THE THOMAS PAINE OF IRAQ

Well, now we've gone and done it. Now we've really moved into the Vietnam mode with our attacks on a true Iraqi patriot, al-Sadr. In black robes and white turban, he's the fiery Thomas Paine of the American Revolution .

We have no business going after a true patriot, but we're doing it. We've crossed the line in our obsession with forcing an American-style government onto Iraq when we promised we'd let the Iraqi's have any type of government they wanted. Another Bush lie. Pile it on that slag pile of Bush lies we've already got.

Some history. In Nam, America supported a government led by French trained, Catholic leaders who had been educated in France during the French occupation of South Vietnam. Ninety percent of Vietnam's citizens were Buddhists, but their country was being led by the 10% of them who were Catholic, educated in French schools with Western cultural ways. In Iraq we're supporting a bunch of hand-picked American trained Iraqis. In Nam, we were sort of like the Germans who helped Britain against American revolutionaries rather than being like the French who came to the aid of the American Revolution. We were on the wrong side. We're begining to be on the wrong side in Iraq.

We're starting to lose sight of our values in Iraq. al-Sadr is a patriot of Iraq who suffered under Saddam and who now is suffering under America's occupation of his country. He has every right to want the Americans out. It's his country, and he wants a government for his country which is not like America's government. He has the right to disagree, and he has a right to fight the occupiers of his country to achieve his aims (didn't our founding fathers do exactly the same thing?), and what does al-Sadr get for it? As the British did to our newspapers in our Revolution, we shut down his newspaper. We silenced dissent. We did an undemocratic thing and something totally against our own Constitution, but Bush is not a Constitutionalist. He doesn't believe in the Constitution. He puts the Bible over the Constitution, so, of course, he doesn't mind silencing a Moslem.

But, aren't we being told that 90% of the Iraqis want democracy? How do we know that? Who's taking the polls in that country without phones and bad electricity and chaos everywhere, a country divided into three widely disparate groups: Sunnis, Shia and Kurds? What poll taker walks into the armed camps of al-Sadr's men and asks them what they want? How did they take the polls in all the little towns across Iraq? There are no real and accurate polls in Iraq. They're being made up as Bush goes along. Let me predict: the polls being reported don't exist and if they do, they are not scientifically accurate and aren't representative of the country as a whole.

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A TITBIT OF PASSION FRUIT

Jesus was pretty lucky. He died quick on that cross, in a few hours. Other less godlike men, treated the same as Jesus, sometimes hung on those crosses for two to three days before giving up the ghost.

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"Classical music is music written by famous dead foreigners." —Arlene Heath