The beginnings of dictatorship

This one almost got past me. I remember last week reading a report where recently resigned Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor revealed that she'd had a number of death threats from right wing groups. That was as far as the report I read (the AP, I think) took it. But, I just heard on NPR about the rest of her speech. Here is the report from Nina Totenberg of NPR, who was at the speech (an actual recording has not, to my knowledge, been released):

I, said O’Connor, am against judicial reforms driven by nakedly partisan reasoning. Pointing to the experiences of developing countries and former communist countries where interference with an independent judiciary has allowed dictatorship to flourish, O’Connor said we must be ever-vigilant against those who would strongarm the judiciary into adopting their preferred policies. It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship, she said, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings.

I'm amazed that the mainstream press didn't pick this up more than it did. That's almost as frightening as her warning about the dangers we face. Again, I'd like to trumpet my own personal theme, the theme of this blog in a sense: what happens after the NEXT terrorist attack. We need to have a dialog about how we will respond next time, so that we can discuss it rationally, or a bit more rationally, rather than be totally manipulated by fear. Because if we let fear-mongering manipulate us, the terrorists will win and we will become a dictatorship.