Giul to wear the crown

When I was a kid, my two favorite things in the world were sports and politics.

When I wasn't watching the Lions or the Tigers, I was reading about the Asian Tigers (NIEs in the Far East) and the so-called "Lion of Judah", Haile Selassie.

Politics, like sports, is competitive and truly dramatic; and it occurred to me at some point along the journey, that politics is actually sport in the truest sense.

It was no surprise, then, that Newt Gingrich (R-Georgia) and James Traficant (D-Ohio) were every bit as inspiring to me in my youth as Dominique Wilkins (F-Georgia) and Corey Dillon (RB-Ohio).

I shudder to think of it. (Gingrich, a noted history buff, turned out to be an adulterer while Traficant, of "beam me up Mr. Speaker" fame, is in jail serving time for extortion.)

But, for someone as disgusted with partisanship as I've become, it's still somewhat bizarre that the campaign trail has its same old appeal.

I can't get enough of this stuff.

And, what have I taken away from every presidential election in my lifetime (at least the ones I can remember)?

The issues are secondary; what matters most, it seems, is who you would have a beer with (root or otherwise). Who has that certain something that political wonks like me have come to know as "gravitas"?

And so, with that in mind, here are my projections for campaign 2008...

The Right's Big Three

Mitt Romney - He could be the first Republican to win Massachusetts in a general election since Reagan. To do that, he would first have to win the nomination. Unfortunately for the Religious Right, he won't. He is much too rehearsed and business-like in his approach to appear genuine (likeable) to the all too important swing voters.

His connection to the church of Latter Day Saints doesn't hurt him as much as many pundits had projected, mostly because he is the most culturally conservative of the big three. His gaffe (stating that he would consult lawyers before taking action against Iran) at Tuesday night's debate in Dearborn, Michigan, will follow him everywhere he goes. In a moment of national security urgency, do we really want someone wringing his hands over the War Powers Act?

Fred Thompson - The mainstream media's lovefest with Thompson is officially over. The tardy Thompson, inexplicably, turned his quasi-celebrity (he is a reoccuring character on NBC's "Law and Order") into excellent poll numbers based on nothing. His campaign, it seems, is more "Seinfield" than "Law and Order" to this point.

After Tuesday night's hum-drum performance at the debate, I am left wondering how the debate's organizers found a big enough lecturn to hold the guy up. He's not a bad man, but he couldn't inspire most people to zip-up their fly. He, like Bob Dole in 1996, appears to be setting aside his gregarious disposition in favor of a more laconic one; it's one that may, if relevance has anything to say about it, earn for him a spot somewhere between Ron Paul and Duncan Hunter in the next debate.

Rudy Giuliani - Rudy is the most skilled debater I've seen since Bill Clinton. He has a command of the issues to go along with a Clintonesque "I feel your pain" aura. How are you going to dislike this guy when you want to like him so bad? This phenomenon is quite functional, too, when you consider that Rudy, like Bill Clinton, has his share of skeltons in the closet.

Fringe Leftists hate Rudy because he's not progressive enough and fringe Rightists hate him because he's not conservative enough; it sounds like a perfect mix. At the very least, Rudy doesn't have to worry about appealing to a base that he doesn't have.

Also, if history is any indicator, Americans are somewhat less than inclined to perceive members of Congress as anything more than do-nothings. That, perhaps more than any other factor, has led Giuliani and Romney to the top of the heap. They have resumes and experience behind the desk where the buck stops. Romney will win the opening salvo in Iowa, but Giuliani will be the nominee. He's the only one with a popsicle's chance in hell of beating Hillary. Heck, my state of Michigan might actually be back in play in 2008.

Rudy is the only candidate who can beat Hillary in a general election. That alone should compel voters into the booth to pull the lever for Rudy, even if they have hold their nose while doing it.

The Left's Big Three

Barack Obama - Obama is still young, so his best days are ahead of him. Unfortunately for the Dems, I believe their best in brightest is not Obama, but Harold Ford who failed in his run for the Senate in Tennessee last year. Obama, unlike Ford could, simply does not appeal to the red states in middle America (known by many elitists as the "flyover states"). He is not as far left as John Edwards, but he's close enough to read the "kick me" sign on his back.

Sure he's playing well in Iowa, but he has invested more time and money in Iowa than any other candidate. He has to win the Hawkeye state to have any chance against Hillary. Further, his "audacity of Hope" is cute but hardly effective in a battle against the Clinton cabal. If he chooses not to go after Hillary, he will be heading back to the Land of Lincoln with his tail between his legs.

John Edwards - The North Carolinian looks fairly presidential in primary debates because, as is normally the case, he isn't challenged to a great extent. In a general debate, Edwards would try and fail to justify the great chasm between word and deed that his political life so aptly represents. It is, after all, Edwards who talks about "two Americas" during the day, the haves and have-nots, and at night hits the hay in a 20,000 square foot home on property worth millions. He is a guardian class elitist who doesn't even believe the tripe coming from his own mouth. Additionally, he has more than $500 haircuts to worry about. Republicans will kill him on the Iran issue (namely his vote against the characterization of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as "terrorist") as well as certain other peccadillos that will soon come to light.

Hillary Clinton - Mrs. Clinton is the prohibitive favorite not because of who her husband is, as odd as that sounds. She, perhaps as a result of her experiences with her husband, is the smartest politican on the Democratic side. She is the most conservative Democrat of the big three, despite what you might hear on conservative talk radio shows; she is, by comparison, a hawk with respect to national security issues. She knows that being seen as a moderate, while still being critical of the Bush Administration's failings, may be her ticket to the White House. She's tougher than Geraldine Ferraro; heck, she's tougher than Obama and Edwards. Obama may win Iowa, but Hillary wins the nomination.

2008 Prediction

Giuliani d. Clinton

"America's mayor" will be the 44th President of the United States. He will get the evangelical votes, despite their misgivings about his record on social issues (gay unions, gun control, abortion, etc.), as well as the votes of the moderate Republicans and the anti-Hillary bloc (and the swing voters therein). Hillary will turn out a lot of voters, and many of them for all the wrong reasons.

24 years of rule by the "two families" (an obvious organized crime reference) just reeks of old world monarchy, and I don't think that's lost on the minds of many Americans.

An ideological timeline

I thought it might be fun to revisit my youth for a little insight into the development of ideologies--or, more correctly, the acceptance and denial of ideologies.

Everyday we are bombarded with misinformation about every kind of noun, and it’s increasingly difficult to decipher between reality and imagery.

Luckily, ideologues stand at the ready to train you in the art of groupthink—conformity to a certain set of ideals to achieve a certain end.

(I hope you caught the sarcasm there, because as David Spade quipped in Tommy Boy, "I'm laying it on pretty thick.")

Ideologies are certainly not new; that being said, it does seem like a somewhat modern phenomenon to have two consolidated ideologies transform the discourse of an entire country (America in this case) into a simplistic binary opposition—left versus right, Democrat versus Republican, liberal versus conservative, however you choose to label it.

I don’t want to turn into one of the “what happened to my country” blowhards, but I would like to present a somewhat helpful, if not cumbersome, timeline of my own experience with these two noxious ideologies.

I can remember, in my younger days, always being very positive about my country in every way. What was not to like?

I was educated in arguably the most diverse school district in the state of Michigan, and I didn’t even know it at the time. My America wasn’t a “diverse America”, though, it was just America.

I didn’t know that being there, in that time and place, would shape the way I looked at the world. And I didn’t know then that it would take so long to get back to where I was.

Micah, who wanted to be a weatherman, and Ken the math whiz weren’t black, they were Micah and Ken; Jeff and Gabby weren’t Jews, they were Jeff and Gabby; Genie wasn’t Greek, she was just the smartest girl in my class; Jameel wasn’t Pakistani, he was one of my best friends.

Those were the good old days before my brain was convoluted with all manner of misgivings. Everything was just right because I knew of no other way; but, that quickly began to change.

I didn't question the politicians who constantly boasted from the stump that our country was the greatest country in the world. Why not? Things seemed pretty good for me and pretty bad for a lot of other people.

I didn't live in the Middle East with all the brown people who wore towels on their heads and threw rocks at tanks? Who does that? What could a rock do to a tank, anyway? And why weren't they in school? As an older child, I finally found out what Muslims and Jews “looked like” and the only ones I knew back then were rich and they were the ones driving the tanks—we started calling them SUVs around that time.

I didn't live in Canada where the jealous "wannabe" Americans lived. I remember thinking about just how pathetic Canadians actually were; I mean, how many of those colorful bills could I get for just a few greenbacks? Pathetic. Canada was so close and yet so far away. And in what parallel universe could "The Kids in the Hall" and “Mr. Bean” actually be considered funny?

I didn't live in France or Belgium or any of those feckless Scandanavian countries. What did those frogs know about fighting a war? Where were those Nordic-types during World War II? Probably skiing someplace, whittling wooden shoes or erecting goofy windmills. Those poor saps live in welfare states where transient junkies huddle around every corner; who were they to question my country when the tanks rolled into Baghdad? In America we lock our junkies up and throw away the keys.

I didn't live in Africa where the dark people lived; well, the dark people and the missionaries that is. Africa never made sense to me. Why didn't they have roads or phones or televisions? I knew they were poor, but how much poorer could they have been compared to the kids down the street? You know, the kids whose father squandered his paycheck entering junk cars into the demolition derby. But, they were poor and I knew it.

I had to sit through boring missions services at church on a fairly regular basis--complete with pictures of kids forcing smiles in squalor. It made me feel good to think that Christians were helping Africans go to heaven. But why do we have to help them? Why us? It seemed to me that we were blessed and they were forsaken for a reason; I just couldn't figure out why.

I didn't live in South America or Mexico where the machete-wielding banana republicans lived; I never understood those people either. Were they Indians or Spaniards? Why were they speaking Spanish a half a world away from Spain? And why were those Mexicans still trying to take over Texas? Texas is ours and always has been, right?

I didn't live in Asia where the smart people lived. They seemed very American in a lot of ways, but they were certainly smarter than us. The kids over there go to school year-round and would certainly have all of our jobs before too long. All the I was told were Asian were smart, rich and named Neil, or Michael or Johnny. Asians never seemed threatening to me, but, then again, I didn't have a job for them to take.

As the world became more complicated, I became somewhat obsessed with explaining it away. I loved books because they provided answers; right or wrong, I had something I could turn to in my attempt to figure it all out.

As I grew older, non-threatening people were increasingly few and far between in my world. Everyone, as far as I was concerned, who wasn't American, or at least openly pro-American, only wanted to bring us down--down to their level. That wasn't going to happen on my watch. I stood at the ready to defend my country against anyone who had one negative word to say about it. I read books by authors who were of like mind. Men like Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan, David Horowitz and Alan Keyes really appealed to me. They recognized the greatness of my country and they wanted to keep it that way.

These ideologues had an affect on me before I even knew what the term meant.

All this changed for me when I became an adult and began to take an inventory of the interested parties. The "what" was no longer good enough in my life; I had to know the "why."

I knew I was supposed to be a conservative, but why? What did I have in common with my intellectual heroes and the wisdom they were espousing? The answer, I soon found out, was very little.

So, I looked elsewhere.

When I got to college I immersed myself in the works of the heroes of the left—Marx and Engels, Zinn, Nader and Chomsky. The same curiosity that led me to the right was now pushing me left. But there was still a lot of unanswered questions that nihilist leftist ideologies only served to expand.

And so, in an attempt to rebuke one ideology I pursued another.

But that’s life. It’s full of questions in need of answers. And it’s this pursuit that has led me to the point at which I can say with confidence that, at least for a time, ideologies destroyed the natural tolerance of my youth.

Today, everywhere I look I find little bits of truth in need of gathering. I don’t find them piled up in one corner or another—my old expectations are gone.

Our house is full of truth, but it’s a big house; and I’ve learned that one must be willing to look in some strange places to find it. And, in order to do that, we must spurn these noxious ideologies that pit us against one another.

In the end, I came back to the center where the boring people live, breathe and wring their hands. From here, I can gravitate toward the truth in whichever direction it pulls me.

A caricature at Columbia

Caricature by John Cox (coxandforkum.com)

I couldn't help but to take a long lunch on Monday to take in the speech and subsequent Q & A forum with the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, at Columbia University in New York.

There was a great deal of popular chagrin directed toward Columbia University's president, Lee Bollinger (formerly the top brass at the University of Michigan), after he extended an invitation to the "terror of Tehran" to coincide with his trip to speak in front of the United Nations.

For those who defended the actions of Bollinger, the buzz phrase was "freedom of speech"; that somewhat fickle argument just doesn't do it for me--not now, not ever.

Simply put, there is nothing intrinsically good about exercising rights--this is a significant philosophical mistake. Ahmadinejad certainly had the right to speak, and Columbia had the right to invite him to their campus; but, that's not "what's great about America" as so many are prone to say.

What's great about American is that we have those rights. Try having an academic forum in Iran with President Bush or Ehud Olmert. Professors in Tehran don't even have the right to criticize their own leadership. And, those who have attempted to do so have been dealt with harshly (see the "new cultural revolution" that began after his 2005 election).

Disinviting the Iranian President would not have signified anything other than grace under fire (and, it is helpful to remember, something that they've done before). It was a mistake for Bollinger to bring the head of a rogue nation to his campus on a few fronts:

1.) Iran is a terrorist state

One would think that this alone would make him exempt from using one of our country's most presitigious universities as a platform for his tripe. Iran is funding what amounts to a proxy war against coalition (mostly American) forces in Iraq. Further, Iran funds one of the world's most notorious terror groups--Lebanon's Hezbollah.

This is to say nothing of Iran's ruthless domestic policies that repress Muslims and non-Muslims alike (read about people of the Baha'i faith and their treatment in Iran). Women are persecuted (imprisoned for not being covered from head-to-floor*), homosexuals (which Ahmadinejad claims do not exist in Iran--"I don't know who told you that they did...") are executed and there is no such thing as a free press (for a contemporary example of this fact, read about the speech in the state-run press in Iran and all the "standing ovations...")

Ahmadinejad is packing prisons full of dissidents in an apparent effort to reignite the "moral" fervor that brought about Iran's Islamic Revolution under the infamous Ayatollah Khomeini. So, we should not be surprised, then, to see hangings making a return to public life (and, in many cases, you don't even have to leave the living room to watch them). And not just hangings, but stonings that normally involve women being buried up to their necks and, in some cases, in the presence of their children.** This practice has, ostensibly, been in moratorium in Iran since 2002, but evidence suggests otherwise (see Amnesty International report).

2.) PR

In the eyes of the public, Columbia could scarcely look worse. He alienated nearly everyone with any connection to the school, especially the school's Jewish community. (A relationship that may be bruised forever after Bollinger confessed that he would have offered a similiar forum to Hilter in the 1930s. As if Ahmadinejad's own words about wiping Israel "off the map" weren't enough to cause some derision.)

In an effort to be seen as a strict cosmopolitan, the milquetoast academic made the mistake that will inevitably become his legacy as president of the university.

3.) Academic Integrity

To call the forum with Ahmadinejad an "academic" forum is a total misuse of the term. Bollinger played the role of chickenhawk as he kowtowed to the furious masses by taking cheap shots at his guest BEFORE he had even spoken a word. It looked like a desperate attempt by the president to score points with a disgusted populace.

Further, had Bollinger done any research into his guest's track record, he would have known that Ahmadinejad DOES NOT ANSWER QUESTIONS. Ahmadinejad's schtick hasn't been considered academic since Plato went about impersonating Socrates nearly 2400 years ago.

Bollinger, then, simply gave him a platform from which to speak his unenlightened rot.

Studying propaganda is academic; producing it is not.

Ahmadinejad, apparently, is a master of illusions as evidenced by the applause (much more than a smattering) he received from many of the 600 in attendance at Columbia. The fact that Ahmadinejad is a puppet of the mullahs and ayatollahs in his country doesn't make him any less dangerous. It is clear that he is making every attempt to build consensus in the world against the "arrogant powers"--the United States, Israel, Britain and, before long, Sarkozy's France.

And, thanks to some strange historical phenomenon, people are listening.

Ahmadinejad's appeal to the non-aligned countries of the world during his speech before the United Nations is every bit as scary as it is transparent. Iran is bloc-building, preying upon the empty-headed anti-American hysteria that exists in some parts of the world.

And, as is now clear after the Columbia debacle, we now live in one of those parts.

Keep churning out your allied lemmings, Lee. Their prestigious degrees will make for impressive sandwich boards one day.

*Indeed, even hospitals in Iran have been directed to refuse aid to women who do not meet the strict code of dress. (See "Islamic Republic of Fear", in the Economist (August 23, 2007)

**"Rules also specify the size of the stones which can be thrown so that death is painful and not imminent." (IPS News, September 29, 2006)

Defending the indefensible

It became clear to me this past week that race relations in this country are never more than a single incident away from falling to pieces.

To say that what happened in Jena, Louisiana, is a microcosm of the problem of racism is irresponsible.

It's not. It's just another case of misguided justice in the wildwood of rural America.

For those of you who know nothing of the saga that has unfolded in central Louisiana over the past year, here is the truncated version:

Jena, a small town of less than 5,000 people, is overwhelmingly white; and, like most cities in the Deep South, it has a sizeable minority of blacks that is, for lack of a better term, cordoned off in one part of town.

Late last year, when several black students at Jena High School decided they wanted to sit under a shade tree that was, ostensibly, for whites only (called the "white tree"), all hell broke loose in the town.

The following day, three whites students hung nooses from the tree and were subsequently compelled to serve in-school suspensions for a short period of time. (This, in spite of the fact that both the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office felt the incident rose to the level of a hate crime.)

Months later, a white student was attacked in the schoolyard by six black students. The student was badly beaten, but did not spend the night in the hospital.

Five of the students, inexplicably, were charged with attempted second-degree murder. The sixth was charged as a juvenile.

One of the six, Mychal Bell, was also a juvenile at the time of the incident (he was 16) and was tried as an adult.

Bell, whose record wasn't clean to begin with, never stood a chance:

--He faced an all white jury drawn from an all white pool.

--His court-appointed attorney failed to call a single witness, believing that the prosecution hadn't proven its case. (Something that could not have been evident considering the unanimous verdict the jury returned.)

--He had to answer to a zealous prosecutor who, from the outside looking in, did not fulfill his duty without respect to persons.

The trumped up charges against Bell and the others were eventually reduced to aggravated second-degree battery--a charge that requires the use of a "deadly weapon." Since no deadly weapon was involved, the district attorney was successful in convincing the all-white and (apparently) all-clueless jury that the accused's tennis shoes were deadly weapons.

Bell was convicted of the crime that carried a maximum punishment of 22 years in prison. Soon after, the conviction was overturned by the the Louisiana Court of Appeals. (The district attorney in Lasalle Parish is set to appeal the Appeals Court decision.)

The charges against the other four (sans the minor) are unaffected by the decision in Bell's case, as they were all over 17 at the time and, according to Louisiana law, technically adults.

What has happened in Jena is tragic on three fronts.

--The charges against these six individuals were CLEARLY trumped up and race DID play a role in their treatment. The white students that precipitated this conflict got a slap on the wrist. (This was not the only incident in the town that year that involved preferential treatment for whites, however.)

--The district attorney failed to seek justice for the young man who was beaten. Instead, he sought retribution; the punishment doesn't fit the crime.

--The district attorney's apparent double standard in the issuance of charges for whites and blacks convicted of the same crime puts people like me in a position to defend six young men who do not deserve it. They made a huge mistake, and deserve to be punished. Unfortunately they are now considered victims--and for good reason.

Racism does exist in this country, and this will never change. What has to change, however, is the way we react in this country to incidents like the one in Jena.

If I didn't know any better, I would think that this one incident in this tiny town in Lousiana actually set race relations back to the mid 50s.

Again, it didn't.

During these moments people seem all too eager to run to a side, blindly defending the indefensible.

The Jena Six committed a crime.

The district attorney is Jena is probably a racist.

I'm not going to waste any time defending the actions of either.

ANTlanta

Rather than spending Labor Day weekend couped up in smalltown America, I decided to visit my sister, brother-in-law and niece in Charlotte, North Carolina.

After work on Friday, I pointed my car towards Atlanta where I would spend the night.

On the way, I stopped at Andersonville, GA, home of the notorious Andersonville Prison where thousands of Union Soldiers were imprisoned during the Civil War.

Andersonville possesses that duality that almost always exists in historic places. It is at-once breathtaking and burdensome, leaning on the knowledge of all the horrors the ground I was standing on once upheld.

After spending the better part of an hour circling the prison yard and adjacent cemetary, I hopped back on state road 49 en route to Interstate 75.

I arrived to my hotel on the southside of Atlanta (Jonesboro area, another notable Civil War era town(, dropped off my luggage and got something to eat just down the road at Sonny's.

After a good night's sleep, I checked out of my room at around nine and when I got out to my car I didn't know whether to flip or fall in it.

Ants.

There were ants all over the INSIDE of my car.

All over the console, the seats, the floor mats, the door panels...everywhere.

I immediately looked around to find some port of entry for these ants and, finding none, I started to search for some earthly reason why they would have any interest in my car. (Although, I have been told that only the lowest form of life would ever get into a Chrysler...)

And then I saw the open package of Sour Patch Kids in my seat.

I had found the culprit.

And so, I did my best to swallow my disgust for these nasty little creatures and proceeded out of the parking lot and across 75 to a gas station. I spent the next 30 minutes with a vacuum, an air hose and a can of bug spray. (Not raid, mind you, but the kind you apply to your skin.)

I got the majority of the ants out of the car, but I still had to battle the most ambitious arthopods all the way to Charlotte. I would say that it simply helped to pass the time, but I would be lying.

It was disgusting.

Once in Charlotte, I spent most of my time hanging out with my 4-month-old niece. I also mixed in a little shopping at Concord Mills. I'm not much of a shopper, but I needed a new pair of shoes.

My niece, Jaedyn, is a lot more active than she was the last time I saw her--only three weeks ago! She speaks a lot more gibberish and has already begun to dwarf other babies her age.

On Sunday night, I went to the Nascar Speedpark in Concord with my sister, her husband, and their neighbors, Jessica and Jonathan. After ravaging two of the park's go-cart tracks, we all played 18 holes of putt-putt--Jeff won.

I left early Monday morning to go back to south Georgia on a different route than the won that took me there. (Within reason, this is my longstanding policy for traveling by car.)

Instead of traveling through Atlanta, Greenville and Spartangburg, I drove through Columbia, Augusta and nearly 100 miles of the Georgian wildwood.

In total, it took me about six hours not including my hour-long jaunt around Augusta just to get a peek at Magnolia Drive.

I made it back in time to watch Phil Mickelson beat Tiger Woods in the Deutsche Bank Championship in Boston.

All-in-all, not a bad way to spend a Labor Day weekend.

FATSO

The real problem with healthcare in the United States is overuse, not corporate greed.

Enter the American Fatso, Michael Moore.

Moore's latest work, "Sicko", is another in a long line of documentaries that are less about documenting events as they unfold and more about pushing a socialist agenda.

He plays fast and loose with the truth, yet again, by bombarding viewers with sob stories and diversions that take away from even the possibility of an unaffected discourse on the issue.

Somewhere in the haze lies his point: Healthcare in the United States should attempt to mimic Canada's system of healthcare-for-all. It is truly embarrassing that there are millions in the world's richest country that are without proper healthcare.

He's wrong, and he's right.

Canada's system isn't perfect. Since healthcare is available to all, it is often not available in a timely fashion because of the sheer volume of need--or in the case of overuse, want.

And, it is to our shame that we have so many people without healthcare. This should never be the case in a land of plenty like America.

Truth be told, I don't run scared from socialist ideologies like so many in this country do. I, for one, embrace many facets of the socialist ethos including universal healthcare.

Ideally, we would all have a minimum level of healthcare. I sympathize will folks who do not have healthcare coverage. It's easy because I'm one of them, and have been for several years.

That being said, desiring healthcare for all is simple, but the devil is in the details.

Universal healthcare simply cannot work within societies that overuse existing medical resources--societies like ours, awash in gluttony.

It is much too expensive.

Healthcare in America is already pricey, but not for the fact that it remains, for the most part, a for-profit enterprise.

Americans go to the doctor too much.

As long as we continue beating a path to the good doctor's office every time we have a sniffle, the cost of healthcare will continue to rise.

Recently I had a friend try to opt in to the healthcare plan at his place of work only to find out that the cost was astronomical.

Why? Because half the staff he works with is obese and wreaking havoc on that provider's bottom line. (So is that the fault of the profit-makers, or the fatsos?)

Obesity in America is an epidemic from childhood through adolesence and into adulthood.

This is a fat country and we are paying a high cost for it.

How ironic, then, that the spokesperson for a nationalized, not-for-profit healthcare system is himself a revolting blob.

People who take Moore seriously need medical attention, if only they could afford it.

Moore is a typical guardian class elitist who pretends to know what's best for the peasants, while keeping his mouth covered at a distance.

He's a limousine liberal.

Moore, like Hillary Clinton, support public schools and universal healthcare; but, do not think for one minute that they would EVER subject their loved ones to rubbing elbows with commoners.

And so while I accept that a for-profit healthcare system has numerous pitfalls, I am not willing to subscribe to this idea that a national healthcare system could remain salient without some serious restraints on use.

Restraints that, of course, would not affect elitists like Michael Moore.

Don't get me wrong, corporate greed is a serious problem in this country, and especially as it relates to healthcare. Too many people are denied claims for the express purpose of turning a dollar, this much is obvious.

But, the bigger issue is that those among us who have health insurance continue to be irresponsible with it.

Slim down, America, or you, too, will look like Michael Moore.

Commuter-in-Chief

This week's commutation of Scooter Libby's sentence for obstruction of justice in the CIA leak investigation is just another in a long line of second term blunders for which President Bush will be remembered.

For those among us who voted for Bush the second time around, it has become abundantly clear that he isn't who we thought he was.

Many of us came to the conclusion that his plain-spokenness and old-fashioned dungaree disposition made him unique in Washington--a shiny buckle inside the beltway.

We were wrong.

President Bush is a corrupt politician at his core, corrupt even in his feigned old west populism.

And while it is clear that Scooter Libby lied about his involvement in spilling the beans with regard to Plame, who was an undercover CIA operative at the time, what is more troubling is that Libby is probably just another useful political cast-off--the quintessential fall guy.

Plame's husband, Joe Wilson, is a virulent anti-Iraq War critic and outing her, in my humble opinion, the Bush Administration's way of taking revenge for undermining the effort.

Borrowing the title of a David Horowitz (or Sun Tzu) book, it is the art of political war.

Libby got sentenced to 2 1/2 years in federal prison and fined 250,000 bucks. Since, of course, paying the fine won't be much of a problem for Libby, Bush saw to it to award him clemency without every serving a day behind bars.

This is the unchecked executive power of the President at work, and it stinks to high heaven.

The same people who were outraged when President Clinton pardoned his derelict brother, George, and international scumbag, Marc Rich, should be every bit as disappointed in Bush for enaging in blatant cronyism.

But, they won't be because they cannot see truth through that opaque veil of partisanship that continually clouds their judgement.

Presidents Bush and Clinton both defended their constitutional right to pardon and commute such sentences as if that, by itself, made their decision just. Like the Apostle Paul wrote, their actions may have been "permissable," but they were certainly not constructive.

Like I.F. Stone wrote many years ago, "all governments lie."

Bush on Immigration

Suffice it to say, there are several facets of the on again/off again immigration bill that I actually agree with.

That being said, President Bush (and other prominent Republicans like Lindsey Graham) is breaking ranks with conservatives and throwing in with Ted Kennedy and Harry Reid for the express purpose of putting his party in good stead with the largest minority group in the United States--Hispanics.

At the very least, when Lyndon Johnson pandered to African-Americans in the early 1960s (Civil Rights Act of 1964) he did so with the after effect of empowering millions of marginalized minorities.

LBJ did it for votes, and it worked.

The merit of the 2007 immigration bill, however, is dubious at best. Bush and his cronies in the Republican Party ostensibly support the legislation because they've decided that illegal immigration is good for business in this country.

Again, such an assertion is dubious because illegal immigration is clearly a strain on the economy as well (social services, education, etc.)

Granting legal status to 12 million or more illegals living in the United States currently is amnesty irrespective of the measures that are to be put in place in the interim.

Illegal today, legal tomorrow...that's amnesty.

(And yes, race does play a role in the equation. The fact that the vast majority of the illegals in this country are hispanic is part of the reason many conservative are virulently against the bill. It's a regrettable mindset, to be sure.)

The bottom line is that the United States government is responsible for the security of our borders and it is failing. Protect the borders, enforce the law and only then will this country be in a position to utilize the reserve labor pool to the south.

It's poor timing on the part of Bush, the Democrats, and those few churlish Republicans who will take it on the chin for playing kissy-face with the far left.