I've decided to keep up this blog on a more regular basis. Maybe it's the approach of the elections. There was a Republican debate (yawn) last night, where the hangers-on in Vulcan's blacksmith shop played with anvils and hammers, the Red Sox (yay!) won the ALCS, and the lovely Valerie Plame was on 60 Minutes. It's a tempo that's picking up, and by October '08, it will be unstoppable.

I went to the CBS News site last night before the interview, at least on the West coast, and there were already 900 or so messages on the comments boards. When I went there, it was dominated by the Freeper type of Republican, full of unbelievably nasty thuggish remarks about tampons and lying and Katie supposedly asking a fluffy female question and -- Where did we get these people? How many years of demented propaganda did we have to go through to get this mentality?

I'm old enough to remember McCarthyism, at least as an atmosphere of fear and scary pictures that were being raised in the public arena. America was being taken over by vampires or something called communists who were purely evil and scary and stealing the atom bomb and making ridiculous charges of germ warfare and the like. I looked to my parents then, and they were much more mainstream FDR and Al Smith types, and they weren't so sure of Nixon, though they trusted Ike. And I remember them applauding when Edward R. Murrow took his stand.

It's not that terrorism isn't a challenge, it is. But we won the freaking cold war against a real nation of crazy dictators with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, and we basically won it by building up our forces, and demonstrating our superiority simply by being free. Surely we can overcome a few terrorists without taking apart our Constitution.