Amity: You are right in your post. An earlier reader wrote a beautiful letter to Feinstein regarding the silence of the Germans before World War II. We are similarly silent.

So I will take your strident tone as a pretext to action. If I am willing to criticize Schumer, then I must be willing to criticize myself.

However, while your criticism may be on the mark for many of us, it is a bit simplistic. There are many people actively working for change. They have been working for years. However, as has been documented on these pages as well as in more moderate and more progressive publications, the multinational control of the media has served to render these people invisible.

We may need to change our techniques with the times. Sites like Salon do just that. Greenwald and Walsh (among other writers here -- Kamiya's article is quite good today) are positive forces for change -- particularly since they are willing to criticize even the Democratic Party in a reasoned fashion and call them to account.

And though I like to hurl insults at Salon's editors in my letters, I'd certainly count them on the side of 'doing good for our nation.'

comet: I was one of the people who criticized the Democratic Party. I'd like to respond to a good point you made. You noted in your letter that the Democrats are certainly different than the Republicans. I wholeheartedly agree. Democrats have much different beliefs, and I believe a Democrat in the White House would not create the crass and lawless state we see now.

What I am frustrated by is the fact that, in practice, the Democracts (as a party) are not working to do anything with their power. I don't see any real change since the Democrats took the majority in 2007. The only change seems negative: the Democrats have put a rubber stamp of approval on administrative actions.

I wrote that I wanted to change parties, but I also wrote that I would not. Why? Because while the Democratic Party as a group seems inept, individual Democrats (and the platforms they defend) do tremendous good. I noted Dodd and Leahy as examples. I'll also note again my own Congressperson, Maurice Hinchey. But you are right: even Schumer (who riled me today with his atrocious lack-of-stand) would be better than Guiliani.

Thanks for the dialog.

Forty years ago, while he was being slandered in the press, Jim Garrison was interviewed in Playboy Magazine. This is what he said:

I was with the artillery supporting the division that took Dachau. I arrived there the day after it was taken, when bulldozers were making pyramids of human bodies outside the camp. What I saw there haunted me ever since. Because the law is my profession, I've always wondered about the judges throughout Germany who sentenced men to jail for picking pockets when their own government was jerking gold from the teeth of men murdered in gas chambers.

I'm concerned about all of this because it isn't a German phenomenon. It can happen here, because there has been no change and there has been no progress and there has been no increase of understanding on the part of men for their fellow man. What worries me deeply, and I have seen it exemplified in this case, is that we in America are in great danger of slowly evolving into a proto-fascist state. It will be a different kind of fascist state from the one the Germans evolved; theirs grew out of depression and promised bread and work, while ours, curiously enough, seems to be emerging from prosperity. But in the final analysis, it's based on power and on the inability to put human goals and human conscience above the dictates of the state. Its origins can be traced in the tremendous war machine we've built since 1945, the "military-industrial complex" that Eisenhower vainly warned us about, which now dominates every aspect of our life. The power of the states and Congress has gradually been abandoned to the Executive Department, because of war conditions, and we've seen the creation of an arrogant, swollen bureaucratic complex totally unfettered by the checks and balances of the Constitution. In a very real and terrifying sense, our Government is the CIA and the Pentagon, with Congress reduced to a debating society.

Of course, you can't spot this trend to fascism by casually looking around. You can't look for such familiar signs as the swastika, because they won't be there. We won't build Dachaus and Auschwitzes; the clever manipulation of the mass media is creating a concentration camp of the mind that promises to be far more effective in keeping the populace in line. We're not going to wake up one morning and suddenly find ourselves in gray uniforms goose-stepping off to work. But this isn't the test. The test is: What happens to the individual who dissents? In Nazi Germany, he was physically destroyed; here, the process is more subtle, but the end results can be the same.

I've learned enough about the machinations of the CIA in the past year to know that this is no longer the dreamworld America I once believed in. The imperatives of the population explosion, which almost inevitably will lessen our belief in the sanctity of the individual human life, combined with the awesome power of the CIA and the defense establishment, seem destined to seal the fate of the America I knew as a child and bring us into a new Orwellian world where the citizen exists for the state and where raw power justifies any and every immoral act. I've always had a kind of knee-jerk trust in my Government's basic integrity, whatever political blunders it may make.

But I've come to realize that in Washington, deceiving and manipulating the public are viewed by some as the natural prerogatives of office. Huey Long once said, "Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism." I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security.

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This is the answer for all the clueless people who are baffled by how come elections don't seem to matter, why we always get stuck with lousy Presidents, why liberals' planes are the ones that crash. We had a coup in 1963 and whenever it's been necessary to blackmail, sabotage or kill anyone who's a threat to the real rulers of the country, then they take action. Accept it, or call me a "conspiracy theorist" and continue to scratch your pathetic noggins.

"Treason doth never prosper, what's the reason?

For if it prosper, none dare call it treason."