Enemies Of Freedom, Antidemocratic, Antiequality, Highly Prejudiced, Mean-Spirited, Power Hungry, Machiavellian And Amoral.

John Dean's -- yes, that John Dean -- recent editorial in the Boston Globe spends quite a bit of time going over some territory that's fairly familiar to most of us by now. Turns out that the Bush junta and its enablers are actually NOT conservatives, according to Dean.

And, some of his points are well taken. Conservatives did, at one time, stand for less government spending, for example. However, Dean's assertion that Reagan and Goldwater were leading lights of the environmental movement, however, simply rewrites history.

But Dean's larger point, that "We need to stop thinking we are dealing with traditional conservatives on the modern stage, and instead recognize that they've often been supplanted by authoritarians," is an important one. However, Dean fails to grasp what's really going on. As I've noted before, this is a coup. The democratically-elected government of the United States has been, and is in the process of being, replaced by a coup. By stealing votes, Diebolding votes, and control of the media, they've succeeded in taking over America.

The only difference between the Bush Coup and the sorts of coups we're used to hearing about in South America, for example, is that there was no armed assault on the Capitol and, especially given the junta's control of the media, that allowed many Americans to remain blind to what happened. Dean shouldn't be surprised that these people call themselves conservatives even though they aren't. They also pretend to be democratically-elected when they aren't, to have a mandate that they don't have, and to support concepts such as "freedom" and "democracy" that they actively work to undermine.

This is hardly a new tactic. The invader marries the wife of the murdered king. The xians build their churches on old Pagan holy sites. The empire claims to be liberating the people they subjugate. Bush pretends to be conservative. It makes it easier to pretend that nothing's really changed. Nothing to see here; move along.

Dean is completely right about one thing, though:

"Authoritarian conservatives are, as a researcher told me, `enemies of freedom, antidemocratic, antiequality, highly prejudiced, mean-spirited, power hungry, Machiavellian and amoral.' And that's not just his view. To the contrary, this is how these people have consistently described themselves when being anonymously tested, by the tens of thousands over the past several decades." Now that someone has articulate the nature of the people we want to depose, perhaps the Democrats will quit pretending that if they just apologize a few more times for a few more attempts at having a spine everything will turn out A-OK