This is not a stable democracy. It can't survive this sort of thing. This is more like the Weimar Republic. Or maybe Chile.

We managed to survive eight years of a president who could only manage about 44% of the vote. The good old separation of powers contained a lot of things. Some damage was done, but even at that we're no Venezuela - except maybe in some parallel moral-equivalent universe.

The Clinton era strengthened my admittedly weak faith in our government. Not any branch of government. The thing as a whole. After all the things Clinton and friends tried to get away with and couldn't, I find it hard to get overly worried about all that Ashcroft crap. It's just not going to happen. And then there's Lincoln's messing with habeas corpus, and FDR's trying to pack the Supreme Court, and LBJ's lies, and Nixon's lies, and Iran-Contra, and Clinton's lies, and his auctioning our foreign policy, and Waco, and that budget shell game, etc etc. This republic has survived all that. We know for a fact it can't happen here, from past experience. (Hi Ash! Time to trot out Sinclair Lewis again! Fiction trumps history!)

But [link|http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?frd/cstdy:@field(DOCID+ve0015)|Venezuela]'s a whole different case.