Selling the American Dream...

The doors at my house needed replacing.  Too many were hung off kilter, slamming shut on their own accord or not closing completely, failing to act as a proper barrier to entry.  So after being shocked by the high prices at the home improvement supercenters, I took my brother's advice and joined him on a visit to a rural auction.

 

After traveling fifty miles, deep into the Midwestern country, leaving the comfort of the suburban curbed roads, stop lights and the company of compact cars, I found myself standing in frigid field that extended in every direction toward the horizon.  The only interruption in the scenery was the road on which we came, a barn and piles of construction material drawing crowds of red nosed contractors.  The ground was frozen solid and the sky a cold blue.  The fog of my breathe crystallized with each exhale, shattering the sunlight with a million microscopic prisms. 

 

I didn't dress for the tundra, the sharp winds cut through my weak jeans and poorly lined wool jacket to petrify my frame and freeze the tears it pulled from my eyes.  The contractors wore more appropriate apparel: black fleece face masks, insulated leather work boots and heavy arctic coveralls in prints of camouflage or tan. 

 

I wasn't the only one sparsely dressed.  There were several burly men that seemed quite comfortable in this bitter environment.  One man had a large fur lined leather jacket, unzipped to reveal his homemade knitted sweater.  He didn't wear a hat, nor gloves, but remained outside in the single-digit temperature for most of the day.  His hair was disheveled into a greasy blond Mohawk, his nose came to a red point and his suspicious eyes, sunken and weathered.  He looked Russian, but never spoke above a whisper to expose an accent to reinforce the assumption.

 

Another man of enormous proportions stood above me at a height of at least six foot eight.  He had black bushy eye brows, a wide nose and a thick shadow of a beard.  Wearing a flannel jacket over a sweater and denim overalls, he resembled a humbled Goliath - he rarely spoke and whenever he won a bid, he personally carried his prize silently to his truck.  He would lift lumber, weighing hundreds of pounds up to his chest, over most men's head, and carry it with ease.  I heard him speak and his accent was distinctively Slavic (heavy of the "sh" and "eck" with a trilled "r").

 

Although the characters that speckled the icy landscape were interesting and unique, those that were a part of the clamor inside the barn were equally entertaining.  The warmth of the barn attracted scores of people eager to escape the glacial Sunday morning.  They gathered around the auctioneer.  He sat on a makeshift wagon beside an auction recorder and a simian man of red hair, protruding jaw and strong brow.  A loud speaker was mounted on either side of the cart broadcasting the unintelligible blather that seldom resembled English.  Those on the wheeled platform were propelled by the auction participants, and from afar it seemed reminiscent of an ancient ritual spawning from the slaves of Egypt that hauled the mighty bricks of the pyramids to the shouts of the pharaoh's guards. 

 

The owner of the barn and the person that ran this auction was a burly man that carried his weight well.  He had a mischievous look on his face at all times.  He would never stop moving his legs or his mouth.  He would yell at the top of his voice for silence from the crowd, but it was solely his fault for disrupting the procession.  He tormented his employees - none earning more than minimum wage.  The young girl responsible for opening and closing the door of the barn was a frequent target of his abuse.  He would rush at her as though he were about to throw her to the ground, but he would stop inches from her face to curse at her for having the door open too long.  A boy no older than sixteen came in to escape the cold, his lips were blue and his cheeks were a frost bitten purple.  The owner threatened to withhold his earnings unless he stayed outside.  With tears frozen to his cheeks, he followed the horrid directive.

 

It appeared that the races of Middle-earth had found sanctuary in this large but cramped barn.  Hobbits, though shod and closer to five feet tall rather than three, bustled about with glazed expressions and smelling of ale.  They were directed by Dwarves and dark Elves.  After many hours in the blistering cold, the Russian entered the barn with a band of Orc's.  The short, putrid beings were filthy in both mind and body.  I overheard them exchanging lurid jokes, saw them picking at their orifices and wounds, and they would sneak smokes in the corners and relieve themselves on the walls.  The perimeter was occupied by wizards and men.  Wielding tape measures and clip boards, they would fight their way through the crowd to bid on items of appeal.  They followed a more precise agenda than the rest who fought for every item like it was the One Ring of Sauron.

 

The only woman to join the crowd was a bizarre figure.  Dressed in a pristine white skier's vest and fluffy snow boots, she stood almost six feet and always at the back of the crowd.  She gave the air that she was of too high a status than to join the cluster of people that surrounded each auctioned item.  Indeed she would never even approach the items to measure them or inspect them for damage.  This lack of knowledge didn't dissuade her from bidding exorbitant amounts over others in order to have the winning bid.  She would often bid against individuals that had no notion of the regular price of an item.  The others would regularly bid higher than what the item would go for at a home improvement store.  Nonetheless, this queen of the auction wouldn't allow an insolent peasant to win a bid over her.  The auctioneer noticed her spendthriftiness and exploited it.  Whenever a damaged item came up for bid the simian auctioneer, that served as a second pair of eyes for the one blathering into the microphone, would pick her out of the crowd, calling her by name and she would make a bid.  The Russian's Orc's would deliberately bid against her with no intention of winning the item.  She didn't realize that they were toying with her as she was trying to flaunt a status of upper class and wield the power of money.

 

She was accompanied by a jolly man, armed with a permanent grin and rosy cheeks he walked beside her nodding at every question she whispered in his ears.  He looked unaccustomed to his flannel shirt and blue jeans and regularly tugged at his waistline and scratched around his neck.  I overheard a Hobbit saying that the man was her husband and that they would come to the auction once a month and drop over twenty thousand dollars just to get a rush from masquerading as opulent developers.  Indeed neither of them had the tell tale signs of the developer- no weathered faces, their nails were immaculate and their hands absent of disfigurement, and neither scoff nor scratch defaced their Timberland boots.  The facade they projected won them no status amongst the proletariat, to their contrary, they were an secret joke to which all but them were privy.  This didn't prevent them from parading around, chip up, back straight, looking through people rather than at them, all the while thinking that they were above this wretched rabble.

 

I was lucky in my bidding.  I attended this auction for doors and won what I needed.  While suffering the elements outside, I competed against the Russian on 4 bundles of 25 doors.  He won the first three but let me have the last for 75¢ a door.  Inside I bought half a dozen door frames for $5.  I was satisfied with my prize, but my fiancée had mentioned to me that she wanted French doors in the attic bedroom, so I waited around until the end when the auction wagon came around to the doors.  The French doors were at the end of a long line of doors.  By the time the wagon reached the items I wanted, the Russian had abandoned the crowd, obviously irritated from competing with the auction queen.  The auction queen had also reached her limit after squandering a small fortune on so many damaged items.  The Dwarves and Elves were busy directing their Hobbits to load the items they already won.  Those that were left were the humans and wizards and they only had specific items they desired, luckily the French doors were not them.  A small crowd still circled the auction wagon.  They were mostly drunks that would only buy items for under $10.  I ended up winning the doors for that very price.

 

My brother and I loaded my winnings into the trailer of his truck.  The end of the auction was a chaotic period when everyone is busy packing lumber and the like into vehicles.  Developers barked orders at contractors, contractors barked orders at foreman, and the foreman magnified the abuse upon the slow witted workers rushing about with dollies and fork lifts.  The Russian and Goliath were the only two silent.  The Russian watched over his workers to ensure they didn't steal any of his winnings.  Goliath just continued to labor, carrying his large winnings one at a time to his enormous trailer, alone in the cold, humbly a solitary workforce chasing the American dream one step at a time.

Chaos in the Name of Islam...

The city of Islam is in chaos, student protestors are being tear gassed and shot, Western embassies have been torched,  McDonald's has been ransacked, and not even the Colonel's secret recipe is safe behind the counters at a Pakistani KFC.  The pillars of Western civilization are being toppled and replaced with those of Islam.  Allah, the compassionate and merciful, is being invoked to assemble the faithful into a collective force that will bring death to Denmark, France, Britain, Israel and America.  The doomed European countries have provoked these rioters by publishing childish drawings that included the Prophet Muhammad wearing a bomb-clad turban.  Israel and America have done no such thing, but are included as default targets of Muslim rage.

 

The American media has been quite respectful of the Muslim outrage by not republishing the cartoons in newspapers and magazines, but our leaders have expressed solidarity with out European colleagues that they have every right to free speech.  Israel-- still working to remove settlers from a newly created Palestinian state run by Hamas, a group whose platform includes the destruction of their western patrons-- has also refrained from republishing the offensive art.  This however has not stopped the Iranian president from calling his resident cartoonists to take up pen and paper to make a mockery of the Holocaust.  The Danish and French papers have announced that they would gladly republish the Iranian cartoons in their own publishings.

 

How can a dispute so ridiculous and sardonically funny incite so many in the Muslim world to destroy their own cities and economies in order to teach a lesson to the arrogant West?  Punishment by suicide obscures any principles that are meant to be emphasized.  There must be another agenda at work.

 

The rioters are composed of students and the religiously devout-- those that are most easily and predictably manipulated.  I have no doubt that clerics, that run the schools and mosques in the countries overrun with chaos, are responsible for instigating the violence that has monopolized the media.  These Islamic Pharisees have amplified this otherwise miniscule insult to an abstract level that calls for an apocalyptic holy war between the faithful and the infidel.  The sheep that follow these wolves sacrifice themselves for the glory of Allah, they kill and they slaughter in order to purge their culture of tainted Western trends, they wish to live according to the code of the Koran as the clerics interpret it. 

 

And they will interpret the Koran to provide themselves with absolute power.  They applaud the terrorists even though innocent children have been murdered en masse.  These clerics live in lavish estates upwind from the city, so that they can maintain their senses while those teeming masses in the slums of the city must continually suffer the dementia caused by the build up of carbon monoxide in their blood stream due to the lack of pollution controls.  The clear headed plutocracy has convinced the poor that they represent a theocracy and that to disobey them is to disobey Allah.

 

America has seen the same threat.  The right-wing of the Republican Party has been working to define themselves as the voice of the Lord-- those that will lead the country into providence.  Luckily with the help of the still culpable media, the public is exposed to the pseudo-theocratic corruption.  We learn of the exploitation done by the politicians at the expense of the public and then we grow reluctant to reelect the crooked in exchange for those that have yet to prove themselves so depraved.

 

The rulers in these far away and chaotic countries don't suffer from the chains of free speech and independent press.  They can censor what they deem to be heretical or deviant to the teachings of Muhammad.  Ideally they would prefer to replace the Western placed figure heads and provide the nations of Islam with a true leader that would represent the culture they define as their own. 

 

Unfortunately, the culture that they have been forced to endorse has been based around violence (as seen in Iran after the fall of the Shah).  Those that dragged the country out from under the thumb of the west did so using violence and feel reluctant to give up what they are accustomed to.  So the violence prevails and since foreign diplomacy requires embassies and globalization blessed their cities with the yellow arches and popcorn chicken, which are so characteristic of America, they turn their anger towards these stores, restaurants, and embassies, regardless of whether they employ their fellow Muslims.  Ordinary citizens are afraid to venture out in public and economies slow to a crawl, hurting commerce and costing the countries millions in GDP further solidifying their status as a nation of poverty.

 

Al Qaeda works to create chaos in these struggling nations.  In cooperation with the Muslim Brotherhood they hope to replace the governments-- democratic, socialist or otherwise-- with a theocracy operated by an extremely privileged few.  These few endeavor to live the life of Muhammad and conquer a land as vast as his and institute their versions of what Allah would declare law.  They don't want to honor Muhammad, they want to be Muhammad. 

 

To create their state of Islam they need the current governments to topple and for chaos to reach such a level whereas, the oppression of the antagonizers would be a relief from the madness.  The frenzies that we see sweeping the Muslim dominated nations is a stage of the take over.  Those whose lives are being ruined are mere pawns, sheep to the slaughter and an exploitable resource. 

 

Are the sheep a product of failed education systems, economies, cultural role models or the heavy pollution that fogs the skies and the mind?  No one is to say, but the leaders that they obey are guilty of the same crimes that they deplore from the West. 

The Hunter in the Rye...

This Sunday my worst suspicions were confirmed: Dick Cheney is a human hunter! He reportedly shot a man in the face, neck and chest on a ranch not far from the Texas-Mexico border, about 60 miles southwest of Corpus Christi. The weapon was a 28 gauge shotgun. The victim was a 78 year old attorney from Austin Texas by the name of Harry Whittington.

Cheney obviously lacks the confidence of a seasoned human hunter. He didn't abduct a team of high school wrestlers, infect them with rabies, shoot them up with PCP and send them running off into the Texas wilderness foaming at the mouth in a chemically induced fury. Instead he opted for an enfeebled old man, slow on his feet with a partiality to the Republican party. Harry Whittington, described as a "major Republican Party donor," probably would've laid down his life for the pleasure of Cheney in the manner that the members of the SS commit suicide at the behest of the fuehrer during the final days of the third Reich.

Unlike a true sportsman, Cheney's choice of game bares a likeliness to the pickings of non-Alpha lions or hyenas. He chose the easiest kill - the lame prey. Although the victim had accumulated millions his failing sight and arthritic hands would leave him vulnerable to even the most pathetic of human hunters. Even more embarrassing to the vice president than his target was that he couldn't slay the prey.

The vice president's media spokesman declared the attack an accident, saying that Dick was aiming at a flock of quail and inadvertently shot the millionaire attorney, who was supposedly retrieving a bird he shot moments earlier. If Whittington had made a kill, the shot of his gun would've frightened the surrounding quail into flight. While hunters typically aiming toward flying quail angle their weapon skyward from the shoulder, somehow Dick managed to aim toward the horizon, pulled the trigger and shot Harry standing behind the tall rye grass in his flamboyant neon orange hunting outfit.

The man survived and is predicted to recover completely from the attack. He is being treated at Christus Spohn Hospital and has refrained from commenting on the hunting "accident" out of respect for the vice president. Whether the motive of his silence was to save Cheney's face before other human hunting, right-wing, NRA gun enthusiasts or to drawl out the media coverage to deflect national attention from the brewing impeachment of the vice president, we'll never know.

Cheney's exposure as a human hunter couldn't have occurred at a better time. Scooter Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff, pointed the finger at Dick as the decision maker to expose covert CIA agent Valerie Plame and therefore committing an act treason against the United States. The redirection of media coverage may provide the public distraction enough to pardon the vice president of his high crime committed in order to send America into a pointless war costing tens of thousands of lives.

Mary Matalin, the top advisor to the vice president, stated in regards to the "accident" that Dick "didn't do anything he wasn't supposed to do." This leads me to the conclusion that Harry Whittington was a human sacrifice. But unlike the Aztec priests that would slice out the still beating heart of the victim, Dick was more compassionate and merely shot the man in the face from 20 yards away.

There is a common saying that once an animal gets the taste of blood, they crave it and continually seek it out. I predict, that if this is Dick Cheney's first human victim, he will certainly strike again. His friendly fire may soon find a target near the reddened nose of Edward Kennedy, the elongated chin of John Kerry or the crotch of Bill Clinton. By shooting another human being Cheney has officially founded the militant wing of the Republican party (if you don't already count the Michigan Militia, Montana Freemen, the Guardians of Liberty, Nevada's Patriots Underground or the thousands of armed vigilantes prowling the Mexican border with the hopes of mounting a human head above their mantels and beside their framed photographs of George W or Ronny Reagan).

A Defensive Caricature...

Over the past week the Muslim world has rioted and protested against the forces of blasphemy and free speech. The Al Aqsa Martyr's Brigade, the violent offshoot of Palestine's Fatah Party, stormed the European Union's offices in Gaza. Syria recalled its ambassadors from Denmark. The Danish embassy in Damascus has been barraged with bomb threats. Muslims all over the Arabian peninsula have boycotted or destroyed foreign products from Norway, Denmark, France, Germany, Spain and Italy. Gunmen in the west bank have threatened all westerners with kidnappings. The newspaper's that published the cartoon have had their websites compromised by Denial of Service Attacks. Commerce has ground to a halt in these areas as angers rose to heavenly heights. All of this over a silly cartoon.

The cartoon, originally published in the Danish Jyllands-Posten last September contains several satirical depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. The cartoonists commissioned by the paper to draw the various images have gone into hiding for fear of assassination attempts from Islamic extremists. Being a former newspaper cartoonist, I feel compelled to help qualm this situation before a western aid worker gets decapitated or a starving artist gets stabbed to death while riding a bicycle through Amsterdam.

Why are Muslims so upset? Sure the teachings of Islam prohibit the depiction of both Muhammad and Allah, but I question whether these cartoons depict either of those two divine entities.* Typically, the news reports mention the depiction of Muhammad wearing a turban shaped as a bomb with a lit fuse. After careful analysis of the drawing I have determined that the man depicted in that image is that of Iraqi Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. The supposed depiction of Muhammad with his eyes blacked out wielding a saber in front of conservatively covered Muslim women, is that of Osama Bin Laden (note the signature gray streak in the beard). The depiction standing on a cloud in heaven informing the incoming suicide bombers that heaven had run out of virgins is a drawing of Iranian Supreme Ruler Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. None of these drawings can be said to be the image of Muhammad.

The millions of screaming, rock throwing, flag burning Muslims should be upset that the artists failed to draw original depictions of the Prophet and instead surfed the internet for the stereotypical religious minded Muslims and copied the likeness. But even the lack of creativity on the part of the artists doesn't excuse the Muslim community from being labeled as extremely melodramatic and exaggerating the insult.

They should take a lesson from the Christian Community. In the later nineties the western world experienced the peak of blasphemy shrouded in art. Andres Serrano took a photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine, calling it Piss Christ, and it toured the world, drawing crowds of angry museum goers. Chris Ofili painted an uninspired depiction of the Virgin Mary, but increased the painting's appeal to art museums by flinging elephant feces at his finished piece, and called it The Holy Virgin Mary. Recently, a statue of the ten commandments drew the rage of secularists when it found a home outside an Alabama courthouse.

The people disgusted by these works of art didn't run off and threaten the lives of poets and artists in Greenwich Village, ransack liquor stores throughout Brooklyn, nor did they kidnap any lawyers, judges, bailiffs or juvenile delinquent. They simply tolerated the insult and politely threw white paint or performed jump kicks into the art pieces. Why can't Muslims practice a similar degree of self control?

Ignoring the collective evidence supporting the view that Islam as a whole is histrionic (consult your DSM-IV), the eccentricities of Muslims is due to their fervent fanaticism regarding their faith. All religions under the umbrella of the god of Abraham demand that false idols be prohibited, but we never saw Charlton Heston, Maia Morgenstern, Willem Dafoe, Jim Caviezel or Glenn Carter attacked. Why? Because Moses, Mary and Jesus (tempted, impassioned or superstar) are not true deities.**

Many Muslims routinely substitute false idols for manipulative clerics. The Koran (Qur'an) states that a sacrifice of life for the cause of Allah rewards the victim with 40 virgins in an afterlife in paradise. But those that perform suicide attacks are doing so under the guidance of agenda driven clerics, that subjectively interpret the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad. Since Islam proclaims that Muhammad was the last prophet, no other person afterwards could truly know the will of Allah. Therefore all current clerics that call for Holy Jihad are only speculating that Allah wants Muslims to kill the infidels.

The clerics would argue that the scripture of the Koran demands the death of Israel, America or some poor artist living in a moldy basement apartment outside of Copenhagen. But the scripture wasn't even written by Muhammad and Allah never personally told him anything. So we're depending on a successful game of telephone from Allah to the Arch Angel Gabriel to Muhammad to his disciples who edited their combined works into what has become the Koran. The Koran is riddled with inconsistencies, monotony, repetitions and contradictions (like most every other religious text). How can clerics find a firm foundation on which to declare that they can be trusted to express the will of Allah? They can't, but millions in the Muslim world are unable to understand this and expose the extremists of their pretensions.

The clerics themselves that urge their followers to react so violently against the blasphemous infidel should examine the elements of their own motives. Is the institution of Islam that vulnerable that the 11 pathetic drawings of turban clad cartoons done by a handful of Danish atheists could present a danger to its founding principles? If the foundation is so shaky, then why are radical clerics able to easily recruit martyrs willing to blow themselves up in the name of that which is compassionate and merciful? The answer is contained in the absurdity of the question. Each Surah (chapter) of the Koran begins with a dedication to Allah as the compassionate and merciful. How is killing people and yourself, compassionate or merciful? Rather the killing is done in the name of the clerics. Those that manipulate life and death are playing the role of god and those that kill themselves for the manipulator's sake are the subjects. Therefore every Jihadist is themselves an infidel for they are worshiping the false idols represented by the hate mongering clerics.

I urge all Muslims throughout the world to restrain their anger caused by these images from the Netherlands. The overreaction is a disguised compensation that inadvertently exposes the weakness of the religion. Extremism does a disservice to the religion of Islam and to all of it's followers that must bear the embarrassing brunt of the radical stereotype.

* I applied the term "divine entity" to both Allah and Muhammad. This was not an accident. If one would read the Koran, they would see that the prophet Muhammad consistently uses the first person both when talking of himself and as the creator. Islamic scholars have dismissed this subtlety as a matter of style or interpretation, however, given that Muhammad used his religious interpretation as a means of conquering millions of square miles and governing millions of subjects, it can be said with a great deal of confidence that Muhammad used God to suit his own agenda, much as Bush or Osama invoke the god of Abraham today. So we can infer that Allah and Muhammad are both the same entity.

** It is true that Christians believe that Jesus was the son of God, but that makes him no more a god than it does Hercules or Xena Warrior Princess. The demigod status allows for Christians not to feel so insulted when a crucifix is dropped in urine or the life of Jesus is poorly reenacted by Willem DaFoe.

The State of the Onion...

From the moment the President walked into the south wing of the Capitol building until he left the Chambers of the House of Representatives, I couldn't help but laugh myself nearly to tears at the theatrics that ensued for nearly an hour. Mr. Bush made a grand entrance no different from a pro-bowl bound quarterback, he shook hands and kissed the cheeks of a hysterically cheering crowd as he made his way to the podium. Before the scowl of Dick Cheney and the glazed look of the rotund Dennis Hastert, the CEO President laid out a litany of lies and false promises befitting of a shareholder's meeting of WorldCom or Enron.

He gave tribute to a lost icon of civil liberties and urged congress to pass legislation to threaten the liberties of all American's. He honored a fallen marine and rebuked members of congress that work to prevent similar fates of other soldiers. He hailed his track record on AIDS and Malaria and then condemned the stem cell efforts to save thousands from Parkinson's, Sickle Cell Anemia, Hodgkin's, Diabetes, Leukemia, Multiple Sclerosis, Alzheimer, and a whole host of other ailments that he could neither understand nor pronounce.

After every third sentence the audience on his left, composed of republicans, stood simultaneously and applauded for extreme durations that were reminiscent of applauding awarded to Josef Stalin. Bush would stand erect and wink with a smirk toward some obscure member of the audience (if not his wife, then most likely Satan). The praise of the puppets didn't seem to provide Bush the confidence to speak without stuttering and jumbling his words.

The puppet master even caught the audience off guard. He proposed important earmark reform to funnel money away from special interest spending. To that no congressman except Senator John McCain clapped, all other sat in contemptuous silence feeling betrayed. Bush asserted that to make progress on such a reform he would require the line item veto. The republicans got the joke, understood the bait and switch and stood proud of their grand deceptor and applauded wildly. It would not be the republican earmarks that would be threatened by his veto, but only those of the democratic party. They celebrated his proposal to further consolidate the corporate interest in the republican party.

Mr. Bush submitted to the floor his American Competativeness Initiative to advance the study in math and science, but only through high school, as though the competitiveness of America need only depend upon basic geometry and biology. His cuts to funding of college and graduate students will remain in effect. He proposed to provide $136 billion to make the American business environment more conducive to dominating global competition. So other companies like MCI will receive billions for data and network projects and produce nothing in return.

The former oil businessman criticized American's for their addiction to petroleum and announced an Advanced Energy Initiative that would replace 75% of our oil with coal, nuclear, ethanol and hydrogen fuels. On the topic of addiction, he stated that drug use was down 19% since 2001, but his figures don't include the ever increasing addictions to prescription drugs. Addicts like Rush Limbaugh hooked on Oxicontin, Percocet, Percodan and Vicodin can rest assure that they aren't targeted in any Bush Administration war on drugs.

He invoked the creator when speaking of the gift of life, proposed saving those of faith from HIV and AIDS, chastised those that want to expand the institute of marriage beyond that description found in the bible, and admonished radical Islam for holding in such low regard those that don't adhere to their faith. He spoke of a revolution of conscience and improving the character of our country, and yet failed to recollect the lies he told to get the country into a war that has killed over two thousand soldiers, twenty thousand civilians and thousands of insurgents, he didn't mention his reallocation of the tax burden upon the meek of the country, he failed to cite the growing hatred between Americans of differing views, and he avoided the topic of the world's disappointment with the American conscience and character.

As he piled on each layer of bullshit, I became more and more repulsed by his blatant manipulation and distortion of reality. He still referred to his lie that Saddam had acquired weapons of mass destruction. His corporate before citizen priority was still well intact despite the obvious failures and exploitations of privatization. He ignored the wide spread corruption of elected officials in Washington by special interests. He deliberately avoided the issue of campaign finance reform despite the overwhelming need to make politicians side with their constituents rather than their corporate donors. The layers solidified and formed a noxious new dome of lies, large enough to fill Capitol's 180 foot Rotunda, and served to insulate the puppet master and his puppets through the coming mid-term elections.