George W. Brezhnev

John Aravosis has nailed what should be the permanent perspective of the reign of Bush the Younger and his court:

I studied the Soviet Union in grad school, it was one of my main areas of expertise. I'm a hawk on defense. I hated the Soviets and there was little Ronald Reagan could do wrong vis-a-vis the evil empire, in my eye. And I'm telling you, what is happening in our country today is right out of the Soviet playbook. (It's also right out of the Nazi playbook.) You slowly criminalize dissent so that the public accepts infringements on civil liberties that it would never accept in one fell swoop (and, well, in the Soviet Union there was no slowly to it at all - it was pretty instantaneous). Has America become the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany? No. Have we started down the path to a more totalitarian government that no longer respects, that no longer fears, its citizenry? Absolutely. Do we tolerate today in America presidential policies that would have been unconscionable under any circumstance just ten years ago. Sadly, yes.

In its arrogance, authoritarianism, and incompetence, the Bush Administration and his cronies and sycophants have shown themselves to be an unfortunate match for Leonid Brezhnev, complete with the single-party, surveillance state and the Pravda/Izvestia media. As he says, we aren't there yet, but that's where this ends if better forces than we've had to this point can't be marshalled to stop them. One of the first things to do is apply this Brezhnev label at every possible opportunity. Draw the parallels and shout them out. We know where Brezhnev took his country. It's not over-the-top. They are.