unfortunately this cannot be hung on the last seven years alone, it's been happening for decades.  Which is why I am doubtful that they will come back in full force.

/snarky reference to the ex-Attorney General's remarks on a note to President Bush, to wit, that the Geneva Conventions were a 'quaint' or old-fashioned idea.

I am a pessimist ;-)

We're heading towards a set of tipping points, any of which can turn America into something best viewed at a safe distance.

What are we going to do about:

• peak oil
• global warming
• financial meltdown in progress
• the increasing centralization of power into the executive and its police state implications
• the effect on the non-Richistani of neoliberalsm / globalism
• $2T of civil infrastructure that's gradually turning to shit because politicians see no personal benefit in adequate maintenance or replacement?
• an adequate national health system which is not a back door subsidy gateway to health insurers

Get all of this more or less right in the next few years and we'll have a chance to rebuild America into a prosperous and democratic nation.

Get it right a decade from now and America's last remaining important resourcem, the Federal government's ability to borrow will be pissed away in tax cuts for the wealthy, health insurance company subsidies traded for junk insurance for all, and on military misadventures like Iraq.

is a little demeaning.  Merely lots of study of Rousseau, Herder, Voltaire, Locke Jefferson and the like.  Those ideals were materially written in historical documents.

But also with the territory come the Robespierres and Andrew Jacksons.  There is no denying the big warts, such as the attempt to write slavery out in the Constitution but political expediency required the support of the southern colonies, or the massacres of indigenous populations.

But there is also no denying that for a time, the US was the best hope and a beacon in a time of degenerating aristocracies, social class stagnation, and bourgeois empires.  Until, of course, the US succumbed to the same forces.

Never before in human history had so many thinkers and political leaders come together to actually try to change the human condition, and they did succeed to a certain extent, but they couldn't do it all themselves... hence the Great Experiment.