In the whitehouse occupied by GW Bush and Dick Cheney, the Americans to whom loyalty is owed are not simply those who give their life's work over to serve their country. To have the your life work appreciated, you have to serve the policies and ideologies of the Bush and Cheney administration. Thus, you see the product of a lifetime of creating and managing intelligence resources for the protection of American lives destroyed by the muttered, leaked and sneaked campaign that Dick Cheney, I Lewis Libby and Karl Rove conducted to reveal the clandestine status of CIA employee Valerie Plame. Shattering a network of intelligence resources to warn the husband of the CIA agent who recruited and managed it to fall in line behind the administration's contention,(discredited) that the Iraq had WMD is a staggeringly arrogant act.

Our country's existence as a democracy depends on the ability of conflicting ideas to be heard. Dissent must always, in a democracy, test and inform the assertions of those in power. Any other system is something other than a democracy