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Still, you are missing the big picture. Our country was knocked off balance by 9/11. It could be knocked off balance again in the future. But the ship is righting itself.
* Democrats are in the majority.
* George Bush has negotiated a deal with North Korea.
* George Bush is negotiating with Syria and Iran.
* It is likely that our troops will begin withdrawing from Iraq within the next 12 months.
* By all accounts, Dick Cheney has been marginalized within the administration. His muscle, Scooter Libby, is gone.
* Don Rumsfeld is gone. Most of his generals are gone. The new defense secretary is not considered a neocon.
* Doug Feith is gone.
* The neocon movement is in tatters.
* The leading candidate for the Republican nomination is Rudy Giuliani. Despite his best conservative impression, he is a liberal. He nominated liberal judges. He was for gay marriage. He was for public funding of abortions. He was strongly for gun control.
We still have work to do in repairing the damage to our foreign policy, reputation and Constitution. Bush could do yet more damage.
But, while it makes for good book-jacket copy, we are hardly marching toward authoritarianism. You should have more faith in America, red and blue. Some Bush dead-enders remain, but they are in the minority.
Yep, the country is correcting course, just like it did in '92. The country is correcting course the way a bottle floating in the gulf stream corrects course ... it may being going one way or the other at any given moment ... but its still heading the same way.
Your scare-mongering about the right is no different than the neocons' scare-mongering about the terrorist hordes on our doorstep.
Right, because neoconservatives don't have a political ideology that looks upon democracy with contempt, and because neoconservatives in power haven't been dismantling the Constitution. That Yoo theory ... no big deal.
Just like Article 48 of the Weimar Republic was no big deal. I'm glad there were no paranoid nut jobs back then to say that Article 48 might be used by anti-democratic forces to install a dictatorship. Good thing.
War radicalizes people. It polarizes. It divides. So why declare war on conservatives?
We shouldn't declare "war" on conservatives. We should say that people who don't believe in democracy don't believe in democracy. And when people who don't believe in democracy are representative of a movement in total, we should say the movement does not believe in democracy.
The goal is that people who do believe in democracy will leave the movement, and then the movement will not be in a position to dismantle democracy.
That IS how democracy works. With, you know, pointing out to people that they are voting for people who will take their freedoms away.
What seems to be being said, although some might realize it, is that "we" shouldn't point that out just because Hannity, Malkin, Coulter, Limbaugh, etc are making that accusation against "liberals."
And so now we've come full circle. We see why them doing that works. Now we see why Howard Kurtz is a soft-ware program.
They've already lost. Find common ground with the moderates and move on
As indicated by the rejection of their foreign policy objectives by those who are in a position to carry them out.
