The Politics Of Cowardice

When it comes to terrorism, much of our political leadership appears to have lost both its nerve and its mind. Consider this statement: "I'm worried that too many people, both in politics and out, don't appreciate the seriousness of the threat to American security and the evil of the enemy that faces us - more evil, or as evil, as Nazism, and probably more dangerous than the Soviet communists we fought during the long Cold War."

These words were not uttered by an involuntary resident of a mental hospital, or Mel Gibson after a night of perusing The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and drinking single-malt scotch, but by Joseph Lieberman, a man who has been a senator for the past 18 years, and who came within a handful of dangling chads of becoming vice president of the United States.

That a statement like this is treated as a reasonable observation rather than denounced as transparently hysterical nonsense indicates the extent to which hysterical nonsense now passes for clear-eyed statesmanship. And that should be far more frightening to Americans than any terrorist threat.


Full Article, August 15, 2006--Well worth reading--by Paul Campos, professor of law at the University of Colorado, thanks to the Rocky Mountain News