DU POLL - Since 2000, are there now states you would never move to or work in ...

[Spider Jerusalem]

68. I really, truly dislike the term "un-American"

and you know, I find it kind of hilarious that anyone is going to say "un-American agenda" when the USA is a country built on tax evasion, slavery and Native American genocide. Bush? Heh. How about Adams? (Read about the Alien and Sedition Acts, sometime.) Or Polk (Mexican War) or McKinley (Spanish-American War). Curtailing civil liberties and justifying it with "threat to national security"? Nothing new, and as American as baseball (same thing with trumped-up wars for nonsexistent reasons). Radical, sure; the radicalism of the extreme right wing of the Republican party is pretty much what William F Buckley described as "standing athwart history, yelling STOP!". The white evangelical Christian cultural conservatives of places like Georgia and Mississippi and Oklahoma and so on see the world changing around them, see themselves becoming a minority in a generation, see the slow decline of religion, the acceptance of things like divorce, same-sex marriage, and so on, see a black president, and it terrifies them because they have a very narrow idea of what constitutes "America" and can't really cope with the idea that they are becoming increasingly irrelevant. If things go on as they have for another few generations it's entirely possible that this may lead to another civil war. (Especially if both sides keep bandying about terms like "un-American" to describe the other.)