Assessing hopes for change in USA

Here we are in the last week of August. President Obama is taking a vacation on Martha's Vineyard. Every day brings news about forces mobilizing against real health care legislation. Military leaders are talking about the need to further increase troops in Afghanistan. While signs point to economic recovery in the United States, this has been a discouraging summer for those of us who had hoped that the election of President Obama would mean more fundamental change in the United States. The reactionary forces in the United States are, in fact, quite strong and all the more bitter and dangerous because of their defeat last November.

Yesterday's column by Paul Krugman reflects this discouragement. The multiple myths that underpin the political thinking of the United States are apparently unassailable. The fact that the economic doctrines and approaches of Reagan and the neo-conservatives lack both supporting evidence and logic does not apparently detract from their political power. It's discouraging because I believe that the path to the future for America is to be found in an economic approach that is both more realistic and better designed to benefit all classes of people, not just the wealthy

I can hear the chant of conservatives first voiced more than four decades ago: "America. Love it or leave it!" But I refuse to believe that those of us who do not agree with conservatives are not American. We are citizens too, and America cannot be claimed as the possession of conservatives only. I'm not leaving. (Yet.)

Do American conservatives prefer radical Islamic leaders?

Today I read an amusing analysis of the political turmoil in Iran. Written by George Friedman, a conservative political scientist. The piece disparages allegations of vote fraud, and all but announces that Ahmadinejad must have won the election, because fraud would have been to difficult to arrange. Written before the street protests that followed in the days after the vote, Friedman almost seemed eager to maintain the status quo in Iran. It's an interesting perspective. I wonder if the existence of such a radical leader in Iran is quite useful to certain conservatives. With his extreme statements about the Holocaust, for example, Ahmadinejad is a perfect example of the "crazy Islamic leader," against whom all sorts of force is justified. Dealing with a more moderate Muslim leader might actually be more difficult intellectually for some conservatives.