America is learning the greatest lesson of its young life...

[Writer]

HISTORIANS TAKE NOTE.

What more can one add than what we are witnessing at the present?

We lazily permitted a man without the intelligence or wherewithal to occupy the White House, surrounded by extreme ideologues. Those ideologues pieced together the most self-destructive, arrogant policy so far in our young history. The ideologues propagandized its people and its leadership, playing on fear, to execute that plan. All the while the most religious of our nation have been used as brown shirts to keep that leadership in power.

And now it's crumpling. Our nation, not even 250 years-old, has learned its greatest lesson yet of its young life. Hopefully this time will mean that we will mature somewhat. Hopefully this time will permit us to become an even better nation in the future - but sure as hell, not without this group of extreme ideologues occupying the White House and Iraq.

Let us hope that our society still has some sense remaining.

[NEOBuckeye]

1. Pain and Suffering are life's great teachers. n/t

[JDPriestly]

2. Thanks. Good post. I think we will learn and turn the country around.

There's a hidden optimism in what you say.

[SharonAnn]

7. I don't know about that. He broke the entire world.

[AndyTiedye]

3. Nothing Lazy About It. WE GOT ROBBED!

[punpirate]

4. One would think we'd learn something...

... from it all, but we've already been through this a few times. The corruption now is reminiscent of the McKinley administration. We were dragged into the Spanish-American and Vietnam wars by a press anxious for war and paid no attention to those few in Congress who thought them a bad idea.

This sort of lockstep Republican demagoguery we've seen in the McCarthy years. The secrecy we've already seen in the Nixon years. Many of the same ideologues we're facing now occupied the government during the Reagan years and pulled the same tricks, playing on the public's fears and prejudices, and Reagan himself was simply a slightly more polished version of the younger Bush. The religious right, as well, found their voice and their power with Reagan.

What is happening now is the result of a convergence of all those properties of an aberrant brand of politics, but little of it is genuinely new. We keep making the same mistakes, electing the same sort of con men and the neo-con men. Will this experience eventually produce permanent changes? I'd like to think so, but I have to wonder, given history.

[omega minimo]

6. You've got the perspective. Why do you think this is undiscussable?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x2222668

[applegrove]

5. Yup. Being adult means being vigilant at times.

[sleipnir]

8. Or the last lesson before Old Yeller is put down for good.

n/t