Yet while many men mellow as they age, Conyers, if anything, has become more militant. That’s especially notable, given that the political culture has moved far to the right of where it was when he took office.

Many voters and officeholders were proud to be called "liberal" in 1965. Now that term has become such a dirty word that even the liberals don’t use it. If any presidential candidate today proposed trying to wipe out poverty in America, the richest nation in history, they would be laughed out of politics.

Yet it’s acceptable to invade and occupy small weak nations whose governments we don’t like. Our current government did that, giving a justification (Weapons of Mass Destruction!) that long ago was shown to have been wrong, and which now has been exposed as an intentional lie.

John Conyers has been fighting to wake people up about that too, persuading 88 members of Congress to sign a letter to President Bush, asking him to explain the recently discovered memos proving that the United States and Britain secretly decided in 2002 to go to war in Iraq, evidence or no evidence.

That may not be popular now, though I’m betting that it won’t be long before everybody will be pretending to have been against the war in Iraq all along.

posted by Cyndy | link | | |