TODAY MUST BE MICHAEL JACKSON DAY

Young kids are taught from an early age to respect and trust authority figures. Parents don't warn their children to flee from egregious war criminals and charlatans like Bush and Cheney nor from in-the-spotlight "super-stars" like Michael Jackson (well-known serial pedophile) nor from the mentally unbalanced repressed perverts who make up much of the Catholic Church's screwed up clergy. Let's leave Bush and Cheney out of this for now (since neither-- to my knowledge-- has yet been accused of sexually molesting young children).

I don't follow the Michael Jackson case as assiduously as the fascist state's Infortainment Dept would like us all to. (Kinda keeps you busy so you won't pay attention to the Bush deprecations in Iraq and Ohio. You know, if you're watching a CNN bulletin on the runaway bride or the missing Alabama sweetheart in Aruba or a special on Lacy Petersen you might miss the fact that the judges Bush has been appointing to the Federal appeals courts are extreme ideologues-- like whackos so far from the American mainstream as to be actually bizarre-- and incompetent hacks. I saw a poll the other day that showed that the VAST majority of Americans don't know what a filibuster is.) Anyway, the little I've followed of the Jackson case makes me pretty sure the man is a very sick and perverted character who preys on young boys and has, for many years, avoided punishment for outrageous crimes by paying MILLIONS of dollars to disgruntled victims.

So it pains me when I see Jesse Jackson, who I respect tremendously, come on the TV and defend Jackson. OK, true Jackson does have a bit of a well-deserved reputation for being a whore from time to time (like almost ALL politicians) but, still, Jackson isn't some kind of lowlife slime like a Bush or a Rove or DeLay or the Ohio GOP posterboys Noe and Ney. So what's he doing? Is he on the Jackson payroll? He says this whole stink over Jackson is racist (presumably still thinking of Jackson as an African-American). OK, institutionalized and inbred racism is part of just about everything; I agree. But does that excuse child molesting? Then I started thinking about a big story that I saw today that Rachel Zoll did for AP-- "Sex Abuse Cost for Catholic Church Tops $1 Billion." Remember what I said about Jackson above? "...the man is a very sick and perverted character who preys on young boys and has, for many years, avoided punishment for outrageous crimes by paying MILLIONS of dollars to disgruntled victims." Does that apply to the Catholic Church? Except billions is more than millions.

The American Catholic Church has, very very begrudgingly, doled out $1,060,000,000, give or take a few million dollars in parishioners hard-earned contributions, to pay "settlements" for predatory sexual attacks by priests against children. In MANY (not a few, MANY, actually MOST) of these cases, the upper echelons of the Church hierarchy have been involved in a criminal conspiracy not just to cover up these heinous crimes and to protect the criminals but to actually insure that the criminal priests could continue their serial sexual molestations of children unhindered, by transferring them from parish to parish if the heat got turned up-- even secreting some of them abroad. The case against Michael Jackson is NOTHING compared to the non-case against the Catholic Church. These pious hypocrites, so-called bishops and cardinals and archbishops should ALL be rounded up, tried and severely punished if found guilty. This doesn't let Jackson off the hook but why go after him and let this horrendous criminal entereprise go undisturbed? I mean the "settlements" these churches pay isn't even their money; it's the poor parishioners' money. And in most cases it's insurance companies footing the bill anyway! The fact that this criminal enterprise and its hierarchy doesn't pay any taxes on the BILLIONS of dollars they take in annually from their various non-religious enterprises just makes it all the more galling.