The sad reality is that all the well-meaning groups and individuals who challenge our permanent war economy and the doctrine of preemptive war, who care about sustainable energy, fight for civil liberties and want corporate malfeasance to end, were once again suckered by the Democratic Party. They were had. It is not a new story. The Democrats have been doing this to us since Bill Clinton. It is the same old merry-go-round, only with Obama branding.

I do believe that the collapse of the traditional media is catastrophic for our democracy, but I wasn't about to mythologize it. I understand its structural flaws, and the lies it tells, which are primarily, but not always, the lies of omission, and I wasn't going to leave that out. Knopf offered to publish the book but they said that an editor was going to "take out all the negativity," which, of course, I wasn't going to accept. I had been paid half my advance, and I had Nation Books buy the manuscript for that half.

A democracy survives when its citizens have access to trustworthy and impartial sources of information, when it can discern lies from truth. Take this away and a democracy dies. The fusion of news and entertainment, the rise of a class of celebrity journalists on television who define reporting by their access to the famous and the powerful, the retreat by many readers into the ideological ghettos of the Internet and the ruthless drive by corporations to destroy the traditional news business are leaving us deaf, dumb and blind.

The notion that the press was used in the [first Iraq] war is incorrect. The press wanted to be used. It saw itself as part of the war effort.

They [Harvard academia] liked the poor, but didn't like the smell of the poor.

The evil of predatory global capitalism and empire has spawned the evil of terrorism

The failure to dissect the cause of war leaves us open for the next installment.