In today's OpEd section of The New York Times, Elizabeth Edwards delivers a very well expressed and unfortunately, very necessary, critique of today's press regarding the picking of a president.

Opening with a mention of the media's (lack of serious) coverage of the Pennsylvania primary, Elizabeth hits the nail on the head and calls the press out for what it has become: shallow. She also notes that she is not alone in this observation.

I'm not the only one who noticed this shallow news coverage. A report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy found that during the early months of the 2008 presidential campaign, 63 percent of the campaign stories focused on political strategy while only 15 percent discussed the candidates' ideas and proposals.

The picking of our president is too important a task to approach without good, solid analysis of a candidate's policies and positions.

There are many things the GOP has either trumpeted, co-opted, been inadvertently given, or outright stolen during the past 15 years: terms of language, ideologies and philosophies, even tangible things. These things are either now found to be somewhat (and that's being nice) lacking in the GOP; some are even blatantly contradictory. As a Democrat, and actually as an AMERICAN, I say, LET'S TAKE THEM BACK!

I'll start with the somewhat obvious things and go from there; feel free to add to the list.

The Constitution, in all its glory: Let's TAKE IT BACK!

I have been thinking lately about that old quote from Nobel prizewinning author Sinclair Lewis: "When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."

Thinking in terms of the past several years of the Bush 43 Administration, I can't help but draw many parallels; from the claims of "compassionate conservatism" to the current occupier of the White House consistently trotting out his faith, in a way to reassure that we're on the side of the angels and being led by a guy who is a really devotedly religious fellow. And we all know about the patriotism, or lack thereof, that have been regularly employed in an attempt to stifle any dissent. "Wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross." How easy it would be to take over this country simply equipped with well-crafted and sellable rhetoric...