"Watching the responses of Bush and Cheney to 9/11, their obsessive secrecy, their endless political manipulation and exploitation of 9/11, their blatant supression of rights and liberties of foreigners, their taking our nation to its first 'preventive war' as aggressors in Iraq, their distortion of intelligence gathering, their Nixon-like rationalizations, I realized that--with the near certainty of a catastrophic terrorist attack against America one day--we have the wrong leaders.

Not because they are not able or well motivated or 'real Americans,' as President Lyndon Johnson used to say--for they are all those things. But they are also zealots who are convinced of their own wisdom, oblivious to not only what Americans think but the opinions of the entire world. Former Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis once spoke of this problem: 'The greatest danger to liberty lurks in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.' "

—excerpt from Worse than Watergate by John Dean