Hope indeed. I had lots of hope when Kerry was nominated, only to see him prove to be one of the most powerless on the team against framing. I soon realized he was a weak candidate, and have since wondered just how much good we do ourselves with the current primary system and its tendency to earlier and earlier decisions.

Although I fully expect a backlash, I also know from my own experience in the 60's and 70's that a foreign war is about the easiest thing to justify and maintain, once it's started. That goes double when the battleground is populated by people who speak, look, and worship differently than we do. The backlashes seem to come most strongly from domestic issues. The current polarization can't last forever, but we've managed to fight one civil war that was fomented by the same type of tactics. Only half a century ago we were sending our citizens to live in foreign countries, or to suicide, if they weren't willing to bow the knee of fealty to a paranoid, far-right demagogue. And we've even got some intelligent people on this forum who can't seem to discuss certain issues without resorting to the most disgusting sort of name-calling. So the backlash may take awhile.

If the current administration can manage to keep a lid on the dissent and the investigations long enough for the 2006 elections to pass, they can totter along for at least one more year. Once the 2008 primary season begins, there's a good chance that Sonny will fall out of favor as quickly as he did in some of his petroservices corporate placements. His right-wing replacement could easily rise to power by scapegoating Sonny and climbing right over his corpse.

So right now I'm timing the backlash, and working as best I can to see that the opposition has some opposition to give, besides a bunch of bitching. We've got to frame our own arguments, and that's going to take some good thinking, good speaking, and good writing, along with deciding just what stands we're going to take.