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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (157723)	1/9/2003 5:02:27 PM
From: Alighieri	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1583677

It is sickening to see them pretend that Bush is turning America into a fascist state, Wow...I did not think that until now. Al

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (157723)	1/9/2003 5:57:50 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1583677

If you liked Al's, you'll probably really get off on this one too. Aaaahhhhhh, the sweet smell of liberalism.....all that's good about this nation......freedom, love of country, fairness, racial and religious equality, et al. <g> ted ___________________________________________________________ America's Age of Empire: The Liberal Challenge For liberals who oppose Bush's imperial strategy, it's time to come up with a foreign policy vision of their own. By George Packer January/February 2003 Issue Long ago, 50 years or more, America had a liberal foreign policy. It came out of the war against fascism, the containment of communism, and the postwar international organizations that the United States led into existence. Near its peak, in 1949, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. gave the philosophy of liberalism underlying this policy an extensive justification in his book The Vital Center. Today we tend to think of the post-war period as a time of soaring American confidence, but the real subject of the book is anxiety. It wasn't just totalitarianism abroad that threatened American democracy, Schlesinger realized, but a loss of nerve at home. To confront them both, America needed "a rededication to concrete democratic ends; so that the exercise of democracy can bring about a reconciliation between the individual and the community, a revival of the élan of democracy, and a resurgence of the democratic faith." Democracy, in other words, wasn't merely a political system, but a spirit, a worldview -- an affirmation of individual liberty and human solidarity. From Woodrow Wilson's vision of freedom under international law to FDR's struggle against totalitarianism, the liberal tradition in foreign affairs inspired people around the world. Now its ideas are suddenly more relevant than ever, and they point a way out of the current liberal impasse over America's role in the world. For more than a year we've been quietly living in continual crisis. The mood was expressed by a Russian woman who, after her release from three nights of captivity by Chechen terrorists in a Moscow theater, went to a café and found that "people were drinking coffee and having fun. It was a totally different life." Theatrical terror on one side of a wall, daily banality on the other. For the first time in over a generation, this reality has forced foreign policy on a superpower whose citizens would rather think about other things. But there is only one coherent response in play, contained in what's come to be called the Bush doctrine -- a blend of aggressive nationalism and incompetent imperialism, led by people who want dominance without responsibility. The Democratic Party has no foreign policy. It hasn't since Vietnam. The usual response is to moan about the party's spineless leaders, but their failure to stand up to the Bush juggernaut is more symptom than cause. They can't stand up because they have nowhere to stand, no alternate vision of what purpose America's enormous power in the world should serve. And so, with very few exceptions, the Democrats have been reduced to reaction, me-tooism, and, it sometimes appears, sheer hope that the crisis will go away. It won't -- not for a long time. America will go on being the superpower, and radical Islamists will go on trying to kill Americans and reestablish the seventh-century caliphate, whether George W. Bush is president or not. Liberals need to begin asking themselves hard questions about how they would handle this threat if they were in power. I'm not addressing doctrinaire leftists, who know what they think about American foreign policy -- they're against it and see no useful American role in the world other than disarmament and withdrawal. A precondition for a viable liberal foreign policy is a clean break with this view.