And this sort of artificial problem is like throwing old kerosene on a dying fire.

If you want to know what a recipe for disaster is, it might start with investing executive power in people unaware of theior own history, uncomfortable with their own laws, devoid of principles, and committed to crony-support as the greatest good within their reach. Add a "base" of half-mad myth-minded theocrats and you have a recipe for serious disorder and the beginning of serious corruption. Add a power circle of high-dollar lobbyists backed by deep-pocker corporations with absolutely no governing sense of public ethics, driven only by the rancid smell of the trough into buck frenzy, and you have the collapse of empire and the ruination of a republic.

Well begun, wouldn't you say???

As for "rational discussion", if you will try to find and cleave to factual statements as premises for a dialogue, it would be a good start.

Obama's election is the first spark of possibility we have seen here in recent years of turning around the disaster already chewing away at the entrails of the republic. It is the possible cure, not the actual disease. To understand that, you have to be really clear about what the disaster actually is.

A