It may well be on the fringe in "America" but most of you are blinded by fear and paranoia.
The "most of you" is based on your own personal assumptions, I take it?
People on the outside can clearly see the war-mongering country the US has become. Your military-industrial complex is just itching for another war. You invested so much in it that you have to keep them busy, that's why the "War on Terror" was designed to never end. Don't get me wrong, I love Americans, even (some of) the religious ones, and NYC is probably my favourite city in the world and I even love Buffalo, I had a wonderful time there, its gay scene is probably the friendliest. Anyway, it's your administration(s) I can't stand.
Nice to get the compliments, but they're at odds with your sweeping generalization above. My views are, admittedly, not exactly politically centrist. But I basically agree with you and I'm hardly a member of some fringey subversive minority. I'm a middle-class, middle-aged, mother of two who lives in a mid-sized Midwestern city and writes for a mainstream media organization.
As for us having "invested so much we have to keep them busy," I'm sure that's not what's going through the heads of anybody outside the departments themselves, or at least the government. I like to believe that many of us, if we were fully informed, would rather have the money back to divert to more constructive projects, or even to keep for ourselves.
Americans aren't constantly paranoid or rabidly hawkish, they're just underinformed. Too many of us (not the majority, let's hope, but who knows what percentage) would be clicking over to People or TMZ at this point to see what those krazy Kardashians are up to. And some of us are brainwashed by right-wingers to think their biggest tax problem is lazy poor people living on the dole, rather than rich people and the military, um, living on the dole.