http://seetheforest.blogspot.com/2005_02_01_seetheforest_archive.html#110909138824507896

Checks and Balances and the "F-Word"

Is there enough going on to make you nervous yet? The Vice President of the United States was the keynote speaker at a conference where other speakers called for "a new McCarthyism" to bring "terror" to intellectuals, saying "let's oppress them [liberals]," and "the entire Harvard faculty" are "traitors." A Congressman said, "America's Operation Iraqi Freedom is still producing shock and awe, this time among the blame-America-first crowd," ? Then he said, "We continue to discover biological and chemical weapons and facilities to make them inside Iraq."

Meanwhile, right-wing commentators talk about killing American journalists, their premier blogs talk about former president Carter as being on the side of the enemy and leftists have "seamlessly taken up the cause of Islamic fascism". I have provided only a few examples.

When you hear threatening talk like this, in the company of the country's leadership, you know that whatever comes next isn't going to be pleasant. Things do not appear to be heading in a good direction at all. If you have been following this in the blogs, you know that more and more people are becoming concerned that the Right's rhetoric is growing ever more violent and totalitarian. Serious people have started referring to the "f-word." (See also here, here, here, here and many other places.)

Oliver Willis writes,

You cannot deal with that sort of ideology in any sort of accomodationist manner. Liberals need to understand this, from Democratic senators in Washington who still refuse to vote their conscience out of some sense of loyalty to a long-dead notion of civility in Washington, to progressive pundits who actually believe that their right-wing counterparts in the nation's media are actually there for a give-and-take rather than a chance to paint everyone to the left of Joe Lieberman as a terrorist sympathizer.

[. . .] Wake up, folks. We're in an ideological war with these folks and the sooner you realize that the better. The goal of the modern conservative movement, as embodied by George W. Bush, is not just a simple majority of conservative thought – rather, it is the elimination of everything but conservative thought.

I think we are entering a new phase of American history. These are not normal times, the pendulum is not swinging back, and historical trends of American politics no longer apply. American democracy was built on a system of checks and balances, and mechanisms of oversight and accountability. But the checks and balances and oversight and accountability are being removed. There is no Congressional oversight of this administration, the Justice Department does not investigate its crimes, the Federalist Society judges block all attempts to enforce the laws and the new media is no longer functional. The military acts as an arm of The Party and The Party is firmly in control of the State. The system of controls and protections that was carefully built over the last two centuries was put in place for reasons, by people who learned the lessons of history. I can not think of a time in history when a society left itself so wide open to tyranny from its leadership without it occurring.

Posted at 8:00 AM by Dave Johnson

__________

http://seetheforest.blogspot.com/2005_02_01_seetheforest_archive.html#110908992077997065

Dangerous

Another example of the dangerous direction the Right is taking us, from Heritage's Town Hall (Heritage is the hub of the modern Republican Party), Dennis Prager: Liberal feeling vs. Judeo-Christian values: Part VI. First, he goes after the enlightenment,

"Instead of being guided by God, the Bible and religion, great numbers -- in Western Europe, the great majority -- have looked elsewhere for moral and social guidelines. ... With the ascendancy of leftist values that has followed the decline of Judeo-Christian religion, personal feelings have supplanted universal standards. In fact, feelings are the major unifying characteristic among contemporary liberal positions."

Then he advocates war as the preferred solution to problems,

"Aside from reliance on feelings, how else can one explain a person who believes, let alone proudly announces on a bumper sticker, that "War is not the answer"? I know of no comparable conservative bumper sticker that is so demonstrably false and morally ignorant. Almost every great evil has been solved by war..."

Then vegetarians,

"The animals-and-humans-are-equivalent movement is based entirely on feelings. People see chickens killed and lobsters boiled, feel for the animals, and shortly thereafter abandon thought completely, and equate chicken and lobster suffering to that of a person under the same circumstances."

Then gays,

"The unprecedented support of liberals for radically redefining the basic institution of society, marriage and the family is another product of feelings -- sympathy for homosexuals. Thinking through the effects of such a radical redefinition on society and its children is not a liberal concern."

Then against self-esteem,

"The "self-esteem movement" -- now conceded to have been a great producer of mediocrity and narcissism -- was entirely a liberal invention based on feelings for kids."

Then against laws protecting women from sexual harassment,

"Sexual harassment laws have created a feelings-industrial complex. The entire concept of "hostile work environment" is feelings based. If one woman resents a swimsuit calendar on a co-worker's desk, laws have now been passed whose sole purpose is to protect her from having uncomfortable feelings."

Against non-Christians,

"Almost everything is affected by liberal feelings. For example, liberal opposition to calling a Christmas party by its rightful name is based on liberals' concern that non-Christians will feel bad. And for those liberals, nothing else matters -- not the legitimate desire of the vast majority of Americans to celebrate their holiday, let alone the narcissism of those non-Christians "offended" by a Christmas party."

And more of that kind of stuff. He concludes,

"And that, in a nutshell, is what our culture war is about -- Judeo-Christian values versus liberal/leftist feelings."

Remember, people like this are paid, and paid well to put out this kind of stuff. It is designed to reinforce a "narrative" - an overriding story in which specific things don't even have to be true, as long as they ride along with the larger script. Liberals hate God, aren't patriotic, etc.

Also at Town Hall today, Cal Thomas says it is time to close the mosques in the U.S.

Posted at 8:32 AM by Dave Johnson

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium

Madness takes its toll. Please have exact change.

The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity: André Gide

Integrity is telling myself the truth. And honesty is telling the truth to other people: Spencer Johnson

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society: Ralph Waldo Emerson

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" -- Thomas Jefferson

Now Bush's Stalinesque KGB is in place. Negroponte, who has an "iffy" relationship with truth and human rights, might be the very one AG Gonzales and Bush had been waiting for: a man without conscience who wouldn't (perhaps) hesitate to make even Americans "disappear." Sen. Frist (GOP Senate Majority Leader) seemed to lay some ground work by advocating that conspiracy theory (actually dissenters) be labeled as "mentally ill." It boggles the mind to watch the president appoint some of the most sociopathic. criminal members of society to high ranking "security" posts. At the risk of disappearing into a Negroponte sanctioned gulag, I have to ask: was that the plan all along? -- Claudia

_______________________________________

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3449870/

John Negroponte: See No Evil

Death Squad Cover-up/February 17, 2005

By Eric Alterman

Back in January 1982, the Reagan administration was desperate to cover-up evidence of a horrific massacre undertaken by U.S. supported military forces in El Salvador, in the village of El Mozote in the province of Morazan, whom the U.S. was funding and training. The massacre was reported in The New York Times and The Washington Post by Raymond Bonner, and Alma Guillermoprieto, respectively, along with Susan Meiselas. As the reports appeared on the eve of Congressional hearings on funding for the Salvadoran killers, administration officials, like Elliott Abrams, sought to discredit the reports with McCarthyite accusations, and were supported by their allies in the conservative punditocracy—which, was just a fraction of its current size and scope. They succeeded and the funding went through, in part due to the cooperation of then-Ambassador to Honduras, John Negroponte. The gruesome details of the massacre were later excavated, journalistically, by reporter Mark Danner. What follows is drawn from When Presidents Lie:

Bonner, Guillermoprieto, and Susan Meiselas returned and presented their evidence to readers, State Department officials received a confidential cable from U.S. ambassador to Honduras John Negroponte reporting on a visit by a U.S. embassy official and a House Foreign Affairs Committee staff member to a Colomoncagua refugee camp, where many of the survivors of Morazan had fled. The cable described the refugees’ account of “a military sweep in Morazan December 7 to 17 which they claim resulted in large numbers of civilian casualties and physical destruction, leading to their exodus.” Negroponte, himself noted that the “names of villages cited coincide with New York Times article of January 28 same subject.”

He noted that the refugees’ “decision to flee at this time when in the past they had remained during the sweeps . . . lends credibility to reportedly greater magnitude and intensity of . . . military operations in Northern Morazan.” The State Department, however, decided to keep this information secret. By the time of the second certification report—which appeared six months later, in July 1982—the massacre reports were ancient history. Enders now bragged of “many fewer allegations of massacres during this reporting than last,” a trend he attributed to the fact that “many earlier reports proved to be fabricated or exaggerated.” Like its predecessor, the second certification resulted in a noisy hearing, but a solid majority backed the Reagan administration’s aid to the regime. This time military aid was more than doubled, from $35 million to $82 million, and economic aid increased to more than twice that amount.83 In 1993, Enders finally admitted to a reporter, “I now know that the materials that we and the embassy passed on to Congress were wrong.” It took a decade’s passing and the Salvadorans themselves to determine, definitively, what took place in El Mozote.

In the fall of 1992, investigators for the postwar Salvadoran Truth Commission spent more than thirty-five days digging through the burial sites filled with decomposed bodies, bones, skulls, and bullet cartridges. They identified more than five hundred human remains in El Mozote and its surrounding villages.85 Of the 143 human remains discovered in the sacristy of the Mozote church, 136 were judged to be children or adolescents, of whom the average age was six. Of the remaining seven adults, six were women, one in the third trimester of pregnancy.86 When all the forensics had been uncovered, the commission revealed at least twentyfour people had participated in the shooting and that every cartridge but one had come from a U.S.-manufactured and -supplied M-16 rifle.Of these, “had discernible head-stamps, identifying the ammunition as having been manufactured for the United States Government at Lake City, Missouri.”87 No one has ever been officially charged or tried for any crimes associated with the actions taken in El Mozote, which were deemed by Danner to be “the largest massacre in modern Latin American history.” {Negroponte never said a thing in public.]

MORE ON NEGROPONTE HERE: http://thinkprogress.org/index.php?p=263

The Unintelligent Choice
At 10AM this morning, President Bush will name John Negroponte as the new Director of Intelligence for the United States.

Who is John Negroponte?

You may remember him best as one of the key figures in the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration. John Negroponte was the ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985. While there, he was directed the secret arming of the Contra rebels in Nicaragua to help them overthrow the Sandinista government.

At the time, he also was “cozy” with the chief of the Honduran national police force, Gen. Gustavo Alvarez Martinez. Martinez ran the infamous Battalion 316 death squad. Battalion 316 “kidnapped, tortured and murdered” dozens of people while Negroponte was ambassador. Negroponte, however, turned a blind eye to the death squad and ignored the gross human rights abuses so Honduras would allow bases for U.S.-backed Contras.

Negroponte maintained he knew nothing about them, leading to his nickname, “the ostrich ambassador.” The abuses, however, were widely chronicled in local papers. That means he either willfully ignored the mass murders and torturing of citizens or he was so out of touch that he didn’t see the atrocities going on beneath his very nose. Neither of these scenarios is what the United States needs in a National Director of Intelligence.



Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium

Madness takes its toll. Please have exact change.

The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity: André Gide

Integrity is telling myself the truth. And honesty is telling the truth to other people: Spencer Johnson

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society: Ralph Waldo Emerson

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" -- Thomas Jefferson

Spearing The Best

February 8, 2005



http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/08/opinion/08krugman.html?oref=login

By PAUL KRUGMAN

President Bush isn't trying to reform Social Security. He isn't even trying to "partially privatize" it. His plan is, in essence, to dismantle the program, replacing it with a system that may be social but doesn't provide security. And the goal, as with his tax cuts, is to undermine the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt.

Why do I say that the Bush plan would dismantle Social Security? Because for Americans who entered the work force after the plan went into effect and who chose to open private accounts, guaranteed benefits - income you receive after retirement even if everything else goes wrong - would be nearly eliminated.

Here's how it would work. First, workers with private accounts would be subject to a "clawback": in effect, they would have to mortgage their future benefits in order to put money into their accounts.

Second, since private accounts would do nothing to improve Social Security's finances - something the administration has finally admitted - there would be large benefit cuts in addition to the clawback.

Jason Furman of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that the guaranteed benefits left to an average worker born in 1990, after the clawback and the additional cuts, would be only 8 percent of that worker's prior earnings, compared with 35 percent today. This means that under Mr. Bush's plan, workers with private accounts that fared poorly would find themselves destitute.

Why expose workers to that much risk? Ideology. "Social Security is the soft underbelly of the welfare state," declares Stephen Moore of the Club for Growth and the Cato Institute. "If you can jab your spear through that, you can undermine the whole welfare state."

By the welfare state, Mr. Moore means Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid - social insurance programs whose purpose, above all, is to protect Americans against the extreme economic insecurity that prevailed before the New Deal. The hard right has never forgiven F.D.R. (and later L.B.J.) for his efforts to reduce that insecurity, and now that the right is running Washington, it's trying to turn the clock back to 1932.

Medicaid is also in the cross hairs. And if Mr. Bush can take down Social Security, Medicare will be next.
The attempt to "jab a spear" through Social Security complements the strategy of "starve the beast," long advocated by right-wing intellectuals: cut taxes, then use the resulting deficits as an excuse for cuts in social spending. The spearing doesn't seem to be going too well at the moment, but the starving was on full display in the budget released yesterday.

To put that budget into perspective, let's look at the causes of the federal budget deficit. In spite of the expense of the Iraq war, federal spending as a share of G.D.P. isn't high by historical standards - in fact, it's slightly below its average over the past 20 years. But federal revenue as a share of G.D.P. has plunged to levels not seen since the 1950's.

Almost all of this plunge came from a sharp decline in receipts from the personal income tax and the corporate profits tax. These are the taxes that fall primarily on people with high incomes - and in 2003 and 2004, their combined take as a share of G.D.P. was at its lowest level since 1942. On the other hand, the payroll tax, which is the main federal tax paid by middle-class and working-class Americans, remains at near-record levels.

You might think, given these facts, that a plan to reduce the deficit would include major efforts to increase revenue, starting with a rollback of recent huge tax cuts for the wealthy. In fact, the budget contains new upper-income tax breaks.

Any deficit reduction will come from spending cuts. Many of those cuts won't make it through Congress, but Mr. Bush may well succeed in imposing cuts in child care assistance and food stamps for low-income workers. He may also succeed in severely squeezing Medicaid - the only one of the three great social insurance programs specifically intended for the poor and near-poor, and therefore the most politically vulnerable.

All of this explains why it's foolish to imagine some sort of widely acceptable compromise with Mr. Bush about Social Security. Moderates and liberals want to preserve the America F.D.R. built. Mr. Bush and the ideological movement he leads, although they may use F.D.R.'s image in ads, want to destroy it.

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium

sic transit gloria mundi [so passes the glory of this world.]

HEADS UP: The greatness of every mighty organization embodying an idea in this world lies in the religious fanaticism and intolerance with which, fanatically convinced of its own right, it intolerantly imposes its will against all others: Adolf Hitler (German chancellor, leader of the Nazi party, 1889-1945)

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" -- Thomas Jefferson

The emperor of vulgarity

http://www.smh.com.au/news/Mike-Carlton/The-emperor-of-vulgarity/2005/01/21/1106110942667.html

By Mike Carlton
January 22, 2005

George Bush's second inaugural extravaganza was every bit as repugnant as I had expected, a vulgar orgy of triumphalism probably unmatched since Napoleon crowned himself emperor of the French in Notre Dame in 1804.

The little Corsican corporal had a few decent victories to his escutcheon. Lodi, Marengo, that sort of thing. Not so this strutting Texan mountebank, with his chimpanzee smirk and his born-again banalities delivered in that constipated syntax that sounds the way cold cheeseburgers look, and his grinning plastic wife, and his scheming junta of neo-con spivs, shamans, flatterers and armchair warmongers, and his sinuous evasions and his brazen lies, and his sleight of hand theft from the American poor, and his rape of the environment, and his lethal conviction that the world must submit to his Pax Americana or be bombed into charcoal.

Difficult to know what was more repellent: the estimated $US40 million cost of this jamboree (most of it stumped up by Republican fat-cats buying future presidential favours), or the sheer crassness of its excess when American boys are dying in the quagmire of Bush's very own Iraq war.

Other wartime presidents sought restraint. Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address in 1865 - "with malice toward none, with charity for all" - is the shortest ever. And he had pretty much won the Civil War by that time.

In 1944, Franklin Delano Roosevelt opened his fourth-term speech with the "wish that the form of this inauguration be simple and its words brief". He spoke for a couple of eloquent minutes, then went off to a light lunch, his wartime victory almost complete as well.

But restraint is not a Dubya word. Learning nothing, the dumbest and nastiest president since the scandalous Warren Harding died in 1923, Bush is now intent on expanding the Iraq war to neighbouring Iran.

Condoleezza Rice did admit to the US Senate this week that there had been some "not so good" decisions. But the more I see of her gleaming teeth and her fibreglass helmet of hair and her perky confidence, the more I am convinced that back in the '60s she used to be Cindy Birdsong, up there beside Diana Ross as one of the Supremes of Motown fame. I don't think it's a good idea to let her make a comeback as Secretary of State.

THE war in Iran is under way already, if we believe Seymour Hersh, the distinguished investigative writer for The New Yorker magazine.

Hersh reported this week that clandestine US special forces have been on the ground there, targeting nuclear facilities to be bombed whenever Bush feels the time is ripe.

"The immediate goals of the attacks would be to destroy, or at least temporarily derail, Iran's ability to go nuclear," he wrote, quoting reliable intelligence sources.

"But there are other, equally purposeful, motives at work. The government consultant told me that the hawks in the Pentagon, in private discussions, have been urging a limited attack on Iran because they believe it could lead to a toppling of the religious leadership."

Naturally, Pentagon flacks rushed out to deny all. But then they did that when Hersh broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1968, and again when he revealed the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. A tussle for the truth between Hersh and the Pentagon is no contest.

What terrifies me most is the people planning this new war. The CIA professionals have been frozen out: too weak and wimpy for the Bushies.

The Defence Secretary, the incompetent Donald Rumsfeld, has seized control, aided by two Pentagon under-secretaries. One is Douglas Feith, a mad-eyed Zionist largely responsible for the post-invasion collapse of order in Iraq, a civilian bureaucrat memorably described by the former Centcom commander, General Tommy Franks, as "the f---ing stupidest guy on the face of the Earth".

The other is army Lieutenant General William G. (Jerry) Boykin, whose name also rings a bell. Jerry is a born-again Christian evangelical, a three-star bigot who, in his spare time, stumps the country in full uniform, preaching that America's enemy is Satan, Allah is a false idol, and that George Bush has been ordained by the Lord to rout evil.

"He's in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this," Jerry told a prayer meetin' in Oregon just a while back.

Be very afraid.

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium

sic transit gloria mundi [so passes the glory of this world.]


HEADS UP: The greatness of every mighty organization embodying an idea in this world lies in the religious fanaticism and intolerance with which, fanatically convinced of its own right, it intolerantly imposes its will against all others: Adolf Hitler (German chancellor, leader of the Nazi party, 1889-1945)


"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes


"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" -- Thomas Jefferson

No time for euphoria
If Bush believes what he said Wednesday night -- that we must stand with our allies to prevent tyranny -- he should stop his incoherent saber rattling over Iran's nuclear plans and join Europe in real negotiations.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2005/02/03/euphoria/index.html

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By Sidney Blumenthal

Feb. 3, 2005 President Bush's State of the Union address adds the element of euphoria to the utopianism of his inaugural address. Coming between the two speeches, the Iraqi election gave him a “landmark event in the history of liberty” over which to drape his universal abstractions. Who would not want it to be true that the courageous people of Iraq as one body have defied bloodthirsty fanatics in order to establish a thriving democracy that will be a beacon to the rest of the Middle East, and that the glow from that fire will truly light the world?

The Iraqi election, in fact, went more or less as anticipated. The Kurds voted in overwhelming numbers (though an exit poll reported that they also overwhelmingly endorsed independence). The Shiites, the majority suppressed throughout the entire history of Iraq, turned out in large numbers to celebrate their inevitable empowerment. And the Sunnis, who have always ruled, for whom the election would ratify their minority status, and who as yet have been allotted no part in a new government, hardly voted at all. Most of the Sunnis, according to one poll, are sympathetic to the insurgency. Yet all the parties campaigned on ending "the occupation," as even members of interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's Cabinet call the coalition forces. Integrating the Sunnis, beginning with the writing of a constitution, has been made more difficult by a centrifugal election process.

The morning after, the Iraqi state received the nod of legitimacy from other governments, but it is no more capable than before of providing security or basic public services. It remains utterly dependent on "the occupation" for the indeterminate future. Nor is this democracy any more protective of liberal values. Just days before the election, Human Rights Watch reported that the Iraqi government engages in systematic torture of detainees, including children.

The Shiite victory was also a quiet victory for Iran, whose leaders, unlike Bush, did not claim credit. The Iranian Shiite government has invested more than $1 billion in Iraqi Shiite political parties, organizations and media. The Qods Force, the extraterritorial arm of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, has trained Shiite militias, and its intelligence agents have honeycombed the Iraqi government and Shiite parties.

Before the election, King Abdullah of Jordan warned of a "Shiite crescent" dominated by Iran, stretching through Iraq to southern Lebanon. Though Abdullah subsequently praised the balloting in Iraq, his anxiety about Iranian influence in Iraq is shared by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

The Iraqi election is the culmination of the long Iran-Iraq war -- which Iran has now won without lifting a finger. Its deadly neighbor has been replaced by a Shiite ascendancy atop a weak state that cannot threaten it but is subject to its influence in a thousand and one ways. When the mist of elation lifts, the shadow of Iran looms.

The Bush policy consists of paralysis interrupted by fits of saber rattling. The responsibility for reining in Iran's development of nuclear weapons has been assumed by the United Nations and the European Union. Led by Mohammed ElBaradei, head of the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency, the EU negotiated Iran's agreement to allow inspection of its facilities and to freeze its production of fissible material. For his good deed and for declaring before the war that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Bush administration has attempted to oust ElBaradei.

Despite their promise, these negotiations are unlikely to succeed unless the United States enters into them; for only it can offer the big carrots: a lifting of sanctions, then recognition and perhaps eventual entry into the World Trade Organization. Iran has not been intimidated by the presence of some 150,000 U.S. troops next door; that has not prevented it from suppressing its reform movement. Opening Iran to liberalization while containing its nuclear ambition would appear to be an obvious win-win for the West. But some within the administration actively wish for the negotiations to fail.

Vice President Dick Cheney openly fantasizes about an Israeli airstrike on Iranian nuclear facilities. Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker reports that there are clandestine Special Operations teams inside Iran trying to identify hidden facilities that might be targets of U.S. bombing. Two Republican senators, Rick Santorum and John Cornyn, have introduced a bill that would authorize the funding of Iranian exile groups and stipulate "regime change" as official U.S. policy.

Yet the United States is already overstretched militarily. And, in any case, there is no way of knowing conclusively that all Iranian nuclear facilities would be eliminated by an Osirak-like strike. If attacked, Iran could create untold mischief within Iraq. But the dream world of ideology trumps the national interest. Thus, toward the Europeans' greatest diplomatic initiative, on the country whose fate is most closely linked with Iraq, Bush's policy, on the eve of his trip to Europe, is a vacuum.

In his State of the Union address, Bush boldly stated: “We are working with European allies to make clear to the Iranian regime that it must give up its uranium enrichment program and any plutonium reprocessing and end its support for terror.” But Bush is playing no part whatsoever in the Europeans' negotiations. His declaration, a shameless falsehood, suggests that he cannot defend his actual refusal to do what he says he is doing.

Blinding bursts of triumphalism are characteristic of a march of folly and quicken its pace. True, just as paranoids have real enemies, so the euphoric can experience a high from genuine events. But the insistence on euphoria, as those who grapple with sober reality know, is symptomatic of a disorder that can dangerously swing in mood.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writer
Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior advisor to President Clinton and the author of "The Clinton Wars," is writing a column for Salon and the Guardian of London.

Sound Off
Send us a Letter to the Editor

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium

sic transit gloria mundi [so passes the glory of this world.]

HEADS UP: The greatness of every mighty organization embodying an idea in this world lies in the religious fanaticism and intolerance with which, fanatically convinced of its own right, it intolerantly imposes its will against all others: Adolf Hitler (German chancellor, leader of the Nazi party, 1889-1945)

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" -- Thomas Jefferson