"Who are you?"

Why do people ask this? That's like asking someone to describe a color. Everything you would want to know is on this blog. Take a look around, read. I'm a writer, that's who I am. By this point, I've made it clear where I stand on most issues, political, cultural, and otherwise. Beyond my book Let the Dead Bury the Dead, most of the answers to your questions are here.

The rest you don't get to know because all men are islands and all the self-help gurus can't get their shit together either.

Postscript: I make no claims of perfection.

C'est la vie

You have to laugh when things begin to happen--constructive ones, nothing weird, now--without any effort: writing, creating, and even traffic to your website. It seems the less you do these days, the more happens, and that makes a lot of sense in an era where there's to much coming at you, so, you look for your own "port in the storm." People need some kind of a niche that makes some kind of sense in a chaotic and confusing world, God knows.

This makes all the sense in the world, and in that spirit, without much effort, my site traffic has tripled (not a BIG deal, mind you) without any effort and me neglecting this blog for about a year to finally catch my breath--what little there is of it. What's always interesting are the "whys." Everyone wants to know why. I'm no exception.

I've written on a wide variety of topics: the DC Madam (which went on far longer than I would have imagined), geopolitics, history (a lifelong interest), art (ditto), cinema (a more recent obsession), tidbits of high weirdness, and simply put, my observations on any number of subjects. I make no claims of being a scholar of them, but there it is: I have many interests, too many. What you find when you write about certain topics is that they have a tendency to come looking for you eventually. The Internet is like that. These things don't happen when you simply write a letter and post it.

And so, as America careens over yet another cliff of its own making, I believe some, a tiny percentage of this site, will assist in making a little sense of the mess we're going to be in very soon. I don't claim to have the keys to the crapper like everyone else, but I do have my own unique insights into the nature of things in human society. I'll be writing a little more frequently here. However, don't expect anything. ;0)

Don't get your hopes up too high: Ted Stevens loses his seat in Alaskan recount, while Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzales await inevitable pardons

“Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the bastard is dead, the bitch that bore him is again in heat.” --Bertolt Brecht, "The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui" ("Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui," 1941)

Washington D.C.--To be sure, this is a time to breathe a little easier, until reality sets-in. Let's be honest with ourselves and each other and acknowledge that neither Congress, President-elect Obama, nor the Supreme Court are going to do anything to prevent the Bush II administration from leaving office scot-free. Why would they want to when the Bush administration and Vice President Cheney expanded the powers of the executive branch in ways that any American politician would slaver and drool over?

Journalists can write hundreds of exposes, we can have as many smoking guns as you want, and Congress especially, will do nothing of any substance before January 20th, 2009. Nothing that gets results, that is. Nothing succeeds like failure, especially when both major parties have no real commitment to democracy beyond the fact that it gets them elected. If only it were otherwise. What's sad is that these sell-outs, these corrupt scum who are going to take us over the cliff into the abyss understand better than the public that the public is the solution to all of this.

Small wonder that they hate the public so much--who would respect anyone who does nothing in the face of such obvious and open corruption? Look at Cheney: does it appear that he cares what the public ever thought about anything-at-all? What self-respecting citizenry would tolerate this? Americans, and it's shameful. But wait, it's not as if events aren't going to shift things radically, they are and they will continue to.

Pardons are going to come into question when the Bush II cha-cha line gets going in December and January. Luckily, he's used-up a few and there are limits to how many he can hand-out. Will he give one to Stevens? Doubtful, he's not useful to anyone in the GOP now, and he's just turned 85. Stevens almost became the first American senator to be elected with a felony on his record, congratulations Alaska, you can secede. He's over, it's done, and he probably only had so much of an insider's view into the Bush II administration. Obama may not have the will to clean-up this constitutional crisis, but Pardon me, Jerry!

There are no messiahs, only this life and a lot of people avoiding responsibility for the mess we're in. It's time that we all accepted that responsibilty and stop looking to someone else to shoulder it. There is such a thing as collective-guilt, just ask the Germans some time--while they and the rest of the developed world are busy blaming us entirely for the economic crisis. Were we paying attention to our political class and pushed them hard to behave, we wouldn't be in this mess. It takes two to tango.

It took a greedy, apathetic, and jaded electorate to birth the presidency of George W. Bush. We tolerated it, and we tolerated the inaction of the other two branches of government. We still are. At least nature and the laws of physics are going to correct all of us. The soil is still very fertile for another George W. Bush and all the other kinds of scoundrel that have inhabited the highest offices in the land. We're fighting learning much from the last eight years, but events are going to correct most of this.

Just because the GOP is on the ropes doesn't mean the same problems aren't out there. They're going to bide their time when the American public loses its mind again and swings towards more self-destruction. Life's a bitch, brothers and sisters, and she's in heat again. The system just got a new face, a new mask--a brown one. The maggots, the rot, and the offal are still there behind the new facade.

[Ed., 11.19.2008--The AP is reporting that Stevens has stated he will not ask President Bush for a pardon. I think he knows he wouldn't get one.]