The Decade When Americans Lost Their Country

Well, I thought I'd put one more top ten for the decade here. It's a pretty good one. Robert Freeman has come out with The Real Top Ten Stories of the Past Decade on Common Dreams.

They're all important stories, but I would hazard to guess that this particular one was the precursor to all the others. Had this not happened, the country would be in much better shape, and the other nine stories would not be as serious (or even nonexistent) as they are now:

The Supreme Court hijacking the 2000 presidential election. This isn't even a historical controversy anymore. Al Gore won the national popular vote by 570,000. And we now know he would have won the Florida vote as well if the vote counting had not been stopped by the Supreme Court. This was literally a right wing judicial coup d' etat, so it's understandable that it's never mentioned in the "right" kind of circles.

We will never know what state we would be in now with Gore at the helm, but I believe it certainly would not have been bad as we currently are. Sadly, after listing the stories, Mr. Freeman's summation is bleak, but so true,

History paints decades with broad brushes-the Roaring Twenties, The Depression, World War II. Historians will look back on the Naughts as the time when Americans Lost Their Country. It was the decade when all the institutions that they believed would protect them — the media, the courts, Congress, the market, a messianic new president — in fact betrayed them. It will forever more be a different country.

What might have been...