The world is a little bit scarier today than when President Bush took office. And it's not because of 9/11, it is because the seeds planted in the aftermath of that tragedy have come to fruition. The Bush Doctrine adopted as our national security posture in 2002 creates a right for nations to interfere in each others affairs if something in one nation might, in some imaginable future, threaten another nation.

With the United States' actions in invading Iraq, without U.N. approval, other states now have a strong precedent to go interfering with each other and ignoring the wishes of the international community. After all, the United States did it, and what's good for the U.S. should be good for all. As a result, we are starting to see simmering international conflicts beginning to boil, with only ourselves and the precedent set in 2002 to blame.

"Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle." - Thomas Jefferson

Anyone who has been on, or even around, the Internet for more than a few years knows Godwin's Law: "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." In general, once Godwin's Law has been invoked the chance of getting any useful signal out of the preponderance of noise in the discussion is zero. The practical upshot of this rule is that coherent, critical, rational discussion has a time/space limit, because at some point, people involved in the debate will invoke some comparison which renders further debate moot.