The newspapers and the mags and rags and television shows take up a caricature, and digest its gruesome exaggerations.  Then they regurgitate them to us--as a mother penguin to her chicks--as fact, whose sour effect can be argued, but not their correctness.

And we groan.  Why is so much of the "news" the reporter’s opinion of how the public’s opinion, as abstracted by the reporter, will be affected by the abstracted collective opinion of reporters?  "What do you think, Howard, about what is being thought about what we think people might be thinking?"

Senator Obama's speech made me pull down my old paperback copy of Soul on Ice, Eldridge Cleaver's prison autobiography.  Cleaver, a Black Panther who advocated self-defense for the ghettos, made white American wail in indignation, "How can he say such things?"

But, as today, it was the older generation, frightened of what they could not understand, frightened of too much change,  who cried such things.  The young were trying to continue the promise of the republic.

We stand at the threshold of momentous events, no matter which of the possibilities occurs.  Obama wins big and Clinton capitulates? Certainly something no one of us has ever seen.  Clinton wins big and the contest continues?  No matter how that shakes out, it will be something to tell your grandkids about.

You may be moved to tear your hair or rend your garments.  It may be tempting to call down curses on your opponents.

But.  Today is traditionally the day in the United States when we inaugurated our President.  And on just such a day, in 1861, the newly elected President Abraham Lincoln spoke.

       It’s an old story—perhaps even an urban legend—that a frog in a pan of gradually heated water will not perceive its peril and will fail to leap from the pan until it’s too late and it is effectively cooked.
Or there's the tale of the death of a thousand cuts.  One cut, or two, or three--or eight--and you might not even take notice.  But in a few more cuts, or a hundred, suddenly a threshold is passed, and in surprise, you find your very survival at risk.

More and more, the feeling has grown in me that our country is this frog, and we are cooked.  We’re done, but we don’t yet know it.  

The telecoms couldn’t have broken any laws because they only did what the government asked them to do.  The government couldn’t have asked them to do anything illegal, because the FISA lawrequires them always to get legal permission from a special court, after which immunity is granted for anything the government requests them to do.  

The government believed it was always obliged to consult this special court, except when it felt it couldn’t, so now the telecoms  need an immunity which would have been automatically granted except that the government didn’t think it always had to follow the FISA law and consult the court.  So now, that law needs to be changed so that everyone can be certain the government will always obey it in the future, barring those hypothetical instances when it feels it can’t.  

Who should be president, really?  

Where shall we find in one person that mix of principle and knowledge and character and humility, gravitas, humor, plain-speaking, and humanity to lead us through the dangerous waters that lie ahead?

None of the current candidates, I have to say, quite measures up to my admittedly lofty expectations.  My friends or family members don’t either.  In fact, no one I have ever met seems quite up to it.

That is not to say I am without hope, however.  I am certain that someone will somehow appear, and bring the nation together.  He or she will inspire us to take up the difficult work ahead, make us remember a quiet pride in being a people with honor and idealism

It has been a full week, and I encounter still the odd fugitive coffee bean.  The foil pouch exploded and rained dark beans onto the counter and into the corners and down upon the floors when I ripped its side open in my tugging and straining to unseal it.  The packet was of course strongest where it was marked, "open here," at the top, just above the pictures promising delicious glistening beans inside.

The First Rule of 21st Century Packaging: Glue’s strength shall exceed by double that of the material fastened by the glue.

Sealing adhesive, it was once widely known, does not merely serve to keep a package from coming open during its shippings and its handlings.  It ought also to permit customers to get at and use the coffee or the cereal or dog food inside (which was the point in the first place of the packaging and gluing and the enticing by advertisement and all the shipping and handling).

You might be wondering, what does that have to do with the odious and wretched administration of George W Bush?  

Too much, too much.

I don’t know how it ends. I saw a bleak presentiment, five years ago.  Saw destruction hang like a dark satanic cloud over the bully’s pulpit at the UN, where the President preached his disdainful  jeremiad to the lesser nations.  I heard the blood dimmed tide roar when the Secretary of State proclaimed his holy justification for the slaughter of innocents.

I've been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard.

Still, I blew on the embers of hope as best I could.  Cooler heads could yet prevail. Grownups could come to the rescue, a light could spring over the dark brink eastward.

I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it

Now I find it hard to look.  Our president can’t.  He foretells ends that confound reason.  Full of passionate intensity, he professes beliefs that reveal only a fool’s understanding.  Yet even so, I hope, I pray, I hope again, that it will somehow turn out.  Not good, maybe but please God, not disastrously bad.  

Inshallah, not apocalypse bad, not Gotterdammerung bad.  

You heard me.  All this Biden-bashing going on here in the hallways, and the Biden-bashing-bashing, fistfights and piefights spilling out onto the front lawn, with formerly cordial people calling each other terrible names and suddenly thinking dreadful thoughts of those whom they would have previously hailed as buddies of the bosomest sort.

My bad.  It was me.

And it’s not the first time, either.

Fella americans,
Four sore and stubborn years ago my advisors shoved forth on that far continent, a new nation, conceived in idiocy, and dedicated to the proposition that all threats are regarded equal.
Now they are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We go to no great battle-fields in this war, but visit the Green Zone,if things are not too bad. We dedicate no public final resting place, we offer no official show of reverence, for those who there gave their lives. It is altogether fitting and properthat we should do this, but we want to hold our sacrifice to a much smaller portion of peace of mind.  

Yesterday evening, a bomb of terrible destructive power, termed a "doomsday device" by Democratic leaders was detonated in Washington DC.  Reports have identified a room in the White House as the epicenter of the blast.  Its effects were felt immediately in the capital and elsewhere throughout the nation, causing widespread reports of nausea, confusion, and despair.  There were even instances in some cities of heads exploding.  

But the worst may not be over, experts say, because the greatest damage from this bomb—created at the American Enterprise Institute during the 1990s--occurs long after the initial explosion.

Our dog, WhoMe, is famous in the neighborhood for his looks of astonished innocence whenever a human refers to his possible role in any matter of overturned garbage cans, disturbance of the peace, flowerbed excavations, or odors so rank as to invite respiratory system failure.

Who, me? his look says.  Me?

That is the great thing about dogs.  They never admit responsibility. For anything.  A dog whose look is embarrassed or guilty is putting you on.  He has merely resigned himself to the airtightness of the case against him and is angling for leniency at the sentencing phase.

FROM: DEPARTMENT OF LESSONS LEARNED
TO: POTUS           
RE: FUTURE FOREIGN POLICY ADVENTURES

Mr. President,
We got your hurried directive of Wednesday morning to "bring me up to speed on what the hell has been going on around here and why everyone is so upset about it." We are offering a set of guidelines, which we confidently believe the blame for not following can be completely and solely placed on Don Rumsfeld.  

In a press conference today, presidential mouthpiece Tony Snow touched on the point we have all been hammering away at.  

At his daily briefing today at the White House, Press Secretary Tony Snow fielded a barrage of questions related to the recent upsurge in U.S. deaths in Iraq and worries that the Iraqi government is failing to stem the tide of violence. Suddenly one reporter put the issue squarely: "Sorry. Just the simple question: Are we winning?"

Snow punted.

"We're making progress," he replied. "I don't know. How do you define `winning'?

President Bush on Wednesday quietly signed a law that will outlaw foreign alcoholic beverages in the U.S, a move designed to quell the number of illegal acts committed by otherwise law-abiding, decent Americans acting under the influence of foreign, perhaps terrorist-inspired liquor. Republicans had sought the protection in the wake of the scandal involving Rep. Mark Foley, who said earlier that if it had not been for non-American booze, he would never have been moved to act inappropriately "in any way" with House pages.  

The legislation was necessary, said presidential press secretary Tony Snow, in the wake of foreign-alcohol-inspired school shootings, child predation, homosexual marriage, and in Snow's words, "a completely drunken set of intelligence failures on Iraq."

:More on the flip:

The candidate loony enough that even Idaho Republicans (!) are distancing themselves from him, Bill Sali, revealed Sept. 6 (via Lewiston (ID) Tribune--alas, subscriber only) his insiders' understanding on the question of WMDs:

Sali insisted weapons were recently discovered and that early in the war weapons were spirited away to Syria. "I know that I saw it on the TV station," Sali said. "It might have only been on FOX, come to think of it."

Well, there you go.  It must be true, then! And the fact it was on Fox alone proves the liberal media tried to keep this important story away from the public!

Boss's Main Guy comes to you, sits on the corner of your desk.  "We got a war to wage," says he.  "Only one way to show terrorists you mean serious business, and that is to put them out of business.  We need to shut Hizbollah and Hamas down and scare the other Islamowackos.  And that means we have to bomb the shit out of Iran.  Maybe Syria, too.  You in?"

You like having this White House job.  I mean, it's the White House, for chrissakes.  The freaking White House!  Your mom and dad are busting with pride, telling everybody they can buttonhole in the old home town their kid works at the goddamn White House.  All the old frat brothers are jealous, too awed to even flip you shit about it anymore.  You have thoughts of someday doing something historical.  No doubt...this Iran thing would be historical.  

Just one problem.  

Let us begin with

Bush's Tautology of Terror:
For there to be a war on terror, terror must exist.

Pretty straightforward, eh?  Ah, but there are worlds of equivocation hidden there.  

Suppose you are a certain gifted, near-genius president.  Attacked by terrorists, you declare a war on terror.  And you demonize anyone not sufficiently devoted to its perfect success.  For instance, certain treasonous parties may have mentioned they thought terrorism might properly be a law-enforcement issue.  

This you cannot allow.