Now that George Bush’s marbled columns of support have turned to sand, there is talk of impeachment and, perhaps, even his criminal prosecution, along with that of his coterie of unprincipled administration thugs and advisors who helped turn America into the 21st century equivalent of 1939 Germany. If Bill Clinton was to be impeached for lying about his oval office peccadilloes, the bill of particulars against Mr. Bush and his fellow barbarians rises to exponential levels of insistence.

I refuse to take part in this whooping and hollering. It is driven by the same refusal of men and women to examine what they have made of themselves that allowed Mr. Bush to mobilize their “dark side” energies into murderous attacks upon hundreds of thousands of innocent people; to torture and detain – without hopes of trial – anyone the administration saw fit to deprive of their liberties; and to turn America into the kind of dystopian police-state that was beyond the fertile imaginations of Messrs. Orwell and Huxley. It is, in a word, just another collective exercise in scapegoating.

This is not to suggest that Mr. Bush and his fellow butchers and plug-uglies are not deserving of punishment. While “justice” amounts to little more than the redistribution of violence, those who consider themselves called upon by God to slaughter, torture, and otherwise destroy the lives of their fellow humans, need to be held accountable for their actions. But I resent any notion that they ought to be answerable to the same people who, over the past five years, could not find enough flags to wave, bumper-stickers to attach to their cars, or angry vitriol to direct at what few of their neighbors retained a sufficient sense of maturity and integrity to resist the collective madness that now defines America. . . .

Dear Tony, That doesn't matter. The point is that people voted based on an ideal rather than their perceived economic self-interest. In any case, the handling of the war and the war itself are inseparable, same as socialism and the handling of socialism.

complete redeployment of our troops out of Iraq over a period of time. . . . They could go to Bahrain, they could go to Kuwait, they could go to the periphery. We’re not deserting Iraq. What we’re doing is sending our troops to the periphery where they can go back in if [Iraq's turmoil] endangers our troops or if it endangers our allies.

“We've grown accustomed to believing that economic interest alone dictates voter habits. From that point of view, voters have little to complain about on the surface. Unemployment is low, stocks are up, inflation is mixed but under control, and growth is not brilliant but creditable. The Iraq War is in the news constantly but it has little impact on most American voters. The draft is threatened but not likely. The war debt is high but hidden. What do regular Americans care whether we were lied into war or that Iraq suffers under military occupation that is driving the country into the hands of fanatical Islamic theocrats? Well, apparently many voters do care, even those who don't have family members fighting and dying. Many people voted based on what might otherwise seem to be an abstraction. Bush undertook this war with arrogance and claims of god-like power. The result has been catastrophic. And apparently this amazing failure of government had an impact on the vote.

“How very 19th century! How very extraordinary! It seems that a certain impulse toward idealism still can make the margin of difference. It's not only about economic interest. Issues of peace and justice and truthfulness really do matter, even now. Ideas and not interests alone can still change the course of history, even in an age of cynical democracy in which buying and selling votes is said to be what matters.”

“. . . Let there be no more talk of the good guys and bad guys in the mainstream of American political life. The state in all its forms is the enemy, and both parties are part of the problem. . . . The election of 2006 shows that short-term economic interests alone do not always dictate the political future.”

The ostensible supporters of the Constitution . . . are made up of three classes, viz.:

1. Knaves, a numerous and active class, who see in the government an instrument which they can use for their own aggrandizement or wealth.

2. Dupes . . . each of whom, because he is allowed one voice out of millions in deciding what he may do with his own person and his own property, and because he is permitted to have the same voice in robbing, enslaving, and murdering others, that others have in robbing, enslaving, and murdering himself, is stupid enough to imagine that he is a "free man," a "sovereign"; that this is "a free government"; "a government of equal rights," "the best government on earth," and such like absurdities.

3. A class who have some appreciation of the evils of government, but either do not see how to get rid of them, or do not choose to so far sacrifice their private interests as to give themselves seriously and earnestly to the work of making a change.

Lysander Spooner, No Treason, No. 6: The Constitution of No Authority,

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

In our capacity as political scientists, historians, or philosophers we all have had occasion at one time or another to engage in debate with ideologists . . . . And we have all discovered on such occasions that no agreement, or even an honest disagreement, could be reached, because the exchange of argument was disturbed by a profound difference of attitude with regard to all fundamental questions of human existence—with regard to the nature of man, to his place in the world, to his place in society and history, to his relation to God. Rational argument could not prevail because the partner to the discussion did not accept as binding for himself the matrix of reality in which all specific questions concerning our existence as human beings are ultimately rooted; he has overlaid the reality of existence with another mode of existence that Robert Musil has called the Second Reality. . . . [B]ehind the appearance of a rational debate there lurked the difference of two modes of existence, of existence in truth and existence in untruth. The universe of rational discourse collapses, we may say, when the common ground of existence in reality has disappeared.

. . . The speculations of classic and scholastic metaphysics are edifices of reason erected on the experiential basis of existence in truth; they are useless in a meeting with edifices of reason erected on a different experiential basis. Nevertheless, we cannot withdraw into these edifices and let the world go by, for in that case we would be remiss in our duty of “debate.” The “debate” has, therefore, to assume the forms of (1) a careful analysis of the noetic structure of existence and (2) an analysis of Second Realities with regard to both their constructs and the motivating structure of existence in untruth. “Debate” in this form is hardly a matter of reasoning (though it remains one of the Intellect), but rather of the analysis of existence preceding rational constructions; it is medical in character in that it has to diagnose the syndromes of untrue existence and by their noetic structure to initiate, if possible, a healing process.

“On Debate and Existence”
Intercollegiate Review, 1967; Collected Works, Vol. 12