What's in a name?

I hadn't put two and two together until very recently about what was so fundamentally disturbing about a major neocon organization, the "Committee on the Present Danger". The CPD is a protean group, including people like Richard Perle and Ronald Reagan, and has gone through several incarnations: its 1970s and 80s incarnation was convinced that the Soviets were an eyeblink away from attacking the US and could never reform or change, and the current incarnation believes that the world is one Osama bin Laden video tape away from nuking Orange County, California.

Several prominent right-wing attack dogs are former leftists or the children of leftists (notably the "Scoop" Jackson Democrats and the Commentary crowd like the Kristols and the Podhoretzes) or actual communists--red-diaper babies like David Horowitz and neo-Communist Shachtmanites like Jeanne Kirkpatrick.

The connection I hadn't made was to Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky's greatest lasting contribution to the Soviet utopia, the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage--better known as the Emergency Commission, abbreviated to "Cheka". Cheka was Lenin's first secret police organization, the precursors to the NKVD and KGB.

The wonderful thing about governing by emergency rules is that if you handle it correctly, the emergency never ends.