And we should be very very sad and sorry.

I felt what you said. Thanks. I'm sorry.

As it becomes more and more obvious that the Democratic leaders in Congress are either inept, intimidated, or being manipulated by their wealthy corporate sponsors, I see many of us throwing up our arms in the air beseechingly asking "What should we do?" I've been there myself.

The first thing we need to do is put the Bush Administration and the last six years in perspective. I just finished John M. Barry's "Rising Tide."

The book is ostensibly about the disastrous Mississippi River flood of 1927, but Barry writes extensively about the politics and abuse of power that allowed such a disaster to happen, and how badly flawed politicians like Herbert Hoover used the disaster to gain political power.

"Rising Tide" is must read, along with Barry's later book "The Great Influenza," because both books examine the way the rich and the powerful manipulate and control all levels of our government. While most of what he exposes was not know toby the general public at the time, eventually it has all come out, as will most of the skullduggery of the current Administration and the Democratic enablers. When you look back at the egregious abuses of power that Barry writes about, you will realize just how important it is to remain vigilant and never let our guard down, even when politicians you support get in power. Power corrupts.

The "Rising Tide" had me in tears of anger at how the smug, pompous New Orleans bankers screwed the poor, powerless residents of two rural Louisiana parishes, and how the leadership of the Red Cross turned a blind eye at how local leaders used the National Guard to imprison the all local black residents in the Mississippi Delta and forced them to sandbag the levees in return for food, food that was poorer quality than the food freely given to the whites who did almost none of the heavy labor.

I digress. In "The Great influenza," Barry devotes a substantial portion of his book to the rarely taught excesses of the Woodrow Wilson Administration during World War I (he also touches on it in "Rising Tide"): the Espionage Act of 1917, the Sedition Act of 1918, and the Palmer Raids of 1919-1921. Check out the entry for "Palmer Raids" in Wikipedia to get an idea of how much worse Wilson was than Bush in this regard. Bush, of course, is far more flawed than Wilson in other areas.

Barry's books and about Wilson's fascist legislation hopefully puts our era into some perspective. These abuses of power by the wealthy and the politicians happened only 80 years ago, and yet just a decade or so later we had Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal programs, some of the most progressive legislation to that time, legislation that would never have passed in the 1920s.

We can turn this around.

I believe it is incumbent on us to identify the weaknesses of the Bush-enabling wing of the Democratic party, focus on those weaknesses, one at a time, and fix them. Right now I believe Harry Reid is a Bush enabler that can be fixed. I don't know Nevada politics well enough to know why he is so unpopular in the state, but I suspect a recall campaign could be effective in either getting him to grow a spine or to get him removed. Showing that we can bring down the Senate Majority Leader would certainly give the other Bush-enablers pause and possibly work a little harder to turn the country around.

Even if we can't make big changes immediately, be assured that the many liberal blogs, like Glenn's, have just begun to make a difference. Like a giant supertanker, a government as large as ours has an inertia that can't be turned quickly. I believe we can already see some change and there will be surely more progress to come (our biggest concern in the future may center around how to stop the turn once the country is headed in the right direction!).

If, under "war" conditions, dissent is equated to treason, as a secret, official government policy; there certainly can be - with the technology now in place - wholesale surveillance of, not just perceived threats and action, but all political speech, whether public or private.

Does that sound far-fetched? Conspiratorial? Paranoid?

Let's beat a dead horse here one more time while we thumb through our well-worn paperbacks by Orwell and Kafka.

... I attended Gerry Spence's Trial Lawyers College in DuBois, Wyoming. Spence was in the middle of representing Brandon Mayfield at the time and left the ranch for a period for hearings in this case, returning to tell us about Mayfield's children being frightened during the day when, after staying home sick from school, a child heard someone enter the house, gathering evidence such as DNA samples from the family's toothbrushes pursuant to a FISA warrant. Of course, the family didn't know it was the "authorities" and assumed that burglars were coming in or that they were targeted by hate groups because they were practicing Muslims. Spence later raised his hands before us to demonstrate his belief that both parties were like his arms, extending in seemingly separate directions but both powered by the same corporate heart.

Like other "good democrats" present, I was skeptical of this claim, assuming he was biased from going up against the Reno-led Justice Dept. during the Randy Weaver case. I no longer doubt his description, given recent events, a few isolated Democrats such as Dodd notwithstanding.

One day at lunch I said something that was perceived by the group, and even Spence, as pretty stupid. I voiced my opinion that our conversations, at least those on the phones, were being monitored. I based this on such things on the fact that Spence had gotten not guilty verdicts against the feds in the Marcos case, the Weaver case, and that he was currently involved in Mayfield's case which was potentially embarrassing to the FBI yet again. I also based my prediction on the things I heard from several of the attendees who were Muslims who described being followed by the police after 9/11 and having their cell phones "borrowed" for a few minutes while the contacts were likely copied. I also remembered reading about the activites in programs such as Cointel Pro in the 60's.

But more than anything, I was aware, from reading this blog and others, that (1)the Bush-led executive branch was on occasion willing to violate the law and the Constition he swore an oath to uphold, and that (2) there was much we still didn't know about the lengths such an administration would go to, and how complicit the "opposition" would be.

Still, when someone like Spence looks at you skeptically, like perhaps you've gone a little too far out on the limb, it's tempting to conclude that your imagination might be going too far. After all, we were all taught to think like lawyers, assuming that "no warrants shall issue" without "probably cause, supported by oath or affirmation." And, the thought went, what judge would issue a warrant that would interfere with attorney-client privileges or intrude on lawyers learning about techniques to win jury trials and keep executive excesses in check?

It's obvious now, however, that bets such as these are off, that the rule of law has become as quaint as the Geneva Conventions to these people, who can no longer be described as operating under the banner of one political party.

In short, I no longer doubt Spence's description of both parties as powered by the same corporate heart. I wonder if he still doubts my prediction that these new executives listen to whom they want when they want, unconstrained by warrant requirements, laws, or even the Constitution?