I am encouraged by the signs, lately. The worm has turned.
After the election, I said, well, the good news is that George Bush will have to wrestle with his own messes.
At the time, it didn't seem possible. Still, wars have a way of growing stinky. Ugly, messy, unkempt. Killing is just not all it's cracked up to be after the first adrenaline rush. There's bodies to be hauled away, bloodied children screaming, and the curses of distraught mothers to contend with.
Remember the U.N. inspectors? Sanctions, diplomacy, moral imperative. That was once, the world agreed, the way to deal with Saddam. It was also a little uncertain, a little risky. But much less so than war.
I am happy the worm has found a spine. Yet the taste of hindsight is bittersweet. America is finally waking up to the brutal realities of the Bush Administration, a ruthless cabal with a stage managed storefront. I just wish, like many people, the other shoe had dropped a year or two earlier.
When leaders lie to the public, manipulate and obfuscate, democracy doesn't stand a chance.
A million minds in healthy dispute are a powerful force in the pursuit of truth and happiness. Democracy is a kind of filter for ideas, and if it's slow or unwieldy, well, it gets results.
This is how we confronted slavery, built the interstate highway system and gave women the vote.
I believe now the gravest threat before us is not the war, not the Chinese, and not jihad, as others believe, nor diminishing oil supplies or our slipping competitiveness in a world economy.
It's global warming.
No one wants to talk about it. It's like we're resigned to the fact, already.
The poorest, of course, will take the brunt. Africans. Penguins.
Polar bears are starving, this winter. Until the sea freezes, they can't hunt seals. They're programmed to migrate south in the summer, but bridge back is gone. Their world is rapidly shrinking.
We humans may survive, we may turn away, but we'll be standing by watching poor people suffer and other species go extinct at a rate that will take your breath away.
And, somehow it's all the Democrats fault. For not voting with them and not voting against them.
I am encouraged that some Democrats are standing up and saying "No!'. I am encouraged that mollycoddling journalists are being nailed. I'm glad to see individual citizens making changes. If we build an environmental infrastructure, as the world wakes up, there'll be something to turn to.
Global warming is real. We've been on record saying all this since the 70's. Why haven't we been able to capture the imagination of the American people? How did a few Machiavellian people make the whole country cower and kowtow? How do we take the reins of leadership now in the post-Bush era?