A friend wrote today to tell me my blog has become too much bashing of Republicans and not enough intelligent discussion of issues. If that's true, that's too bad, because intelligent discussion is far more interesting than Bush-bashing. But in today's political climate, political discussions aren't very intelligent anyway. Take port security. Republicans only discovered we even had a port security problem when a company owned by an Arab government legally purchased the contract to run them. When that "crisis" blew over, so did any chance of discussing the real issue: our need to inspect the cargo that comes through those ports.
My friend might be in that category of reasonable people, as Paul Krugman describes them, who don't see radicalism growing:
Kissinger [in his Harvard Ph.D. thesis] talked about the time of the French Revolution, and pretty obviously he also was thinking about the 1930s. He argued that, when you have a revolutionary power, somebody who really wants to tear apart the system — doesn’t believe in any of the rules — reasonable people who’ve been accustomed to stability just say, “Oh, you know, they may say that, but they don’t really mean it.” And, “This is just tactical, and let’s not get too excited.” Anyone who claims that these guys really are as radical as their own statements suggest is, you know, “shrill.” Kissinger suggests they'd be considered alarmists. And those who say, “Don’t worry. It’s not a big deal,” are considered sane and reasonable.
Well, that’s exactly what’s been happening. For four years now, some of us have been saying, whether or not you think they’re bad guys, they’re certainly radical. They don’t play by the rules. You can’t take anything that you’ve regarded as normal from previous U.S. political experience as applying to Bush and the people around him. They will say things and do things that would not previously have made any sense -- you know, would have been previously considered out of bounds. And for all of that period, the critics have been told: “Oh, you know, you’re overreacting, and there’s something wrong with you.”
So in the interest of demonstrating the radicalism of the current regime, let's review, in no particular order, some of the horrible things that the President and his willing Congress have done to the United States in the last five years. This is a handy list that you can refer people to whenever they think things aren't so bad, or not worth talking about.