The shrill tone in American politics has always irritated me. Be it economic policy or going to war, it seems terribly easy to choke off a sensible argument by calling it 'unamerican'. Maybe controversy and argument should be resuscitated as American values... Clearly having had a sensible argument over, say, the Irak war, no matter the outcome, would not seem so ridiculous now. The way I remember it, this was pretty much impossible in the media.