>Is Lapham wrong. bin Laden will pass. He may even be dead now. The
>Ashcroft madness may be much harder to reverse. Noam was telling Doug
>yesterday about the hard won victories for more enlightened policies in
>the US, yet Ashcroft can extinguish them.
To be fair, Noam also said that was very unlikely for people like him & me, as he put it. For the vulnerable - immigrants and Taliban non-POWs - things are dire. But for mainstream Americans, he thought that civil liberties were too ingrained to be undone. I made a point of getting him to say that, by the way - and also the follow-up, on how the U.S. is an "incomparably" more civilized society than it was 40 years ago. I'm guessing a lot of his fans wouldn't say that.
Doug