Democrats Need to Grow Up.

The article at the end of this blog supposedly is the enlightened answer to Zell Miller's rap on the Dems. Typical of most Dem retorts, there was nothing specific or edifying. It was the typical liberal rail on conservatism. What is so interesting about the writer's ability to chain together some big words which shows his erudite ignorance?

This writer is obviously a liberal intellectual who thinks Bush is an ignorant, idiot. While I have known a few people who would agree with that assessment, I have don't see it in the interviews I have heard him hold on TV and radio.

There is no doubt W is not an intellectual, but he certainly seems to have common sense and goodness about him I find endearing. Most of all he has convictions and is willing to stand by them. This is more than we can say about Flipper. Besides, anyone who follows politic knows most of what happens in Washington is not in the President's control anyway. He is often relegated to being an observer of events.

I am sure those who won't vote for Bush have some good arguments. But do those reasons justify voting for someone who has voted consistently against the strategic defense of America and wants to socialize America? Let's assume for a moment he is of the highest integrity (which is still an issue for me) - how can abortions, gay marriage, and a tax the rich philosophy be good for America?

We do have two Americas as Edwards suggests - those who are capitalists and those who are socialists. Those for abortion and those against. Those for gay rights and gay marriage and those for protecting family values. Let the gays have legal relationships to protect their legal rights- but why does it have to be called marriage?

The down trodden in America need our help - but that is accomplished in much better ways than through social legislation that inhibits the creativity of the business class. Where is the incentive if 45%-50% of your income goes to pay taxes? I would rather pay a flat tax of 10% and give away 40%.

Bush made some specific proposals in his convention speech. I think they merit investigation.

I liked Bush's plan to revamp the tax code. A 10% flat tax would bring reason to our economy. Get rid of all this tax nonsense and bring rational thinking to investments and planning. Most Americans would go for this. The only ones against it would be Tax attorneys and CPAs.

Freeze social security for the younger people and let them have individual social security accounts that can be invested in America. This quantifies the pension obligation for those who have the greatest stake in Social Security - the Baby Boomers and older. But it freezes the cost and allows the US to amortize those costs over the next 40 years.

Create HSAs to fund medial expenses. This allows people to fund their health benefits through individual, portable accounts. In today's mobile environment, we need better solutions to health care.

Stop the proliferation of lawsuits sponsored by attorneys who use the system to their betterment. This is going to be a huge fight because there are many wealthy attorneys who will see their meal tickets disappearing. The biggest hurdle is the lawyers who are serving in Congress. They have a conflict of interest on this issue.

I have not heard any specific ideas from Kerry. Are there any? All I have heard him say is I will the same thing Bush will do, but I will do it better than Bush. That is not an acceptable platform for me.

Most of my friends who are against Bush fall into three camps - No WMD, the tax act and the economy.

No WMD is certainly not Bush’s fault. Both the House and the Senate saw the same info Bush did and voted on it as if it was true. Plus Saddam did have WMD - he used in on the Kurds. What’s the problem? There seems to be some evidence the WMDs got shipped to Syria. That story is not over yet.

More important - the choice is simple - fight the war here or there. To wit - Russia's problems of late. Fighting Saddam stirred up a hornet's nest of reaction, no doubt - but it was just a matter of time. People say if we were going to go after anyone - it should be Iran. Well, Iran is in the axis of evil the last time I checked. They may be next, unless they pull a Gaddafi.

The Tax Act - is a philosophical argument - but both the House and the Senate passed it. It is not like Bush did this all by himself. Dems always hate tax cuts that are across the board. They think the wealthy should always pay the highest percentage in taxes. This is part of the two Americas. Those who want to tax the "rich" and those who want a fair tax rate across the board. Besides, who is rich? With the school system in such disarray, four children costs nearly $50,000 after tax. The number of people who are really rich number very few.

The Economy - the Clinton's administration left the economy in a complete mess when they left office. March of 2000 was made in the USA by 8 years of Clinton policies. It was exacerbated by 9/11 and the War. So to blame Bush for a failing economy is pure nonsense.

At any rate, all the economic evidence shows the economy is in full recovery. The GDP is up, employment is the lowest percentage in 15 years, production is up, inflation is down. The benefits of this will trickle down over time.

So I am confused. Enlighten me. How can any right thinking American want higher taxes, less defense and more social programs when we can barely afford what we have?

The two Americas is about power - those who have it today and those who don't. The ones who don't want it back - and based on all the evidence they will do anything, including lying and degrading the loyal opposition to get it. There is no such thing as fair play in politics. It has just gotten uglier and uglier. Most of the Dems sound like spoiled children on a yelling "He hit me." And then turning around a kicking the kid when the teacher is not looking.

I have but one thing to say to the intellectual snobs - grow up.

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Culture: August 26, 2004

We're Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore

How did the Party of Lincoln and Liberty transmogrify into the party of Newt Gingrich's evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk?

By Garrison Keillor

Something has gone seriously haywire with the Republican Party. Once, it was the party of pragmatic Main Street busi-nessmen in steel-rimmed spectacles who decried profligacy and waste, were devoted to their communities and supported the sort of prosperity that raises all ships. They were good-hearted people who vanquished the gnarlier elements of their party, the paranoid Roosevelt-haters, the flat Earthers and Prohibitionists, the antipapist antiforeigner element. The genial Eisenhower was their man, a genuine American hero of D-Day, who made it OK for reasonable people to vote Republican. He brought the Korean War to a stalemate, produced the Interstate Highway System, declined to rescue the French colonial army in Vietnam, and gave us a period of peace and prosperity, in which (oddly) American arts and letters flourished and higher education burgeoned-and there was a degree of plain decency in the country. Fifties Republicans were giants compared to today's. Richard Nixon was the last Republican leader to feel a Christian obligation toward the poor.

In the years between Nixon and Newt Gingrich, the party migrated southward down the Twisting Trail of Rhetoric and sneered at the idea of public service and became the Scourge of Liberalism, the Great Crusade Against the Sixties, the Death Star of Government, a gang of pirates that diverted and fascinated the media by their sheer chutzpah, such as the misty-eyed flag-waving of Ronald Reagan who, while George McGovern flew bombers in World War II, took a pass and made training films in Long Beach. The Nixon moderate vanished like the passenger pigeon, purged by a legion of angry white men who rose to power on pure punk politics. "Bipartisanship is another term of date rape," says Grover Norquist, the Sid Vicious of the GOP. "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." The boy has Oedipal problems and government is his daddy.

The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong's moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt's evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we're deaf, dumb and dangerous.

Rich ironies abound! Lies pop up like toadstools in the forest! Wild swine crowd round the public trough! Outrageous gerrymandering! Pocket lining on a massive scale! Paid lobbyists sit in committee rooms and write legislation to alleviate the suffering of billionaires! Hypocrisies shine like cat turds in the moonlight! O Mark Twain, where art thou at this hour? Arise and behold the Gilded Age reincarnated gaudier than ever, upholding great wealth as the sure sign of Divine Grace.

Here in 2004, George W. Bush is running for reelection on a platform of tragedy-the single greatest failure of national defense in our history, the attacks of 9/11 in which 19 men with box cutters put this nation into a tailspin, a failure the details of which the White House fought to keep secret even as it ran the country into hock up to the hubcaps, thanks to generous tax cuts for the well-fixed, hoping to lead us into a box canyon of debt that will render government impotent, even as we engage in a war against a small country that was undertaken for the president's personal satisfaction but sold to the American public on the basis of brazen misinformation, a war whose purpose is to distract us from an enormous transfer of wealth taking place in this country, flowing upward, and the deception is working beautifully.

The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few is the death knell of democracy. No republic in the history of humanity has survived this. The election of 2004 will say something about what happens to ours. The omens are not good.

Our beloved land has been fogged with fear-fear, the greatest political strategy ever. An ominous silence, distant sirens, a drumbeat of whispered warnings and alarms to keep the public uneasy and silence the opposition. And in a time of vague fear, you can appoint bullet-brained judges, strip the bark off the Constitution, eviscerate federal regulatory agencies, bring public education to a standstill, stupefy the press, lavish gorgeous tax breaks on the rich.

There is a stink drifting through this election year. It isn't the Florida recount or the Supreme Court decision. No, it's 9/11 that we keep coming back to. It wasn't the "End of innocence," or a turning point in our history, or a cosmic occurrence, it was an event, a lapse of security. And patriotism shouldn't prevent people from asking hard questions of the man who was purportedly in charge of national security at the time.

Whenever I think of those New Yorkers hurrying along Park Place or getting off the No.1 Broadway local, hustling toward their office on the 90th floor, the morning paper under their arms, I think of that non-reader George W. Bush and how he hopes to exploit those people with a little economic uptick, maybe the capture of Osama, cruise to victory in November and proceed to get some serious nation-changing done in his second term.

This year, as in the past, Republicans will portray us Democ-rats as embittered academics, desiccated Unitarians, whacked-out hippies and communards, people who talk to telephone poles, the party of the Deadheads. They will wave enormous flags and wow over and over the footage of firemen in the wreckage of the World Trade Center and bodies being carried out and they will lie about their economic policies with astonishing enthusiasm.

The Union is what needs defending this year. Government of Enron and by Halliburton and for the Southern Baptists is not the same as what Lincoln spoke of. This gang of Pithecanthropus Republicanii has humbugged us to death on terrorism and tax cuts for the comfy and school prayer and flag burning and claimed the right to know what books we read and to dump their sewage upstream from the town and clear-cut the forests and gut the IRS and mark up the constitution on behalf of intolerance and promote the corporate takeover of the public airwaves and to hell with anybody who opposes them.

This is a great country, and it wasn't made so by angry peo-ple. We have a sacred duty to bequeath it to our grandchil-dren in better shape than however we found it. We have a long way to go and we're not getting any younger.

Dante said that the hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who in time of crisis remain neutral, so I have spoken my piece, and thank you, dear reader. It's a beautiful world, rain or shine, and there is more to life than winning.