Wow, Dean and Edwards as “progressive populists”! How ’bout regressive reactionaries? That’s how I view them. I have a particular affection to progress. Neither of those two would be “leaders” represents any hope of progress.
Jerry,
Great suggestion for quick reading for military history, particularly the parts about how “best laid plans” get ganged up on gleefully (or whatever the heck that old long saying is). Another Cornelius Ryan book that is worth reading is “The Last Battle” which helps educate one about how victorious armies are apt to behave (with the notable exceptions of the modern British and American militaries). For lessons regarding how effective “no two bricks left standing” or “kill everything that moves”, see pretty much anything about Grozny – pictures will be enough to make the point.
I often wonder if the people who are so ready to scream and stamp feet about “failure” have ever been party to constructing a plan, any plan, that required the cooperative actions of more than a handful of people and was designed to achieve “success” against some form of opposition. I’m not talking about peripheral involvement such as stuffing evelopes or working a phone bank or waving a banner and participating in the pep rallies, I mean actually sitting down and defining the goals, what success looks like, what failure looks like, and what is an adequate outcome short of “success” and then mapping out a serious of milestones and tracking progress against them and adjusting to changes or new information. I can’t imagine they have because they don’t demonstrate any understanding of how such things work.
Plunge,
Regarding civil liberties. First off, review some US history. It won’t take you long to realize that even if your accusation against the Bush administration is not wildly overwrought, even if it largely accurate (I don’t believe for a moment that it is), there are numerous examples of presidents who have done things similar on much larger scales. I’ll leave it as an educational exercise for you since I already know where to go look for references and cites.
