Mood:  irritated

"We all know that crap is king, give us dirty laundry... "  - Glenn Frey

Remember when the New York Times was with the rest of the mainstream press in this country in their determination to shield Bill Clinton from charges of perjury - and there can be no doubt that he lied under oath, on the witness stand in court and during depositions outside of court - because the lies were about his private life?

Funny, isn't it?  That same New York Times, the celebrated "Gray Lady" of American journalism, has decided to throw away their high-minded concern about the privacy of what politicians do with their privates.

Specifically, they sat on a potentially inflammatory news item concerning the now-front runner to be Republican nominee for the Presidential election when it might have influenced many voters' decision to vote for another candidate (one who, like Mitt Romney or Fred Thompson, might have been much more electable in the general election) for several months - during which nothing seems to have changed to make the story more nor less newsworthy. 

Now, when the field of candidates has dropped to the social conservatives' clear favorite, Governor Mike Huckabee of Arkansas and the only remaining alternative, Senator John McCain, they drop this bomb - more of a damp firecracker, really - allegations by a disgruntled former employee of McCain's that he had an "improper" relationship with an undeniably attractive and much younger female lobbyist.

The Times claims that they only released this story to keep from being scooped on it by The New Republic.

Those of you reading this, tell me quick (I'm dead serious - leave a message on the blog here for me, if you would) - could you find a copy of The New Republic without going to the main branch of your public library if your life depended on it?   Do you even know the sort of news it specializes in, or what political slant it generally applies to the news that crosses its editor's desk?

Don't feel bad if you can't.  I wish I could say the same thing.

The New Republic, like The Nation, is a magazine catering to those who work in politics and government at the levels where serious amounts of your money are spent for things you wouldn't want it spent on (pictures of crucifixes in glasses of urine, that sort of thing).  It's a fan magazine for the Barack Obamas and Ted Kennedys of the world, a magazine almost completely insulated from reality.  They only stopped portraying Rudy Giuliani as Dracula with a Bronx accent after 9/11, when mayors with limited patience for the nanny state became necessary all of a sudden.

So the idea that the New York Times was concerned that they'd lose readers to The New Republic for any reason short of terrorists flying a 747 into their offices isn't even plausible enough to be a joke. 

The New York Times, folks, has been caught red-handed playing cheap politics with their front page.

They seem to have decided "We'll wait until McCain's real competition, Romney, Thompson, Giuliani, those guys, run out of money and drop out of the primaries, and when it comes down to a choice between McCain and someone who, being an ordained minister in an evangelical Christian sect, can serve as a spoiler against McCain - THEN we'll run this story."

Not bad political analysis - for Neanderthals.  The trouble with the Times' strategy is that no one in the Republican right seems to be buying it.

It's a lame charge, to begin with.   If there were anything to it, then yes, everyone who was lukewarm towards McCain from the start, but especially committed evangelicals with strong intellectual credentials like Hugh Hewitt would be fighting to see who could condemn McCain in public first.

But nothing about this story makes one bit of sense.  Rush Limbaugh, only recently come around to supporting McCain, has pronounced it transparent provocation, and I agree with him.   Washington is a small enough town that if Senator McCain were a skirt chaser, it would have gotten out long ago.  Witness the lack of success with which Ted Kennedy was able to conceal his fondness for being fellated under the table in the back room at Bullfeathers - he's only now living that reputation down after a decently long interval of marriage to a daughter of one of the more formidable political families of Louisiana.

So the story almost certainly won't have legs (even if those of the lady involved go clear up to Hudson Bay).  Why do it at all?

We'll find out eventually, but the most probable reason is that the New York Times has sold its journalistic virtue, once again, for a chance to make news rather than reporting it.

I never seriously thought that the NYT had made much headway since the days of Howell Raines and Jayson Blair.  The Jayson Blair episode was only a symptom of a disease which still afflicts the New York Times - the editorial board there cares more about the appearance of journalism than actually printing the news.  You just can't depend on what you read in that paper to be the truth - given the chance to turn heads and influence people rather than stick to reporting the facts, they go for misrepresentation and flashy rumor-mongering, every time.

How else do you explain people like Nicholas Kristof still being able to work there after being found out wrong about the facts of what they write for years and years?   It used to be that when a newspaper found out that one of their writers hadn't checked facts before going with a story, that would be it - pfffft, gone, outta there.   But Pinch Sulzberger seems to have devoted his life to tearing down what his predecessor built up over many years - credibility, even through a haze of political partisanship that from time to time made it hard to tell what was really going on.

Now, no one reads the New York Times to find out what is true - they go there for instructions on how to think.  About half of the people who vote in this country no longer care if their newspapers tell them the truth, as long as they help elect sleazeballs who will promise them unlimited benefits from someone else's pocket...  the Clintons and Obamas of the political spectrum.  Everyone else is fair game to be lied about and smeared.

The New York Times is selling her virtue for influence, just as the voters have, time and time again, sold their votes for money taken from other people's paychecks by the IRS at gunpoint.  P.J. O'Rourke described the process in the title of one of his books - A Parliament of Whores.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 12:03 AM MST

Updated: Monday, 25 February 2008 1:32 AM MST

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Mood:  celebratory

Pentagon confident satellite's toxic fuel destroyed according to the Cable News Network's Web site

"Pentagon officials said they think a Navy missile scored a direct hit on the fuel tank of an errant spy satellite late Wednesday, eliminating a toxic threat to people on Earth.

The USS Lake Erie launches a missile as the satellite travels over the Pacific Ocean.

"We have a high degree of confidence we got the tank," Marine Gen. James Cartwright said at a Pentagon briefing Thursday morning.

A fireball and a vapor cloud seen after the strike appeared to indicate the toxic hydrazine fuel had been destroyed, he said. The missile that struck the satellite did not carry an explosive warhead.

Cartwright also said the satellite seemed to be reduced to small pieces.

"Thus far, we see nothing larger than a football," he said.

The military was analyzing data from the strike to confirm that the tank was hit and that no larger pieces of debris escaped detection, Cartwright said.

The missile that struck the satellite was launched from the ballistic missile defense cruiser USS Lake Erie from the Pacific Ocean west of Hawaii at 10:26 p.m. ET Wednesday, the general said. Breakup of the satellite more than 130 miles above was confirmed 24 minutes later, Cartwright said."

___

 
So what?  Well. it means that in practical terms the dictator of Russia now has more to worry about than whether or not the Czechs and/or Poles allow us to set up an antimissile defense system in their countries.  Now every Aegis cruiser in the fleets of America and her allies (notably, Japan) can shoot down at least some orbiting targets.

There are lots of "Yes, but" remarks which can be made - we knew the complete orbital mechanics of the target (it belonged to us, after all), it wasn't capable of taking evasive action, and there weren't any penetration aids ("decoys") around the target to distract the SM-3 missile

But as an impromptu use of a weapon designed to kill aircraft and surface-to-air missiles in a much more ambitious role... IT KICKED ASS.

Just think what could be done with something built from the ground up as an antisatellite weapon...  I'm sure the foreign critics of our missile defense program are thinking about it - and chewing Maalox, or whatever it is that communist bad guys take for acid indigestion.

___

Why, precisely, would anyone object to our being able to shoot down items in orbit which threaten civilians on Earth?

I can't think of a legitimate reason for being against that.  I can think of plenty of reasons that other countries whose contingency plans depend on being able to hit the United States and her allies with ballistic missiles would hate this development.  

I have a two word-long response for anyone who's bothered by the fact that the US Navy's now able to kill orbital targets from its missile cruisers.   Those who know me can probably predict that the second word is "you," and what the first word is without even thinking hard.

The lives of our country's enemies just got much more complicated and nasty.   Good.

___

In related news, I'm watching a new V-22 Osprey (the "Thunderchicken")  show off its capabilities hauling air cargo out to the boonies in Afghanistan  on the Military Channel while I'm writing this article.  Freakin' splendid.

More bad news for the bad guys.  Keep it coming, folks.  We're behind you.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 2:17 PM MST

Updated: Thursday, 21 February 2008 2:39 PM MST

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Mood:  incredulous

Answer:  When it's committed against someone not in a "protected" group.

Example: Rude, hostile and threatening phone calls.  The last one was this afternoon, I have the phone number, have reported the call as a nuisance call with Qwest, and I have the subscriber's name.

Example: One of the lawn sprinklers on our front lawn was mangled, the little rocket scientist next door as much as admitted to doing it (after spending most of the preceding week stirring up racist hate speech directed at our home - we're one of the few caucasian families in the area, and since we stopped paying the kid who's stirring up all the trouble NOT to do our lawn work, we've been getting... well, it's extortion.  If you don't pay the kid, you get fireworks set off in your enclosed garage, you get gangs of the little bastards screaming in front of your home, your car gets keyed... just high-spirited fun, according to the local police department.

30 million people are in this country illegally.  What happens when they are the majority in a neighborhood?   Everything that the people who insist the law be enforced are accused of.

I have so much of this activity on video and audio tape, it's incredible.  Eventually someone will be interested.   I am not going to be driven out of a place where I have a legal right to be.    I think that it's about time that the people who are trying to run honest, law-abiding citizens out of the area are investigated.   I'd bet that at least some of these people don't belong here - in the sense that they are illegal immigrants, people who stole the rights that the rest of us have by right or because they went through the proper steps to become US citizens.

I have no problems with Hispanics or anyone else because of their race, religion or creed.  

I have BIG problems with little sneaks who make trouble for hardworking people because they won't pay protection money.   When you pay a malignant, lying little shit money to keep your yard up, and he won't - and when you stop paying him (partly because we over-heard him bragging to his friends about the way he abuses our attempts to be friendly), then the petty crimes start ramping up - and the police do nothing but "talk" to the perpetrators - that's an extortion racket.   I don't care WHO does it - it's extortion.   And when the cops won't enforce the law against extortion, that's corruption, malfeasance and a violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1965.

That's what our contemptible coward of a President wants to happen more and more.   He wants people like this to have a "path to citizenship."  I want them to have one-way bus tickets to wherever they come from.  And I want them in jail when they come back after having been sent home.   And after their jail terms expire, I want them shipped back to the country they came from.

We already had crooks here twenty years ago.  We don't need more crooks.   We need to send the new crooks back where they come from.

Want to read more stuff about our new "guests," the ones that George Spineless W. Bush wants to have a "path to citizenship?"

http://www.nicedoggie.net/2006/?p=1056 has stories to make your blood boil.  

So does 

And this is proof that we're not just enforcing the law against south-of-the-border criminals - the border cops and Customs just nailed three Canadians who had dug a tunnel under our border to smuggle marijuana in to the US.  Works for me.   Crooks are crooks, no matter where they're from.  Bust 'em all.   Better yet, flood the tunnel while the perpetrators are in it. 

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 9:52 PM MST

Updated: Monday, 25 February 2008 12:50 AM MST

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unabashedly borrowed from infidelsarecool.com 

 http://infidelsarecool.com/2007/02/14/the-eve-of-world-war-iii/

The Eve of World War III

Meir Amit, former Mossad Chief, and one of the highest respected intelligence officials in Israel says that we are on the eve of WWIII:

While the former Mossad chief did not call for a military strike against Iran, Amit said he foresees a war in the region in the future.

He said global civilization is on the verge of “World War III,” a massive conflict in which the Islamic world is attempting to impose its ideology on Western nations.

“I am worried about a regional war, but also we need to look at the bigger picture and see that Islam is fighting western world and not only Israel. Look at the terror in Spain, France, London, the U.S.,” said Amit.

“I call it World War III. You must look at it from this angle and treat it wider, not as a problem of terrorism here and there. The war is not being waged just by Iran and in Iraq, it’s being launched by Muslims all over the world,” said Amit.

Amit referenced recent terror attacks against Israel, Europe and the United States; Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions; the insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan; and recent worldwide Muslim riots.

“It looks to me like it is a kind of coordinated or contemplated problem to somehow impose the Islamic idea all over the world,” Amit said.

Amit urged Western nations to “unite and work together. Unfortunately, the world is not uniting. Russia is playing its own game, and so is China.”

___ 

It's not just me thinking this, folks. 

You can say "the clouds are gathering,"

you can do a Barry McGuire and sing off-key about "The Eve of Destruction,"

you can compare what's happening now to the headlines of 1938 to 1940 -

the one thing you can't do is deny that a war's about to happen. 

The headlines haven't been this ominous since 1983, when Yuri Andropov (projecting his own warlike tendencies on President Reagan) pushed the world to the very edge of nuclear war by deciding that if he were us, he'd be getting ready to fight a nuclear war.   Meanwhile, we had the absurd spectacle of John Kerry (lieutenant-governor of Massachusetts at the time) forbidding his fellow citizens of Massachusetts to prepare for World War III - I guess he wanted to make sure the side he was rooting for won.

Now we have one of Andropov's protegés, Vladimir Putin, talking just like a parody of a bellicose, blustering moron, er, Kruschchev as he turns his country into a one-party dictatorship, and no one in the White House or the mainstream press seems to be taking notice.  At least he's done away with the pretense that Russia was going to even try to conform to any of the arms control treaties they've signed.  

The significant thing to me is the degree to which our missile defense program has enraged Putin.   I was under the impression that we and the Russians had agreed not to target each other's territory with nuclear weapons back in the 1990s - that's what the Clintons were going around telling everyone, after all - but now that we've actually acquired the means to physically blunt a surprise nuclear attack, Putin is responding with anger and surprise!  Why?  If he wasn't targeting us, why is it so important to him that we leave ourselves open to a surprise nuclear attack?

The only answer that comes close to making sense is that Russia had intended all along to continue targeting us in fact - it takes from minutes to just under an hour to re-install the targeting data in our countries' fleets of ICBMs, and Putin's anger at not being able to steal a march on us can only mean that a surprise nuclear attack has continued to be the cornerstone of Russian nuclear strategy all along.  

Whether we realized it or not, Clinton allowed us to be deceived all this time, disassembling our Peacekeeper missiles and embarking on a continuing effort to disarm our nuclear-armed cruise missiles under the assumption that the Russians were doing the same thing.  Well, guess what?   All this time, we've remained on their nuclear target list for all intents and purposes.   

If history is any indication, the next step will be for the close relationship between Russia and Iran to gel into another Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, at which time even the pretense that the Iranians aren't being outfitted top-to-bottom with a complete suite of nuclear offensive weapons and delivery systems will go by the wayside.  All because we, as a species, don't like to study history, so we must repeat the less pleasant parts of it from time to time.

Why don't we ever learn? 

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 4:51 PM MST

Updated: Thursday, 14 February 2008 4:55 PM MST

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Mood:  incredulous

In his James Bond novel "Dr. No," Ian Fleming once wrote:

"Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. 

Over the past two weeks, undersea Internet and telephone cables have been cut.  Five times in two weeks. 

Why?

What's in the works this time?  You don't go to all the trouble to pull telephone cables off the bottom of the ocean and cut it for no reason.  So whoever's doing this HAS a reason.  It can't be a good one for us. 

Just another news item you don't get from Katie Couric. 

___

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 9:55 AM MST

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Watching a documentary on Pearl Harbor on the History Channel ("The Real Story of Pearl Harbor"), I heard the following words and a chill went up my spine:

"Conspiracy?   Don't believe it.  No truth to it, no fact can be found.  And more importantly, more than enough warning came to the commanders here in the Pacific, for them to be more prepared than they were.

The American people bear some responsibility for knowing that war was on the horizon on both the European and Asian continents to think they could get away with doing nothing.  So everyone is responsible."

- John DeVirgilio, Hawaii Director, Pearl Harbor History Association

What are we thinking now?  

- We've already suffered a sneak attack on our nation's largest city as well as on the capital city of our country that has cost more lives than the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor;

- We're already at war in two countries, trying to prevent them from being used as bases for terrorist attacks against us.  Regardless of the weapons of mass destruction issue, no serious dispute is possible that Al-Qaeda was active in both countries before and after we invaded them (and it is still very much plausible that the Iraqi WMD were sent over the border into Syria before we invaded);

- People who claim to speak for a billion Muslims are declaring that they intend to conquer us and kill us if we do not submit to their will, and soon they will have nuclear weapons at their disposal, if they do not already have them;

- We have the virtual dictator of Russia making unwarranted threats to us and our allies in Europe, as have military officials in North Korea and China;

- Venezuela has become a dictatorship and is using its oil wealth to partner with Cuba to foment revolution throughout Latin America;

and yet we are not behaving like a country at war.   

I have lost a son in combat, one of about 4,000 troops who have died in the War on Terror, and yet we are not making even remotely adequate preparations in case the world situation degenerates further and we must engage one or more of the dictatorships which threaten us daily:

- no resumption of the military draft;

- we have yet to replace our fleet of forty-year old F-15 fighter planes even though one of them recently broke in half during an abrupt turn (the pilot was able to parachute to safety but it was close),

UPDATE - According to the US Defense Department, two more F-15 fighters were just lost when they crashed into each other for reasons not yet determined (but probably at least in part due to the fact that they are OLD AIRCRAFT); 

- and we have bargained away a large part of our nuclear deterrent force in a treaty with Russia, a country that has yet not to break an arms control treaty that it possibly could have with us.  They swore solemnly not to make biological weapons in the early 1970s - and that's exactly when they began making tons of the worst biological weapons ever made!  They kept doing it for twenty years!  They filled some of their ICBMs with weaponized smallpox and plague and aimed them at us and at our allies in Western Europe (what's really funny, in a sick way, is that Gorbachev - the Nobel Peace Prize winner - ordered that last war crime done).

--- 

We have been foolish. 

In our rush to collect a "peace dividend" in the 1990s, we have become weak enough to invite military attacks that would have been inconceivable just ten years earlier.  

Every single time we have begun to take our military apart, a Hitler, a Tojo, a Stalin, a Khrushchev, a Khomeini, a bin Laden took advantage of it.  

And there is no shortage at all of more people to follow them - people named Ahmadinejhad, Chavez, Kim Jong-Il, Putin....

The sorry truth is that we are woefully underprepared if the current situation should degenerate into another world war.   

We now face a new enemy alliance, the Shanghai Cooperation Conference, which poses a worse potential danger to us than the Axis did in World War II or the Central powers in World War I - in fact, it may be the worst danger the world has ever faced.

Two of the major partners in the Shanghai Conference, Russia and China, have large arsenals of nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons on other delivery systems.  Both countries still have active biological warfare research programs as well - they promised to stop making bioweapons, but we know how that works, from recent history.

The virtual dictator of one of those powers, Vladimir Putin, has yet to pass a month without making either open or veiled threats aimed at us or our allies, while providing the terrorist regime in Iran with nuclear technology that will allow them to threaten us with nuclear weapons as well.

In this year's Presidential election, should we vote for the party that took our military apart after World War II, just in time for the Korean War, and after Vietnam, just in time for Iran to take our embassy staff hostage... and after the end of the Cold War, just in time for Osama bin Laden and the fanatics of Saudi Arabia to send terrorists crashing airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?

As many mistakes as George W. Bush has made, he did not disassemble our military - that was the work of Bill Clinton, partly on the advice of his wife.   Think she'd be a good choice to lead our country into a potential world war?  A manipulative, possibly unstable liar?

How about Obama?  As impressive as he seems to be - he seems to be a good guy, well read -  how well do you think he'd hold up if things really got bad?

John McCain has weaknesses, but also many crucial strengths.  One of them is that he has served and bled for his country in Vietnam.  Senator McCain is by far the best choice we have from the available alternatives to be the next President of the United States of America.  He has personal integrity and the other leaders of the world know better than to provoke him unnecessarily.  He also has shown undeniable leadership in the United States Senate for years.

John McCain should be our next President.  Any other choice would be disastrous. 

We're heading into a large war in the coming years and we need to be serious about preparing for it - we can't wish it away.  It's time for hard choices. 

It may be too late to stop the death of our country - but we can at least die on our feet.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 11:20 AM MST

Updated: Friday, 22 February 2008 12:27 AM MST

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Mood:  incredulous

The man on the right of the picture (courtesy of the Weekly Standard) is Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. 

Mr. Chavez doesn't like America or Americans.  He has boasted that his control over the oil under Venezuela gives him power over us.  Indeed, if you buy your gasoline from a Citgo filling station, the deal is ultimately with Chavez. 

Chavez is also tight with Fidel Castro and the leader of Iran, the one who has talked about "sharing" nuclear technology with Chavez.

Mr. Chavez has also been spending immense amounts of his country's oil money supporting violent guerilla fighters in Latin America and buying weapons from Iran and Russia.  Under his leadership, Venezuela has begun the process of joining a military and political alliance with China, Russia, some of the former Soviet states around the Caspian Sea and Iran.  The common motive of this alliance is anti-Americanism.

__

The other guy in the picture is Larry Glover.  While he's done movies on his own, he is mainly famous as Mel Gibson's sidekick in the "Lethal Weapon" movies, and more recently, the "Saw" series of movies.  To be fair, he did put in a decent job of acting in "Flight of the Intruder," but that's about it.

Mr. Chavez has given Mr. Glover twenty million dollars to make some movies.   One will be about famous South American revolutionist Simon Bolivar, arguably a great man; the other will be about Haitian rebel Toussaint L'Overture, arguably a butcher and a the man who cost Haiti a chance to be a reasonably prosperous, reasonably well-governed nation. 

Given Chavez's own willingness to spill the blood of those incautious enough to disagree with him in public and to buy the votes of his countrymen with other people's money taken at gunpoint, it's a good bet that Glover's film about Toussaint L'Overture will give us a side of that man that has not only not been seen before but may never have existed at all.

Glover has telegraphed his leftist sympathies in the past by political messages left in the kitchen fridge of his character Murtagh's house in the Lethal Weapon movies, and voiced them more explicitly among friends in the Hollywood left.

Since Danny Glover has a job as a propagandist for a declared enemy of the United States, he doesn't need our business any longer. 

Those of you who are not looking forward to losing relatives, sons, daughters and spouses in the war that Mr. Chavez has announced he will someday welcome with our country should think very, very hard about whether Glover needs any more of OUR money, now that he has so much from the dictator of Venezuela.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 3:25 AM MST

Updated: Monday, 11 February 2008 8:19 AM MST

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There's a minority group out there which really needs us to reach out to them and give them every sort of help we can! 

We need to show more sympathy for these people. 
* They travel miles in the heat. 
* They risk their lives crossing a border. 
* They don't get paid enough by a long shot. 
* They do jobs that others won't do or are afraid to do. 
* They live in crowded conditions among a people who speak a different language. 
* They rarely see their families, and they face adversity all day, every day. 

I'm not talking about illegal immigrants; 
I'm talking about our troops in combat zones all over the world! 

Strange, isn't it, that so many Congressmen and Senators from both major parties AND our President are willing to lavish all kinds of social benefits on illegals, but don't support our troops - and what's more, the leaders of Congress in both houses are now threatening to defund them?

 
Could this just maybe have something to do with the millions of dollars being spread around Capitol Hill by 1,700 members of CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations)? 

So much money spent by so few people... where's it all coming from?   Are the people gouging us for oil using the money they take from us at the gas pump to control our political process?

____________________________
 

This November we need to remember this problem - and FIX IT by pulling the right levers in the voting booth.  We need to be honest enough to admit we screwed up in 2006 and undo the damage - send the slick-talking politicians who take oil money to destroy our country back where they came from and elect people who care about our country!   We have a war to win and a country to save - let's get on the stick!!!

 
Please pass this on; this is worth more than the short time it takes to read it

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 11:39 AM MST

Updated: Tuesday, 15 January 2008 10:39 PM MST

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I just read an essay by Dennis Prager which comes very close to saying what I have thought for a long, long time. 

Perhaps it doesn't go far enough - Barack Obama by no means has a monopoly on the sort of mealy-mouthed arrogance that allows him to assume that we should naturally unite behind HIM.   Pat Robertson had an even larger dose of "I love Me-ism" during HIS Presidential campaign, and Huckabee's self-love is both strong and apparently sincere, as is John McCain's, Al Gore's, Rudy Giuliani's and (of course) Hillary Clinton's. 

It's been said half jokingly before, but I am strongly of the opinion that the only person fit to be President of the United States is someone who has to be dragged kicking and screaming into the office, and who will demand as part of the deal that he gets to only serve one term for good behavior. 

When you consider the crap that someone has to go through to be elected President of the United States of America, the natural assumption is that anyone who WILLINGLY goes through enough of it to actually be elected is either a crook or one of those unfortunates who pays women lots of money to tie him up and beat him with whips during his off time.

But the scary, scary thing is that the process of running for President is such a nail-pulling pain that the winner of a Presidential election logically must be a control freak of such immense and frightening proportions that he or she NEEDS to have the country all thinking his or her thoughts, surrendering their will to him or her, abdicating what is supposed to be the sovereign status of the American citizen to their newly elected Chief Executive.  

It actually makes sense that after a full Presidential campaign, the winner of the election becomes the kind of self-infatuated psycho which Martin Sheen played so adroitly for two "terms" of the TV series "The West Wing."  After all the talking out of both sides of one's mouth, the surrender of one's integrity to the siren call of the smoky back room, the immolation of one's family life on the altar of political primacy, perhaps Presidents feel as though we should all line up and smooch their fat behinds.

And nothing convinces me more that perhaps it's time we ditched our two-party, directly-elected Presidential system in favor of Parliamentary rule as Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand know it.  They're not perfect by any means, either, but the illusion that one party has all the answers and it makes sense to directly elect a leader based on the amount of crap he or she can throw against the wall and make stick under which we presently suffer is just no good. 

No one man or woman has a vision that is valid for three hundred-plus million people.  It's time we tried to create a system in which the leader rises to the top from LISTENING to the voters, not by TALKING to them incessantly - and often saying contradictory things from one day to the next.  In Britain, no one party has a firm enough lock on power to be able to effectively ignore the voters, the way both major parties are able to here in America (as long as they keep the extremist party faithful happy at convention time).

But let's read what Prager has to say: 

________________________________________ 

"Obama's calls for unity are not what they seem

Dennis Prager

We are repeatedly told by the news media that there is a deep, almost
palpable, yearning among Americans for unity. And Sen. Barack Obama's
repeated and eloquent claims to being able to unite Americans are a major
reason for his present, and very possibly eventual, success in his quest for
his party's nomination for president of the United States.
I do not doubt Mr. Obama's sincerity. The wish that all people be united is
an elemental human desire. But there are two major problems with it. First,
it is not truly honest. Second, it is childish.

First is its dishonesty. Virtually all calls for unity - whether national,
international or religious (as in calls for Christian unity) - do not tell
the whole truth.

If those who call for unity told the whole truth, this is what they would
say: "I want everyone to unite - behind my values. I want everyone who
disagrees with me to change the way they think so that we can all be united.

I myself have no plans to change my positions on any important issues in
order to achieve this unity. So in order to achieve it, I assume that all of
you who differ with me will change your views and values and embrace mine."

Take any important issue that divides Americans and explain exactly how
unity can be achieved without one of the two sides giving up its values and
embracing the other side's values.

Barack Obama wants American troops out of Iraq now. About half of America believes that American troops abandoning Iraq will lead to making that country the world's center of terror and to the greatest victory thus far
for the greatest organized evil in the world today. How, then, will Mr.
Obama achieve unity on Iraq?

Mr. Obama believes in repealing the tax cuts enacted by the Bush
administration. How will he achieve unity on that? Many of us believe that
re-raising taxes will bring on a recession.

And what is the "unity" position on same-sex marriage? Either one supports it or one supports keeping marriage defined as the legal union of a man and a woman. The only way to unite Americans on this issue - and I don't know what is more seminal to civilization than its definition of marriage - is to convince all, or at least most, Americans to embrace one of the two positions.

It is fascinating how little introspection Sen. Obama's "unity" supporters
engage in - they are usually the very people who most forcefully advocate
multiculturalism, who scoff at the idea of an American melting pot and who
oppose something as basic to American unity as declaring English the
country's national language.

Their advocacy of multiculturalism and opposition to declaring English the
national language are proof that the calls of the left-wing supporters of
Barack Obama for American unity are one or more of three things: 1. A call
for all Americans to agree with them and become fellow leftists. 2. A
nice-sounding cover for their left-wing policies. 3. A way to further their
demonizing of the Bush administration as "divisive."

In case the reader should dismiss these observations about calls for unity
as political partisanship, let me make clear that they are equally
applicable to calls for religious unity. For example, one regularly hears
calls by many Christians for Christian unity. But how exactly will this be
achieved? Will Catholics stop believing in their catechism and embrace
Protestant theology, or will Protestants begin to regard the pope Christ's
vicar on earth?

Ironically, one reason America became the freest country in the world was
thanks to its being founded by disunited Christians - all those Protestant
denominations had to figure out a way to live together and make a nation.

Given what Sen. Obama's calls for unity really mean - let's all go left - it
is no wonder he and his calls for unity are enthusiastically embraced by the
liberal media.

For nearly eight years the media and Democrats have labeled President Bush's policies "divisive" simply because they don't agree with them. They are not one whit more divisive than Sen. Obama's positions. A question for
Democrats, the media and other Obama supporters: How exactly are Mr. Obama's left-wing political positions any less "divisive" than President Bush's right-wing positions?

Second, the craving for unity is frequently childish. As we mature we
understand that decent people will differ politically and theologically. The
mature yearn for unity only on a handful of fundamental values, such as: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Beyond such basics, we yearn for civil discourse and tolerance, not unity.

The next time Sen. Obama speaks with his usual passion and eloquence about his desire to unite Americans, someone must ask him two questions: Why are your left-wing positions any less divisive than President Bush's right-wing positions? And if you are so committed to uniting Americans, why did you vote against declaring English our national, i.e., our unifying, language?  Without compelling answers, Sen. Obama's calls for American unity are no more than calls to unite around his politics and him."

__________________

The only point where I disagree with Mr. Prager is, as I said earlier, that Barack Obama isn't the only man in the Presidential race playing this game - they all do to some extent or another.   Huckabee may actually be worse about it than Obama is.  

And if our choice boils down to a self-infatuated left-wing pseudointellectual populist or a self-infatuated right-wing chiliast back room deal cutter who turns dope pushers and rapists loose if they thump their Bibles convincingly enough, that's a dismal choice indeed. 

I first threatened to emigrate to another country if Jimmy Carter were elected, and of course, I didn't put my walking shoes where my mouth was when it came down to hard cases.  But I'm actually practicing ending my sentences with "eh?" now and sampling Molsons (the alcohol-free kind because my liver won't put up with the real thing anymore).  All it'll take is for either of those yo-yo's, or Clinton (please, God, no, not her!) to be elected President.

I guess that I support Fred Dalton Thompson above all the others because he's already demonstrated in the US Senate when he served there between stints in Hollywood that he knows how to listen and how to seek compromises.  If any of the current crop of candidates knows how to listen more than he talks, it's probably Fred Thompson.  He certainly seems to view the office of the Presidency as more of a job and less of a personal entitlement.

Besides, the last time we went with a movie actor as President, it didn't turn out very badly at all.  Won the Cold War, cured the national case of mullygrubs we contracted from Mr. Peanut - yep, going over to the Screen Actors Guild for a President (again) isn't the worst thing we could do by a long shot.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 3:10 AM MST

Updated: Sunday, 10 February 2008 11:30 AM MST

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