I hear the argument a lot that we should just let the Democrats win the Presidency and that will cool things off, which I agree it will. But I don’t want Hillary or Obama to have Cheney’s secrecy and extra-constitutional defacto power either.

Seems to me that checks and balances and rule of law are largely ignored today by both sides. Meanwhile we hear all this window-dressing about democracy in third-world countries.

Keep posting up about those videos, somebody will watch them.

John

If you are going to keep blogging about politics, you’re going to force me to keep recommending videos — even if you insist on not watching them.

Peter Dale Scott, author of “The Road to 9-11″ was interviewed by a Berkeley poli-sci professor and he pretty much lays out what Eisenhower’s warning about the military industrial complex as wrought half a century later.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5829118121827327998

To the jaded, that may sound old-hat. But the line he traces is freshly chilling in the telling.

It’s about secrecy and the deadly compromise we make when we convince ourselves that governments need to keep and act secretly. And the trickle-down effect on other areas of the culture and economy reinforce the impulse to control events (like an empire) rather than have to innovate, adapt and evolve our way forward.

Our ship of state is much closer to being lost at sea than we allow ourselves to imagine.

Your litmus test about torture is a good one. It also demarcates the boundary between those who are too Machiavellian in their personal world view to actually believe in the US Constitution and the principles it represents, and those of us who still want to believe that democracy has a future.

We are still fighting the civil war folks! The culture wars are the real deal, and the conservative side is by far and away the more ruthless of the two.