•• US finds evidence of WMD at last..... ••

How can this be happening? Most people, even most liberals, are complacent. They don't realize how dire the fiscal outlook really is, and they don't read what the ideologues write. They imagine that the Bush administration, like the Reagan administration, will modify our system only at the edges, that it won't destroy the social safety net built up over the past 70 years.

But the people now running America aren't conservatives: they're radicals who want to do away with the social and economic system we have, and the fiscal crisis they are concocting may give them the excuse they need. The Financial Times, it seems, now understands what's going on, but when will the public wake up?

Sept. 11 rightly made us more cautious and more vigilant. But it also diminished us. We're less tolerant of dissent; less thoughtful about world issues; less concerned with principles of justice, fairness and equity; and -- to the apparent benefit of Bush's poll numbers -- less demanding of our political leaders.

It made us intellectually passive -- which frightens me much more than a hijacked airliner.