BUSH/CHENEY'S WAR ON DEMOCRACY

"I'm too old for this." Having lived through the Vietnam conflict and all the ridiculous rhetoric then ("love it or leave it"), I just can't believe "everything old is new again." What they said:

It is fair game for the president to claim that toppling Saddam Hussein was a blow to terrorism, to accuse Mr. Kerry of flip-flopping and to repeat continually that the war in Iraq is going very well, despite all evidence to the contrary. It is absolutely not all right for anyone on his team to suggest that Mr. Kerry is the favored candidate of the terrorists. And at a time when the United States is supposed to be preparing the Iraqi people for a democratic election, it's appalling to hear the chief executive say that loyal opposition gives aid and comfort to the enemy abroad.

The general instinct of Americans is to play fair. That is why, even though terrorists struck the United States during President Bush's watch, the Democrats have not run a campaign that blames him for allowing the World Trade Center and the Pentagon to be attacked. And while the war in Iraq has opened up large swaths of the country to terrorist groups for the first time, any effort by Mr. Kerry to describe the president as the man whom Osama bin Laden wants to keep in power would be instantly denounced by the Republicans as unpatriotic.

Are we supposed to believe that the patriotic thing to do is to let a terribly mismanaged and misguided administration conduct a terribly mismanaged and misguided war that results in thousands of innocent lives lost (ours as well as theirs) and nets not one single advantage or benefit to our nation without RAISING A PEEP of dissent? Silly me. I always thought that was the way of dictatorships, not democracies.