This fool was Powell's Chief of Staff?

Lawrence Wilkerson in the Baltimore Sun:

As Alexis de Tocqueville once said: "America is great because she is good. If America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great."

In January 2001, with the inauguration of George W. Bush as president, America set on a path to cease being good; America became a revolutionary nation, a radical republic. If our country continues on this path, it will cease to be great - as happened to all great powers before it, without exception.

From the Kyoto accords to the International Criminal Court, from torture and cruel and unusual treatment of prisoners to rendition of innocent civilians, from illegal domestic surveillance to lies about leaking, from energy ineptitude to denial of global warming, from cherry-picking intelligence to appointing a martinet and a tyrant to run the Defense Department, the Bush administration, in the name of fighting terrorism, has put America on the radical path to ruin.

Unprecedented interpretations of the Constitution that holds the president as commander in chief to be all-powerful and without checks and balances marks the hubris and unparalleled radicalism of this administration.

First, that quote from Alexis de Toqueville is bogus. He never wrote it.

Secondly, his examples of our drift away from "goodness", surrendering our sovereignty to the European bien pensants and a bunch of unproven allegations accepted uncritically as fact, are highly debatable. I would say that the efforts of the ACLU have done more to cause America to cease to be a good people than anything else. Acceptance of moral equivalence in legal theory and legal protection for evil practices like sexual promiscuity, pornography and abortion have hurt our soul more than any of the politcally correct pronouncements of people like this.

And by the way, his legal pronouncements are wrong and stupid at the same time.