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President Bush and all his crew are now caught in a tightening spiral. As the messy consequences of their reckless policies gather force and they are caught in the steel jaws of their exposed lies, their confused and frightened jefe lashes out with increasingly hysterical desperation and increasingly transparent new lies in a vain attempt to cover the old ones.

It's time for us to turn our attention away from this crippled and mortally wounded regime, because it's now obvious that the attempt to impose fascism on the United States has failed. Continuing to expend energy vilifying the fallen serves no purpose.

Instead We need to re-open the debate, not seriously contested for 70 years, concerning the essential nature of the kind of country we wish to have. This was exactly the purpose of President Jimmy Carter's op-ed piece which ran in the LA Times yesterday.

Unfortunately, Carter is a good-hearted person with limited vision, as evidenced by the ineptitude which characterized his administration. He would, of course, do away with the worst excesses of the current regime, but at the same time, would return us to the type of society and the kind of policies we had under Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Reagan: imperialism without fascism and the rule of monopoly capitalism without dictatorship.

I'm hoping that public reaction to the bankrupt and vicious policies of the present failed regime will be extreme enough to lead us in a direction not envisioned by the well-intentioned but myopic Jimmy Carter, back to the approaches, objectives, and socialist programs of the New Deal, which gave us Social Security, the G.I. Bill of Rights, subsidized home mortgages, and later on, medicare. These measures, augmented today by a single-payer system of guaranteed health insurance, would for the first time in a long time bring the U.S. government into harmony with the main principle of the Declaration of Independence, that government exists for the benefit of the governed.

I'm also hoping that we will finally, belatedly, pay attention to the warning President Eisenhower prophetically included in his 1961 Farewell address, and work actively to do away with "the unwarranted influence...(of) the military-industrial complex." Militarism, combined with monopoly capitalism, was the foundation and prerequisite of our tragic fascist episode. But now the Iraq War has shown that we'll have to find methods other than imperialistic aggression to solve our energy dilemma, as well as our other global and hemispheric problems.

I say this not as a Democrat or a liberal, for I am neither, any more than I'm a communist or a socialist. I'm a revolutionary who tries to follow the teaching of Mohandas K. Gandhi, that is to say, a person for whom revolution begins with purification of the heart, and for whom politics is a spiritual discipline.

It's time for a real change, and that doesn't just mean a retreat to the Kennedy-Johnson days and the kinder, gentler imperialism, wars, and monopoly capitalism of a time when we had better drugs and better music.