Our own Kevin Carey has already weighed in on the subject in a similar vein.

But those are European concerns, legitimate as they are. What should be more ominous for Americans is the evolution of the concept used by the Clintonistas of the "perpetual campaign" (a Sydney Blumenthal 'insight') to that of the Bush regime's perpetual war campaign. It should be clear to the politically savvy that His Fraudulency fully intends to ride this Orwellian perpetual war into the 2004 elections. Americans are reticent to unseat a wartime President. Lyndon Johnson, the older readers amongst us may recall, chose not to seek re-election during the Vietnam conflict. Other wartime leaders have died in office, but never has one failed in an election attempt to my recollection.

Bush, Card and the other people around His Fraudulency know this and intend to cynically, in my view, capitalize on this fact by wrapping themselves in the mantel of patriotism and an elusively omnipresent threat.

The approach justifies what has always been their penchant toward American unilateralism and the projection of American dominance upon the nations of the world. Period.

It feeds directly into the strong conservative impulses of John Ashcroft, the Attorney General of the United States, who seems to care as much about basic civil liberties as a dog does about its fleas.

The poor state of the economy, the Enron scandal, and even the disastrously misguided environmental approach of this Big Oil presidency will get short shrift from pundits or any of the Mouthpiece Media as long as America is bellicosely asserting itself on the international stage against terrorism.

Was September 11, 2001, the first terrorist attack in world history? No. That is why Slobodan Milosevic, who this publication has railed against for a decade, can now do his pirouette at the Hague Tribunal about the hypocrisy of the West. Meanwhile, the Balkans nations of the former Yugoslavia, who the United States feels safe to basically ignore -- once one overlooks our perpetual military occupation there -- slip deeper into relative degrees of hopelessness.

What's most frightening about this new war-fever in this land is that two of the so-called "axis of evil" nations, Iran and North Korea, have actually moderated their positions in recent years. Iran has been anti-Taliban for years, and been the home of over a million Afghan refugees. So the very concept that Mr. Bush and his cronies refuse to back away from is a chilling one that says more about America's perceived right to rule the world than it does about the furtherance of peace, freedom or democracy.

Secondly, there seems little justification to antagonize North Korea with inflammatory rhetoric -- bordering on the threat of war -- when it has been bending over backwards to open itself up to the international community and moderate its relationship with South Korea these last few years.

Worse yet, as Mr. Carey points out in his editorial, it completely abrogates the notion of national sovereignty. As German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer has put it, Mr. Bush's statements and tone would suggest that the United States means to treat the nations of the world as its "satellites."

Very little good can come of this internationally but domestically, despite the much-touted "new patriotism", it is having the chilling affect of muzzling legitimate dissent and turning our nation closer to being a true single party state.

While looking at the rest of the world, the United States of America might do well to remember the words of the song by Bob Marley: "You are the big tree, but we are the small axe..."

Dollar Bill Clinton often bragged that he had an administration that "looked like America." These days, under Bush II, America is beginning to look less and less like America.

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