Rebecca Blood pointed us to this long thoughtful saga of the journey of an Idaho-bred conservative to a profound mistrust and disapproval of the current neo-conservative regime. An excerpt:

“There’s no doubt my feelings about the legitimacy of George W. Bush’s presidency affected my view of his behavior after the terrorist attacks. In fact, I was profoundly dismayed that someone as manifestly unfit for the office was occupying it at such a crucial moment in history. Now, had Bush gone about pursuing the war on terrorism seriously, building multinational coalitions; recognizing the myriad faces of terrorism, and the limits of the military response; perhaps even recognizing when a criminal-justice response is more warranted; and uniting the nation around a genuine consensus — well, then, I would have been forced to change my opinion of the man. I would have backed him as gladly as the Glenn Reynoldses and Andrew Sullivans are urging us to do now.

But Bush, of course, did not. Because he is so grotesquely shallow a leader, he has essentially allowed a cadre of genuine radicals — specifically, the ‘neoconservative’ ideologues from the Project for a New American Century — to take control of both our foreign policy and the entire direction of the ‘war on terrorism.’ The result has been that we have spit in the face of our traditional allies, as well as the United Nations (and then had the temerity to come back to them demanding help when it all turned sour); only limited recognition that terrorism has a home-grown face as well; embarked on an invasion of another country with the September 11 attacks as a pretext, while such claims have not proven to be well-grounded; and completely divided the nation by making out dissenters from the radical direction in which he has taken the nation as ‘unpatriotic.'”

But this is only a portal to the author’s ongoing and more broad-reaching work on incipient fascism in America.