For many people who live here, presidential politics is an exciting and uncertain enterprise, where the fate of an ideological principle or, more important, a career, may hang on a slip in a debate or a brilliant 30-second commercial.
Though doubtless spooked by the fate of their ideological cousins, some within Syria's ruling party believe that the mayhem that followed Saddam Hussein's overthrow could prolong their own hold on power.For one thing, Iraq's travails serve to highlight the nicer aspects of Baathist rule.
The public's reaction was more positive, but often came laden with complex sentiments and anxieties that are the legacy of a shared history of awful wartime violence, yield-no-quarter ideological jousting and harshly contrasting economic fates.
As Ian Kershaw notes, though the predicament of the German population in the war's final months was dreadful, "the fate of Nazism's prime ideological target, the Jews, was infinitely worse".
With the economic crisis, the war in Iraq and countless other issues facing the nation, the stakes are too high to simply let one ideological segment of the country determine our fate.
The first concerns the role of the press in American politics; the second considers the fate of the Republican Party and the ideological divisions that persist to this day.
After all, the self-confessed "positive cynic" has spent enough time grappling with the "moral and ideological imponderables which have decided our nation's fate", and now it seems the time has come for action.
Fate is simply another form of ideological empire.
Hamas's ideological partners assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Saadat and promise the same fate to his successors.
Setting the stage for discussions on how to pursue a formal end to the conflict will be two documentary films, "Memory of Forgotten War" and "The Woman, the Orphan, and the Tiger," tracing the tragic fates of war survivors and families separated by the ideological cleaving of their homeland.
