You all know what a shill is, don't you? I know of at least one political blog that is composed almost entirely of shills. Sure, hapless players wander in from time to time, but for the most part, it's the same old faces loading the deck with frantic knight-errantry. It's an act of desperation. We are all consumed by fear that Bush will somehow get another four years to trash America. Still, it offends me. It isn't democratic. Now if someone comes along and tells me we can't afford democracy in our efforts to regain democracy, then I'll know that Orwell was truly a prophet, for we not only have that, we have war to win peace and tax breaks to help the deficit.

Some scoff at the idea that using the tactics of your opponents is self-destructive, but you don't have to think about it much to see the wisdom. You adopt a mantle briefly, intending to shrug it off when it isn't needed. Instead you find more and more reason for wearing it. If you can find excuses for your behavior, how do you think the other side got where they are? Can we set morality aside with impunity in our quest for victory ?

"But how can we win otherwise," you say.

I don't know the answer to that, except to say there are various ways to lose and one of them is through assimilation. I would also suggest that Gandhi prevailed without deserting the moral high ground. Martin Luther King, Jr. endured without compromising his vision. Sometimes you can accomplish your goals simply be giving the other side what they profess to want. Often it isn't as rewarding as they anticipated, and even they are appalled by what they've wrought. You just have to trust in the basic decency of humanity to set things right in the long run.

Just take Bush's war in Iraq as an example of losing by winning. Let's give him the benefit of the doubt for a moment (yes, I know it's an aching stretch) and say he was sincere in his desire to defeat terrorism in Iraq. Even if that was so, how does it change us when we attack a country that has not attacked us? How does that make us anything but terrorists ourselves? Pre-emptive war today, pre-emptive executions tomorrow? For if we can decide today, before the fact who will be a terrorist, it's a small step to decide who will be a felon deserving of the death penalty tomorrow. We're getting closer and closer to believing we can tell, genetically, who will commit crimes or develop certain mental diseases. Why not just preempt those lives? Won't we all be safer then? No more violent crimes. Do away with the chronically angry, the pedophiles, the thieves, the poor. Or why not just anybody who's out of fashion? Sure, why not?

Okay, I'm being silly now, so I'll stop, but these concerns are real. And they aren't new. People have been warning against them for over 50 years, at least.