"I tremble for my country when I consider that God is just..."

..."that his justice cannot sleep forever." -Thomas Jefferson

That quote came to mind earlier tonight, and it was still fresh in my mind when I read Billmon's latest post.

What it may need is a new population (or half of a population, anyway), one that hasn't been stupified or brainwashed into blind submission, that won't look upon sadistic corruption and call it patriotism, and that will refuse to trade the Bill of Rights for a plastic Jesus and a wholly false sense of security.... Which is why right now it's easy for me to imagine Richard Nixon, looking up from the inner circle of hell and lamenting his bad luck in being elected to the presidency just 30 years too soon.

That comes at the end of a long rebuttal to those who think we don't have modern Deep Throats - Billmon and Bob Harris have both compiled long lists of modern candidates. We've got plenty of information, and plenty of news channels covering them. Hell, even with Fox News, I can still get the Beeb on RSS, so it's not like we're in a new dark age. No, as Billmon points out, the problem is deeper than a cowed media or a corrupt political system. The problem is that most people don't care, or are able to explain it away as "liberal bias."

Well, I hate to sound bitter or vengeful, but the wheel never stops turning - something Jefferson understood very clearly. If the policies of the Bush administration lead to ruin, it's not going to be because people lacked for warnings. The job for the rest of us is harder - either trying to stem disaster before it happens, or enduring the aftermath. Or dig a hole and don't come out until it's all over. Some days, it's the latter that's most appealing.