DR. PHIL BEATS AROUND THE BUSH

I hear tell that Texan, Dr. Phil, is going to help the Texas Bush-league team by interviewing Laura and George about parenting. I can’t wait to learn the secret of how a couple of average or below average Texans can raise two daughters to be empty-headed, inarticulate, tongue-sticker-outing, hard-drinking party girls while another couple on the front pages these days manage to raise two articulate, intelligent, informed and interesting young women. Can you?


STRENGTH AND WISDOM ARE NOT OPPOSING VALUES

Enough said?

Now... if we can only get someone in the oval office who has the second to go with the first.... On second thought, since “strength” is the military’s purview, actually, we only need the second in the oval office. Will we get it come November?


THIS ‘SPLAINS BUSH P’URTY GOOT

In a USA Today article on literacy (August 3, 2004, p. 50) you can find why the bushman is what he is. In the top ten most literate cities, nine are northern states. Denver, not a southern state, is #7.

In the bottom ten, five cities are in Texas. Now do we understand why Laura Bush has to read and digest the papers for George? Now do we understand why Texas was number one in murder a few years back, why the whole South is poverty stricken and backward, why the Southland is the home of the Bible Belt, why compassion, as demonstrated in the welfare system, is so lacking in the South, why Republicans under master dunce Bush are able to hoodwink the entire undereducated southern populace and gain political ascendancy, why prejudice and integration persisted so long in the South? I still don’t know why we didn’t let the South secede.

By the way, I was born and raised in Ohio. Akron, Toledo, Columbus, Cincinnati and Cleveland came in high among older, industrial cities. That’s why I’m such a smart a--—I mean—intelligent fellow.


VOTERS NOT SO DUMB?

In a Robert Samuelson article in this week’s Newsweek (August 9, 2004, p. 35), Ken Goldstein, director of the Wisconsin Advertising Project, is reported as saying “that people’s party identities, their views on issues and the economy still determine far more than 90 percent of voting decisions.”

In my own case, that’s true enough.


GOOD OLD SOPHOMORIC DAYS....
STILL IN VOGUE?

Back in the mid-Sixties, when I was attending grad. school in Carbondale, Illinois, one of my buds came up with a sure fire way to demoralize our Soviet friends and possibly set them up for failure. He said we ought to “bomb the hell out of Scotland. Sad,” he added, “to lose all that good scotch whiskey, but,“ he winked, “we’ll make everyone think we’re so crazy they'll steer clear of us.”

As far as I know, my old buddy doesn’t work for the bushman’s regime in Washington, but someone sure as hell thought like him when we propelled ourselves into Iraq as an answer to Saudi-inspired terrorism.


ONCE MORE, PLEASE

The battle is over as far as evolution is concerned, but just as the average European in the Dark Ages didn’t know that the world wasn’t flat so the average Bible literalist doesn't know that evolution is here to stay, along with psychoanalysis, a round globe, the Big Bang and the wheel.

Their failure to live in the real world causes literalists to misrepresent so many things to themselves. It’s why they see “liberals” everywhere they go. Since evolution is a fact and is presented matter-of-factly in NPR shows and other modern media, literalists call NPR and other media “liberal”. They still believe, on ever-fallible faith, that evolution is an opinion, open to debate.

The bad fact of their ignorance, however, is that no matter how far backward the media bends to present politics in a fair and balanced way, the media would have to lie about science in order not to be called “liberal” by literalists. Literalists are so far out of step with knowledge that I don’t know if they can ever be in the mainstream again unless they take over America and force dogma and falsehood on us as the Catholic church did in historical times. Then they’d make the media be their way even if not the factual way.
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"I have had just about all I can take of myself." —S.N. Behrman (1893-1973) on reaching the age of 75