The Republicans

First they had John, Rudy, Mike, Mitt, and Ron. Am I leaving anybody out? I probably am. If so forgive me. I tried to remember you, but you were just so damned forgettable. If I left you out, don’t hold it against me. All you old white guys look alike to me.

I remember the early debates for how moronic all those guys seemed to me. Ron Paul stands out as the only one among the bunch with a mind of his own and the courage to express it. I’m not the sort of citizen who wants to do away with government entirely, so he seems like a fringe candidate, but I am heartened to see the support he has among young voters on the right. I like the idea that anyone, or any ideas, energize and engage young people in the electoral process. I don’t care who they vote for. But once they feel that small sense of power that casting your vote gives you for just that moment, I think they will be back to vote again. That’s a good thing for democracy.

Until yesterday morning, here in Utah, there were three “mainstream” candidates still in the race on the Republican side. Ron Paul was always considered a “fringe” candidate, and so he has been left out of the conversation and news coverage. It’s a pity. His participation in the conversation made it so much more interesting. Now he is relegated to footnote status.

Then in a stunningly disconnected and oddly intense speech Mitt Romney withdrew from the race (I have to quote this loosely since I don’t have a photographic memory) “And so, my fellow Americans……in this time of war, for the good of the country, I will step aside and ……..bla bla bla. My brain short circuited there for a second. It was a speech at CPAC, full of red-meat Republicans. Republicans who are still supporting a senseless, economically ruinous war, still rabid to keep their big tax breaks (welfare for the rich), anti gay, anti abortion, anti help for the poorest among us. Anti public school, since they can afford sending their kids to good private schools and will continue to whether or not we improve the public schools. Strange that Mitt Romney, a man who reinvented himself to run in a national election, seemed to be the darling of CPAC. When John McCain came to the podium to speak he was booed, even after the crowed had been asked not to boo—so much for Republican unity and polite behavior when covered by national news media. I’m quite happy to have McCain the Republican nominee. Whichever of the two Democrats running wins the nomination, they will make him look like the bad tempered, ill informed buffoon he has become, in any debate. It will be easy to piss him off, and it will be easy to discredit his support for the Bush/Chenney war and his desire to continue it for ….what did he say? A HUNDRED YEARS!!!! The only way we can continue the two wars we’re already fighting, and start new wars of aggression and occupation, is to reinstate the draft., and raise taxes on everyone. Our military is tapped out. We have sent our National Guard overseas in such numbers as to make us less safe at home. And in so doing, we have made service in our National Guard less attractive to millions of young Americans who want to serve our country at home, but now would be likely to be sent to fight in Iraq. All of this is bad news for America. But good news for the Democrats in this election season.

Vote

This is an exciting political season. And I’m an old political animal, passionately engaged and paying close attention. My plan was to vote for Hillary. I’m a life-long democrat, and a sixty three years old . I’m female. I’m a feminist, and I’m volunteering for Barack Obama. I don’t have children or grandchildren influencing this decision. I came to it slowly and it took the behavior of both candidates after the South Carolina Primary to galvanize me to take action and actively support Senator Obama. I have written a letter to the editor of my favorite local news paper. I write a daily political blog and I am calling folks on the phone, asking for their support but most importantly urging them to vote. Really the most important thing in a democracy is the right to vote. Give up that right, leave it to someone else to make the most important decision of you life, and you get the government you deserve. What’s worse, you’re stuck with it for at least four years. And very often that mistake can last eight years. And look what can happen in just eight years.

I love the Clintons. The Clinton years were some of the best of my life. But the rancor and divisiveness during the Clinton years was exhausting. It was the press and the very far right-wing side of the Republican party that kept the engine of vitriol cranking out mud to be slung everywhere. And Bill didn’t help much with his licentiousness and his inappropriate choice of on-the- side partners. So Hillary as our nominee will churn up all that hatred again. It is tiresome and boring. I do not want to go through that again. And as we all know, with the 24 hour cable news cycle, a rumor seems to be as good as the truth. Say it long enough and a lot of people are going to take it as the truth just because everybody’s saying it.

My second problem with Hillary is her vote on the resolution for the Iraq War. I have listened to every debate on both sides of the aisle and I have heard her tortured rationalizations for her vote several times. If the Clintons learned nothing else from their experiences in the White House, the one thing they should have learned is that we Americans can forgive a lot of bad behavior and wrong votes, but we can’t abide a liar. But if once the lie has been told we are pretty quick to forgive once an apology has been given. We seem to like to forgive. John Edwards knows us pretty well. He was quick to say he was wrong on that vote and he apologized for that vote. ‘Nuff said. On to other subjects. But Hillary keeps explaining as if that changes anything. We need an apology. That’s the bottom line.

Then there was the Primary in South Carolina. There were three things about that Primary that made me change my mind:
First there was the stunningly beautiful speech Senator Obama gave that night. It was so moving I sat on my bed as I watched and sobbed. I’m a tough old bird and it isn’t all that easy to move me to tears. But Barack can do it. He inspired me to write a letter to the editor of my local paper. A first for me. The second thing about that Primary was Senator Clinton’s boorish behavior toward Senator Obama. She didn’t have the courtesy to go to South Carolina, face her disappointed supporters, and deliver a graceful concession speech. She was campaigning in Tennessee (I think that’s where she was) and gave a graceless stump speech. Yes she did say “congratulations”, but that was about it. And unlike Senator Obama, who almost never uses the personal pronoun “I”, her stump speech was full of “I”. “I have the experience” “I will be ready from day one.” We yearn to be a united country again. We do not want anymore politics of polarization and divisiveness. We are sick of huge egos and it isn’t all about you. It’s all about us. But the final thing that made me volunteer to work for the Obama campaign was the demographics of that vote in South Carolina. I knew that the large African American population in South Carolina would give Barack a slight edge, but what I was unprepared for was the vote by young people. I have watched young people turn away from participation in electoral politics over the decades and worried about the fact that the old farts are choosing the leaders who will set policy and direction for a Nation that will soon be in the hands of those disaffected young people. It made me hopeful once again that we will be able to keep this country a democracy. It makes me proud of all of you young people. And so I join you to support the new leader of your generation. Yes we can.

Dear Hillary Clinton

Dear Hillary Clinton,
I have always admired you and your husband. I voted for Bill both times. Those were the best years of my life. For the first time, with a growing economy and a rising stock market, I was able to invest a little and watch my investment grow. I had hope that this path we were on would carry us on to another eight years of peace and prosperity under the leadership of Al Gore. And that we would be able to tackle the urgent problem of global warming under his administration. But one of the things that happened along that difficult path was divisiveness within the Democratic party. What stands out in my memory of the Primary season, and the campaign after the Primary was an absence of enthusiastic support for Vice President Gore’s candidacy by you and the former President Clinton. If you and Bill had whole-heartedly stumped for Al Gore, if you and Bill had called in all the favors, cashed out all your political chips, he could have won.

Within the first year of the G.W. Bush Presidency I cashed out my dwindling portfolio of stocks and hunkered down for what has been the most painful and depressing period in our Nation’s history during my lifetime. If Al Gore had won decisively, we would not have spent the last nearly eight years in a ruinous war of aggression, scared by the fear-mongers, made poorer by tax breaks for the richest among us and benefits cuts for the poorest among us: poor children, the disabled and the elderly living on small social security checks and medicare. Why didn’t you put the welfare of our Nation above the petty little problems you had with Vice president Gore? I have been wondering about this for almost eight very painful years. It seems like very small thinking to punish a nation for disagreements and disappointments that really amount to personal pettiness. We all had a right to be angry with President Bill Clinton when he risked so much to satisfy his hunger for a little strange sex with a young White House intern who will always be famous now for the dress she saved, for the words your husband uttered in front of this Nation, and those words now stand to remind us all that he lied to us. He lied to us over something most of us didn’t really care about. It wasn’t the sex. It was the lying. It was the standing there and saying “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” that fractured our country and polarized us even more. It gave traction to the Christian fundamentalists. It angered and galvanized the religious right-wing of both parties, so that people across this land voted against their own self-interest to protest what they thought was sinful and dishonest behavior by your husband. This put Vice President Gore in a tough spot, and I think you and Bill were petty not to understand his dilemma, not to get behind him, and help in whatever way you could to make his Presidency a reality. Frankly my dear, none of us gives a damn if Al’s disapproval pissed you off. It was up to you to rise above it, and to do whatever it took, even if that was entirely behind the scenes, to help him win the ‘02 election. This past eight years is what pettiness has given us. Now I’m asking you to do something that will require giving up your own personal ambition to be the first female American President, so we can have the first African American President.

I am 63 and female. I’m a feminist. I would love to see a woman President in my lifetime. I was a supporter of yours until the night the South Carolina Primary was decided in Senator Obama’s favor. I watched the results come in on CNN and was thrilled by the large turnout of young people. I listened to his victory speech and sat on the edge of my bed with tears streaming down my face because not once in his entire speech did he use the personal pronoun “I”, and I found myself whispering “Yes we can,” along with him, as I sat alone in my small house watching what I believe will be the seminal moment in our country’s history. But the real reason I switched my support that night from you to Barack Obama was your behavior after that Primary. I’ve known all along that Barack is an orator, a brilliant and inspirational speaker, but the absence of a gracious concession speech from you was heart-breaking. It was a real low-point in your campaign. I watched you in, where was it, Tennessee? Your speech was just a stump speech, just another stop along the way to Super- Tuesday. I listened to you say over and over “I can do this, I will be ready on day one, I, I, I.” It was graceless, it was rude. And in the end it was alienating.

I have watched in horror over the decades as young people have become cynical and disaffected by the political process. Fewer and fewer even registering to vote. They have tuned-out and stopped paying attention to anything politicians have to say. They believe you are all liars. But Barack has touched something in their collective consciousness that has ignited a flame of hope. Please, let’s keep that flame of hope alive. So in the spirit of unity, I’m begging you to do the right thing for our country. I’m asking you to go before the Nation and give a speech stating your support for Barack Obama. I’m asking you to step aside and throw all your mighty political power, all your connections, all your drive and passion into a unified campaign to make Barack Obama our next President of the United States. Please Senator Clinton, make history now. Make history in a way that will forever make you a hero with the young people who so passionately want change now. Help Barack end the war in Iraq. Help him unite a country that has not been this divided since the days of Richard Nixon and the waning days of the Vietnam War. Please help him restore trust and solvency and hope and integrity and generosity and a spirit of enthusiasm to this fractured land. We so need your help. We can not heal our tarnished reputation around the world without you help. But now, in this day in this time, we need a great and inspirational orator to speak for us. To make us proud of who we are, to give hope to other nations that we are not the bullies and thugs they see us as today. Please help us heal our Nation. Please support Barack Obama now. With your help, we can do all of this. Yes we can.

How Do We See Ourselves?

Identity is a complex process of often painful evolution. But we have developed an identity, as a culture, a nation in a world of other nations, as bullies and thugs. That is a big part of the Bush Legacy. Thank you Carl Rove, Thank you Vice President Chenney. Thank you Donald Rumsfeld. I could go on and on with the kudos, but if you’ve been paying the slightest attention over the past seven years, you know the cast of characters. Second raters, one and all. Mean and greedy. It’s hard for me to believe that these people all had reasonable credentials—good schools, a history of public service, business, law. What happened along the way that made them all so cynical and mean and greedy? What’s in it for them besides wealth? Is wealth enough of an incentive to work so hard to wreck a country?

We have a chance right now to stop this on-coming train-wreck. We are speeding toward a fascist dictatorship, willing to wage wars of aggression, willing to occupy other countries just like an old fashioned Colonial Empire. Is that how we want to see ourselves? Our decisions, our personal, private choices about this upcoming Presidential Primary are critical right now. If we choose not to vote we give up all our power as a people, as a nation, we are lost. If we vote mindlessly, out of habit for the party of our parents, we have abdicated our responsibility to think for ourselves. If we don’t listen to the debates on both sides of the aisle, we can’t vote intelligently. Do not let your Church or Parent or Spouse or cable news pundit tell you what to think about the important issues of this election season. Think for yourself, make your own decision, and then vote. For God’s sake VOTE. That is what Democracy is all about. If you don’t vote, do not doubt that someday you will loose the right to vote. And this will be a Democracy no more.

The Redemptive Power of Apology

In last night’s Democratic debate between Senator Obama and Senator Clinton (hardly a debate, more a very civilized and elegant discussion), the only thing that I can’t get out of my mind was the briar patch Hillary got into over her vote to give President Bush the authorization to declare war on Iraq. I remember the debates about that authorization. I remember her justification then, and it still doesn’t fly. When she cast her vote, I said aloud to myself, “Oh my God, we’re going to war!” I paced around my house saying it over and over. I’m not half as smart as Hillary Clinton, so how is it I knew we were going to march right into Baghdad? We all knew it. If we knew the consequences of that vote why didn’t she? Many of her colleagues read the classified intelligence reports on WMD, and Enriched Uranium, Terrorist ties to Bin Laden and voted “NO”. If no other Democrat had voted against the Authorization for War, we might buy her rational for that vote. But that wasn’t the case. It was a mistake. It was the biggest vote of her life. And we deserve to hear her say she’s sorry. Now, sadly, it may be too late.

Did Hillary Clinton learn nothing from the scandal surrounding her husband’s relationship with Monica? We are a forgiving people, and if a public figure confesses to making a mistake, especially a very public mistake, we are are pretty quick to forgive and forget. The reason the Lewinsky scandal still sticks in our collective craw, is the sentence, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” We don't like lying. I’m not Catholic, but it’s a pretty universal bit of wisdom that confession is good for the soul. None of us is perfect. Once Bill apologized, came clean with us, we were quick to forgive. His reputation and place in our hearts is secure. He has been rehabilitated, and we love him still. We all make mistakes. But it’s the trying to explain it away and rationalize a mistake, without ever admitting that what you did was a mistake, now that really pisses us off. It's often not the sinning that makes us so mad, it's the lying about it. It's the justifications we don't like.

John Edwards admitted his mistake, apologized and moved on. His lack of viability in this race has nothing to do with his vote on Iraq or his populist message. It is the super-star status of his rivals that is the problem for him. But super-star or not, we are waiting for Hillary to say, “I made a mistake to vote yes on that authorization, and not saying so early on, in the wake of how it all turned out, has just compounded the mistake.” Now we want interest on that political debt.

The Value of Political Theater

Today there were three performances of interesting and important political theater. First, this morning John Edwards withdrew from the Democratic race. He did this in New Orleans. John Edwards has a wonderful consistency in sticking to his message and giving that short, sweet speech in that still devastated city. He made his point about the two Americas. He made it in a place where that divide is apparent to all of us. And now he has the chips to change the outcome of the primary. That’s how close the race is on the Democratic side.

The second bit of theater was the endorsement of John McCain by Arnold Schwarzenegger, with Rudy Gullianni standing by as the sweating court jester. This act took place in a factory in California. If I recall correctly, this company makes solar collectors of some kind. But the locale was distinctly industrial. Very clean industry, and I’m happy to know that all our manufacturing hasn’t been outsourced to countries with cheaper labor and no regulation or restriction. But those three men seemed completely out of place. Dressed in their suits. They all spoke but said nothing memorable. What was memorable to me was the complete absence of eloquence or clarity of thought. It was all so mundane, so pedestrian, so uninspired.

But the third act was brilliant. It was the first Democratic debate with just Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. To me, a life-long Democrat, it was enormously satisfying to know that whichever of the two wins the nomination, we have profoundly attractive and intelligent candidates to choose between. And, clearly, either one of the two would be infinitely better for us as a nation, for us as actors on the world stage, than anyone the Republicans have to offer—which now looks like McCain or Romney. So, now is the time to really pay attention to what the players on this grand stage are saying.

Who gave the best performance? In my opinion Barack goes home with the award. And in my case that’s my vote Tuesday. What did he say that reenforced my inclination to support him? Nothing new really. It was what Hillary said that sent me further into the Obama camp. It was her attempt to justify and explain her initial vote on the Iraq War. She was wrong to vote for that folly, and there is no way to justify it, no way to explain it. I remember the day she voted to give George W. Bush the authorization to embark on a war of aggression against another country for no good reason—all rationale manufactured, all evidence trumped up and amplified and repeated. If she had taken the time to read the classified intelligence reports that were available and were read by colleagues of hers who voted against the resolution based on that information, she might have voted differently. But I remember the moment I knew we would be invading Iraq and what it would mean to us as a country, and it made me cry. It was the moment Hillary Clinton voted to allow George W. Bush to go to war. She has to apologize for that failure. It is her Achilles heel. She cannot get away with claiming not to know the consequences of her vote. I knew it the moment she voted.

The War On Meaning: Words Matter

Chris Matthews has always annoyed me, partly because he calls his show Hardball. Jeez, why all the pretense "power?" The Power Points? The Big Number? It just screams insecurity. It's so puffed-up and strutting. It all makes me think "someone's over-compensating for some real insecurity." I have found myself, lately, screaming at the TV, “Who gives a damn what you think—just give me the story. Stop trying to manufacture fear and confusion in the electorate. Tone back the bells and whistles, drop the volume on the graphics. But most of all stop talking over your guests.”

And now he’s making up words because actual words, real words that already exist, don’t quite do justice to his biases, his prejudices, his point of view. Last week, in reference to the dust-up between the Clintons and Barack Obama, Mr Matthews referred to the Clinton’s "strategery." I lost it for a minute. (I’m not a fan of the politics of divisiveness, so I’m tired of the Clinton’s now. I do have Clinton fatigue, finally, but it's primarily due to the press nastiness, the mean spirited tone of the coverage she gets). Don’t get me wrong, I want both Clintons engaged and working for unity, but Obama has ignited young voters and inspired them. So yes, it is time for a change. And words matter.

But "strategery" was a new wrinkle in the war of words, or should I say the war on words. What’s wrong with “strategy?” Why isn’t the correct word enough? I give a pass to new immigrants—English is a difficult language to master. And I love the creativity of anyone unfamiliar with a language and its limitations who makes up new words to fill in for the words in their native language that don’t exist in English. But a native speaker, especially one with a cable news show, ought to raise the level of discourse, not lower it.
It made me think we’ve all become infected with G.W Bush-mouth. Despite good educations, grown men act like total morons because every time they hear our current President speak he so mangles our common language that it’s now cool to talk like an idiot. Is that the Bush Legacy? The total dumbing-down of everyone? I’m longing for Chris Matthews to retire and Rachel Maddow or Eugene Robinson to replace him. It’s time for real change.

And all of this gets me to Barack Obama. I have never heard any politician (and that includes President Kennedy, the last great orator in the White House) use language more eloquently, more elegantly than Senator Obama. I long to hear him deliver his first State Of The Union address. He will lift us up with the eloquence of his words, he will inspire us to be better, smarter, nicer, more inventive and creative than we have become under the ugly brutality of the Bush administration and its total dumbness, its fear mongering, its give your millionaire friends a tax break kind of governance. Words matter. If you don’t think so, read The Constitution, read The Bill of Rights. It might remind you what we are losing every day we have republicans at the helm. Do you doubt it? Listen to the republicans closely. Do these old white men inspire you?

Bush's Greatest Hits

The State of the Union? Phone it in, why don’t you, Mr. President. It could have been any year since 2003. Yawn. Is he really that lazy and cynical? It is mind-boggling, the cognitive dissonance. The wise-cracking jokester smile. The folksy, country huckster, still trying to scare us with his warnings of Ballistic Missiles and Nukular Weapons and Enriching Uranium. He’s got the gestures down, by now he’s probably got the text memorized. Ignoring his own government’s intelligence report? It’s stunning! I’ve never seen such a robotic performance of George W. Bush playing George W. Bush playing President. Get a day job Mr. President. Or better yet, stay home. Take naps. Take this last year off, and go down to Crawford and clear some brush. Please? Now that you’ve got it going, the prairie schooner of state will roll down hill withoucha. Take Vice President Chenney with ya. You two ole boys can go on an extended huntin’ trip ‘round the state, shootin’ dove together. He He He.

Barack Obama

Tonight I watched the South Carolina Democratic Primary results. I was pretty sure Barack Obama would win in South Carolina. And why not. He is the first African American candidate who even has half a chance of going all the way to the White House. But in this particular election year, that’s all he needs. Half a chance. I think he’ll make it. I sure hope he will. And hope for change is the operative word here. He gives me hope. It’s been in short supply around here for a long time.

I have listened to all the political debates, both republican and democrat. I was raised by a feminist and life-long democrat who immigrated out of Texas in the late 1940’s to Salt Lake City, Utah. Strange place to find herself. She was always at odds with the culture here, but stayed, despite her alienation from the Mormons surrounding her. She was married to a man who probably suffered post-traumatic stress from his service in France at the end of World War II. When she married him, he had three sons ranging in age from five to fifteen. And when shortly after their marriage, he left her to go fight overseas, she was pregnant with me. And now she isn’t here to see, not just a woman running for President, but an African American man as well. She would have been overjoyed.

And so I feel all the emotion my mother would have felt in this season of hope. I listened to Senator Obama deliver one of the most eloquent and inspirational speeches I’ve heard any politician ever give. I sat and listened to Barack Obama speak tonight with tears streaming down my face. I found myself saying aloud, with the crowd gathered in the room with him, as I watched at home in front of a television set, “Yes We Can!” And I thought, Yes, we can restore our Bill of Rights! Yes, we can take care of all our citizens in times of trouble. Yes, we can end an ill-conceived, poorly planned, badly executed and economically ruinous war. Yes, we can take care of our veterans from this horrible war. Yes, we can unite a country that has been divided on issues of choice and faith, gender and sexual preference, care for the planet pitted against corporate greed. Yes we can.

What strikes me every time I listen to Senator Obama is his elegant and thoughtful use of language. What was conspicuously absent from his victory speech tonight was the personal pronoun “I.” He didn’t say, “I can do this.” He said, “We can do this.” Yes we can.

Young Lawyers

In late middle-age, tough, smart, competent, attractive, experienced in every way that counts, Hillary Clinton is poised to be the democratic nominee for President of the United States. She would be the first female President, if elected. That’s a big deal. She has been vetted by the most viciously partisan constant investigation of every aspect of her life, both public and private. She has been embarrassed on the biggest public stage in the world by her husband’s betrayal of her. And despite the fact that she did just what Christian women are urged to do from every corner of the land, and she stood by her man, the right-wing is still going after her in the same old way. She’s a woman who knows how to do what’s hard to do when it’s the right thing. And to tell you the truth, most people didn’t give a damn that Bill was a normal man whose dick seems to have a mind of it’s own. She forgave Bill, and so have most of us. Why can’t you right-wing white guys get over it? I’d posit, that as long as we elect men to be our Presidents, we’ll have plenty more extra-marital fornication to deal with in the future. We always did—but prior to Bill nobody had the bad-taste or hypocrisy to make anything of it.

No other First Lady in recent history has been so hostilely scrutinized. No other First Lady had her nerve, wit, and quick intelligence, all backed up by a first class education, and the right sort of experience as a hard working lawyer. And she pissed-off a lot of republicans with her self-confidence and her feminism and her smart mouth. Remember Newt, Ken Starr? She had the nerve to try to tackle the embarrassing problem of health care in America. And the republicans, along with the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, became apoplectic. Now, after having served quite successfully (and to my way of thinking, way too conservatively) she’s got the chops to run and win. Unfortunately, she’s running against another great democratic candidate, a smart, elegant, eloquent, handsome African-American man with good credentials. Who has stayed above the fray and seems unsullied by his career so far in the national political arena. And he offers us such beautiful words, so dashingly delivered we shiver and long to embrace his idealism, and, yes, the beauty of his delivery takes your breath away. It’s a little like falling in love. And that’s become the conventional wisdom if the pundits are to be believed. They say, “Democrats fall in love; republicans fall in line.” It’s a telling saying about the nature of the souls of each party, and the people therein. Or if you don’t believe in the soul of a party, how about the heart? And this year we democrats have an embarrassment of riches. I’d be happy with any of the three. Toss a coin. Really. Just don’t give the presidency back to the republicans, or we just might be in Iraq for a hundred years.

I heard Tucker Carlson say this week that Rudy would make a great President of Pakistan. Chris Matthews said John McCain claims not to understand economics, and we are in a steep downturn, and have been for quite awhile. Do we want him at the helm right now? At least he’d stop the torturing that makes us look so bad in the eyes of the rest of the civilized world. In fact, isn’t that one of the very things that makes a nation “civilized”— that it doesn’t engage in torturing? Rudy’s all for torturing. I’m not sure how Huckabee stands on torture, but he want’s to amend the constitution to reflect Christian biblical beliefs. I’m not Christian. My religious background is not grounded in the bible, old or new testament. So I’m not particularly excited about making this country a Christian theocracy. And when I watched one of the early republican debates, most of the candidates raised their hands when asked if they didn’t believe in evolution. If this is true, that these grown men don’t believe in evolution, the educational situation has been appalling for a long damn time. No wonder we’ve lost our edge when it comes to science and technology.

The thing that scares me most in watching the democrats right now is the sniping that Obama and Clinton are engaging in . And at the moment this sniping is a result of some unfortunate and slightly inflammatory words delivered by Senator Obama in praise of Ronald Reagan. It’s parsing and nit-picking and will be gone over with a fine-toothed comb, but it sounded to me like Senator Obama was giving Reagan credit for something I don’t think he deserved credit for. Great ideas, vision, some damn thing. Let’s leave it to the republicans to deify Reagan. It also sounded pretty disrespectful to Bill Clinton. It was, at the very least, dismissive. Then when Bill and Hillary objected to Obama’s comments, the tone got pretty snippy. And so, in the last democratic debate, Senator Clinton and Senator Obama started a pissing contest about who did worse things when they were each young lawyers. She represented Walmart. He represented a slumlord. I don’t know which is worse. They’re both pretty awful to me. But I’ll bet when you’re starting out as a young lawyer you have to hold your nose and take the work that comes your way. All in all, John Edwards is probably the candidate who has it all. He has a powerful message of Populist change, a health care plan, a plan to get us out of Iraq as fast as possible. I like him most for his concern for the poor and disadvantaged. But he’s just one more smart, good-looking white man, and running against two spectacularly good candidates who represent change just by virtue that they are not white men. This puts him at a big disadvantage.

This I do know. Hillary has already been gang-raped by the republican’s slime machine again and again and she’s still going strong. She might even have learned how to sling a little of it right back at ya. But Barack has not yet had that experience. He seems to be shaken by the meanness of the campaign so far. You ain’t seen nothin yet. He seems to think he can dance the light fantastic, high above the fray. And that won’t happen in the general election. They will drag him down and use every childish indiscretion, and despite the fact that he wrote a book and disclosed his youthful drug use, believe me, the republicans will make much of Obama’s past drug use once the real race to the White House has begun. It shouldn’t hurt him too much, since we all know W was a drunk and a cocaine user, but W had a daddy who’d been President and access to his momma’s money, and all those Skull and Bones connections, and he had Karl Rove (one of the nastiest men ever to run the country, never having served in any elected office.) I know, I know, Barak has his own brain. But those lying, cheating, criminal, well-connected S O B’s with their popular big-mouths Bill O’ and Rush would stop at nothing to find some imagined scandal that just might knee-cap the handsome young thing. And I have hoped too often, believed that young people would give a shit, and work to get out the vote amongst their peers—it hasn’t happened since the early sixties. I’m pretty sure Hillary is tough enough to take it. And like I said before, she’s ready. She has been there, she has done that. And I’m starting to get a kick out of watching the news on MSNBC so I can hear Chris Matthews worry about the "castration" factor. He just makes female viewers wince every time he says the word "shrill" in reference to Hillary’s voice, "cackle" when she’s seen laughing. He’s got a lot of nerve talking about anybody’s voice and laugh. She applauds her audience back. This drives him crazy. Chris advises her to appear softer, to seem more human, more feminine. But the second she shows her sweeter, softer side, he’s all over her for looking weak. All this does is make Mr. Matthews look insecure of his masculinity, all this does is make him look misogynistic. All this does is make us wish he’d move to Fox and let us have someone smart and half-way neutral take his place. Let’s have Rachel Maddow in his place. Rachel Maddow followed by Keith Olbermann on the air and a democrat in the White House. Now that’s a future I can look forward to.