HOW QUICK WE FORGET

There are those - Stanley McChrystal are you listening? - who are whimpering about Obama's delay in committing to a new strategy (really an ACTUAL strategy) in Afghanistan.

How quick we forget.

A year ago, before the election, we were experiencing a total meltdown in the financial sector. I don't know how things were going for you, but the bank where I have my mortgage and checking account went bankrupt! Out of business! Sold to the highest bidder!

And dear old Iraq was still killing Americans despite McCain's devout mantra "The Surge Is Working!"

And the polar icecap was melting and the national deficit was exceeding $1 billion and the NSA was tapping all our phone calls and prisoners were being tortured at Gitmo, etc.

Obama inherited a HUGE mess to clean up.

He's stabilized the economy.

Our military troops in Iraq are relatively safe on their bases. (Support Our Troops!! Bring Them Home To Their Families!!)

And Obama is working to develop a successful and intelligent strategy in Afghanistan.

So chill out, dudes. Remember, the goddam GOP created a HUGE mess.

Or have you forgotten already?

SARAH FOR SALE

The last time I posted, I said Sarah Palin might have decided to resign as governor so she could spend more time with her family. I also said she might be hooked on national politics and positioning herself for a 2010 candidacy.

But now I don't think either description really fits the facts.

After the McCain/Palin ticket went down in flames - an oddly appropriate description considering McCain's "Ace" status in losing five aircraft during his military service - Sarah had lucrative offers rolling in from wealthy right wing reptiles all over the country. But as Governor of Alaska she was legally prevented from accepting outside employment. On the other hand, she was incompetent and increasingly unpopular as Governor of Alaska. Why not just quit? Why not indeed.

Well, one might consider that election to a public office implies an obligation to serve if elected. One might consider that running for public office should be done to serve one's country and community. One might consider that promises made during an election campaign are moral obligations that must be kept. One might consider that a public office is a public trust.

"Oh the hell with that. I'm takin' the book deal."

At this point, it's not a question of whether Sarah will run for Pres in 2010. Sarah is not capable of organizing and planning such an effort. The question is whether the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy - which apparently does exist - will choose to run her. They have already had spectacular success in electing idiot spokespersons to the White House. Reagan was a corporate shill doing radio promos and hosting "Death Valley Days" before rightwingers decided to rewrite his scripts and bankroll his TV ads all the way to the White House. They still get a certain thrill "down there" when they think about it. Dubya was a complete idiot, but they stole two elections from overly polite and underly patriotic Democrats to put him in the Oval Office. Didn't that work out well? It sure did, if you were a crony collecting federal dollars and chortling over federal tax cuts.

So the question is, will the right wing decide they can elect Sarah? She's infinitely pliable and gullible. Plus. She's unprincipled and self-centered. Plus. She's a whacked out revivalist rapture-lovin' so-called Christian. Plus for the nomination, but maybe a negative for normal voters. Who knows what they will decide?

But one thing we do know, if they do decide they want her.

Sarah is definitely For Sale.

SARAH PALIN

Hmmm.

So Sarah is resigning because she doesn't want to "accept that lame duck status" and "draw a paycheck" and "kind of milk it" and "put Alaskans through that".

Ridiculous. You don't run for public office, particularly a powerful position like Governor of a state, and then resign when you decide not to run for re-election. You have a civic responsibility to serve out your term, to exercise the powers of your office according to the promises you made to the people who voted for you.

Only Sarah knows the real reasons she decided to resign.

It seems to me there are a few possibilities.

First, she may have gotten a taste of national politics and hated it. The timing of the recent Vanity Fair article would support that idea. She was asked to join the GOP ticket. She did. She did her best, and for a brief moment, enthusiasm for her choice lifted GOP poll numbers above the Democrats'. But, in the end, her ticket lost and her own inexperience was blamed as a factor in the loss. Sniping from ex-McCain personnel has been ugly and painful.

Sarah has five children, and Bristol has a newborn Palin grandchild she can't support. I don't know if you've been in a similar situation. I've helped raise four kids, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if Sarah Palin has decided that her young family needs her more than Anchorage does these days. She may really have decided to leave public life for a while and to stay home with her kids.

But there are other possibilites.

Sarah may have gotten a taste of national politics and LOVED it! It's quite possible she has offers to do national fundraisers or to be a Fox fake news spokesperson that would get her out of Alaska and onto a national stage. She may simply be quitting her present job because she got a better offer. It would be typical of the faux patriotism displayed by many on the right. Country First -and by Country I mean ME!

Only Sarah really knows what's going on. But it will be easy for the rest of us to tell if either of these guesses is right. Three months from now Sarah will either be (1) in Wasila taking care of her kids while her name fades away from the news or (2) somewhere else - Los Angeles, New York, Dallas - trying to get ready for 2012 candidacy.

I hope she gets the nomination. It would be even better if the 20% of Americans who vote for her in 2012 decide to move to Alaska after she loses.

There's another possibility, considering the moral depravity of the GOP these days. She may be facing some terrible legal or personal crisis. Will she be arrested for leaking classified information to the media? - no, that's Karl Rove's nightmare. Is she facing charges for reaching under a bathroom stall seeking gay sex? - no, that was ex-Senator Larry Craig. Did she disappear on National Nude Hiking Day, with a cover story that she was hiking the Appalachian trail, and then surface tearfully with a confession that she had an Argentinian lover? Are you making this up? No, really, that happened, but it didn't involve Sarah Palin. Still, with GOP lowlifes, it's always a possibility.

Let's see if Sarah ends up spending October 1, 2009 in Wasila or elsewhere. Is she a devoted mother? Or something else?

YOU MIGHT BE A CONSERVATIVE IF ...

How times have changed.

A "conservative" once meant someone who wanted to "conserve" things, to keep things from changing, to preserve things the way they were, especially to limit the size and powers of government. Now so-called "conservatives" are recklessly gambling with the earth's environment despite the clamor of alarm bells from all over the world; smiling in agreement at universal, unsupervised, unconstitutional monitoring of all forms of electronic communication by the federal government; and consenting to spending deficits and shady corruption that truly boggles the mind.

I don't really think they should call themselves "conservatives" any more, or that we should call them "conservatives" either. It isn't fair to the reputations of real conservatives who have something valid to say - and actual ideas.

We should call them by their own term, one that summarizes their intellectual traits and reasoning processes.

Dittoheads.

Let's put it this way: If you haven't caught on yet that Fox News and AM radio are owned and operated by big-money people, who pursue their own interests by lying and especially by distracting ordinary people from reasonable discussion about our own welfare, well, now would be a good time to wake up and smell the stuff that Limbaugh and Savage and Beck and Hannity and Coulter and the rest of the crew are dishing out. They are protecting big-money interests like coal and oil by casting doubt on the truth about global warming.

You might remember how the cigarette companies reacted to the 1965 Surgeon General's Report about smoking. It's deja vu all over again.

Dittoheads, please wake up. The last eight years did happen, and your "conservative" leaders did exercise virtually unlimited powers to implement their destructive ideas. It's time to realize that you have been betrayed by those who knew what lies it would take to ensnare you, and who are absolutely shameless liars.

Wake up, already.

VICE PRESIDENT HILARY CLINTON?

Yesterday Oprah Winfrey - following in the sly gotcha-journalism footsteps of Katie "Velvet Fist" Couric - exposed a shocking secret in O's interview of Dr. Jill Biden, wife of new Veep Joe Biden. "Joe Biden had been offered a choice of positions in the new Obama Administration: either Vice President or Secretary of State." Whoa!

Joe quickly tried to shush her up, but it was too late. Now the secret is out.

So Joe could have had Hilary's new job. But think about it. What if he had wanted that job?

It makes sense to me that Obama picked Biden first. Obama was expecting that the main campaign against him would highlight his relative lack of experience in Washington. Although he had spent eight years in the Illinois state senate, he had only been elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004. Joe Biden had already been there for 32 years when Barack arrived.

What about Hilary? First elected to the Senate in 2000, she was the junior senator from New York, not as experienced in government as she portrayed herself. And having been demonized for so many years by the right wing, she would face her own questions - unfair and biased questions, to be sure - about her own readiness to lead.

I think Biden was a good choice. No one ever questioned that he would be ready to serve as President if needed. (By the way, Sarah, that's what the Vice President's job is. He's not "in charge of the U.S. Senate". He or she is supposed to be ready to serve as President. Give Colin Powell a call; he'll explain it to you.)

I think things worked out really well. Joe Biden, as Vice President, will return to the Senate chambers, working with his friends and colleagues to achieve the goals of the new Administration. Hilary Clinton will be a dedicated and energetic Secretary of State, working to bring peace to the Middle East, holding the respect of both Israelis and Arabs, resurrecting a peace process started by President Clinton and abandoned by the neocon warmongers.

But what if Joe had wanted to be Secretary of State?

It seems clear from his later actions that Barack Obama tries to reach out to political opponents, and to build unity and consensus wherever possible.

It seems clear that there was a time when Obama was reaching out to his rivals for the Democratic nomination in the same way.

He offered the positions of Vice President and Secretary of State to Joe Biden. Joe decided to stay in Washington and on the Senate floor as Vice President.

He then offered the position of Secretary of State to Hilary Clinton. It seems clear that she was next on his list after Biden.

If Joe had wanted to be Secretary of State, would Obama have offered the Vice Presidency to Hilary Clinton? We can only speculate, but it certainly does make sense.

Vice President Hilary Clinton?

I really think it worked out better this way.

I hope that everything the Obama Administration attempts works out as well.

Our nation and the world could use a change for the better right now.

EVOLUTION

Do you want to hear something really spooky?

Evolution is in the Bible. And so are a whole lot of modern scientific ideas.

Let's sum things up. In the ninteethth century, naturalists explored new ecosystems around the world, and Charles Darwin proposed the idea of species differentiation through natural evolution. In the early twentieth century, red shift measurements of star spectra by Edwin Hubble implied the notion of an expanding universe. And later ideas about nuclear and subnuclear particles defined a theory now known as The Big Bang. It kind of goes like this.

In the beginning, all of the matter and energy of the entire known universe was concentrated in an area of space smaller than an atom. We don't know or understand how this happened, but the evidence points to this as our reality. An explosion into empty space started in darkness, because the density was too great to allow light to propagate. Some time later, energy was converted into nuclear particles like protons and electrons, and some time after that stars formed from the hydrogen gas clouds. Planets formed from supernova debris ejected by early, massive stars. Our own Earth formed as a hot, rocky, impact-scarred planet, later covered with water oceans formed from icy asteroids. Primitive life originated in these oceans, and later developed into land animals.

Now suppose you are Moses. You were found in a reed basket along the river, and raised in the Pharoh's court. You have been educated by the most civilized, most powerful, most sophisticated culture in the Western world.

But you still don't know as much math and science as a typical third grader these days. You don't have numbers like billions and trillions, because you don't have the modern number system invented in the ninth century. You don't know the sun is a star or that planets like Earth move in orbits around stars. You don't know about deep ocean thermal vents or bacteria or kangaroos.

Just suppose that some other being comes to you in a dream, and shows you how the world began. Just suppose your words are passed by word of mouth for many centuries before being written down for the first time. Just suppose even the first hand-copied written Scriptures don't even agree exactly with each other. What would we be left with? Maybe this?

In the beginning, there was nothing. And God said, let there be Light, and there was light. And first He separated the light from darkness, craeting the stars in the sky. Then He created the Earth, and covered it with seas. Life began in the oceans, as fish. Later forms of life were the amphibians - who moved from the water to the land - and the reptiles. Then mammals appeared on Earth. And finally, last in the chain of life, most recent in the history of this planet, mankind appeared.

I think it's a pretty good description of Evolution, and a whole lot of other stuff. It's spooky.

Why do so-called Christians object to Evolution? It's not because they are defending the Bible. What they are defending is their own egotistical, self-worshiping, sanctimonious desire for the Bible to mean what THEY say it means.

It's one thing to believe in the Bible. Then you approach it with reverence and humility, believing it was inspired by a superhuman, immortal creature far beyond your comprehension. You seek to learn and understand, with the admission that your knowledge will always be limited and imperfect.

It's another thing to say you believe in "a literal interpretation of the Bible". That's just code for "The Bible means EXACTLY WHAT I SAY IT MEANS!" It's kind of a way for a sanctimonious creep to identify himself as a sanctimonious creep.

People who attack attack Evolution aren't defending the Bible or any legitimate religious belief. They are simply showing themselves to be one of two things. They may be timid sheep who do not dare to admit that they are responsible for their own choices, and desperately wish to yield that responsibility to some other authority. Or they may be arrogant, self-worshipping asses.

The Bible itself has no problem with Evolution. In fact, it's kind of amazing that Evolution appeared in it so many centuries before science figured it out.

LURKING IN THE SHADOWS

There are those who feel some sympathy for Dubya.

Matt Taibbi, for example, in his funny and sad article in Rolling Stone, describes Bush as "desperate" to fulfill expectations of "emotionally absent" parents, and lets Bush end a fictional interview by saying, "I really am sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

My aunt, a lifelong Democrat and ardent Hilary supporter, said Bush was pathetic in his final press conference, that he just didn't seem to understand what people were saying about him.

I don't agree.

Bush and his administration are war criminals and thieves, shameless liars and contemptible hypocrites. They deserve to be tried for war crimes by an Iraqi jury - one chosen from outside Baghdad, miles away from the Green Zone. I have no sympathy for them. They are traitors to my country, enemies of the People of These United States.

But they're not failures.

Their goal, from the beginning, was to expand Presidential powers to seek their own ends. They waited until the warnings of a terrorist attack came true, they created wars and a wartime environment to stifle dissent, and they ran rampant through eight years of unchecked power.

Their goal, from the beginning, was to subvert the powers of government to benefit their private sector allies. They created a foreign policy in Iraq designed for the benefit of the oil industry, with more private contractors on the ground than soldiers. Do you remember the Declaration of Principles Agreement promulgated by the White House in November 2007? Permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq and preferential treatment for U.S. corporations. That's what it was all about from the beginning. That War On Terror thing? Pure propaganda for the gullible and the unwary. Pipsqueak Iraq was never a threat to the U.S., and the scheming, secular Hussein was never connected to any Islamic fundamentalist group, especially Al-Qaeda.

Their goal, from the beginning, was to protect the oil, gas, and coal industries from any actions to stem global warming. Done. Their goal, from the beginning, was to eviscerate government regulation of the financial industry. Done. Their goal, from the beginning, was to cripple enforcement of any environmental regulations. Done. Their goal, from the beginning, was to reward their backers with irresponsible tax cuts. Done.

Don't call these guys failures. They are spectacularly successful traitors and thieves. They are only failures if you consider that they intended to govern this country with honor and patriotism. Did you really believe that? You are an idiot.

The danger now is that the shady characters who distorted the media and perverted the political process to put these guys into power won't be going away on January 20. They've done pretty well for themselves during these eight years of corruption. And they want that power back.

We won a tremendous victory for our democracy and our nation's future by electing Barack Obama. But don't kid yourself. Bush, the tongue-tied fool, and Cheney, the delusional paranoid, were not the whole problem. The danger now is that the darkest monsters were the ones pulling the strings, manipulating public opinion, insinuating themselves into our government. They're still out there: unrepentant, ravenous, greedy for more.

Keep your eyes open. For there are still dangerous beasts lurking in the shadows.