Gore Vidal Says It Well

This paragraph comes at the end of Vidal's Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia in an essay on the Patriot Act called "We Are the Patriots". It's just one of those things you want to remind yourself and others of when war-mongers throw out the accusation of "cowardice" at those who criticize them and their methods.

Those Americans who refuse to plunge blindly into the maelstrom of European and Asiatic Politics are not defeatist or neurotic. They are giving evidence of sanity, not cowardice, of adult thinking as distringuished from infantilism. They intend to preserve and defend the Republic. America is not to be Rome or Britain. It is to be America.

Exactly.