…to my previous response to his “Democrats for Bush” blog (see an entry or two below):

“Clark,Thanks for your thoughtful note; I am indeed a Democrat because I say I am and because I have never voted Republican in my life. In earlier posts in the blog I set out to offer Kerry some campaign advice but I realized no Kerry people were interested in anything I might say. What monster on the Kerry campaign decided to run Vietnam as as a rallying point? That was sheer madness. Why run Kerry at all? The guy is a strange combination of patrician and cipher. I have no idea what the Dems want. OK cut the tax cuts for the rich, yawn. The war on terror is the big issue, the right issue, and the Dems did not get that until very late in the game.

I really want to ask you what you mean when you talk about the neocon machine and their responsibility for the world as it is – or 2/3 of it. I don’t get that at all. Near as I can tell there is no machine running anything in human affairs. I do know that we are in a fight for our survival and politico killer Muslims want to take us down. What’s this machine your talking about? More than anyone I always thought of you as someone who values the particulars of the human community of free people just doing whatever the hell they want independent of fads and social pressure. Everything you’re for the Islamo killers are against. Anyway, I’m glad you didn’t cut me off completely; hope we can keep talking….

Doug”

1. Yes, Virginia, there is a neoconservative political faction, and yes, it’s got a hold on the White House, the Supreme Court, both houses of Congress, vast swaths of the “news” media, major segments of corporate America, and some well-funded think tanks and lobbying groups. While its dispersed sects and factions don’t always operate in sync with one another, it generally moves in a well-directed path, led by the likes of Richard Mellon Scaife, Ralph Reed, the oil and mining lobbies, and their ilk.

2. The phrasing of “Islamo killers” is just the sort of “Other”-bashing jingoism we used to hear during the anti-Commie days, and for the same rhetorical purpose: To keep us cowered in fear of a dehumanized enemy, willing to abandon all independent thought and obediently submit to our own national rulers.

3. Yes, there are terrorist gangs out there, who’d like to do horrible things to Americans (and to Israelis, and to Canadians and Europeans, and to rival Islamic factions, etc.). The Bush crew has utterly failed to stem this threat, and has even made it worse by giving this previously stateless bunch a whole country (the non-Green Zone Iraq) to play in.

4. But there are also additional threats to American democracy, to our well-being, and to our personal freedoms. Among these: An economic “recovery” that hasn’t happened for hardly anybody except the CEO class; the ongoing attempts to turn a particularly hate-based fundamentalism into America’s state religion; the bungled Iraq occupation; the outsourcing of the legislative process to the zillionaires’ lobbyists; the homeland war against civil liberties; the backward pace of environmental protection, and our deteriorating reputation in the rest of the world, even among our own allies.

The Bush team has done nothing substantial to effectively ease these non-terrorist threats, and has intentionally worked to worsen many of them.

5. You bet I’m for a free world and a free people. That’s why I support Kerry. Even on the single issue of terror, he’d do better than Bush.