When Washington makes a big decision—to pass the PATRIOT Act, to invade Iraq, to bail out Wall Street, to spend hundreds of billions "stimulating" the economy—the most important stage of the debate isn't the final agreement on what to do, but rather the establishment of an acceptable radius of disagreement, writes Jesse Walker. The goal, as in the current "stimulus" debate, is to establish that dissidents just don't deserve attention: that they're extremists, partisan flacks, or just not "serious."
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