In Last Rites for the USA, Cindy Sheehan addresses the substantial erosion of U.S. democracy by oligarchy. The freshest hell, as Sheehan sees it -- an ultimate tipping point, she claims, in tearing away ANY illusion of democracy -- is the Supreme Court’s recent aggressive decision to expand “personhood” rights and protections of corporations in relation to campaign financing.

“Corporations have long held sway over our government and the soft fascism of corporate control has been running things behind the scenes.”

Sheehan points out that the oligarchs no longer need to lurk behind the “soft fascism” curtain to achieve their grotesquely ambitious goals. That had been soft fascism for decades, she contends. The corporatists presume to operate in front of the curtain now, thanks to the near unanimous, bi-partisan (or post-partisan in the darkest, Orwellian sense) cronyism -- of the across-the-moral-divide enabling of the executive, legislative and judicial branches of this, our formerly representative, democracy.

I decided to google those haunting, 14 Points of Fascism that every so often serious progressives forward to each other. I, once again, took that scary, fast, mental-clipboard inventory of America against the list. I ticked off every item as a qualifier for fascism, American style. They seemed even more entrenched at this moment in 2010 than during my last dismaying read.

1) Powerful and Continuing Nationalism; 2) Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights; 3) Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause; 4) Supremacy of the Military; 5) Rampant Sexism; 6) Controlled Mass Media; 7) Obsession with National Security; 8) Religion and Government are Intertwined; 9) Corporate Power is Protected; 10) Labor Power is Suppressed; 11) Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts; 12) Obsession with Crime and Punishment; 13) Rampant Cronyism and Corruption; 14) Fraudulent Elections.

Sheehan is right. What we now have is the fast hardening of soft fascism in America!

To the eternal Charlie Browns among the progressives, we don’t have time for denial or slack-cutting for corporate-cronied Obama and Congress. Obama's recent stylistic rally, his say anything/everything conflation of the apolitical with, tragically and too successfully, the amoral, his Lucy and the football re-seduction all feed a false hope. Fascism is hardening, as Obama willfully dissembles this perilous reality.

Brad Jacobson in Rawstory writes that “trade associations” such as the Chamber of Commerce are legally considered tax-exempt, non-profit organizations. The Chamber is the world’s largest trade association, representing over 300,000 businesses and organizations. Jacobson asserts:

A fellow non-profit that works on campaign finance, the Center for Political Accountability, calls trade associations “the Swiss bank accounts of American politics.”

Apparently, now with the Supreme Court's anti-democracy decision, a donor organization of the Chamber of Commerce and other trade associations, if it doesn’t technically specify what is to be done with its money, can trust the Chamber (or any other fronting trade association) to invest massive amounts of said money for campaigns in its best avaricious interests and at the same time successfully avoid disclosure of its identity to the FEC and public.

So self-aggrandizing, profit-obsessed, sociopathic organizations in the crazy-making guise of constitutionally protected legal persons can capsize citizen activism with their tidal waves of opportunistically targeted money. The free speech of the corporation does not and should not parallel the free speech rights of an ordinary citizen. This is surreal. Once again in America, immorality is being legalized. The letter of the law is twisted to make a mockery of the original and benignly intended, citizen-empowering system of checks and balance.

Paul Craig Roberts, in Markets Fail When Humans Are Unregulated, focuses on another facet of this fast hardening of soft fascism in America.

The failure to regulate financial markets has produced enormous losses to all Americans except the super-rich. But the U.S. government is guilty of an even greater failure. Washington has not only permitted but also encouraged the unemployment of its citizens by enabling greed-driven corporations to send American jobs abroad in order to maximize profits for CEOs' bonuses, shareholders, and Wall Street.

As Ralph Gomory has made clear, economic theory has been shattered, because there is no longer any connection between the profits of American companies and the welfare of Americans. The profits of American companies are derived from the cheap labor in offshored locations and are at the expense of the American work force.

This dispossession of American labor has been heralded by offshoring's pimps in the major universities as “the New Economy.”

Professor Michael Hudson, in Deepening Debt Crisis: The Bernanke Reappointment: Be Afraid, Very Afraid, writes about the long-entrenched corporate cronyism of Obama’s inner circle of economists, and what dangers the reappointment of Bernanke will mean to our economic future. (BTW, this past Sunday I discovered Meet the Press had invited both Paulson and Greenspan to offer their economic expertise on US economic recovery. I thought I was in a cruel time warp. Why are the architects of our economic collapse being given vast access air time to spin justifications and incredibly continuing the promotion of their already globally devastating corporate exploitive operations?)

Some of Hudson’s rational points about Obama’s "say anything/everything" economic positioning, while in actuality empowering Bernanke, et al., as they thoroughly sell out the welfare and futures of the middle and working classes:

Mr. Obama supports Mr. Bernanke and his State of the Union address conspicuously avoided endorsing the Consumer Financial Products Agency that he earlier had claimed would be the centrepiece of financial reform. Wall Street lobbyists have turned him around…

[snip]

Instead of recognizing that deepening debt, low wages and the siphoning up of wealth to the top of the economic pyramid were primary causes of the Depression, Prof. Bernanke attributes the main problem simply to a lack of liquidity, causing low prices.

[snip]

The problem is a combination of Mr. Bernanke's dangerous misreading of economic history, and the banker's-eye perspective that underlies this view - which he now has been empowered to impose from his perch as central planner at the Federal Reserve Board. Pres. Obama's support for his reappointment suggests that the recent economic rhetoric heard from the White House is a faux populism. The President promises that this time, it will be different. The former Bush appointees - Geithner, Bernanke and the Goldman Sachs managers on loan to the Treasury - will be willing to stand up to Goldman Sachs and the other bankers. And this time the Clinton-era Rubinomics boys will not do to the U.S. economy what they did to the Soviet Union.

[snip]

Mr. Bernanke's fight against proposals for such regulatory agencies to protect consumers from predatory lending is thus a second reason not to re-appoint him. How can Mr. Obama campaign for his reappointment as Chairmanship of the Fed and at the same time endorse the consumer protection agency? Without dumping Bernanke and Geithner, it doesn't seem to matter what the law says. The Democrats have learned from the Bush and Reagan administrations that all you have to do is appoint deregulators in key positions, and legal teeth are irrelevant.

[snip]

fourth reason to reject Mr. Bernanke personally: the Fed's secrecy from Congressional oversight, highlighted by its refusal to release the names of the recipients of tens of billions of Fed bailouts and cash-for-trash swaps.

The definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Obama’s “best and brightest” -- not change but status quo corporate -- selection of an economic brain trust is using the same economic recipe. The trickle up highway robbery of the American citizenry, and, clearly much of the rest of the globe. Obama in his apolitical talk infers a win/win scenario for both citizenry and oligarchy. Every sane person, not seduced by his charisma and their own desperate false hope, knows this is not possible. The government game is fixed against us. Profoundly. The formula has been win/lose, game to oligarchs since forever.

Obama’s three-year freeze of government spending, anti-circulation of currency, will worsen our plight. No question. And the even more amoral-bizarro dimension of this arch focus on the deficit in calling on sacrifice from the citizenry when there are obvious sources of recovery, of "rising tides lifting all boats" (easily named by most -- citizens, that is, totally taboo for anyone in serious political power) which might include drastically reducing the military budget or instituting at long last a universal health care system. But in the bizarro-fascistic dimensions of Obamaworld, Glenn Greenwald points out citizen-friendly programs such as education, nutrition, farming, etc. are excluded from governmental support. Citizen-soldiers and foreign citizens are destined to be devastated while global, corporate-friendly militarized operations are to be promoted and protected.

In sum, as we cite our debtor status to freeze funding for things such as "air traffic control, farm subsidies, education, nutrition and national parks" -- all programs included in Obama's spending freeze -- our military and other "security-related" spending habits become more bloated every year, completely shielded from any constraints or reality. This, despite the fact that it is virtually impossible for the U.S. to make meaningful progress in debt reduction without serious reductions in our military programs.

And Greenwald surmises a shameless (my word) Obama will call on the citizenry to embrace the call for sacrifice:

It's time for "everyone" to sacrifice and suffer some more -- as long as "everyone" excludes our vast military industry, the permanent power factions inside the Pentagon and intelligence community, our Surveillance and National Security State, and the imperial policies of perpetual war which feed them while further draining the lifeblood out of the country.

Greenwald’s statistics on our military spending are startling. During such times of economic crisis the amounts are staggering.

President Barack Obama will ask Congress for an additional $33 billion to fight unpopular wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on top of a record $708 billion for the Defense Department next year, The Associated Press has learned.

[snip]

The facts about America's bloated, excessive, always-increasing military spending are now well-known. The U.S. spends almost as much on military spending as the entire rest of the world combined, and spends roughly six times more than the second-largest spender, China. Even as the U.S. sunk under increasingly crippling levels of debt over the last decade, defense spending rose steadily, sometimes precipitously. That explosion occurred even as overall military spending in the rest of the world decreased, thus expanding the already-vast gap between our expenditures and the world's. As one "defense" spending watchdog group put it: "The US military budget was almost 29 times as large as the combined spending of the six 'rogue' states (Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria) who spent $14.65 billion." ...

Greenwald emphasizes how unpopular military spending is with the citizenry. A clear pre-election mandate of the citizenry ignored by Obama, our Congress and the corporate-owned media. Obama willfully ignores the call from the citizenry NOT to spend their own tax dollars on militarized corporate adventurism at the expense of the economic welfare of citizens and the very lives of their soldier sons and daughters.

A June, 2009 Pew Research poll asked Americans what they would do about defense spending, and 55% said they would either decrease it (18%) or keep it the same (37%); only 40% wanted it to increase. Even more notably, a 2007 Gallup poll found that "the public's view that the federal government is spending too much on the military has increased substantially this year, to its highest level in more than 15 years." In that poll, 58% of Democrats and 47% of Independents said that military spending "is too high" -- and the percentages who believe that increased steadily over the last decade for every group.

Obama doesn't get it? Or gets it and doesn't care? Either way, it constitutes the fast hardening of soft fascism in America. Why are Obama apologists minimizing this clear duplicity?

I was stunned over Obama’s ... what to call it? Supposed professional courtesy-cronyism in assigning George W. Bush, partnered with Bill Clinton, to head an official fundraising effort for Haitian relief. Bush’s role with Katrina alone should have given Obama more than pause. But in delving into the dark US-Haitian history, the assignment of both Bush and Clinton is a demoralizing and callous insult directly from Obama to the Haitian people. May well you ask of Obama, “What manner of man is this???” In America's Dark Side William Blum explains:

The last/only Haitian leader strongly committed to putting the welfare of the Haitian people before that of the domestic and international financial mafia was President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Being of a socialist persuasion, Aristide was, naturally, kept from power by the United States - twice; first by Bill Clinton, then by George W. Bush, the two men appointed by President Obama to head the earthquake relief effort. Naturally.

Aristide, a reformist priest, was elected to the presidency, then ousted in a military coup eight months later in 1991 by men on the CIA payroll. Ironically, the ousted president wound up in exile in the United States. In 1994 the Clinton White House found itself in the awkward position of having to pretend - because of all their rhetoric about "democracy" - that they supported the democratically-elected Aristide's return to power. After delaying his return for more than two years, Washington finally had its military restore Aristide to office, but only after obliging the priest to guarantee that after his term ended he would not remain in office to make up the time lost because of the coup; that he would not seek to help the poor at the expense of the rich, literally; and that he would stick closely to free-market economics. This meant that Haiti would continue to be the assembly plant of the Western Hemisphere, with its workers receiving starvation wages, literally. If Aristide had thoughts about breaking the agreement forced upon him, he had only to look out his window - US troops were stationed in Haiti for the remainder of his term.

On February 28, 2004, during the Bush administration, American military and diplomatic personnel arrived at the home of Aristide, who had been elected to the presidency once again in 2002, to inform him that his private American security agents must either leave immediately to return to the United States or fight and die; that the remaining 25 of the American security agents hired by the Haitian government, who were to arrive the next day, had been blocked by the United States from coming; that foreign and Haitian rebels were nearby, heavily armed, determined and ready to kill thousands of people in a bloodbath. Aristide was then pressured into signing a "letter of resignation" before being kidnaped and flown to exile in Africa by the United States.

[snip]

But the large military presence can also serve to facilitate two items on Washington's political agenda - preventing Haitians from trying to emigrate by sea to the United States and keeping a lid on the numerous supporters of Aristide lest they threaten to take power once again.

This the fast hardening of soft fascism in America, not so soft to the Haitians and plenty of other countries whose citizens are struggling for economic justice, only to be smighted by the United States as global enforcer for the rights of oligarchs everywhere. Willing to send the lower-classed adult children of its citizenry to kill (and be killed) – to kill desperate lower class citizens of all ages in other countries. Thanks to the smoke and mirrors manipulations of faux-patriotism/nationalism in America, immoral, illegal -- as in murderous -- as in genocidal -- wars are launched, enabled, sustained for simple evil -- economic profit uber alles. How many war-mongering architects of imperialism are not even bothering to lie anymore about the true motivation for Middle Eastern oil. Coming soon, further South America aimed U.S. militarized enterprises, a/k/a shock and awe opportunism. Our self-destructive military cronyism with Israel is still not copped to readily, but is nonetheless another U.S. slippery slope to self- and world destruction. Slippery slope, as in "fast hardening of soft fascism" in America.

What I find personally, most heart-breaking among Obama’s fast hardening fascistic policies is his minimization of torture and other war crimes. I have been wearing a black arm band daily since last May, awaiting the day Obama would take care of the moral insanity and travesty of the habeas corpus-lessness, of Geneva Convention law-lessness, of legalization of rendition and undoubtedly incarcerating sadism (that was begun as blatant manipulation to garner false evidence to launch an illegal war). Obama feels no compunction to fully explore these moral nightmares with the citizenry. We also can't expect the corporate press to focus and care, nor a scaredy-cat of being soft on terror Congress. Maybe Obama ought to gather some progressives on camera instead of clamoring to out-wit irrational knee-jerk Republican representatives? He can frame himself as heroic in context to those beholding to rabid xenophobes. But he does not wade into his own oxymoronic Democratic (both small and capital d) festering swamp of constitutional betrayals from his first, not at all B+, year!

Charlotte Dennett asserts in Why We Can't Afford to Let Obama Give Bush's War Criminals a Free Pass:

Late last Friday, we learned that Obama's Department of Justice plans to go easy on John Yoo and Jay Bybee -- the two assistant attorney generals under Bush who penned the infamous torture memos…

[snip]

In the months leading up to the invasion, Yoo produced legal memoranda that circumvented the Constitution and its Article I provision that declared that Congress (not the President) had the authority to declare war. He argued that the President, as Commander of Chief, could launch an attack anywhere he wanted to fight terrorists -- not just in Afghanistan but also in Iraq. Again citing the president's Commander in Chief powers, he exempted Al Qaeda and the Taliban from the protections of the Geneva Conventions in order to limit the threat of domestic prosecutions. He came up with a whole new definition of torture that was narrower than the definitions provided by the Geneva Conventions and the 1996 War Crimes Act. And, last but not least, he devised a new venue for convicting torture victims so that their false confessions (about supposed links to Saddam Hussein and 9/11) would be accepted without any of the due-process protections provided in a federal court or a court marshall. With newly created military commissions in place -- something that even columnist William Safire called "kangaroo courts" -- the detainees' false confessions could be used as evidence (not admissible in regular courts) to supplement the Bush administration's shaky and in fact unsupportable pretext that Saddam Hussein was a threat to our nation.

As I wrote in The People v. Bush, John Yoo -- with Jay Bybee's oversight and assistance -- "did it all in secret because their operations were patently unconstitutional and illegal."

It bears noting that the sadistic waterboarding of a least three high-level detainees occurred not after the invasion of Iraq, but before it. The torturing of these detainees did not happen after Yoo and Bybee wrote their memos, but before. The techniques used by the CIA were not to get actionable intelligence, but to We get false confessions. All of this occurred to strengthen the case for invading Iraq.

Obama must be held accountable if he does not hold Bybee and Yoo, Bush and Cheney accountable. Cronyism with culpable Dems from that time period must be transcended by Obama. Obama does not seem to have the moral courage or imagination and political inclination to do the right thing. This is no small right thing, Barack. This is the moral divide if there ever was one!

Obama is the newest, major, cruelly Democratic catalyst for the fast hardening of soft fascism in America.

Not only are Bybee and Yoo (and ultimately Bush and Cheney) being protected for their evil – there is no other word, evil – but Obama is now reported to have expanded commander-in-chief entitlement to order assassinations of “terrorist-labeled” American citizens! Once again, Obama is the super-enemy of due process in America. A moral terrorist! What say Obama apologists to this situation?

John Byrne in Rawstory:

In a striking admission from the Obama Administration's top intelligence officer, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair announced Wednesday that the United States may target its own citizens abroad for death if it believes they are associated with terrorist groups.

So within his first year in office, Obama, unapologetic and clear warmonger, not only easily accepts a Nobel Peace Prize, but also an illegal and unethical “license to kill,” and the once again, irrational, oxymoronic “anticipatory self defense” rationalization against terrorism, even against a “formerly innocent until proven guilty but apparently not any more” American citizen. Dennis Blair assured the press that caution would be exercised in this extraordinary anti-constitutional policy Obama is horrifyingly sustaining and expanding. Mr. Blair also gave cold comfort to us progressives with the statement, “We don't target people for free speech. We target them for taking action that threatens Americans.”

Hah! Cold comfort indeed. With the bloodlust in a frightening number of xenophobic Americans as well as the vast majority of politicians terrified of being labeled weak on security, and a hyped-up, over-empowered, unmonitored and non-transparent authoritarian-run military along with even less monitored roque contracted legions of mercenaries, what deadly mischief and injustices will be further perpetrated by our continuing rogue-roled U.S. government? And will we advocates of social justice see a repeat of punishing McCarthyism for our commitment to real democracy?

This is the fast hardening of soft fascism in America.

Glenn Greenwald takes on not only Obama but the across-the-moral-divide Dems, in an article aptly entitled "lynch mob mentality". Greenwald warns of the blind nature of the loyalty of some Democrats for Obama, willing to embrace anti-constitutional policies, lost to their own cronyism to Party and status quo gamesmanship with the (no-contest in the chilling amorality and xenophobia of empathyless) Republicans. But the blunt and proud anti-humanitarianism of the Republicans must not eclipse for us the dangers of Obama, a charismatic but amoral leader, making our world safe for the fast hardening of soft fascism. Does the word "fascism" not give anyone in America pause? "Socialism" makes tea baggers nutty. What about "fascism", folks?

That authoritarian mentality is stronger than ever now. Why? Because unlike during the Bush years, when it was primarily Republicans willing to blindly trust Government accusations, many Democrats are now willing to do so as well. Just look at the reaction to the Government's recent attempts to assassinate the U.S.-born American citizen and Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. Up until last November, virtually no Americans had ever even heard of al-Awlaki. But in the past few months, beginning with the Fort Hood shootings, government officials have repeatedly claimed that he's a Terrorist: usually anonymously, with virtually no evidence, and in the face of al-Awlaki's vehement denials but without any opportunity for him to defend himself (because he's in hiding out of fear of being killed by his own Government). The Government can literally just flash someone's face on the TV screen with the word Terrorist over it (as was done with al-Awlaki), and provided the face is nefarious and Muslim-looking enough (basically the same thing), nothing else need be offered.

Greenwald cites Bob Herbert of the New York Times calling out the President and his apologists on this issue:

But no matter. If there's one thing we've seen repeatedly all year long, it's that many Democrats simply do not believe in the axiom best expressed by The New York Times' Bob Herbert when he said that "Americans should recoil as one against the idea of preventive detention." As Herbert wrote: "policies that were wrong under George W. Bush are no less wrong because Barack Obama is in the White House."

Greenwald warns further on this dangerous precedent and, incredibly, the blind loyalty of a strong contingency among the so-called Progressives regarding this constitutional betrayal and the seemingly permanent suspension of the right of habeas corpus.

The Obama administration has decided to continue to imprison without trials nearly 50 detainees at the Guantánamo Bay military prison in Cuba because a high-level task force has concluded that they are too difficult to prosecute but too dangerous to release, an administration official said on Thursday.

The Washington Post says that these decisions "represent the first time that the administration has clarified how many detainees it considers too dangerous to release but unprosecutable because officials fear trials could compromise intelligence-gathering and because detainees could challenge evidence obtained through coercion." Once that rationale is accepted, it necessarily applies not only to past detainees but future ones as well: the administration is claiming the power to imprison whomever it wants without charges whenever it believes that -- even in the face of the horrendously broad "material support for terrorism" laws the Congress has enacted -- it cannot prove in any tribunal that the individual has actually done anything wrong. They are simply decreed by presidential fiat to be "too dangerous to release." Perhaps worst of all, it converts what was once a leading prong in the radical Bush/Cheney assault on the Constitution -- the Presidential power to indefinitely imprison people without charges -- into complete bipartisan consensus, permanently removed from the realm of establishment controversy.

Greenwald goes on:

There are roughly 200 prisoners left at the camp, which means roughly 25% will be held without any charges at all. Using the administration's perverse multi-tiered justice system, the rest will either be tried in a real court, sent to a military commission or released. What this means, among other things, is that the President's long-touted policy of closing Guantanamo is a total sham: the essence of that "legal black hole" -- indefinite detention without charges -- will remain fully in place, perhaps ludicrously and dangerously shifted to a different locale (onto U.S. soil) but otherwise fully in tact. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that the Military Commissions Act unconstitutionally denied the right of habeas corpus to Guantanamo detainees -- a principle the Obama administration has vigorously resisted when it comes to Bagram detainees -- but mere habeas corpus review does not come close to a real trial, which the Bill of Rights guarantees to all "persons" (not only "Americans") before the State can keep them locked in a cage.

Paul Craig Roberts echoes this concern:

By announcing that he intends to continue the Bush policy of indefinite detention, a violation of the Constitution and U.S. legal procedures, Obama has granted the Democratic Party’s consent to the Republicans’ destruction of habeas corpus, the main bastion of individual liberty.

William Fisher cites Chip Pitts, president of the Bill of Rights Defence Committee, who calls Obama’s stance a "significant calcification of the lawless Bush approach of holding (often tortured) detainees indefinitely - effectively, perhaps for life - until the conclusion of some endless 'war on terror'," but said it is "actually undermining vital cooperation from European and Muslim allies, support for the rule of law itself and our country's national standing and historical legacy."

He adds further passionate detractors:

Jonathan Hafetz, a senior ACLU lawyer, told IPS, "By committing to hold suspected criminals indefinitely without charge, the Obama has embraced one of the most lawless and un-American policies of the Bush administration, one that turns the most fundamental principles of the Constitution on their head."

"The notion that the government can simply hold those it believes "dangerous", without putting them on trial, will ultimately serve neither our liberty nor our security," he said.

[snip]

In a statement, Amnesty International USA, said, "There's been talk about people who can't be tried but who are too dangerous to release. This is absurd. People must either be charged with a crime and given a fair trial, or be released. End of story. That's the way it works. Either there's evidence against you or there isn't."

And Virginia Sloan, president of the widely respected Constitution Project, said, "Even if the Obama administration continues to work to close Guantánamo, by pursuing a policy of indefinite detention without charge, the damaging policies that embody the prison will continue, as will the negative effects to American values, the rule of law, and our nation's reputation abroad." She urged opposition to the use of military commissions.

The planned closing of the iconic prison facility on the island of Cuba has been, at the same time, one of the Obama administration's signature issues and most serious embarrassments.

In another Salon article, Greenwald addresses the issues of terrorism as a justification for gutting constitutional rights. And again, on Meet the Press this past Sunday, Obama’s counterterrorism man, John Brennan, was present, beating the war/terrorism, fear-mongering drum of a probable forthcoming terrorist attack on U.S. soil. (Wouldn’t it be nice for David Gregory or Charlie Rose, et al., to maybe just once seriously -- honestly -- explore how OUR behavior as a warrior nation is impacting our vulnerability to attack. I must dream on, I suppose. Helen Thomas did give it a go recently to no avail.)

Far beyond the specific injustices of assassinating Americans without trials, the real significance, the real danger, is that we continue to be frightened into radically altering our system of government. In Slate yesterday, Dahlia Lithwick encapsulated this problem perfectly; her whole article should be read, but this excerpt is superb:

America has slid back again into its own special brand of terrorism-derangement syndrome. Each time this condition recurs, it presents with more acute and puzzling symptoms. . . .

Moreover, each time Republicans go to their terrorism crazy-place, they go just a little bit farther than they did the last time, so that things that made us feel safe last year make us feel vulnerable today. . . . In short, what was once tough on terror is now soft on terror. And each time the Republicans move their own crazy-place goal posts, the Obama administration moves right along with them. . . .

So, terrorism-derangement syndrome is dragging the Obama administration across, I’ll say it again, I’ll say it as many times as I can, a very serious moral divide. The political centrism of our President reflects his amoral relativism. When you operate from gamesmanship not statesmanship, decency, honor and compassion are not the priorities of your leadership.

We have got to stay morally conscious as a citizenry. We don’t have time to linger in denial and flirt with the hope of Obama's potential as authentic leader. We have got to lead Obama and our national community away from the fast hardening of soft fascism in America. Fool us once, blame Obama. Fool us twice? We end up with hardened -- as in permanent and punishing and horrifying -- fascism!