One ideal way to illustrate the difference would be to point out that the Republican approach leads to huge disasters like Iraq, whereas the alternative doesn't. Not anything so high-flying (and, frankly, puny-sounding) as a denunciation of "the politics of fear," but something concrete like, "it seems to me that pulling troops out of Afghanistan so that Osama bin Laden could escape and the Taliban could regroup near the Pakistani border was probably a mistake. Nor was it a good idea to waste hundreds of billions of dollars on a war of choice that wound up speeding nuclear proliferation in North Korea and Iran. Unlike Sen. McCain, I didn't support those moves."

Imagine it's early 2003, and President George W. Bush presents the following case for invading Iraq:

"We're about to go to war against Saddam Hussein. Victory on the battlefield will be swift and fairly clean. But then 100,000 U.S. troops will have to occupy Iraq for about 10 years. On average, nearly 1,000 of them will be killed and another 10,000 injured in each of the first 5 years. We'll spend at least $1 trillion on the war and occupation, and possibly trillions more. Toppling Saddam will finish off a ghastly tyranny, but it will also uncork age-old sectarian tensions. More than 100,000 Iraqis will die, a few million will be displaced, and the best we can hope for will be a loosely federated Islamic republic that isn't completely in Iran's pocket. Finally, it will turn out that Saddam had neither weapons of mass destruction nor ties to the planners of 9/11. Our intervention and occupation will serve as the rallying cry for a new crop of terrorists."

It is extremely doubtful that Congress would have authorized such a war or that the American people would have shouted, "Bring it on!"

The House did a great job of pushing for strong oversight, and yet, the Bush Administration continues to think that their actions should go unchecked…shocker. Many members are facing ads and criticism for their support of strong oversight of the terrorist surveillance systems. Jane Harman’s statement today is the best argument out there that Democrats are working to make America safe in the most responsible way possible, while Bush and Congressional Republicans are simply out to distort the truth:

"FISA has always provided immunity for telecom firms which act pursuant to its provisions. Telecoms seeking relief from Congress now did not comply between 2001 and 2005. Nor did the Administration. That was wrong, and they must be accountable.

Press accounts – especially Monday’s story in the Wall Street Journal – make clear that there are up to five ongoing surveillance programs. Congress is not fully informed, and it would be reckless to grant retroactive immunity without knowing the scope of programs out there."

What Chávez has got wrong is his belief that he has made a revolution when in fact he's simply won some elections. And even those victories are more attributable to an arrogant, bejeweled opposition that lacks mass adherents than to Chávez. This has allowed Chávez to dominate some state institutions and to change some of the rules of the game, but it doesn't give him the leverage needed to impose the sort of drastic ideological sea change he clearly intends.

Nor does Chávez have a revolutionary army. On the contrary, the army has defeated him twice (1992 and 2002). The complicity of the army with Chávez today rests solely on weapons purchases, and that is much more about corruption than about preparing for war. It's exactly this sort of privileged corruption that closes the path to authentic revolutionary change. The Venezuelan military will neither kill nor die for Hugo Chávez.

What's excessive is the idea that we have to steel the national will to respond to an evil of such magnitude. No, we need to keep looking for them and stopping them. Otherwise, if their perverse ambitions to heroism are based on the idea that they are the vanguard of the clash of civilizations, why should we gratify their ambitions? Think of it this way, what if those who frequent the chat rooms found their cause disappearing from the headlines? What if they couldn't find themselves when they try to vanity google? What if they faded from being such a big part of our consciousness? Who would that really hurt -- us, or them?