One of the things I hate most about the Bush administration is the extent they're willing to go to supress dissent. Some students my home town of Kalamazoo, who were fingered by other students as not supportive of Bush were 
excluded from a Bush speech.
When seven sophomores at the school showed up at Wings Stadium in downtown Kalamazoo to see George W. Bush at a campaign rally on May 3 and presented the tickets they had obtained for the event, security officers would not allow them in. The problem, according to these students, was that College Republicans volunteering at the event fingered them as liberals who did not support Bush. And such citizens were not welcome at the rally.
I supposed what I've found most dissappointing is the willingness of Americans to simply accept this kind of behavior on the part of the Bush administration. To accept that people protesting would be locked up someplace distant from the press and media coverage. To accept that the administration can silence critics and deny them the ability to generate news. I don't understand why people are willing to accept it. It doesn't seem like the America I grew up in.
David Brooks claims that "For decades, the U.N. has failed as an effective world power" and says that the UN is "dominated by dictatorships". It rather seems to me that the biggest problem with the UN has been that the most powerful countries in the world, principally among them the United States, have failed to cede to the UN the power to actually govern. The US refuses to participate in treaty after treaty, including the land-mine treaty and the world court. The UN won't succeed unless the US wants it to and is willing to back up that desire with full compliance with the same kinds of limitations we currently aim to impose on the rest of the world.