ESSENTIAL Reading

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/06/AR2009080603854_pf.html

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/08/the-america-of-fear.html

My favorite excerpt from the latter entry:
"The America which Europe fears is the America...once of the Scopes trial; the America of prohibition; the America of ignorant isolationism. The America then of ‘‘better dead than red’’; the America of McCarthyism; the America of the last fundamentalists of the 1950s. The America now of the new evangelicals; the America of the Moral Majority; the America of a now ignorant interventionism; the America which can see homosexuals as a conspiracy; feminists as a conspiracy; perhaps even women as a conspiracy."