Yeah, what was terrifying for me under Shrub was how quickly civil liberties got rolled back, often with the full-throated appreciation of The PublicTM, and how everything was justified in the name of Patriotism and if you criticized it at all you were "with the terrorists." That was the era where someone on LJ got a visit from the FBI because someone got mad at her and passed along a joke she made about Bush. And the media just totally went along with it all, when the headlines weren't written by outright Shrub plants (that woman who won a Pulitzer for the NYT peddling Gulf War lies).