Democrats Live the Lie—to Their Peril and to the Nation’s

100 percent agreement.

real "threat."

..actually said as much when asked why he wouldn't support impeachment. The fear you demonstrate is crippling the nation.

Brain fart. Sorry! :blush:

at the very beginning.

Many of our Congresscritters are attorneys by training, so they should have been mighty suspicious when the 100+ pages of the Patriot Act (the very name is Orwellian, isn't it?) were ready for committee less than one month after 9/11. They must have realized that the Act was at least sketched out BEFORE 9/11 and that the Bushies were just poised and waiting for an opportunity to clamp down on the American people.

They should have demanded a chance to read the thing before the vote. (Voting on something that neither you nor your staffers have read? I wouldn't sign my name to an auto loan contract that I hadn't read.) If the Republicanites had refused them the opportunity, they should have walked out or abstained en masse.

There is nothing to fear but fear itself. This false fear will continue to destroy us.
:applause:

That's about how long we'll remain that 'world's lone superpower'. After that we'll be in a worse boat than anybody else. A big "course correction" is on its way.

It was first cooked up in the late 70's by a group of people associated with the Committee on the Present Danger, George H.W. Bush's Team B, and Binyamin Netanyahu's Jonathan Institute -- a clutch of Neocons, diehard Cold Warriors, military-industrial complex types, rogue CIA agents, and people with vaguely conspiratorial connections of their own like Michael Ledeen and Claire Sterling.

They were afraid the Cold War was petering out and were looking for either a substitute enemy or an excuse for ramping it up again by claiming the Soviet Union was behind all acts of Islamic terrorism. (There was certainly no lack of such terrorism in the 70's, but there were also a lot of false-front incidents, and the whole subject is intensely murky. Suffice it to say, that there was probably a lot of disinfo even at that point.)

In the early Reagan years, there was a brief period of intense drum-beating against Libya and some very strange incidents involving claims of Libyan terrorists running around loose in the US. But by then, more clearly Soviet-related focuses of interest were coming along -- Afghanistan, the Contras -- so the war on terror was allowed to lapse for a time.

It was only after the collapse of the Soviet Union that the war on terror started looking appealing again. Around 1992-93, there was a flurry of attempts, apparently Israeli-inspired, to create a grand unified theory of Islamic terrorism centered on Iran. Then Osama bin Laden was discovered and everything was blamed on al Qaeda (including a few incidents that had previously been in the Iran pile.)

At every step, the great weakness of the terror warriors has been their need to create a single unified antagonist -- first Russia, then Iran, then al Qaeda, now potentially Iran again. Focusing on the period since 9/11, or even since PNAC in 1998, obscures that fundamental dishonesty in their position.

And no amount of lipstick on this pig is going to hide that fact. 'least not for much longer!

My own party has made me an Independent.