To an Unknown Iraqi Journalist

I don't know you. We are unlikely to ever cross paths in a Publix, or the Buford Highway Walgreens, and, one surmises, a good Georgia Barbecue Pork sandwich is completely out of the question.

There is no question that there your motives for lofting those loafers were sound. One imagines that if our roles were reversed, the temptation would be difficult to suppress. There are quite a few Americans who would agree with why you hurled the huaraches.

And in that aspect, all persons concerned would be justified in a sneaker slider...but...here's the issue. Whether we like it or not, George W. Bush is the freely elected President of the United States, and will be for another five weeks. Picking a fight with him outside of the United States makes Americans pissy, even Americans who agree with you. It stops being an attack on a man you find despicable, and becomes an assault on the office and the people it serves.

For our friends on the Left, imagine the same thing directed at President-Elect Obama, by a journalist serving at the pleasure of a military dictator anywhere, while overseas, and feel your ire rise. One is free to his dislike for the officeholder, just do not disrespect the office.

Please do not think that we should hoist the presidency up on an ivory tower. It should be down on street level and able to respond swiftly and surely to assaults from all sides.

As for President Bush, what the hell were you thinking? You have five weeks, and a single digit approval rating, best recognized by the single digit raised by most Americans when you pass by or your picture shows up on the news. This is not a time to start gallivanting around the globe showing your ass while asserting your two drops of relevance as a world leader.

This is the time where you would be best advised to sit your fuzzy butt down in Washington or Dallas, stop costing us any more money, and shut the merry heck up. How much does one of these little overseas jaunts cost in the first blamed place? When you're running multi-trillion dollar defecits and got five fricking weeks left in the White House, STAY HOME!

Can you imagine what would have happened had that Iraqi journalist gotten something more serious than a shoe in that room? This is where you and the Left have a great overlap of agreement. Neither one of you wants a President Dick Cheney, which is precisely what could have happened.

The idea of President Dick Cheney, second shortest administration in history (Only William Henry Harrison's being shorter) because you got a wild hair up your torpedo tube to go to Iraq because you could, well, it annoys me. You deserve to be blessed out for it. When we, the people cannot afford Christmas gifts for our children, much less our mortgages, car payments, heating and light bills, or food, your trip is the posturing of an impotent, arrogant, redundant hack.

The really sad part is that there just is not enough time to impeach Bush. But can someone in Congress cut the funding for Air Force One so he has to carry his behind back to the United States and face the disaster he made in person? By the time he hits Washington, there is a good chance that his Cadillac Limo will be an orphan, i.e., a car whose manufacturer no longer exists.

It's easy to be annoyed at the Iraqi journalist. If he had behaved any more obnoxiously, he would now be Fred Goldman. But one at least understands the motivations behind his act.

Bush, on the other hand, should never have been in that situation in the first blessed place. He has enough people around him to know better. And if they are unwilling to say so, we, the American people, are.

One imagines, with great trepidation, approximately 130 million Nikes lining the telephone lines throughout greater Washington.

Blagojevich In The Punchbowl

Lawbreakers can be compelling and personable. Some lawbreakers are people who, given different circumstances, may have been or later became successful in legitimate endeavor. Others are compelling for their commitment to the nonviolent assurance of equitable treatment of all of God's children, surrendering to the authority of an unjust statute as method of revealing its lack of moral integrity.

Most lawbreakers, however, are people who just got greedy and finally got caught.

The former group runs the gamut. Junior Johnson was a moonshiner who found himself paying a debt to society to become one of the most repected figures in American motorsports. Martin Luther King, Junior is now revered for his work bringing equality to a system which held African-Americans accountable without offering access to the systems that could propel a population to great heights. Not all lawbreakers are crooks.

Rod Blagojevich is someone who got greedy and finally got caught.

One does not question Blagojevich's integrity: that would imply that he had some type of integrity.

He started out by calling himself a reformer. Reformer is one of those words which should be included in a future explaination of what things really mean. In Blagojevich's case, Reform meant that the bully pulpit of the Illinois Governor could be leveraged to the highest bidder, as opposed to giving preference to ideology before taking bids.

On at least three occasions the Illinois legislature attempted to rescind a split speed limit of 55 miles per hour for large vehicles on rural expressways. It is a law held in wide disregard by Illinois law enforcement and most of the population outside of Chicago. In Chicago, 55 miles per hour is a fantasy, the two speeds there being damn slow and stop. Robbin' Rod spoke as an "advocate of public safety."

And Hitler wanted to "help the Jewish people." It is appropriate to question how much money from trucking companies, insurance companies, railroads, and authoritarian "safety" groups like RoadSafe America went into Blagojevich's pocket.

If someone were genuinely interested in trucking safety, one may wish to take steps against archaic laws allowing drivers to be paid by the mile as opposed to the hour. One may wish to offer a statewide moratorium on companies not paying truckers overtime. The state could find ways to sanction communities that impede the construction of rest and service facilities dedicated to commercial drivers. Holding companies to a higher standard of accountability beyond that of provable gross negligence could be a good place to start, too.

It could begin with offering something along the lines of the flat-rate book successfully used by people in other trades for at least fifty years.

Blagojevich holds degrees from several prestigious institutions including Northwestern and Pepperdine. The implicit understanding is that the man knows how to read. It is not as if he attended a Community College located in the abandoned Oasis of an unrealized Tollway project. (Turnpike State! On Atlanta's 420 Inner Belt! Go Roadkills Go!)

One is not wholly insensitive to some of the circumstances in the Governor's life which may have altered his outlook. When the Condo board in Oprah Winfrey's Lake Shore Drive building refused his application, it had to hurt. The clause used was the same one they used on Steadman Graham, and rather insulting in its wording.

It is unfair to blame the Governor for the wanton use of force by state law enforcement agencies since the Blues Brothers' era. At that time, Blagojevich was an apprentice crook in college. Questions remain about the uncredited writing of the script for Blues Brothers 2000, a veritable train wreck of a film.

There has been no truth to the rumor that Governor Blagojevich sold his mother to a white slavery ring in Boy's Town, Mexico.

Investigations with regard to several female cousins, however, continue.

While significant mention was made about President-elect Obama's relationship with Tony Rezko, let it be said that the most fastidious cultivator of hogs will get splashed when a boar goes batty in the slop. Blagojevich dived in and joined the party. That relationship was so strong, former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevy could have been enlisted to perform a civil union.

Political observers throughout the state of Illinois have suggested that Governor Blagojevich's remarkable pompadour is a toupee. That is untrue. There are some things that a wig shop just will not do.

Blagojevich has feuded with over twelve million residents of the state of Illinois, yet was under the illusion that he could win a third term. Talk about living in a river in Egypt. In a poll taken by the Rantoul Morning Spud, of 983 registered voters in Central Illinois, Blagojevich lost to a fictitious Republican candidate, "Ayatollah Fidel Adolf Stalin," an undocumented immigrant and Chicago Cubs fan, 87% to 2%.

95% of the undecided respondents cited the Republican's support for the Cubs as the deal-breaker.

When one speaks of abused political mechanisms, the state of Illinois has been identified regularly as a place of remarkably unethical behavior. The Abraham Lincolns, Adlai Stevensons and even Barack Obama have been overshadowed by Richard Daley, Dan Rostenkowski and George Ryan.

Today we observe the dawn of a new class: a politician has finally been located who is too corrupt even for Illinois. Congratulations, Governor Blagojevich. You will not be forgotten soon.

No matter how much one wants to.

OSAMA BIN LADEN IS DEAD!!!

Osama bin Laden, 51, of Not a Secret Cave Any Damn More, Waziristan, was killed on or about 5 November when a Predator Drone landed in his couscous.

In a moment evocative of the late Jack Anderson, your Wandering Gentile has obtained a transcript of a conversation between two bin Laden henchmen, Farj al-Kufri and Hasan ibn Xanith.

FK: (Intercourse!) They got Osama!

HX: The (intercourse?) When?

FK: The other night.

HX: (Excrement.) Now what are we going to do?

FK: We aren't going to say (male genitalia.) The Yanks are going to have a field day with the death of the Leader.

(Static)

FK, HX: YAAAAAH!!!

HX: How did they find him?

FK: Somebody at the Circuit City in Islamabad spotted him. A dude who stands a meter-ninety two, has a scraggly beard, has not bathed in the last seven years, and speaks poor Urdu sticks out in Pakistan. Believe it or not.

HX: I warned him about his love for technology and gadgets. He spent several weeks last year trying to find a cave with cellular service for his I-Phone. On the bright side, Pakistan Bell Cellular is not going to hold al Qaeda to the leader's contract.

FK: That's mighty Islamic of them. What about Dialysis Time Kidney Machines and Minivans?

HX: Who do you think sent the predator drone?

FK: I thought it could have been the Waziristan Electrical Management Cooperative.

HX: Can we spin this?

FK: Not just no, but (excrement) no. Without Osama, we're like the Stones without Mick Jagger. Wings without Paul McCartney. The (intercourse) you think, dude? We're screwed.

HX: Look, maybe we can pull something out of our ass. We send a video out from al-Zawahiri where he gets racist on Obama, how he's a sellout and a traitor. Maybe that works?

FK: Well, it's probably better than nothing which is all we got right now. You got anything we can hit? Los Angeles? Waco?

HX: You're gonna have to come up with something closer than that. Osama was financing the whole thing with his ATM card, and he never got around to giving me his (almightily condemned) PIN code. We got enough to get maybe to the Khyber Pass, and a phone card to call our cell in Mumbai.

FK: What about our cells in the United States? We had operations in a dozen cities!

HX: "Had" is the operative tense here. Our cells in New York, Chicago, Miami, San Francisco, Cleveland, and Detroit went bust when the economy tanked. Our fronts in L.A., Vegas, and Phoenix were foreclosed. St. Louis and Milwaukee switched their affiliation to Hamas.

FK: That leaves a city! What about Atlanta?

HX: It gets worse. Atlanta got tangled up with Cynthia McKinney when she discovered that we killled Tupac. His future would have been longer in al Aqsa.

FK: Well, we still have the support of our frinds in the Bush family.

HX: Oh, that's just (having intercourse) great. When the economy over there tanked, Bush wound up being three points less popular than Osama. However, that's still within the margin of error. When gas hit four bucks a gallon, Bush may as well have flown the planes instead of listening to a child read My Pet Goat.

FK: (Eeeeeexcrement.) This sucks. Our leader is dead. Our movement is broke. We're (excrement) out of favors with anyone. Can we offer a fitting epitaph to our beloved departed Osama?

HX: It doesn't look like it.

FK: We may as well not give Bush a (condemned) thing, and maybe we slow Obama's (small beast of burden) down just a hair looking for us. In late January we announce that Osama died of natural causes.

HX: Allah be praised! Osama always enjoyed screwing his benefactors.

Conservative Suicide

If Conservatives were less intent upon attending to other people's business and assuring that they legislated effectively, they would not be scrounging around the Beltway for lobbying jobs today. If Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter had been more cognizant of the situation facing the nation; had Lou Dobbs ever bothered to vet a statistic, then Conservative ideas may have earned broader acceptance in the marketplace.

Conservatives got what they asked for.

One does not wish to discredit conservative punditry's knowledge of it's audience. Among them, discussion of alterations to the Tax Code, Abortion, Immigration Reform, or Gay Rights provokes a visceral, immediate and almost uniform reaction. Regrettably (for them), the Far Right Opinion Machine had either no idea or no reverence for the growing chasm between them and the majority.

The Far Right lost on alterations to the Tax Code. Governor Mike Huckabee, and Representative Ron Paul followed behind the "Fair Tax," a consumption tax scheme designed by Atlanta-based radio host Neal Boortz, and Representative John Linder. The basis of its appeal, the decommissioning of the IRS and the sixteenth amendment, is also its downfall.

While one is disinclined to speaking favorably about the IRS, the IRS also has the unenviable task of enforcing the tax codes of the United States. The Internal Revenue Service is overdue for reform in more aspects than can be enumerated here. But doing away with it and moving to a consumption tax lacking regulation or enforcement mechanisms is a vote for the same lack of oversight that put the nation in dutch in the first place.

One also questions a system which allows government to know exactly what and in what quantities an individual purchases. (Hey! Bob just bought fifteen gallons of Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla. Why does he need that?) The current system stinks, but it's better than this alternative.

While questioning President-elect Obama's credentials as a Capitalist, there has been no outcry from Far-Right punditry about the redistribution of wealth from 99% to 1% of the population via current tax policy. One is loath to use a broad term like oligarchist, but what, precisely, is different from the Bolsheviks apart from the transparency of the wealth transfer?

The wealthy have the option of sitting upon their wealth. In the middle classes, a pent up demand exists for liquidity which will purchase cars, homes, durable goods and health care. Call it Trickle Up, a/k/a a rising tide lifts all boats.

The worthy far-right opposition totally lost the abortion debate. The majority is disinclined to reinstating governmental authority over abortion, at times in spite of intense moral opposition to the practice itself. The majority feels that the home is the best place for this discussion, as opposed to public fora. That, and about half of the population is biologically incapable of ever having an abortion in the first place, and would really rather watch football.

In the case of Immigration Reform, four candidates made their opposition a centerpiece of their campaigns. To put it in perspective, in Georgia's Republican primary, the two most vocal opponents to Immigration Reform, Representatives Duncan Hunter and Tom Tancredo, managed to gain 1,076 votes combined.

The author of the Immigration Reform bill despised by Representatives Hunter and Tancredo, Senator John McCain, was a very credible second place with 303,639 votes. Governor Huckabee, who had actually enacted legislation which could be construed as benefitting people who had entered illegally, took first place with 326,069. Call that a 585 to 1 differential against Hunter and Tancredo.

The Far Right Opinion Machine got one small victory in 2008. Proposition 8 failed in California. Judicial resources are going to be tied up for the foreseeable future, and anybody betting on prop 8's survival in the Golden State should be encouraged to send that money via The Wandering Gentile's Commode, P.O. Box Flush-Like-Rush, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

The Gay activist community may soon discover that they are better served by exacting revenge upon the talismen of conservatism. A few well placed ballot initiatives with regard to additional levies upon SUVs, McMansions, guns, and politically active faith communities in California could be much more effective than protesting in West Hollywood.

There is a country which already has many of the things that the Far Right Opinion Machine embraces already. This crucible should be seen as a oracle for the far right. That country has one of the lowest tax burdens in the world. Nativism has been an obstacle to diversity. The country has a strong relationship with a Conservative Christian community of both clergy and laity. Money is not spent on onerous schools or social programs. The wealthy have authority in all matters, and Mexicans are leaving in droves.

That country is Mexico.