, with increasing sophistication, but it's the same damned message:

They're not like US; we're all good, they're all bad, They're out to destroy Us; we must do whatever it takes to destroy THEM, and if you're not with US, you're against US!!

It's rightist propaganda, pure and simple. Bush isn't the source of this ideological sickness; he's just a symptom of it, a fuller expression of it. It's been going on a long time. Take away the nasty Enemy to fight, and the Right has nothing to bitch about -- and they'll just invent another Enemy, anwyay.

How savvy was FDR to say that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself! All that fearmongering simply serves as a diversion from necessary social change, keeps all the money in the right hands. Just ask yourself, to what end does all that fearmongering serve? Who benefits from it, and who loses out? Therein lies the way out. Think clearly who gains when everybody is afraid, who has historically and systematically benefited from it. It's not just the demagogues and politicians. It's a whole industry.