How lion-like the Democrats sound as they circle around Social Security, bellowing their defiance! After years of servility, some of them even presume to shake their fists at Alan Greenspan and hurl insults at the man.

When the chairman of the Federal Reserve put in a decorous word for Social Security "reform" last month, House Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada called Greenspan a "hack." Paul Krugman, who primly chastised Ralph Nader back in 2000 for disrespecting Greenspan, now pelts the chairman with rotten cabbages on an almost weekly basis in his New York Times column.

Presumably enough Democrats realize that if they can't put up a fight on Social Security, then the last supposed major reason for anyone to support their party will have disappeared. (To anyone claiming choice is as powerful a reason, I will offer the obvious, which is that the Republicans will never formally move to rescind the legality of abortions. They will merely continue in the enterprise, in which countless Democrats have colluded, of making it harder and harder for poor women to get one.)

I was glad to open the New York Times last Monday and see the headline: “In Steinbeck’s Birthplace, a Fight to Keep the Libraries Open.” After visiting Salinas, Calif., over the weekend, I was eager to find out whether the disturbing and uplifting events there would gain any significant national coverage.

It was a close call. Other than the medium-length Times article, accompanied by a photo of an 8-year-old girl standing next to an endangered library, the media coverage was sparse. And the Times piece -- while doing a good job of focusing on the danger that all three public libraries in Salinas might close by midyear -- bypassed the connections that many participants in a 24-hour “read-in” had made between lavish spending on war overseas and a funding crisis for libraries at home.

Through the night’s darkness, on an outer wall of the Cesar Chavez Library, a projection showed the mounting revenues from Salinas taxpayers that have helped to pay for the war in Iraq -- already more than $80 million. The odometer image kept spinning while authors read into the night as part of the protest against the planned closure of the public libraries

I celebrate your new robotic fleet,
the unmanned killer plane technology.
Behind a far-off screen controllers mete
out surprise attack on unsuspecting enemy.
They continue to war, denying defeat,
and punishing us for the philanthropy,
of our reward expectant GOP elite.
I too face hidden bombers I can’t see,
when I patrol that same endangered street,
so I need  robots who will die for me.

Even if you've heard more than enough about Terry Schiavo, it seems useful to consider why Bush's political grandstanding backfired. Over seventy percent of Americans, including solid majorities of self-described evangelicals, opposed the intervention of the White House and Congress. Those surveyed mistrusted the Bush administration's blatant disregard for local control, the rule of law, and the right to be protected from a capricious federal government.

Their responses also speak to a broader shift in how we deal with difficult end-of-life issues. For twenty years, gradually increasing majorities have agreed that for all our technological inventiveness, what some people need most is the right to die in peace.

You'd think that this belief--that the most difficult intimate decisions must be our own--would also raise support for maintaining the right to abortion. But it hasn't. In the 30 years since Roe v. Wade, support for keeping abortion legal, and without onerous restrictions, has stayed even, at most, and new onerous restrictions keep getting imposed.

The difference comes, I suspect, from the stories we tell-and those we keep