Cindy Sheehan has been able to demonstrate just how naked the Emperor is, and thus demonstrate the lie of Empire.

No one else could, because everyone else was afraid. Howard Dean said "we broke it, we own it." John Kerry supported it and couldn't back away from it.

This is how Democrats felt forced to respond, because they'd been stuck into a political wilderness for a generation by Vietnam. They were afraid to equate Iraq with Vietnam, fearing that political wilderness, and its chains, which bound liberalism and the cause of human rights for a generation.

Well, Cindy Sheehan broke through that fear. She lost her son. It transformed her. (It didn't transform her husband , but everyone's journey is different.)

By putting that transformation in our face, and in the face of George W. Bush, Cindy Sheehan is also making a change in us. Damn the past, damn the present, our kids are dying. Scales fall from the eyes.

There is no way at this point for the Emperor to appear clothed again, and his supporters know it.

That's why they're acting as they are toward Sheehan. It's like the crowd in the story, at first. Of course the Emperor's New Clothes are beautiful. You're just a stupid little boy. You just can't see the big picture.

Stupid. Little. Boy.

Stupid Little Boy, says Cindy Sheehan? Look at him, look at the Little Boy. Look at Casey. You call him Stupid, you call me Stupid?

Maybe we were. We were stupid because we believed in you. And look at what it's gotten us. My son is dead! And this is no fairy tale.

Khattam-Shud. Completely finished, over and done with. You did that to him. I say that to you. The end to the past, the end to the Empire, the end to the fear.

You see, we have to get past Vietnam in order to deal with Iraq. The whole 2004 campaign was a failure on that score. God, the Democrats wound up nominating a decorated Vietnam veteran -- a veteran of the War and the War Against the War -- creating a campaign that fought that war (and that War Against The War) all over again. With the same result as before. History wasted on irrelevancy.

The clothes of the Emperor, you see, are based on a powerful magic called Denial. Denial that Vietnam was deservedly lost, necessarily lost, fairly lost. It was those others, you see -- the press, the pundits, the academics, the kids, the peaceniks, the hippies, the Hollywood elites -- they stabbed us in the back, like the Jews did to Germany in World War I.

The Empire places Denial against those enemies and seeks to destroy them all. By talking about Vietnam, by allowing that to become the issue, Democrats walked right into Denial. They deserved to lose.

Democrats went right after Republicans' thick metaphysical hide. It takes a different, more powerful magic, a magic of today, to make that armor disappear, so people see the naked truth.

Cindy Sheehan has that magic. It is in the face of her son. Her dead son. Our dead son. Our dead sons, and daughters. And others’ as well. The horror, the horror....

My stand on all this is simple. (But I'm just a blogger.) Acknowledge International Law. Give Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, the whole lot, to the International Court of Criminal Justice. Throw our entire nation on the mercy of that honorable court. We can no longer sort it out -- let others more dispassionate have at it.

Then get out. We've lost. We were the Bad Guys in this one. We ran the Blitzkrieg and got the Resistance. We are worse than Saddam, worse than Osama. Never liberators, only Empire Builders. Imperialists. We have met the real Evil Doers and he is us.

That's the truth. It’s the hard truth everyone was afraid to see, and say, until now.

And that truth shall make you free.

May our country not pull the whole temple down on its head before it understands this truth, and acts upon it. Already the pillars of oil drums are trembling, the roof of dollars over our heads is coming down.

Say it. Admit it. The Emperor is Naked! The Empire is a Lie!