Moyers' speech is powerful and persuasive and distills into good, straightforward exposition the most mightmarish aspects of the decline of reason in this nation over the last decade.

I strongly recommend reading the whole thing (link above).

" As I look back on the conflicts and clamor of our boisterous past, one lesson about democracy stands above all others: Bullies - political bullies, economic bullies and religious bullies - cannot be appeased; they have to be opposed with a stubbornness to match their own. This is never easy; these guys don't fight fair; "Robert's Rules of Order" is not one of their holy texts. But freedom on any front - and especially freedom of conscience - never comes to those who rock and wait, hoping someone else will do the heavy lifting. Christian realism requires us to see the world as it is, without illusions, and then take it on. Christian realism also requires love. But not a sentimental, dreamy love. Reinhold Niebuhr, who taught at Union Theological Seminary and wrestled constantly with applying Christian ethics to political life, put it this way: "When we talk about love we have to become mature or we will become sentimental. Basically love means...being responsible, responsibility to our family, toward our civilization, and now by the pressures of history, toward the universe of humankind."

    Christian realists aren't afraid to love. But just as the Irishman who came upon a brawl in the street and asked, "Is this a private fight or can anyone get in it?" we have to take that love where the action is. Or the world will remain a theatre of war between fundamentalists."

When dogma trumps free choice and individual responsibility, you get a collapsing nation; the USSR demonstrated this in large over fifty years.

The ONLY thing, aside from a wealth of natural resouece, which has given this country any claim to ascendancy among nations has been its assertion that individual freedoms are paramount. As long as we walk that talk, we can survive anything.

Bush's bully boys do not walk that walk, although they are too canny to dispense with the talk altogether.

That is the major crisis of our times, politically and socially.

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