Excellent piece under this tile by A. Cockburn & J. St. Clair at <www.counterpunch.org>, attacking a column by "Katrina vanden Heuvel, (whose periodical has promoted the notion of a "just war" in Afghanistan) [and] Joel Rogers of the University of Wisconsin, published in the Los Angeles Times on November 25, proposing the following: 'If anything, the war on terrorism creates an opening for progressives, not closure -- indeed, it presents the opportunity of a lifetime...'"
AC & JSC comment, "... the liberal Democrats see this as a time of opportunity to invoke the benefits of big government! On this form, these people would hail concentration camps as encouraging pointers towards a 'new sense of collectivity'. This is crackpot realism on an epic scale..." They continue, "Years ago we learned that most mainstream liberals don't give a hoot about the Bill of Rights, or about the paramount importance of independent, 12-member, unanimous juries, whose central role pervades the Bill of Rights. The liberals' vision of big government is coercive to its core. Eric Hobsbawm showed that the model for the organization of their desired society used by many social democrats in the interwar period was the German War Plan of 1914. FDR's New Deal was basically cribbed from Mussolini's New Order."
They go on to suggest an interesting list of allies in opposition to the war on terrorism, which "will not end in our lifetime..." --CGE