as she present is with the madness and insanity of the McCarthy period.

McCarthy, his ilk and atmosphere faded with time and so too will this Patriot Act and warhawk era. It will not begin to diminish during the Bush 43 administration.

I read the post. This was a sage statement.

"Our 'leadership', including many so-called moderates are too enraptured by what could happen if we leave, that they don't understand that they won't or can't believe it is already happening."

from Tom Englehardt. He thinks something significant is in the works. Significant as in good/bad, wise/foolish, etc., who knows.

In fact, what we're seeing undoubtedly adds up to something more than Iraq policy recommendations -- possibly even a genuine purge of most of the remaining neocons and their allies (who are also in the process of, as ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern has written, eating their own). At the Pentagon, rumor has it, the leftover neocons, many of them allies of Vice President Cheney, are just waiting for their pink slips when Gates steps aboard. All this seems aimed at leaving the Vice President's office increasingly isolated and Cheney himself sidelined.

Someday, when the full story is in, we're bound to be riveted. After all, Baker has managed in these months to gather in the wings something like an alternative State Department/National Security Council/CIA-in-waiting in the shell of the Iraq Study Group, which is filled with old movers and shakers going back to the Reagan administration. (He's even begun to conduct something akin to his own foreign policy, meeting with the Syrian foreign minister and Iran's ambassador to the UN, both no-nos for this administration.) The ten key ISG members, in fact, are largely not military strategists or geopolitical thinkers of a sort who might be expected to offer Iraq solutions. They are instead a who's who of establishmentarianism, extending back to the Reagan era.

Is this a major shift in Washington? You bet. How big remains to be seen. But here's the real question: Can the new crowd -- even if the President bows down to Daddy's Boys, which is hardly a given -- get us out of Iraq? Do they even want to? At a moment of such flux, with a new Democratic Congress and growing public pressure for a genuine Iraq exit strategy, what kind of gates will the Gates nomination actually open?