Reply #10: Thank you for this insightful and well-written historical commentary

[DivinBreuvage]

Beautifully written, I wanted to say, but couldn't fit it all in.

Honestly it gets a little tiresome to read the constant stream of "Bush=Hitler" and "It's more worser now than ever before" threads.

As much as I agree with everyone else here that the Bush Administration is an unqualified disaster, I really believe that it is little more than the logical evolution of a strain that has been very powerful and prominent in America since the day the first Puritans and Cavaliers got off the boats; a strain that over and over again, as you point out, has worked far more real harm to Americans in the past than it is doing to Americans today. Hitler, Nazism, and Fascism have nothing to do with it (although of course everyone has to drag them into it because Nazis are "sexy"): the Bush Administration is purely and distinctly American, or else purely and distinctively human.

This is not to say that everything is fine. Obviously it's not. People are suffering as a result of this Administration's policies. This should not be accepted and it should be changed, and I admire and respect the brave and noble people who actively work to bring about that change. All I do is fume about it and bitch on the Internet.

But this is no Great Depression. This is no Civil War. This is no century of lynch mobs and jim crow. We may have one or all of those things soon, but they are not here yet. Anyone who complains about the last four years as being the end of America as we know it should try the 1836 "Gag" Rule, The Fugitive Slave Act, Roger Taney, and the Lecompton Consitution on for size (all of them dealing with that mythical topic that had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the Civil War). I wish more of us had a greater awareness of the fact that past generations had to suffer and endure much bigger crises than the Bush Administration, and that those past generations triumphed over those crises and left America a better place.