You Must Be Very Proud of Your GAY DAUGHTER

Jon Stewart had it right: the Dems might as well have had a bullhorn when they uttered the phrase "gay daughter" in bringing up Mary Cheney during the debates (in connection with Campaign 2004's strangely anachronistic exchanges about gay marriage, which recall discussions of desegregation during the Eisenhower years).

Now the press, with Fox and its hounds in the lead, has decided the gaffe is a story, and has turned out scores of political meteorologists to cover this tempest in a teapot.

Sure, Kerry (and Edwards) went overboard harping on the Cheney family and the implicit hypocrisy of GOP fag-bashing. But when you think about it, they've been pretty discreet in general.

After all, they haven't said word one about Karl Rove's fondness for tranny hookers and watersports.

Or word that John Ashcroft likes to wear a diaper and pleasure himself while watching "The Ten Commandments."

Or even that, when in Crawford, George W. Bush himself has been known to "party" with a neighbor's rottweiler.

They haven't made a peep about Tom DeLay's fondness for being spanked by a naked man wearing a wig and calling himself "grandma."

Or Bill Frist's collection of "erotic fraternity photos."

Or about Ralph Reed's predilection for what are known, in the trade, as "bears."

The list goes on and on. And no, most of the sexual peculiarities chronicled above can't be formally documented. They might just be rumors.

But do you doubt, in your heart, that these moralistic creeps, who have no compunction about micromanaging the personal lives of all Americans, are sick puppies in private?

And God bless 'em, by the way. I've got my tweakage, too.

My point is this: Kerry's awkward (okay, icky) reference caused the Cheney family some short-lived discomfort. But should said discomfort be allowed, in the copious press coverage of this flap, to outweigh the fact that GOP policy on sexual difference seems to be "our privacy is sacrosanct, but yours is up for grabs"? That the policies they advocate are antithetical to everyone's freedom, but that GOP members and their families are exempt, like corporations from taxes?

That is, like, so gay.

Would You Kill for Your Freedom?

I've spent my forty years on earth as a conscientious objector, and have always vigorously opposed the death penalty. But all that righteous pacifism came screeching to a halt early this morning, when I gazed into the bathroom mirror and realized that our democracy was imperiled, and it was time to be prepared to use extreme force to defend it.

No, I don't mean by marching off to Iraq to fend off Baathist insurrection and help establish a civil society that Exxon's Board of Directors will find agreeable. I mean killing those responsible for threatening our way of life.

You know: the terrorists who want to disrupt our election.

The terrorists I refer to are not Islamic fundamentalists. They aren't suicide bombers or anthrax mailers. They're paid political functionaries.

There are concerted and probably connected efforts nationwide to prevent people from voting--sometimes by screwing with voter registration forms, sometimes by phoning people and giving them false information about polling places, dates and times and sometimes--most egregiously--by intimidation, often from law-enforcement agents sworn to uphold the Constitution.

These people get away with this because they serve the goals of the same entity that currently controls all branches of our government--and they seek to help the entity maintain that control.

And if there is no disincentive to meddling with democracy--a decided counterweight to the pecuniary and other benefits to be gained from illegally assisting the political entity in question--it will continue unabated.

Therefore, I suggest that anyone found guilty of authorizing nefarious interference with votes or voters should be put to death by lethal injection.

I know what you're going to say: Vote fraud is wrong, but it's not like murder. And you're right. It's worse.

A murderer takes a human life. But tampering with democracy kills the thing we ask our soldiers (and, by extension, our citizenry) to kill and die for. We must therefore be willing to punish this transgression the way we would punish someone who sold secrets to an enemy power, or, say, ordered a plane to be flown into a skyscraper.

Killing voting kills democracy, and democracy is the only safeguard against tyranny at home. Without it, we become a technocratic dictatorship. Meddling with the vote, then, is unquestionably treasonous. It subverts the foundation of our society in a way no foreign combatant could ever hope to do.

And since those who engage in this unconscionable activity are usually mercenaries, the death penalty will act as a profound disincentive for them--and as great leverage for prosecutors seeking the parties repsonsible for hiring said mercenaries and giving them their marching orders.

And if following such an investigative trail means our courts must put down key political figures like rabid canines, that is the price we pay for our wonderful democracy.

I'm ready to fight for freedom. Are you?

Bully's Progress

What if a playground’s biggest bully, in a run for class president, found a way to do his bullying by proxy?

While paying lesser bullies to beat up the little kids for their lunch money—and pocketing most of the proceeds—the head bully shakes hands and passes out candy. He never mentions the thuggish activity carried out by his confederates. He smiles, and there is a twinkle in his eye.

Of course, if you dare criticize him, his friends will pummel you. Everyone else will wonder why you’d attack such a nice guy, possessed of such a firm handshake and so folksy a manner.

Paging John Kerry's Earpiece

"Mr. President, I did see the same intelligence you saw. And I did vote to give you the discretion to use force in Iraq... because you looked me, the rest of the Congress and the American people in the eye and said, ‘We KNOW there are chemical and nuclear weapons. We KNOW there are ties to al-Qaeda.’ But you were dealing from a stacked deck, made of carefully selected but mostly discredited intelligence. You were going to steamroll us into war and you were going to say anything you had to in order to get us all on board. We believed you because you looked us in the eye and said you had proof. Well, there's an old saying, Mr. President: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. The American people won't be fooled by you again."

"There is no accountability and no responsibility taken for anything in your administration. If the buck doesn’t stop on the president’s desk, it’s time to get a new president."

"Saying the war was worth it doesn’t make it so. Saying there was imminent danger doesn’t make it so. Saying you’ve made the world safer doesn’t make it so. It's The Emperor’s New Clothes: You may once have had a thousand media sycophants fawning over the glittering threads of your war argument, but now you are naked--and everyone knows it."

"While we're on the subject of childhood fables, another one springs to mind: The Boy Who Cried Wolf. We claimed Iraq had an arsenal of devastating weapons as a justification for war. What happens when we see real proof of such programs elsewhere, and take our claims to the world? Aren’t they likely to be much more skeptical than they would have been had we been more thorough in preparing the case against Iraq?"