THE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN: MAINTAINING OUTRAGE.

I believe historians will judge 2007-2008 as a crucial time. The outcome of the crisis now under way is far from known. But I also believe most of us, even those of us who are already angry over how the Bush Administration has distorted and damaged what America stands for, most of us are too comfortable with the situation.

I experience episodes of outrage. But such a strong emotion is hard to sustain, and we haven't really been required to give up our comforts in the almost seven years since Nine-Eleven. I can have equally intense periods of outrage at the Democratic majority in Congress, who haven't been able to carry out the quality or quantity of correction so many voters gave them clear instructions to effect.

I worry that because we haven't lost access to our toys, or our mobility, or our standard of living, to any meaningful degree, that we'll just doze through the Presidential year and forget to carry outrage forward and decimate the Republican Party, which it deserves, or shape up the Democratic Party, which we require in order to have an alternative to dysfunctional business as usual in our government.

PBS's Frontline, the only serious news documentary series on American television, opens its season Tuesday (10/16) with "Cheney's Law," which, they say, elaborates on how the Vice President and his lawyer manipulated our government system to inflate the power of the Presidency, at the cost of our values and what was left of our reputation. They, the Frontline group, don't put it as bluntly as I did just now. But neither do they flinch at presenting the evidence. I'll be watching Tuesday night, and I hope you will be too, in the interest carrying forward our outrage to November 2008.