How Lucky Are Those Damn Democrats?

They're in bed with the same greed-obsessed corporate predators as the Republicans and half of them are, at best, just paying lip-service to wanting to serve the interests of average American working families. Like the Republicans, Democratic elected officials seem so preoccupied with their own career trajectories that their constituents' come way down the priority list-- way down... and only just before an election. That's what makes the House of Representatives marginally better than the House of Lords-- in the lower House an election is almost always right around the corner; the Lords don't have to face the voters for 6 years after being elected or re-elected and even then, the costs of a statewide run by a challenger are so prohibitive that, so long as the incumbent hasn't pissed off all the corporate CEOs, he or she is sure to outraise any opponent fool-hearty enough to give it a try.

On almost any bread and butter issue, if a Democratic member of Congress isn't on the same side as Independent Bernie Sanders of Vermont, you can feel safe to bet that he's earning his keep from his corporate financiers-- or in the cases of contemptible sleaze like Blanche Lincoln, Mary Landrieu and Kay Hagan-- earning her keep from her corporate financiers.

Democrats now have 60 votes in the House of Lords-- just what they need to stop any of the knee jerk Republican filibusters which come automatically every single time a Democrat proposes something that actually does try to better the lot of working families. But it isn't the Republicans they need to worry about-- it's the corporate tools, the ultimate bipartisan Insider coalition determined to uphold the status quo. And along with every single Republican, that coalition can claim the loyalty of putative Democrats like Ben Nelson, Joe Lieberman, Tom Carper, Michael Bennet, Arlen Specter, Blanche Lincoln, Max Baucus, Evan Bayh, Mary Landrieu, Kay Hagan, Mark Pryor... enough, with the help of one or two wafflers like Mark Begich, Claire McCaskill, Mark Udall, Kent Conrad and Tim Johnson, to water down-- if not utterly obliterate-- every single change initiative Obama (or the House) could possible throw their way.

Yes, the Democratic Party is very lucky. They can get away with venality, incompetence, dishonesty, cowardice and all their other trademark qualities because, no matter how you slice it and no matter how you dice it, the Republicans are even more venal, less competent, far more dishonest, just as cowardly and weighted down with a whole grab bag of other heinous qualities (see graphic above) that only serve to make the Democrats look like a quasi-attractive alternative. Before he met his Argentine honey, the right-wing fanatic governor of South Carolina would go away with male buddies and "blow off steam" by picking up random women-- but he never went beyond a quickie blow job until he met the Argentine in Uruguay. The only thing that's keeping him in office now is that the South Carolina GOP doesn't want a gay governor-- not even a closeted one who charms little old ladies who think he's "a devil-may-care bachelor." It isn't even just the legendary GOP backstabbing as much as it is their well earned spate of bad luck. It's pretty much all covered in these paragraphs from today's Politico though-- an example of why the Democrats manage to thrive, primarily a function of any reasonable alternative-- and it starts with GOP extreme right propagandist William Kristol in the pages of a Republican Party throw away he edits:

“In fact, one aide who raised this possibility in the course of trashing Palin’s mental state to others in the McCain-Palin campaign was Steve Schmidt,” Kristol wrote.

Asked about the accusation, Schmidt fired back in an email: “I'm sure John McCain would be president today if only Bill Kristol had been in charge of the campaign.”

“After all, his management of [former Vice President] Dan Quayle’s public image as his chief of staff is still something that takes your breath away,” Schmidt continued. “His attack on me is categorically false.”

Asked directly in a telephone interview if he brought up the prospect of Palin suffering from post-partum depression, Schmidt said: “His allegation that I was defaming Palin by alleging post-partum depression at the campaign headquarters is categorically untrue. In fact, I think it rises to the level of a slander because it’s about the worst thing you can say about somebody who does what I do for a living.”

But Kristol’s charge was seconded by Randy Scheunemann, a longtime foreign policy adviser to McCain who is also close to the Standard editor and was thought to be a Palin ally within the campaign.

“Steve Schmidt has a congenital aversion to the truth,” Scheunemann said. “On two separate and distinct occasions, he speculated about about Governor Palin having post-partum depression, and on the second he threatened that if more negative publicity about the handling of Governor Palin emerged that he would leak his speculation [about post-partum depression] to the press. It was like meeting Tony Soprano.”

Schmidt said Scheunemann’s charges were “categorically untrue.”

“It is inappropriate for me to discuss personnel issues from the campaign,” Schmidt continued. “But suffice it to say Randy is saying these things not because they’re true but because he wants to damage my reputation because of consequences he faced for actions he took.”

Schmidt is alluding, without saying so directly, to the stories that emerged after the campaign that Scheunemann had been fired... Schmidt unloaded in a lengthy telephone interview, suggesting that Kristol was carrying out a personal vendetta based out of anger over the attempt to fire Scheunemann in the final days of the campaign.

In doing so, Schmidt revealed what has been whispered about for months following the campaign: that he and another top aide had ordered a leak hunt in the campaign’s internal email system.

“What this is about is a personal issue that happened late in the campaign relating to a close, personal friend of Bill Kristol and people at the Weekly Standard,” Schmidt said, refusing to use Scheunemann’s name.

“At the end of the campaign there were a series of leaks that were so damaging that it was consuming the 24-hour cable news cycle. Leaks to reporters where Sarah Palin was called all manner of names. [McCain senior adviser] Rick Davis and I jointly felt that was outrageous. So we made an attempt for the first time in the campaign to try to ID who was leaking information that was so damaging and demoralizing to a campaign that was in very difficult circumstances,” Schmidt said, noting that an IT professional executed a system-wide search by keyword.

“What was discovered was an email from a very senior staff member to Bill Kristol that then entered into the news current and continued the negative in-fighting stories for an additional news cycle. I recommended tough medicine for that individual that was carried out,” Schmidt said, again referring to Scheunemann. “Bill Kristol might not have liked that decision, and he might be mad about what happened to his friend, but going all the way back he has been a part of this story and I’ve preserved his confidentiality in that until now. But his use of his public forums to take a personal fight and make character attacks is just simply dishonest and wrong.”

Scheunemann, confirming that his email had been searched, accused Schmidt of “acting in a manner of Iranian secret police” in going to his account.

Yeah, Tony Soprano and the Iranian secret police: today's Republican Party. Just add in the dirty sex. All that remains to be answered is why-- oh why-- a real working-family political party hasn't emerged to balance the class war being waged by the aristocratically-entitled-- and programmed-- zombies of corporate management against the rest of us. You see this kind of thing has nothing whatsoever to do with grassroots Democrats, only with the Inside the Beltway variety.


UPDATE: On The Other Hand, How Lucky Is It Really To Be Burdened With Die-Hard, Unapologetic Enemies Of Working Families?

If you hate working families, why not just join the GOP, whose entire ideological basis is built on that? But, noooooo... Democrats have to get stuck with vampires like Joe Lieberman-- who, bolstered by Inside the Beltway shitheads (like you know who) just refuse to die-- and the 19 putative Democrats who announced they will oppose the public plan unless it becomes an anti-choice bill. We'll come back to that in a moment. First, Lieberputz. Charles Monaco compares him to "a mutant cicada funded by the insurance industry" and reminds us that "Lieberman emerges every 15 years or so to help kill health care. This year is no different than 1994, when CT progressives descended on Lieberman in DC to protest him on health care, even though three years ago he promised CT voters he would do a better job of getting them universal health care than Ned Lamont would. Now, surprise!, he's leading the fight against the public option.

[I]t was all a lie, and a particularly bad one. At the time, it was easy to see that Lieberman's election-year rhetoric on health care was just as mendacious on its face as his claim that "no one wants to end the war in Iraq more than I do", or his promise to help Barack Obama "reach to the stars", or his vow that he would help "elect a Democratic president in 2008" and that it was his primary opponent who would "frustrate and defeat our hopes of doing that".

Now, in 2009, on the cusp of a 60-seat Senate majority and at a
now-or-never moment on heath care reform, Democrats have the old Joe to deal with once again:

"If we create a public option, the public is going to end up
paying for it," Lieberman said following an hour-long confab with public-health experts at the Ashmun Street community center of the Monterey Homes public housing complex. "That's a cost we can't take on."...

Lieberman hopes to help do that through the work of an informal,
but busy, bipartisan group he formed last year with Republican U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander [like Lieberman, an entirely owned subsidiary of the Medical-Industrial Complex]...

That common ground, in Lieberman's view, has no room for the public option.

Just six months removed from being saved by political irrelevancy by President Obama, Joe Lieberman has declared that he is now working to kill Obama's health care plan.... almost exactly 15 years after he helped kill Clinton's.

I'm in Asia right now and Jane Hamsher is in Sweden. When I woke up this morning she had sent me a piece in the National Journal talking about 19 of the worst reactionary Democrats in Congress telling Speaker Pelosi that they will oppose health care legislation "unless it explicitly excludes abortion funding from the scope of any government-defined or subsidized health insurance plan." Please remember these names and keep in mind that when you donate to the DCCC part of your money goes towards supporting some of them, namely far right anti-family fanatics Travis Childers, Bobby Bright, Steve Driehaus, and Kathleen Dahlkemper, all of whom would likely fail to win re-election without massive financial help from unsuspecting Democrats from around the country who donate to the DCCC thinking they are promoting a progressive agenda, never suspecting they are supporting corrupt, anti-family Democrats who vote with the GOP again and again.

Dan Boren (Blue Dog-OK)
Bart Stupak (D-MI)
Colin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN;
Tim Holden (Blue Dog-PA)
Travis Childers (Blue Dog-MS)
Lincoln Davis (Blue Dog-TN)
Rahm Emanuel's greatest hit, Heath Shuler (Blue Dog-NC)
Solomon Ortiz (D-TX)
Mike McIntyre (Blue Dog-NC)
Jerry Costello (D-IL)
Gene Taylor (Blue Dog-MS)
James Oberstar (D-MN
Bobby Bright (Blue Dog-AL)
Steve Driehaus (D-OH)
Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) [consider giving her a pass on this because she's so good on everything else]
Charlie Melancon (Blue Dog-LA)
John Murtha (super corrupt D-PA);
Paul Kanjorski (super corrupt D-PA
Kathleen Dahlkemper (D-PA)

Is John McCain Ready To Lead? Clearly Not-- Let's Look At Georgia

"I had just returned from Gori, which was still under the shadow of Russian occupation," wrote Wall Street Journal reporter Melik Kaylan dramatically this morning. Gori, Stalin's birthplace, has no Russian troops or checkpoints during the daytime. But there is the great big monstrous looming shadow of a voracious bear and if you hang around into the wee hours of the night... "if you stayed overnight after observers left, as I did with various locals, you could hear and glimpse the tanks in the dark growling back into town and roaming around. A serious curfew kicked in at sundown, and the streets turned instantly lethal, not least because the tanks allowed in marauding irregulars-- Cossacks, South Ossetians, Chechens and the like-- to do the looting in a town that the Russians had effectively emptied. Now that the Russians have made a big show of moving out in force-- but only to a point some miles to the other side of Gori toward South Ossetia-- they've left behind a resonating threat in the population's memory, a feeling they could return at any moment."

Yes, Cossacks! They chased my grandfather into a forest when he was a teenager and he hid in a tree before emigrating to America. Yesterday I introduced you to Svetlana, not Stalin's daughter, another Svetlana, a nurse who works for my doctor. She was trembling with outrage about the distortions in the America media about the conflict in the Caucasus. Svetlana places the blame for the flareup squarely on the shoulders of political hack and cynical opportunist John McCain (and well-paid Georgia lobbyist/McCain foreign policy czar and notorious Neocon Randy Scheunemann). When she referred to the deceitful and clueless American media, the Wall Street Journal is more in the deceitful camp than the clueless. They're on a mission: elect McCain.

The trope they're pushing: Saakashvili attacked first because he knew "the Russians had been planning an invasion of his country for weeks-- even months-- ahead of time" and because NATO didn't admit the little Neocon bastion. Oh... and how could a far right mouthpiece like the Journal not mention victory in Iraq? Scheunermann's paymaster-- and McCain's ally-- Saakashvili says "the invasion had to be done before the situation in Iraq got any better and freed up U.S. forces to act elsewhere-- a matter not simply of U.S. weakness but of increasing U.S. strength. 'If America thinks it is too weak to do anything about Georgia,' said Mr. Saakashvili, 'you should understand how the Russians see it, how much Moscow respects a strong United States-- or at least a U.S. that believes in its own strength.'" He must have forgotten to add: "Vote for John McCain."

Europeans are getting a less biased perspective on what's been going on with the nasty little war McCain incised so he would have something to talk about without mentioning that Obama is black. A couple of weeks ago we looked at a column in Britain's Guardian by Seamus Milne. Milne's column today, Georgia is the graveyard of America's unipolar world, is more disturbing-- and something American voters should focus in-- more than just Karl Rove's machinations in getting Willard named to the Republican ticket tomorrow... or whenever.

Milne writes about what McCain's self-serving Neocon publicity stunt has wrought:

If there were any doubt that the rules of the international game have changed for good, the events of the past few days should have dispelled it. On Monday, President Bush demanded that Russia's leaders reject their parliament's appeal to recognise the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Within 24 hours, Bush had his response: President Medvedev announced Russia's recognition of the two contested Georgian enclaves.

The Russian message was unmistakable: the outcome of the war triggered by Georgia's attack on South Ossetia on August 7 is non-negotiable-- and nothing the titans of the US empire do or say is going to reverse it.

...America's unipolar moment has passed - and the new world order heralded by Bush's father in the dying days of the Soviet Union in 1991 is no more. The days when one power was able to bestride the globe like a colossus, enforcing its will in every continent, challenged only by popular movements for national independence and isolated "rogue states," are now over. For nearly two decades, while Russia sunk into "catastroika" and China built an economic powerhouse, the US has exercised unprecedented and unaccountable global power, arrogating to itself and its allies the right to invade and occupy other countries, untroubled by international law or institutions, sucking ever more states into the orbit of its voracious military alliance.

Is John McCain ready to lead? Clearly, not-- not any more than George Bush was-- or will ever be. They walked hand-in-hand into the greatest foreign policy disaster of our time and McCain has learned... absolutely nothing. He is a captive or the worst elements of the Neocon forces that need to be excised from American politics as soon as possible.


UPDATE: CNN INTERVIEW PUTIN

The Moscow Times presaged what Putin told CNN about American neocons encouraging Georgia to attack South Ossetia and destabilize the Caucasus. Putin "accused the United States of orchestrating the military conflict in Georgia in order to boost the chances of a U.S. presidential candidate." You wonder which one? Hint: follow the money.

Tomorrow's NY Times also reported that Putin claimed the Republicans-- though not by name-- "needed a small victorious war." He's groping in the darkness; McCain doesn't care if it's a victory or not. He just wants trouble so he can try making the case that he's an old warrior who can protect us.

No wonder the Right wants to revive the Cold War. It was so easy to understand -- for them. It's just a shame real life really isn't like the WWF

Young Johnny is sending the "McCainettes," Holy Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, to Georgia. Watch for our Lindsey's shopping report.

"American newspapers have run story after story about how 'evil' Russia invaded a sovereign neighboring state. Many accounts made it seem as though the conflict was started by an aggressive Russia invading the Georgian territory of South Ossetia. Some said that South Ossetia's capital, Tskhinvali, was destroyed by the Russian army. Little attention was paid to the chronology of events, the facts underlying the conflict. . . .

"Over the past week, American media have achieved one thing for sure: They have lost prestige among a generation of young Russians who believed that America is a country of true, uncorrupted, independent information."

-- master's degree candidate and Washington Post intern Olga Ivanova,
in an op-ed piece in yesterday's Post, "A Free Press? Not This Time."

by Ken

Note: Howie is enmeshed in a computer crisis that's likely to be unresolvable before Monday, so we may or may not be hearing from him over the weekend. Meanwhile we soldier on. The following is a story we had a chance to chat about a bit, so you'll find some input from him.

It was inevitable that some benighted right-winger complain about my post regarding professional superliar Jerome Corsi's latest steaming heap of doody, the Obama hatchet job that pea-brained propagandist Mary Matalin published under her imprint at Simon & Schuster, with the apparent approval of the corporate swine who now run that once-proud publishing house and apparently think our Mary can steer some of those boodles of moron money they think right-wing publishers are piling up from readers who'll pay cash to have their ignorance and prejudices reinforced. The complaint: that I referred to Corsi's barrage of "facts."

Of course they aren't facts, they're "facts." Corsi doesn't have any facts. What he has, what he's made his vile career of, is lies, delusions, fabrications, and utter bullshit, fueled by bigotry, ignorance, and greed -- he knows, after all, that there's gold to be mined from befuddled right-wingers who like to see someone take down their betters. The problem, as my colleague Jeffrey Feldman was pointing out, is that when you drop these delusions and lies by the bookful on an unsuspecting public, and when in media sound bites you drop a bushel of 'em in a TV segment where there's no opportunity to debunk each of the delusions and lies individually, you have eliminated any possibility of reasonable discussion.

Is it possible that right-wingers don't know they're being lied to? Every second of every day, by every lying scumbag of a right-wing pol as well as the media who service the cause, the famous Right-Wing Noise Machine? Yes, I think it's entirely possible, because at least since the days of the sainted Ronald Reagan, these people have been told that they no longer have to be slaves to reality.

"Screw reality!" was essentially the Reagan message. "You don't have to believe anything you don't want to."

The result is that for a large segment of the American public, there is no such thing as reality. There's only what I call reality-substitute -- a web of story lines that use the names of real people and places but carefully craft them in such a way as to suit that segment of the public's deluded preconceptions. The new test for "reality" isn't whether it's true but whether it makes people feel good.

Is there any better model for this process than professional wrestling? Enthralled viewers seem to eat up the carefully assembled package, with its cartoon violence and its painstakingly scripted cast of characters, with its good guys and bad guys, heroes and villains. I'm sure any wrestling fan will confirm the importance of those villains -- they're really what makes the show go. (Soap-opera fans know this too. A really great villain is a treasure to soap producers, so valuable that they will go to almost any lengths to make sure that their villain never pays the price for his/her villainies.)

Now I think that most viewers of professional wrestling know that the whole thing is rigged. They do, don't they? There aren't any, or at least many, viewers who think they're watching actual "matches," are there? But I think those viewers manage to suppress that distracting reality, the better to enjoy the vastly more entertaining reality unfolding on their screens.

It seems to me that this is exactly the way Americans have been encouraged -- by different parties, for different reasons -- to view the crisis between Russia and Georgia.

Apparently it never seems to occur to Americans, even in the face of the ongoing disastrous messes playing out in Iraq and Afghanistan, that it's dangerous for us to blunder into international imbroglios of enormous geopolitical and historical complexity where we truly have no understanding of any of those complexities. No, we seem to be perfectly happy to apply the professional-wrestling model: Pick out the good guys and bad guys, and settle back with lots of snacks to enjoy the show.

Some of this enjoyment, naturally, will involve carefully engineered rage and hysteria. Just as when the villainous wrestler is seen to be defeating the heroic one by cheating his behind off, and the [expletive] ref lets it go on, when the villain country in defiance of all that's right and holy beats up on the heroic put-upon good country, there is apt to be much spectator participation, in the form of fist-pumping and yelling and otherwise raging. As the wrestling promoters, this makes viewers feel good -- gets the juices flowing, probably releases some luscious hormones.

At this point I want you introduce the interesting op-ed piece I quoted from above. I don't want to except it further -- it really should be read whole. Hey, it's Saturday. You have some time, right?

A Free Press? Not This Time.

By Olga Ivanova
Friday, August 15, 2008; A21

I wish I could fly back to Russia. I have been in the United States for a year, and I am studying and working here to get experience in American journalism, known worldwide for its independence and professionalism. But in recent days it has felt as though I am too late, that the journalism of Watergate is well behind us and that reporting is no longer fair and balanced.

For years I have respected American newspapers for being independent. But no longer. Coverage of the conflict between Russia and Georgia has been unprofessional, to say the least. I was surprised and disappointed that the world's media immediately took the side of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili last week.

American newspapers have run story after story about how "evil" Russia invaded a sovereign neighboring state. Many accounts made it seem as though the conflict was started by an aggressive Russia invading the Georgian territory of South Ossetia. Some said that South Ossetia's capital, Tskhinvali, was destroyed by the Russian army. Little attention was paid to the chronology of events, the facts underlying the conflict.

Last week, Georgia's president invaded South Ossetia during the night, much as Adolf Hitler invaded Russia in 1941. Within hours, Georgian troops destroyed Tskhinvali, a city of 100,000, and they killed more than 2,000 civilians. Almost all of the people who died that night were Russian citizens. They chose to become citizens of Russia years ago, when Georgia refused to recognize South Ossetia as a non-Georgian territory.

The truth is that, in this case, Russian aggression actually made some sense. Russia defended its citizens.

Yet American newspapers published stories that omitted mention of the Georgian invasion. And American media as a whole have been disturbingly pro-Georgian. The lead photograph on the front page of Sunday's Post showed two men -- one dead, the other crying -- amid ruins in Gori, Georgia. Many other images could have been used. Monday's Wall Street Journal, for example, contained several stories about the conflict and even an op-ed by Saakashvili. Where was the Russian response?

I understand why the Georgian government would block access to Russian media Web sites. I understand why Russian media would present events in a light that favors Moscow's actions. But American media are not supposed to do the equivalent.

The much-revered American principle of a free press guarantees access to an independent source of information. It is supposed to mean that nobody takes a side, that journalists give readers the facts and let them draw their own conclusions. The Georgian president quickly became a chief newsmaker for Western media outlets, yet little could be found to explain the Russian side.

It's hard to understand how and why the terrible situation between Georgia and Russia has played out this way. Everything seemed too clear for the journalists writing about the conflict: Big, evil Russia tried to destroy small, democratic Georgia.

And the American media's willingness to choose sides provoked Russian media outlets. Russian newspapers did not waste time reminding readers that the true evil was the United States and that Washington was ultimately responsible for the conflict in Ossetia and Georgia.

Beyond the slanted coverage, I am also concerned about the lack of information on the number of civilians killed and wounded. How should we know which accounts to trust?

Over the past week, American media have achieved one thing for sure: They have lost prestige among a generation of young Russians who believed that America is a country of true, uncorrupted, independent information. Many Russian youths come to the United States for college and then go back to Russia to help build our own democracy. Russians believe in democracy. But I don't know whether many Russians will ever trust American media reports again.

U.S. newspapers have lost esteem among Russian journalists as well. These reporters have long looked to American newspapers as icons of quality journalism. They are supposed to stand for truth and serve the people's interests. But whose interests did newspapers serve by publishing stories in the best traditions of the Cold War?

I think that both the Russian and Georgian governments attacked civilians. I blame the governments for this war. But I am also saddened by the unfair coverage of the conflict from Russian and American media. If this is what freedom of the press looks like, then I no longer want to believe in this freedom. I prefer to stay neutral and independent, just like a professional journalist has to do.

The writer, a master's degree candidate at Duquesne University, is an intern at The Post.

What Ms. Ivanova is possibly too polite to point out is that it's not just the media who've jumped into the ring. There's the president of the United States for one, and for another that crazy old coot, Young Johnny McCranky, whose presidential campaign is essentially on the payroll of the president of Georgia, and almost totally devoid of actual facts about the situation. Still, who cares about facts when there are readily available delusions, distortions, and obfuscations suitable for getting adrenalin pumping among spectators who don't care about niceties like reality.

Howie pointed out an interesting wrinkle. We know, of course, that top McCranky foreign-policy adviser Randy Scheunemann was a paid lobbyist for the Georgian government until his sudden withdrawal from the lobbying world in March. We know too that the Georgians have continued to employ his old lobbying shop. Plus we know that the U.S. government continues to pump massive quantities of aid into Georgia, to support the imagined flourishing democracy there. So is it not fair, he wonders, to say that the U.S. is effectively paying Scheumemann and his old partners in crime? (Notice that it's no longer easy to distinguish who's the master and who's the client here.)

As I pointed out, though, isn't this just proof that the system works? Here we have Uncle Sam dumping money into a foreign country for dubious reasons, but when that money winds up coming back into the pockets of good solid American Bush cronies, isn't it all good?

If you then take into consideration the point Ms. Ivanova makes about American media coverage, you could also say that the Georgian investment in American lobbying prowess has paid off hugely, in a propaganda blitz blanketing our august infotainment media.

Understand, please, that I'm not taking a position here on the crisis in the Caucasus -- unless you consider it a "position" to point out that anyone who even hints that we're prepared to go to war against Russia needs to be institutionalized. I'm just saying that the people who are piling onto the Georgian side, like the shamelessly ignorant demagogue who announced the other day that today we're all Georgians, are not only wrong but dangerously wrong. Their screeching ignorance can only produce an increasingly disastrous result. The situation calls for sanity and informed mediation. Strategy and tactics borrowed from the WWF have no place.

Most incredibly, we're hearing from all around that the vile McCranky, whose ignorance of the situation is total and who apparently has no solutions to world problems except "Let's bomb 'em," has been "looking presidential." In fact, insofar as he has been engaged in behavior legally permitted only to the president, it seems to me he ought to be facing indictment for busting a host of laws, and on his way to prison. If the crazy old coot doesn't find his way to a nice secure loony bin first.

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