This is a must read. Things are much worse than they appear. No sense deluding ourselves on that point.

The Coalition of the Shilling
The Iraqis will have to learn democracy someplace else
by Sam Smith

Tired of killing Muslims, we are now trying to teach their survivors some democracy.

There are a number of practical problems with this, among them being that the curriculum is in the hands of the most authoritarian, deceitful, anti-democratic, and constitution-wrecking administration we've ever had. But there's an even more disturbing matter: wander around your nation's capital and try to find something better. Leaving aside anomalies such as the ACLU and the Cato Institute, a few members of Congress, and a handful of anachronic journalists, this town shows virtually no interest in liberty, the Constitution, or democracy these days - except when prescribing them to those in far away lands.

This is not hyperbole; it is simple, grim fact. And also essential, because what makes a democracy or constitutional republic function are not words written on paper, not oaths uttered, nor clichés reiterated in public addresses, but natural, visceral, organic love of the principles overtly avowed.

You can not find such a spirit, such love, such loyalty in today's Washington in any corner that matters. Certainly not in the administration but also not in Democratic salons, not in the media, nor amongst the ostentatious ministrations of the think tanks. The nation's capital has given up on the very principles it wants to teach the Iraqis. With such leadership, it is small wonder that so much of America no longer wishes to be America anymore.

There are plenty of signs of our democratic dysfunction, beginning with the fact that we're sending a bunch of generals and corporate executives - professionally groomed to honor anti-democratic procedures - to do the job. Then there is the most elitist media in American history demonstrating its love for democratic debate by blacklisting voices of dissent before and during the Iraq invasion, turning its airwaves over to spooks and military brass, and embedding itself without a hint of skepticism in the administration's agitprop.

Most of all there is the atmosphere of hubristic homogeneity that has seized the capital, so full of arrogance, jingoism, narcissism and the political equivalent of the hyperbolic deceit that buoyed the economy in the 1990s. The difference is that instead of a stock market bubble we are now in the midst of an imperial one. Some day, it, too, will end and in a manner not of our choosing.
[...]

Thus, in many ways, America over the past two decades was an accident waiting for September 11 to happen. All the pieces were in place - an increasingly powerful military; a corrupt and leaderless Congress; the disappearance of civics from school curricula; the slow acculturation to unconstitutional behavior by police, military and prosecutors; a media more interested in the power to which it aspired than in the readers and viewers it was meant to serve; the concentration of formerly devolved power inside of Washington, and the concentration of Washington power inside of the White House.

True, contempt for the citizenry has long been part of the character of the capital. For example, in 1963 J. William Fulbright, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a capital favorite, said, "The case for government by elites is irrefutable...government by the people is possible but highly improbable."

What has changed is the impunity with which those in power can act as though they believe something different. Washington has become the capital of great pretenders, where the powerful talk as democrats but walk as tyrants and where television and advanced agitprop have made it perfectly possible to create a dictatorship that the people still regard as a democracy. This is the same coalition of the shilling that now purports to export its sordid distortion of democracy to Baghdad. Don't be too hard on the Iraqis if they fall for it. After all, we did.
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  thanks to BookNotes