divided states of america?

that's what a video of a washington journal viewer said we've become during the last 6 years. he blamed g w bush.

i think bush contributed, but he didn't start it or do it all.

it began as least as far back as the early cold war.

you may know gops like joe mccarthy and richard nixon stirred the anticommunism pot to gain power, but dem harry truman lit the fire by making govt workers sign loyalty oaths.

in 1954 a gop congress divided "one nation indivisible" by inserting "under god" in the pledge to the flag. a year later a new dem majority—not to be outdone—put "in god we trust" on money then made it the national motto, supplanting the latin for "from many, one."

you may object that those were only symbolic acts, but symbols communicate and affect the way we think.

it didn't stop then. irrational fear of communism led to the cuban embargo, the vietnam war, and a lot more crap, and both major parties wallowed in the mire.

meanwhile, religion—never really absent—crept back into politics, while young businessmen—most of them gops—read musashi and sunzi and so discovered strategy.

when the USSR fell, the main bogeyman vanished, but the seed of division, once planted, thrived.

ronald reagan had already attacked liberals. rush limbaugh and other gops continued the process. dems failed to recognize the implications of the trend and so didn't take it seriously or resist.

when dems tried to move to the political middle, gops actually moved further right, tilting the already unstable seesaw into the dirt.

right about then, g w bush began running for governor of texas, and karl rove started a homophobic whisper campaign against the incumbent, ann richards.

dirty politics is nothing new. it has a long history in this country and worldwide.

guys like rove simply raised it to a new level of sophistication, strategically applying every resource they found.

it's hard to foresee how we can scrub off the muck.