Gill Sahib,

I think you are grossly mistaken. Political polls have their ups and downs, Don`t read too much into them.

And don`t start making predictions.

Remember the Cheney?!! He is still around.

Dear Mohammad Gill:

You may think it is cute to have the words regime change in your colomn. But hold your sarcasm!

Most Americans know when to kick the politicians out! United States has never been an Utopian state at any time, but is a practical democracy. People have learnt over a long time by trial and error and experience and know how to guide the nation. That is why there was a change in administartion after the Vietnam war, when Soviets invaded Afghanistan and finally after the end of Gulf war when victorius George Bush I was removed. Just imagine Iran in its place!

Democracy works and even a bad democracy is better than any other forms of political regime.
Kamath

A very timely piece, Gill sahib. America is at a cross-roads, no doubt.

President Bush has made five speeches in the past two weeks. In all of them, he has sought to use the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks to put the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in a more politically viable context. This is a political signal that the White House has seen it necessary to send the President out five times in two weeks in these Congressional elections. It is a signal of political desperation this early in the campaign. There is a long time to go until November 7. This is the election President Bush cannot afford to lose. If the Republicans lose the House, the doors are wide open for full scale impeachment proceedings. That, by itself, ensures that this election will be one of the most grim and bitterly fought ever.

The commemoration of the tragedy of 9/11 five years ago was a full-scale media assault upon the minds of Americans. It was a full-scale political attempt to make 9/11 - not the Declaration of Independence - the ``new`` defining moment in American history. It was terrorisation by propaganda.

``Our history starts here. Live in fear. LIVE IN FEAR!`` This is an old ploy in politics. All revolutionaries in history have used it. What all such attempts amount to is an attempt to replace a nation`s history with a new ethos, new symbols to replace the old, new historical landmarks to replace the old. This is done to make the public forget their past or think about it as being irrelevant.

If American history now starts at 9/11, then the Declaration of Independence disappears into the past and so does the Constitution. Replacing them, a new ``National Security State`` rises.

The United States of America is then no longer ``the land of the free and the home of the brave`` where Americans remember the ``self-evident truths``. It is a land where people cower in fear and terror.