Buzzflash

On November 22, 1963, the day he was assassinated in Dallas, John F. Kennedy was scheduled to give a speech in which he would have said:"We in this country, in this generation, are - by destiny rather than choice - the watchmen on the walls of world freedom. We ask, therefore, that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility, that we may exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint, and that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of 'peace on earth, goodwill toward men.' That must always be our goal, and the righteousness of our cause must always underlie our strength. For as was written long ago, 'except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.'"

In his recent book, The Shield and the Cloak, Gary Hart notes that "When every child in America is secure, then America will be secure." He frames social and economic security as not only equal to national military security, but as the foundation of national security. Hart is right. But he is not the first to have suggested this concept.

On February 14, 2006, the Associated Press quoted U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, while addressing the Federalist Society in Puerto Rico, as criticizing "those who believe in what he called the 'living Constitution.'"

It would not be an exaggeration to say that without Thomas Paine there may not have been an American Revolution. At the very least, it may well have been of a substantially different nature and character, and our government may be far more plutocratic than it was designed to be.

I confess. I'm a Nero Wolfe junkie, and have been for over 30 years. And, like Nero Wolfe's creator, Rex Stout (1886-1975), I have an extensive FBI file, having been considered a "troublemaker" back in my late-1960s SDS days in East Lansing, Michigan and San Francisco, California, just as he was when he agitated against the Republican establishment in the early 1940s in favor of stopping fascism in Europe. Both of us faced the Executive Branch of government before it was restrained in the post-Watergate era.

The story we're told about the human race is that our population was relatively stable for over a hundred thousand years, then slowly grew to around a quarter-billion about the time of Christ. A thousand years later, deep in the "dark ages," it hit around a half-billion. And, finally, in 1800, we hit our first one billion humans.

"They Thought They Were Free" is an intensely personal book for me. Although I was born after Hitler was five years dead, the horrible dance between fascism and democracy has fascinated me since childhood. And, through a series of odd coincidences, my adult life has been heavily intertwined with those of both Nazis and the victims of Hitler's Nazis.

When Sir James Goldsmith died in 1997, one of the more prominent obituaries of him appeared in the conservative National Review. On the other hand, a right-winger wrote a negative blast of Goldsmith's book "The Trap" on Amazon. That he could be hated and loved by conservatives -- and embraced by progressives -- is a testament to the breadth and brilliance of this man.

Walking through a park on a sunny summer day in Portland, Oregon last week, I got a glimpse of the world Barbara Ehrenreich so brilliantly chronicles in her new book "Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream."

How is it, some have wondered, that the Republican Party has been taken over by a relatively small band of radical ideologues who don't believe in democracy or honesty or any specific religion, but relentlessly flog the language of "freedom," "honor," and Christianity? How is it that people who run the government into deficit can campaign on fiscal responsibility? Or that people who campaign on a "pro life" position can be responsible for lying us into a war that has killed well over 100,000 human beings, nakedly advocate torture, and openly promote the death penalty in American?