[PornoDoggy]

Damn ... for someone who seems a little sensitive about my phrasing your views as "don't worry, be happy", you don't hesitate to skew the hell out of mine.

I didn't say we are in a Constitutional crisis. I never suggested that the Administration has plans to kidnap people in the middle of the night and shoot them. I sure as hell never talked about a constitutional meltdown. Expressing of my concerns in such extreme terms is a very, very cheap rhetorical trick, and nothing more. What I said was that I try to stop rodents before I find them in my living room. I do not like the way things are going ... and I would prefer to stop it before it gets too far out of hand.

I don't fear the government today that much more than I ALWAYS fear government. It is, after all, government - a necessary evil. While I have faith in the system, it is by no means blind faith, because the system does not run itself - people run it. The President who got the blowjob was an interesting choice of an analogy ... because the fact that he served out his term showed the system can withstand an assult by a well financed, well orchastrated campaign designed to bring him down (admittedly, more than aided by his own stupidity). But any system will wear down over time without vigilant monitoring. A system can be corrupted, it can be assulted, or it can be destroyed by safety features that prevent it from working. I believe in preventative maintenance ... I don't want to fix it if it ain't broke, but I don't want to wait for it to break before I maintain it, either.

Just remember that on December 1, 1941, the MAJORITY of Americans felt that isolationism was an appropriate response to the world crisis. In November, 1964, the MAJORITY of American people believed that Lyndon Johnson would keep their boys out of a land war in Asia. In November, 1972, the MAJORITY of American people totally rejected the idea that their President was a crook. So the fact that "the majority of people in the United States do not think things are as bad as you do" doesn't mean a lot to me.

I don't spend my days looking over my shoulder for Big Brother - another board member does that enough for all of us. You seem to want to lump my concerns into that sort of paranoia, and I don't quite understand that. I have as much faith in the system as you do ... I guess I just have less faith in the ones that run it.

So, perhaps our characterizations of each other are appropriate. To someone who just doesn't have a care in the world, I must seem as doom and gloom as you paint me. To someone who loves the system and his personal privacy and liberty, your attitude seems very much "don't worry, be happy."