Backward march.(The Week ...)(Frank Rich's opinion on George W. Bush)

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WE hear a lot of bleating and whining from liberals these days about the parlous state of our democracy. For example, Frank Rich of the New York Times--and I am not making this up--flatly said that President Bush "assault[ed]" our democracy so severely that we are little different from Pervez Musharraf's Pakistan. He said it after Musharraf imposed martial law.

To call this stupid is really an insult to stupidity. Rich is hardly alone in suggesting that Americans are living under a quasi-dictatorship. It is, in fact, a common theme in liberal polemics of late. It seems lost on all of them that if what they were saying were even remotely true, they wouldn't be allowed to say it.

Still, the irony of Rich's critique deserves special ridicule because in the 1990s, he made it his beat to mock the allegedly paranoid style of the anti-Clinton Right. Now Rich places himself alongside the sweaty ham-radio operators and religious militiamen he once tried to elevate to prominent conservative spokesmen. Of course, Frank Rich is a prominent liberal spokesman, and therein lies the biggest difference between these two types of political paranoia.

But where do these ideas come from? I think a clue comes from the same op-ed. Rich admits to a burning nostalgia for the 1960s. The Vietnam era had it over today because at least "during that unpopular war, disaffected Americans took to the streets and sometimes broke laws in an angry assault on American governmental institutions. The Bush years have brought an even more effective assault on those institutions from within. While the public has not erupted in riots, the executive branch has subverted the rule of law in often secretive increments. The results amount to a quiet coup, ultimately more insidious than a blatant putsch like General Musharraf's."

Stop laughing. ...