Just a quick note about our President, Shrub. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm getting sick and tired of the continual attempt to gloss over issues by trying to blanket them with names like "Freedom Agenda" "Patriot Act" "War on Terrorism" etc etc, and always framing arguments in such a way that whatever is actually the weakest point in policy as far as favor goes with the public is suddenly the central issue (the Middle East is the "central battlefield" of the war on terror, etc). I think the public is smart enough by now to realize that just because the President and his advisors are framing everything in patriotic and/or all-or-nothing terms doesn't make them so. The War on Terror is just as much a sham as the War on Drugs, the War on Poverty, and the War on Hunger. These are not things on which war can be declared. They will always exist in one form or another, because people will always want cheap thrills, wealth will always somehow become unevenly distributed (or there won't be enough to go around), and people will always seek ways to achieve power over others. Wishing that these things were a matter of national pride, national security, patriotism, or all-important matters of state does not mean that they are. More realistically, they are matters of reelection, and then only if the American public lets the politicos get away with it (and that's a term with specific meaning, you should look it up, because it applies directly to this administration, and most of all to Karl Rove). If you know me, you know that I actually find such rants against our President pretty pathetic and annoying (as bad as he is, he's not Hitler. I mean give me a break). But more and more, Shrub strikes me as even more pathetic than the rabble being roused by the masses against him.
The real point is that both our President AND his opponents are one-dimensional whiny bastards who aren't really thinking about anything except getting elected, getting reelected, or seeing to it that their will is done, "damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead." And that says something pretty sorry about the state of politics at the moment in this country. Maybe its always been this way, but I don't think we've always been so sterotypically and American-ly selfish.
Jon Stewart for President? Sure, I'd vote for him.
Anybody but a politician.