Impeaching Bush and Cheney Can't Happen, Alas

So far I have resisted efforts to get me to support impeaching G.W. Bush and Richard Cheney, though I detest both men and think them criminals who lied with intent to hoodwink Congress and the people and military leaders to support going to war in Iraq.

This Congress, controlled by Democrats, will not impeach the president and vice president for a simple reason: Democrats do not have the necessary votes in the Senate, where they have only a one-vote majority. It takes a two-thirds vote of the Senate to remove a president or vice president once the House has impeached.

Even if the Democrats had enough members to kick Bush and Cheney back into private life, that would not occur because that would topsy-turvy next year’s presidential election, for which four Democratic senators are running: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Christopher Dodd.

Booting Bush and Cheney from office by law would make Nancy Pelosi, as speaker of the House, the acting president of the U.S. and therefore the leading Democratic candidate if she wanted for election as president next year.

Pelosi would find it hard to resist running to make the job hers for another four years. Democrats would find it hard to resist her running.

So Clinton, Obama, Biden and Dodd would be fools now to vote to sweep Bush and Cheney out into the gutter in which they belong.

It ain’t going to happen, alas. There’s no point in fussing and burning hormones trying to make it happen this year or next. A waste of time and energy.

Silly or Stupid for President?

The leading Democratic presidential candidates these days look silly. The Republican leaders look stupid.

In the United States it’s better to appear stupid than silly. Americans look upon being silly as repulsive self-indulgence springing from reading books and going to the ballet. They look upon being stupid as the common lot that hard work (not to mention money) can overcome. Witness the ascendency of G. W. Bush, a rich boy of small intellectual capacities. By assiduously kissing rumps of rich reactionaries Bush went from one soft job to another until he arose one day to find he was President of the United States–the “decider,” as he likes to say.

Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards all ooze education and sophistication while they natter over which of them has devised a better health plan to seek for the unwashed. Their nattering gets the coverage from reporters bored with what has become an endless campaign. Their health plans get ignored because they sound like same complicated contraptions torturing the millions of Americans who endure them in the absence of something better–universal health care–yes, what fat-cat Republicans call socialized medicine. Socialized medicine is the health coverage enjoyed by the president, members of congress and high-ranking federal officials that all of us should have.

For the Republicans Mitt Romney, who has changed political positions more times than he has changed his shorts, can’t remember what he said about not having Muslims in his cabinet. As a Mormon he's up on religious tolerance. Rudolph Giuliani says he’d have no qualms about nuking Iranians who refuse to knuckle to Uncle Sam. As new slaughters douse Baghdad and environs in blood, John McCain creaks about telling New Hampshire hicks that a new day of peace and quiet and democracy dawns over Iraq.

The future leader of the Free World romps among these six? My goodness.

Saudi Civilization: Barbarism Slicked With Oil

We Americans, especially we Republican Americans, will tolerate any evil if it produces oil that we may purchase at any price to calm our petroleum addiction.

Witness the Saudi regime of immensely rich barbarians, a family of male tyrants who pour incredible amounts of dollars into financing Islamic schools that teach that the Americans incarnate the devil and need to be destroyed.

A gang rapes a woman and her male companion. She complains. The rapers go to prison, admittedly no fun house in Saudi Arabia, first for five years, now raised to 10.

The woman, what does she get? She gets sentenced to 90 lashes of a whip against her bare body for being in a car with a man not her relative. She appeals. Big mistake. Because of the appeal, she receives a new sentence: 200 lashes and six months in prison.

Her companion keeps his mouth shut and takes his 90 lashes, which is usually enough to maim and in some cases, kill.

There’s no report yet on the raped woman, whether she’s survived the whipping, handed out under the crude brand of Islam the Saudi potentates personify.

Now the government claims the woman had an affair with her companion, confessed to it. Big surprise, confessing under torture. That, says the royal family, justifies the punishments she’s received.

George W. Bush holds hands with these rich savages, literally. The White House says it is “astonished” by the sentence inflicted on the raped woman. My, oh, my, I bet that makes the playboy Saudis quiver.

Walking the Walk in Baghdad

Sen. John McCain hit the tubes today to brag that he is the only presidential candidate touting the U.S. military build-up in Iraq as a good thing and now, says he, as a successful effort.

Until the presidential bug bit him, McCain seemed like a reasonable conservative–that is, for every good idea he tootled (reigning in campaign contributions and pointing out that TV preachers are generally con men), he snuggled up with the usual right-wing nonsensicals (against abortion, against tax reform, love those military build ups, let every citizen carry a gat).

Now he’s foot-kissing the evangelicals for votes and declaring that our army has Iraq coming into control.

McCain has to know better. There’s one test of whether Baghdad, for instance, has returned to sweetness and light. It is whether McCain or any other American, much less any other American politician, can hop off a plane at Baghdad International, grab a cab and walk around any Baghdad souk by himself.

Small chance of that. The Iraqis of whatever side would blow his brains out in a minute, or kidnap such a fool and cut his head off for a video lead-in for an a terrorist commercial.

If McCain truly thinks our pouring of 10s of thousands more troops into Iraq has poured molasses upon the fevered souls there, he should prove it: Go take a walk there without any Army or mercenary escorts, to shop for artifacts looted from the museums. And take Vice President Dick Cheney and the meathead in the White House with him.

The Nuclear Dole

I am spending Thanksgiving in Richland, WA, the bedroom community for the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, the most-polluted nuclear site in the United States and one of the worst in the world.

Richland now sprawls into its neighboring town on the Columbia River, Kennewick. The river separates Kennewick from the ville of Pasco, once a sleepy farm town and county center and now a transportation hub and also depot for the cocaine, heroin and meth trades.

Together the three towns make up the Tri-Cities, which have annexed all the nearby sagebrush steppes and riverbanks and hills. Giant houses mushroom the terrain, with the greatest and most ugly, per the rule of the rich, fungising the hilltops and waterfront. The whole area booms with population and has, with the exception of some of the older neighborhoods in the town, all of the charm of a monstrous strip mall.

Hanford hasn’t produced much in the way of nuclear materials in decades. A couple of plants generate electricity.

Pollution–the federally financed effort to neutralize some truly dangerous nuclear remains and accompanying nasty chemical baths–drives the economy and the population boom.

The cleanup so far has generated, aside from vast of handouts of money from the U.S. Treasury, far more errors, delays, mistakes and petty frauds than riddance of bad stuff with half lives reaching into the oncoming eons.

It doesn’t seem to make much difference in accomplishments whether a Democrat sits in the Oval Office or a Republican: The U.S. Department of Energy can withstand any effort to make it smart, capable and efficient.

I used to live in Richland and served a few years on its city council. The voters gave me my freedom because I said yes to a motion to fluoridate the water. I still love the area, especially the great river, and delight with my wife Sonjia in visiting dear friends, Rich and Wanda Steele.

Beyond that, Richland and environs provides the entertainments to mind and soul that come from seeing the power of the federal dollar at work, providing many with high-paying jobs that even if they don’t accomplish much do help to sustain a burgeoning economy for many others.

Richland’s many, many highly educated engineers and other professionals consistently vote Republican and, with a few exceptions that keep the Democratic Party breathing here, argue that federal taxes are too high and too many federal dollars provide welfare for ne’er-do-wells without college degrees.

Plainly, the money must go instead in large doles to Hanford and like projects to keep nuclear, chemical and other engineers and professionals in beefsteak and vino and provide enough extra spending money to allow for contributions to the Republican Party.

Yes, the cleanup must go on. But will it ever come to fruition? Then what?
Hanford shut down? All these lucrative jobs lost? Tumbleweed rolling down shuttered streets?

I know better. The federal tit will come up with new milk. Don’t want to put an army of conservatives out the streets pushing grocery carts, after all: Too cruel. They might want welfare.

Capitalism and Other Superstitions Foster Global Suicide

A strong, effective and perhaps dictatorial world government will solve or stem from global warming, if homo sapiens are to survive the oncoming catastrophe.

No guarantee exists that we savage bipeds will live through the droughts, hurricanes, floods, swamping of seashores, death of existing agricultural areas that under the present system of governments we force on ourselves. Someday traveling intelligences from other worlds in the universe may dig up our skeletons in forlorn deserts and speculate scientifically about what we were and why we died off in such hordes and why many skulls show holes other than eye sockets.

Unregulated population growth drives much of global warming: The more of us there are, the more industry and agriculture must result, just to feed and clothe and house and quiet us all.

False ideas–religious, economic and political–drive our inability to try to stop the air and other pollution we now create just to go to the grocery, raise corn, keep our electrical gadgets beeping and blinking.

That some guy in the sky demands we keep spawning more and more of ourselves has such superstitious and political force that right now no national government except the most obnoxious–China’s–limits child births. Try to imagine one of the present herd of U.S. presidential candidates announcing that birth control will stand foremost among the first achievements of her or his new administration.

(For that matter, imagine any of them saying that global warming threatens us and everybody else far more than terrorism--which it does; and that consequently the new administration will bend all our national powers to reverse global warming all over the planet.)

Capitalism–the American holy of holy–amounts to another noxious superstition.
It’s noxious because as a philosophy resting on greed and the struggle for survival, its adherents choke efforts to stop global warming. Plugging smoke stacks costs too much. Such gives competitors an advantage. Besides, as the dominant U.S. economic religion keeps hawking: Ruling and regulating whatever any of us do to make a buck or a Yuan is evil. That belief is going to fry us or drown us all since only unchallengeable governmental power can stop what’s about to kill us.

There also exists the political bane of believing that every linguistic group tempered by geography, every set and subset of humans must have its own national government and each of those governments had equal rights and powers.

Most of the members of the UN are unspeakable hell holes run by tinpots getting rich off of American and other corporations dragging away their riches while dumping garbage on them in return. Getting these countries to do anything to stop pollution requires supplicating the top dogs at Exxon and like filth makers.

China and India have joined us and the Russians and other big countries in streaming carbon dioxide, methane and other poisons into the air.

Who can tell us or the Chinese or anybody else to stop such crime, such suicidal if lucrative stupidities?

Nobody, no agency, because none now exists. Such a world power will come into being because otherwise over time the lot of us will croak. Either we will form it voluntarily or like global warming, it will force itself down our craws–and rightly so.

The Debates: Slumming Toward Election

The new election stew from determining who will be the Republican and Democratic candidates for president reminds of the slum gullion of my childhood hunting trips with my father and his friends.

Into the stew pot dropped whatever what was hand, fish, fowl, vegetable, a dash of minerals–if it was eatable, in it plopped. A few slugs of whiskey before supping might make it tolerable and maybe nourishing.

November 15's so-called debate among the Democrats in Las Vegas proved itself as silly and formless as those previous and certainly those looming. The three leading candidates–Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards–spent most their time acting like high-school sophomores running for class president: Snipe, countersnipe. The other would-be presidents counted themselves lucky to get to speak at all, thanks to the inept moderation of what is called a debate but really is a made-for-TV show crying out for a good script and director.

Of such intellection the republic is to choose its new leader? Yes. The Republicans offer nothing better.

No candidate of either party has demonstrated a debate skill that would withstand 10 seconds of rhetoric from opponents in a British or French equivalent of our high schools.

Oh, well, speaking and thinking well at your feet in a hurly-burly have never stood out as qualifications to take over the White House, not since James Mason left the premises, Abe Lincoln being the main exception after, with Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy in his shadow but better than those they ran against.

What next in our election melange? All look forward to the Iowa caucuses, when a handful of party regulars and some naives–hardly enough to fill a few cars on a Manhattan subway train--gather over coffee and brownies to vote. Whatever these few decide will give our political and reporting classes the heebie-jeebies, just like the jim-jams that tainted meat into the slum gave all of us who partook.

Soothsayers will declare front runners, editorialists will froth, money folks will dump greenbacks into collection baskets, supporters will make reservations in the Hay-Adams across from the White House for the inauguration of the hand that will hold the red button.

Then more slum: More TV extravaganzas advancing human knowledge not an inch, and then primaries–New Hampshire and onward. More auguring. What fun. What a mess.

The Mitres Mitre Abortion and Law

The Roman Catholic majority on the U.S. Supreme Court no doubt will tuck into their judicial robes the latest billet doux from their cardinals and bishops about how Catholics of conscience must react to abortion.

The newest voters’ guide (http://www.nccbuscc.org/bishops/index.shtml) from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops–“Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship: A Call to Political Responsibility from the Catholic Bishops of the United States”–puts the matter plainly:

Along with euthanasia, human cloning, destruction of human embryos, abortion must “always be rejected and opposed and must never be supported or condoned.”

It’s true the document of 40 some pages, along with a shorter version, “The Challenge of Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship” (pun intended), when it comes to voting for political candidates provides an escape zipper:

Catholics with well formed consciences might discover moral reasons for marking yes after the name of someone who favors abortion. The documents leave it to the reader to figure out why and when.

The bishops, however, do not leave it to the imagination about the law and abortion.

They call it a “mistake with grave moral consequences to treat the destruction of innocent human life merely as a matter of individual choice. A legal system that violates the basic right to life on the grounds of choice is fundamentally flawed.”

Among the Catholic justices on the court, Chief Justice John Roberts has scampered around how he might come down on a clear-cut abortion case. Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas have not: They’d outlaw abortion. Samuel Alito has hinted he would too. Anthony Kennedy, now the decider on a nine-member court otherwise often split four-four, leaves us guessing on his final attitude toward abortion. Kennedy enjoys being the court’s swing vote. He gets to write a lot of decisions.

The bishops’ manifesto is worth the reading. They condemn racism, torture (the White House shudders), war, executions, exploitation of workers, deprivation of children, thumb-screwing the poor, hatred of migrants, the usual grist of American practice and politics.

The prelates remain tight-lipped about homosexuals, except to say marriage must be between a man and woman. They want government money, however disguised, to help pay for putting your kids in a Catholic school and they want the government to keep doling out bucks to “faith-based” outfits, which, they say, should be allowed to discriminate against hires who hold to different, offensive religious values.

Finally, they want a taste of government censorship to keep bad things away from the eyes of children and other corruptibles.

They don’t carp about divorce. That’s favors Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Fred Thompson, who now and then acquire younger wives. But the bishops’ restatement of their church’s condemnation of abortion doesn’t do Giuliani much good. Unlike another Republican presidential would-be, Mitt Romney, Giuliani has never abandoned his support for abortion rights.

The bishops wave the cloak of nonpartisanship, but since Democrats in general support abortion and sometimes gay rights, the bishops’ bull cannot make Democrats skip with joy.

As for the Supremes, well, I’m betting all those Catholic justices appointed by the Republican Presidents Reagan and Bush I and II will outlaw abortion, to usher in a new period of jurisprudence to be known as Back to the Coat Hangers.

Vacuities Conquer All

Mrs. Clinton showing too much cleavage? Other Democratic presidential candidates jealous because they have no cleavage–nothing worth bragging about at least?

Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate who can pussyfoot around in flip-flops, is he ever going to reveal all about Mormonism?

Did Dennis Kucinich, the only real liberal slavering for the kiss of the Democrats, accept a packet of soynuts and an Intergalactic Dr. Pepper from crew member on the flying saucer Kucinich approached?

Reporters assigned to the living hell of covering and traveling with presidential campaigns know how boring their job is, especially to such highly educated, sensitive souls as themselves, suffering hangovers for the good of humanity.

The candidates say the same thing over and over. The essence of the news business is to find news–something new.

Thus when the cleavage of the only woman candidate for the presidency receives mention during spin by other candidates and their staffers, that’s news, compared say, with Kucinich’s trenchant but politically hopeless yawners about the sins of G. W. Bush and his flunkies.

So if a few reporters wheezing along the campaign trail seize on Hillary’s cleavage and the criticism thereof as the hot lead to shovel off to thick headed assistant national-desk editors who just refused to OK their expense-account bar bills, then suddenly the nation rivets on accounts of how much breast work a female candidate may or should show without opening herself to charges she is pandering to (1) the female vote or (2) the male vote.

If the story flows from the laptop of an Associated Press reporter, or if an A.P. rewrite soul picks up the cleavage story, this major question facing the fate of the nation suddenly races around the country and the world. Those campaign reporters who did not favor their betters with a piece on the subject feel their cell phones jingle with irate calls from their masters, demanding to know, where is our bosoms story?

If a poor sod on the campaign bus tells her editor, geez, that’s not news, the wax gets reamed out of her ear by her boss saying, the wires have it, or the competition has it, or CBS is leading the news with it, or The New York Times thinks it’s news: Don’t argue, write me a tits story and if you want, dress it up with the women’s angle, OK? Oh, your think piece about Obama’s thumbsucking over global warming, it didn’t make the cut for tomorrow’s paper. It’s in holdover, and we’ll see. Now give us 200 (words) on Clinton’s cleavage. You’ve got 20 minutes.

So inconsequentials become news, to titillate the imaginations of millions of Americans vaguely pondering which of these candidates I can tolerate enough to vote for–if I vote at all.

Now that the presidential campaign stretches in time out to absurdity, causing more and more political reporters to watch their sanities and livers shrivel, we can drool in anticipation of reports on how X charmed a manure spreader in Liverspot, IA, or how Y attacked Z for chewing Red Man tobacco during a debate before the assembled Doukhobors of Squat Swamp, NH.

As has been noted, Rome wasn’t ruined in a day.

Fred Thompson Uber Alles

Poor Fred Thompson. He has the presidency of the United States wrapped up if only (A) he can get the Republican nomination and (B) Hillary Clinton fails to get the Democratic nomination.

Thompson is a literal giant among presidential candidates. He stands almost six foot six inches in height. Were he running against any of the male Democrats so far boring the world, Thompson would win easily under the workings of de Yonge’s Law of Hair and Height.

That law states–please note the subtle wording–that the candidate who seems the taller will win. None of the men Democrats even come close to Thompson in towering, physically, that is. Thompson not only seems taller; he is taller and will look so on television, where tallness counts when it comes to setting off instinctive responses among the voters.

The matter of the candidate appearing the tallest winning the presidential election remains untested, however, if Hillary Clinton receives the Democratic nod and becomes the first woman to run for the presidency as a major-party candidate.

If a Clinton-Thompson contest occurs, the scientists among us will tease the results to yield many, many papers of deep sociology to publish in such learned journals as The National Review and The Nation about whether de Yonge’s Law also applies to females.

Thompson, of course, while interesting to talk about theory, is unlikely to be the Republican candidate simply because he also appears to be incompetent, as a campaigner and as a thinker.

Chaos stirred by his wife characterizes his political campaign. Aside from a few gags that awaken the reporters condemned to covering the now-endless presidential campaign purgatory, Thompson has contributed zero to the so-called debate with other Republican worthies. If there is a bad idea, Thompson has embraced it with gusto, but that hardly distinguishes him from Rudy Giuliani and the rest.

Whoever other than Thompson the Republicans manage to fish out of the lake of banalities central to their mindset, if that person runs against Clinton, an interesting test will otherwise occur of de Yonge’s Law.

The second half of the law states that if two presidential candidates appear to be equally tall, then the candidate that seems to have the most hair will win.

Having a woman in the race with a considerable head of hair not only is a new thing but genetically might bestow upon women candidates over time, whenever matters of height are more or less equal, a leg up in winning, since many male candidates–John McCain, for instance–cannot compete in hirsuteness. Balding is a curse in presidential politics.

In that respect, the law does not discount for wearing a toupee or a wig, since appearing to have the most hair is what matters deep within the brains of the electorate, responding as they are to an evolutionary device, no doubt selected during millions of years of fighting with cave bears and tigers, that regards height first and hair second as signs of the savior. (Can you imagine a bald Jesus creating a religion?)

If Mrs. Clinton fails to get the nomination, then whoever wins out of the mob of lackluster Democratic male candidates will compete with one of the Republican con men. De Yonge’s law will function in its full scientific glory, and millions of Americans will make their ordinary enlightened choice based on unconscious feelings.

Rudy and Pat: Soulmates

Nothing pleases more than watch Republican hypocrites ruin the creases in their trousers by kneeling before right-wing hucksters masquerading as political prelates, to ask for their blessings in the upcoming presidential caucuses and primaries.

Of the rogues running for the Republican nomination none excel Rudy Giuliani
in sauciness and cant and none deserve more than he what he earned the other day, the kiss of that fading Elmer Gantry, Pat Robertson.

The Super Rev. Mr. Robertson, who when he is not shaking down the suckers for money has been foursquare against many of the things Giuliani embraces, spends much of his time talking to God, or at least Robertson says so. God had not said much to others on the subject.

God, you may remember, told Robertson that because of such sins in the United States as allowing abortions and protecting homosexuals from assaults and murders he, God, let the Islamic guerillas fly jet planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as recompense.

God also plays weatherman to Robertson, who relayed that God hinted the nastiness of New Orleans caused Hurricane Katrina to devastate the city and its population.

Giuliani likes to don frilly dresses from time to time, to cool his fevered groin, no doubt--something his sundry wives have not been able to do. He supports homosexual rights and supports the right to abortions (it took him awhile to say that plainly). His children detest him for his crude and embarrassing philandering. He touts himself now as a moral man, a devout Catholic. He never goes to church. His second and third marriages of course abhor the church. (Unless he wins the presidency. Then Rome will find a way to return Giuliani to the right hand of the Pope.)

None of that troubles Robertson. Nor does Giuliani’s ignoring the mob connections of the crooked cop he raised from being his driver and bodyguard to being New York City’s police commissioner, head of all cops, Bernie Kerik.

Kerik is now under federal indictment for a multitude of cheap but profitable sins. Kerik put his hands out for handouts and the wise guys filled them up.

Kerik when he was chief cop right after Sept. 11's attack had the city rent him a command center--an expensive apartment near Ground Zero, where his master, Giuliani, as mayor, was playing the mayor of a city suffering a terrible blow. Kerik, though, went Giuliani’s grandstanding one better: He used his command center for Kama Sutra sessions with his latest girl friend. While the Trade Center’s rubble burned, Kerik canoodled. Giuliani didn’t care. He still defends his former lackey.

Robertson, full of real politik, knows an endorsement now might win him the right to utter the benediction at what he hopes will be Giuliani’s inaugural banquet. Robertson explains his kissing of Giuliani’s forehead by saying he and Rudy traveled together some years back and discovered themselves soul mates. There’s no arguing with that. As the saying goes about grifters, it takes one to know one.

Caligula Strained Through a Sheet

THE CALIGULA IN THE WHITE HOUSE

When youthfully I first read some Roman history, I snorted with glee about Roman decadence when I chanced upon the story of Emperor Caligula’s effort to make his horse Incitatus a priest and consul, consul being the highest honorific and therefore most eagerly sought office below the rank of emperor.

Those who reported the tale, all members of the upper classes that Caligula cuckolded, robbed and murdered, also hinted Caligula was insane.

The Romans at least had the excuse that emperors forced themselves upon them and to oppose an emperor and his minions and hangers-on openly meant you had committed yourself to rebellion and, likely, immediate acquaintance with the lions in the Coliseum.

We Americans, on the other hand, thanks to the propagandistic and legal powers of the industrial-conservative establishment, have no such excuse. We elected G.W. Bush twice to our land’s highest office and, by extension of our imperial powers, to the world’s highest office.

Yes, it’s true that the first time around it took some wicked hokey-pokey by conservative Supreme Court justices to jigger a way unknown in American history or law to anoint Bush as president. But he had enough votes in Florida, the disputed state, to let the salivating right-wing Supremes be able to excuse their coup later over sherry, cakes and caviar.

The second time around the majority of U.S. voters elected Bush without knavery. Never abandon a president who started a war in order to stay in office: That still plucks an old instinct that pickles voters’ brains.

This Bush would not have succeeded even as a used-car salesman had he not been born into a rich, powerful political clan. Money has Vaselined over his characteristics and habits : Small intelligence, eschewal of learning, ignorance of books, distaste for the arts, eagerness to lie and believe his own lies, lust to force the nation and its institutions to bow to the president as emperor, as someone above the laws both of the country and of ordinary decency, someone who without blush drones that waterboarding a captive is not the same as torturing him.

Anyone paying close attention to the Bush regime cannot help but notice what distinguishes his from other presidencies: His drive to get Congress and the courts to kneel to the notion that the president has an inherent power as commander-in-chief to do anything he wants in the name of saving the nation from its enemies:That he can cause underlings to kidnap and torture those he or they accuse of terrorism; that he can jail anyone so accused forever, without right to consult a lawyer or a consul; that despite the Constitution, he can order our military into battle without a declaration of war from Congress; that he doesn’t have to rely on money from Congress to fund his overseas adventures, so long as the Treasury can create dollars by selling bonds; that spook agencies can wiretap U.S. citizens without a warrant and without warrant subpoena their personal records, including mail.

Unlike Caligula G.W. Bush does not claim to a be a god, nor has he so far put his horse forward, not even the asses in his cabinet, to neigh our prayers.

But Bush does claim to receive advice directly from God, who apparently has not yet told Bush about the commandment not to lie. Looking at Bush’s record so far as the biggest and potentially most dangerous fool so far embraced by our democracy, one can only observe that God’s record in politics leaves much to be desired, that God seems to be telling his lackey in the Oval Office that dictatorship is swell.