I noticed an interesting quote in a news article today. Well, not so much a quote, as a definition. I was reading an article by Jay Bookman called "When Facts Collide with Beliefs..." which was published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Jay's article is about the quote, but he doesn't take it far enough. I believe it is the most damning definition of the Bush administration I have ever seen, and it should scare the bejesus out of you.

Jay starts his article with a brief denouncement of the latest 'shift the blame' commission to look at the WMD intelligence data. He correctly identifies one of the passages as damning to the aparazzi.

As the commission put it, our government was crippled by "a culture of enforced consensus."

"a culture of enforced consensus"

A democracy should reflect the values of a society as arrived at by consensus. We have ceased to be a democracy, if the consensus is enforced. The old Soviet Union was a place where there was a culture of enforced consensus. Everyone had to toe the communist line or they would suffer the consequences.

In our current state, this nation is not a democracy, or even a republic. It is a nation of enforced consensus. The problem is not limited to Government, or the intelligence community, those are just outward manifestations of the pressure being exerted upon the individuals in those positions by the people in power above them.

You can view the enforced consensus on the nightly news. You can see who is doing the bludgeoning, and you can see the people who are afraid to step out of line. The enforcers, and the timid.

This is not a democracy, nor is it a free land, not when we have a culture of enforced consensus.