And today, while Rush Limbaugh freaks out on national television and Freepers become ever more irrational about Barack Obama every day, attributing to him the sinister motivations that we now know for certain motivated the previous Administration, we too must always keep George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and their nefarious deeds at the front of our minds, to always remind us of how close we came to danger.
We do, you know, easily forget. And we posterize the Big Picture; there's something to be said for low contrast shadow-detail worldview. This went on within living memory; and anyone who can hold the plots of the six Star Wars movies in memory should be able to hold at least current history in the same place, if not on the same bunch of neurons.
ETA: Avedon Carol, The Sideshow, adds this:
But in a free country, you don't prevent pacifists from getting on airplanes because you're trying to prevent terrorists from flying, and you don't refuse entry into the country to journalists from friendly nations. Neither do you incarcerate people for lengthy periods without trial, let alone torture them. Saddam was a dictator, but many Iraqis went about their daily business without encountering any trouble with him and his government. Millions of Soviet citizens did the same under the USSR, but that wasn't a free country, either. Pretending that nothing is wrong because you don't personally know any of the people who are being abused this way does not provide evidence that the country you live in is, in fact, free.
I remember knowing people who hung out with rogues because, well, the rogues hadn't tried to rob them, up until the rogues robbed them. (No one you'd know, thirty or so years in the past, in another country, wench moved to Coruscant. I mean Beta Colony. Yes, Beta Colony.)
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