I am no neocon.

Your approach serves neocon purposes. You admit it yourself. Neocons have adopted your approach as an element of their strategy. Why do you suppose the neocons supported Nader? Because they support his policies?

At best, you could be interpreted as a mere tool of the neoconservatives, a useful and willing idiot, the same as Nader. Claiming to not be a neocon amounts to a distinction without a difference. You and Nader both support neoconservatism while merely saying that you oppose it.

Please explain how this is a good thing.

Let's see whatcha got. So far you have nothing.

I think it would be extreme to say that Gore equals Bush indeed

And yet, this is the implication made by 'i_ween'. Is it not so?

I like being in teh company of great thinkers--Chomsky, Glenn, etc.--who believe that small differences in political orientation and point of view translate to large differences in governance and outcomes.

Precisely true.

We may have believed that they didn't have the clout in the early 00's to stand against, but it becomes increasingly clear that they are not just enablers but active participants.

Hardly all, and for the rest, hardly out of choice perhaps. Political realities can be compelling. The corporate MIC has at least as great a say as the electorate itself, making political courage amount to corporate suicide.

When you run with pirates, you are compelled to commit piracy, until you become a pirate yourself. And not out of choice.

If you were an anti-war Democrat dependent on corporate support, how would you proceed? How could you proceed, in a rigged game? If you don't bet, you can't win.

Anyway, I think it would be smarter to operate from the perspective that on major foreign policy and domestic security issues, the difference between the parties is largely cosmetic.

Granted. But not wholly. It was not Clinton's policy, and not the policy of the Democrats, to implement a security state before Bush. Therefore it is unlikely that this is their true policy, and that they have become compelled by circumstance, and not intention, to adopt it.

On other issues, perhaps there are great and important differences.

That said, how do we proceed to reverse the present situation and circumstances?

So should we not have criticized and opposed Apartheid in South Africa because of our own poor record on civil rights...

I'll raise another question and toss it back atcha: should we not attempt to correct our mistakes because the other countries are doing it? If the other countries jumped off a cliff, would you jump as well, all the while telling them that what they are doing is wrong?

Shining a light on these sorts of hypocrisies helps us to look more closely in the mirror and, perhaps, effect a change.

Glenn, you are helping to bear witness to the truth: helping us to speak out and avoid indifference to these things. It is essential to our humanity that we stand up to these things and speak out. Elie Wiesel once said:

Of course, indifference can be tempting -- more than that, seductive. It is so much easier to look away from victims. It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes. It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person's pain and despair. Yet, for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbor are of no consequence. And, therefore, their lives are meaningless. Their hidden or even visible anguish is of no interest. Indifference reduces the other to an abstraction . . .

Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor -- never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees -- not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity we betray our own.

Reading your columns helps me to avoid indifference. It reminds me to speak out. Thank you.

re: "how do we proceed to reverse the present situation and circumstances?"

I am of the opinion that we are in a permanent state of decline and, short of a French Revolution-style response by the masses, we are doomed.

In other words, we are doomed.

That doesn't mean I persoanlly am going down passively; rather, it merely means that I do not expect the masses of brainwashed citizens to do much except sheepishly accept their fate.

"America is going to become a mega-banana republic where the army will have more and more importance in Americans' lives. It will be an ever greater and greater overlay on the American system. And before it is all over, democracy, noble and delicate as it is, may give way. My long experience with human nature - I'm 80 years old now - suggests that it is possible that fascism, not democracy, is the natural state.

Indeed, democracy is the special condition - a condition we will be called upon to defend in the coming years. That will be enormously difficult because the combination of the corporation, the military and the complete investiture of the flag with mass spectator sports has set up a pre-fascistic atmosphere in America already."

-Norman Mailer,

'Gaining an Empire, Losing Democracy?'

“Hitler’s dictatorship was the first dictatorship of an industrial state in this modern age of technology, a dictatorship which employed to perfection the instruments of technology to dominate its own people. By means of such instruments of technology as the radio and public address systems [quaint by today’s standards - Scorpio], eighty million persons could be made subject to the will of one individual…The criminal events of those years were not only an outgrowth of Hitler’s personality. The extent of the crimes was also due to the fact that Hitler was the first to be able to employ the implements of technology to multiply crime.”

-Albert Speer,

'Inside The Third Reich'