Reply #9: actually it was the Abu Ghraib revelations

[Pierre Trudeau]

I was in Baltimore at the time the story broke with the prison torture photos. It really did a number on me, psychologically. I began to think that the term "fascism" was no longer an exaggeration, that it might indeed be heading that way. Moreover, it wasn't just the fact of the activities at Abu Ghraib (and elsewhere, as we later learned), which I would have suspected anyway, but the seeming acceptance of such behaviour among a significant portion of the US population. I vowed never to return unless there was a wholesale rejection of these policies by the American people.

Instead, Bush was re-elected. :(

I should add, however, that during all of my working trips to the US, not one single American I directly spoke to or worked with expressed the slightest support for President Bush and his administration. Everyone described him as a national embarrassment, and considered him the worst president ever. But they seemed to be so helpless and unable to affect anything.

Mind you, the circles I was moving in were fairly specific: I work in the performing arts, an industry not known for its right-wing sentiments.