Obama - Bringing The Weathermen Above Ground!

Let's get it straight from the get go. There is no such thing as a terrorist properly so called, the way, lets say, serial killers are murderers. Violent sexual psychopaths kill for the sake of killing. The death of their victims is of the essence of what they're about. Terrorists on the other hand are political cadres who choose violence as a means of advancing their cause.

Apart from some lunatics - not many for they are of very limited use - whom they attract simply because of the prospect of mayhem, they are dedicated, coherent, purposeful operatives as capable of strategic and tactical judgments as anybody else. And, for the most part, perfectly at ease with the moral choice - and they make a moral choice - that now defines their life.

Though they may, at times, succumb to what the old Irish heroic tales call confadh catha or 'battle frenzy' - a well known phenomenon - they are not foaming at the mouth caricatures, drinking in their victims screams and glorying in their inhuman blood-lust. If they were, the authorities would be frogmarching them all the way to the penitentiary by the baker's dozen every day of the week.

Nor are they obviously any different from the rest of us. They are not Lex Luthoresque masterminds or Hannibal Lecterish geniuses. If they were, they'd have far greater success, far more quickly and far more often. They are run of the mill folk who exhibit a run of the mill range of abilities and weaknesses. Some are highly intelligent, some middling, others semi-literate ignoramuses.

They are not part of some well-oiled, slick, utterly efficient death-dealing machine. Their organisations are like every other organisation, peppered with incompetence, blockheadedness, nepotism, petty jealousies and disloyalty, and kept going by the capable, overworked and frustrated 10% who actually know what must be done and know how to do it properly if they could only attract a better quality work force.

In other words when someone becomes a terrorist he doesn't undergo a weird form of confirmation where he is annointed with a Satanic chrism that transforms him into a ccombination of Dirty Harry, Adolf Hitler and Hercule Poirot. He's just another guy but one who's now been given a gun and a bomb and a transcendent reason to use them and is supported by a network of other guys as wonderful or as woeful as himself.

"One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" is an aphorism that has many people reaching for Mitt Romney's varmint gun but it is half-true. Some terrorists are freedom fighters. The Mau Mau in Kenya, Umkhonto we Siswe (Spear of the Nation) in South Africa, the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan, ETA in Spain, the Irish Republican Army (the longest-lived of them all) in Ireland, the various separatist groups in Chechnya and elsewhere in the Caususus.

The aim of such groups is the overthrow of a foreign regime or a goverment imposed by non-native elements in order to achieve political freedom for the people of the nation i.e. they are physical force nationalists in orientation and principle. Though they may espouse some form of socialism that is always negotiable. In the end many of the more prominent terrorists and their fellow travelers become political leaders as part of a settlement: Éamon de Valera, Michael Collins, Jomo Kenyatta, Nelson Mandela, Robert Mugabe, Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness.

There is another kind of terrorist quite distinct from movements of national liberation and having little or nothing politically in common with them. These are groups who attack and seek to destroy the society in which they live on the grounds of ideology alone. In the West they took the form of far left urban guerrila groups. The Brigate Rossi in Italy. The Rote Armee Fraction/Bader-Meinhof Gang in West Germany. The Japanese Red Army which, despite its name, operated internationally.

Flourishing in the seventies and early eighties, they were small tightly organised highly motivated and very violent ideologues. Their strategic aim was nothing less than the destruction of capitalism and the capitalist way of life. Fully aware that they could not accomplish such a task on their own they sought to 'seed the revolution' through consciousness-raising acts of extreme violence - bombings, assassinations, the kidnapping and murder of prominent politicians, judges and businessmen and their families.

In this way they attempted to destabilize the state and goad 'the ruling class' into an oppressive over-reaction which would radicalize the 'masses' and bring about the Marxis/Leninist/StalinistMaoist/Trotskyist/ Anarchist Revolution about which they fantasized. The participants in this well-directed mayhem were invariably scions of the well-to-do bourgeoisie who were their prime targets. They were the children of the university educated academic and professional elite which ran the societies which they were seeking to destroy in the name of a proletariat whom they only knew as domestic servants in the homes of the hapless parents they so despised.

The Weather Underground was such a group and William Ayres and Bernardine Dorhn were such urban guerillas. This terror group wasn't just another tiny splinter from off the many radical left wing logs that were set rolling through Western society with such vehement fervor in the Sixties. Unlike the far more notorious Unabomber - a single, mentally ill 'crusader' - they did more than cause fitful disorder and fatalities. This was a serious network of very sane violent revolutionaries who mounted a sustained and viable campaign from within against their own society and people.

Weathermen leaders such as Mark Rudd were smuggled into Cuba where they were welcomed by KGB Colonel Vadim Kotchergine and whisked away to secret camps for advanced indoctrination and training in urban terrorist techniques. Calling for war against what they always termed "Amerikka" - sounds familiar, don't it? - Bernardine Dohrn - aka Mrs Bill Ayres - hailed the murderous Manson Family as the precursors of the coming revolution: "Dig it. They first killed those pigs, then ate dinner in the same room as them. They even shoved a fork into the victim's stomach. Wild."

Wild, indeed, sister!

Bernardine Dohrn




Lady Macbeth in
a purple mini-skirt


With such fingers on the trigger it is no wonder that the Weather Underground record of destruction and death is formidable, as the Chicago Daily Observer outlines:

7 October 1969 – Bombing of Haymarket Police Statue in Chicago, apparently as a “kickoff” for the “Days of Rage” riots in the city October 8–11, 1969. The Weathermen later claim credit for the bombing in their book, “Prairie Fire.”

8 October-11, 1969 – The “Days of Rage” riots occur in Chicago in which 287 Weatherman members from throughout the country were arrested and a large amount of property damage was done.

6 December 1969 – Bombing of several Chicago Police cars parked in a precinct parking lot at 3600 North Halsted Street, Chicago. The WUO stated in their book “Prairie Fire” that they had did the explosion.

27 December-31, 1969 – Weathermen hold a “War Council” meeting in Flint, MI, where they finalize their plans to submerge into an underground status from which they plan to commit strategic acts of sabotage against the government. Thereafter they are called the “Weather Underground Organization” (WUO).

13 February 1970 – Bombing of several police vehicles of the Berkeley, California, Police Department .

16 February 1970 – Bombing of Golden Gate Park branch of the San Francisco Police Department, killing one officer and injuring a number of other policemen.

6 March 1970 – Bombing in the 13th Police District of the Detroit, Michigan. 34 sticks of dynamite are discovered. During February and early March, 1970, members of the WUO, led by Bill Ayers, are reported to be in Detroit, during that period, for the purpose of bombing a police facility.

6 March 1970 – “bomb factory” located in New York’s Greenwich Village accidentally explodes. WUO members Theodore die in t. The bomb was intended to be planted at a non-commissioned officer’s dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey. The bomb was packed with nails to inflict maximum casualties on detonation.

30 March 1970 – Chicago Police discover a WUO “bomb factory” on Chicago’s north side. A subsequent discovery of a WUO “weapons cache” in a south side Chicago apartment several days later ends WUO activity in the city.

10 May 1970 – Bombing of The National Guard Association building in Washington, D.C..

21 May 1970 – The WUO under Bernardine Dohrn’s name releases its “Declaration of a State of War” communique.

6 June 1970 – The WUO sends a letter claiming credit for bombing of the San Francisco Hall of Justice; however, no explosion actually took place. Months later, workmen in this building located an unexploded device which had apparently been dormant for some time.

9 June 1970 – Bombing of The New York City Police Headquarters .

27 July 1970 – Bombing of The Presidio army base in San Francisco. [NYT, 7/27/70]

12 September 1970 – The WUO helps Dr. Timothy Leary, break out and escape from the California Men’s Colony prison.

8 October 1970 – Bombing of Marin County courthouse. [NYT, 8/10/70]

10 October 1970 – Bombing of Queens traffic-court building . [NYT, 10/10/70, p. 12]

14 October 1970 – Bombing of The Harvard Center for International Affairs [NYT, 10/14/70, p. 30]

1 March 1971 – Bombing of The United States Capitol . ” [NYT, 3/2/71]

April, 1971 – abandoned WUO “bomb factory” discovered in San Francisco, California.

29 August, 1971 – Bombing of the Office of California Prisons . [LAT, 8/29/71]

17 September 1971 – Bombing of The New York Department of Corrections in Albany, NY [NYT, 9/18/71]

15 October 1971 – Bombing of William Bundy’s office in the MIT research center. [NYT, 10/16/71]

19 May 1972 – Bombing of The Pentagon . [NYT, 5/19/72]

18 May 1973 – Bombing of the 103rd Police Precinct in New York

28 September 1973 – Bombing of ITT headquarters in New York and Rome, Italy . [NYT, 9/28/73]

6 March 1974 – Bombing of the Dept. of Health, Education and Welfare offices in San Francisco

31 May 1974 – Bombing of The Office of the California Attorney General.

17 June 1974 – Bombing of Gulf Oil’s Pittsburgh headquarters .

11 September 1974 – Bombing of Anaconda Corporation (part of the Rockefeller Corporation).

29 January 1975 – Bombing of the State Department in (AP. “State Department Rattled by Blast,” The Daily Times-News, January 29 1975, p.1)

16 June 1975 – Bombing of Banco de Ponce (a Puerto Rican bank) in New York .

September, 1975 – Bombing of the Kennecott Corporation .

October 20, 1981 – Brinks robbery in which several members of the Weather Underground stole over $1 million from a Brinks armored car near Nyack, New York. The robbers murdered 2 police officers and 1 Brinks guard. Several others were wounded.

As late as 1984 two former Weathermen, Susan Rosenberg and Linda Evans were arrested with 740 lbs of explosives intended for further bombs. They received 58 and 40 year prison terms respectively but were pardoned by Bill Clinton just before he left office.

Pardoned by Bill!


Now works for Hill!!



Reviewing this sixteen year record, Ayers proclaimed, "I feel we didn't do enough" , enough shooting, enough bombing, enough armed robbing, enough killing! Note that here he is endorsing all the activities of the group, not just his own direct participation. He was indicted on three of the above 'actions' and God knows how many others he was involved in or helped to plan, approve or aid and abet as a member of the leadership. (His wife, Dohrn, was titular head of the organisation. Neither were they teenaged hotheads during these activities, being in their late twenties/early thirties at the time.)

"Memory is a motherf**ck*r."
-Professor William Ayres


Ain't it just!



Ayres is a criminal who escaped justice. "Guilty as hell," he crowed. "Free as a bird. America is a great country." He is now well feather-bedded in the elite that he and his fellow urban guerillas sought to overthrow by violence and death. He has not changed his views, he has merely ducked martyrdom for a snug professor's chair. The snake is still venomous. It simply chooses not to bare its fangs.

All terrorists are political animals. It is by their fundamental political motivations that they are ultimately judged, for some causes are worthy - a nation's freedom from occupation and oppression - while others are decidely otherwise. Bill Ayres' politics are that of the hard revolutionary left. His aim now, as in his bloody past, is the overthrow of the American way of life. Whether he ever primes another bomb or squeezes another trigger is quite beside the point. He is the same political creature now when he addresses an academic symposium as he was then lurking in the shadows with his ticking cargo.

This is Barack Obama's problem. It is not that Ayres and his femme fatale are unrepentant terrorists; the Senator isn't likely to don a balaclava and issue forth to kidnap Bill Gates anytime soon. It is rather that Ayres and Dohrn are unrepentant revolutionaries, a quintessentially political position.

Now politics is Obama's stock and trade and this is the couple who's rings he kissed in order to launch his own political career. But, we need to ask, how was the obeisance from such a weedy unknown as Barack so readily, indeed so spectacularly successful? Bill and Bernie are dedicated radicals. They risked life - their own and others - and liberty for their beliefs.

Such people, take it from me, do not lightly give their blessing to any vaguely leftish wannabe, fuzzy as fresh candy floss, least of all for the reasons his fans are now swooning over him. The Ayreses are hard-core and proud of it. it defines them. They are not going to waste their hard won political currency on woolly-headed idealists so naive as to believe that the evils of capitalism can be vanquished by uniting Blue States with, of all outlandish suggestions, Red States. For such revolutionaries politics is - must be (read your Lenin) - the continuation of war by other means.

But Ayres and Dohrn endorsed Obama handsomely and were able to open doors for him because of their revolutionary cachet, authenticated as it is by their terrorist history. They talked the talk and walked the walk, as it were. This in and of itself tells us an immense amount about the Democratic candidate's ideological orientation, the engine room, so to speak, of his politics.

True, Obama talks a very different political talk but, to judge by his sponsors and his own - to them - congenial record, the American people would be foolhardy in the extreme to give him sufficient votes to allow him to walk his ideological walk.

Obama Commemorates The Heroes Of The "Pueblo" !

Faced with Hillary Clinton's newest incarnation as a rootin', tootin', rifle-shootin', moonshine swillin', bear-wrasslin' mountain gal, Barack Obama immediately went into offense mode with a stirring new war cry - "Remember the Pueblo!"

And we do indeed remember her.

The Pueblo is a US Navy spy vessel which was captured by North Korean warships in January 1968, an incident which made President Lyndon Johnson, already stuck in the tar pit of Viet Nam, look like a toothless old lion weakly pawing at a circling pack of snarling hyenas.

The captured crew had their own problems - none of them metaphorical. They were humiliated, tortured and made to "apologize" for their imperialistic blood-lust. Sounds just like a Code Pink rally in Berkeley, though lacking the fetching radical lesbian chic and aging baby boomer whimsy which help those gatherings put the sigh firmly back into asylum.


This chick's got some chic!










Meanwhile, back in the cells, Kim Jong Il's goons were taking photographs for the purposes of propaganda which, as its major export, is what still keeps the economy of that feisty little nation booming. This allowed the resourceful sailors to pull a fast one on their grinning hosts, as you will see for yourself in the famous photo below. Look closely now, this will be in tomorrow's quiz.











DPRK photographer's flipping bird's eye view of captured seamen

Now Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill) was a mere pup of six and a half when all this was going down, as we say in the 'hood. Yet he must have caught sight of this picture alongside autographed photos of George Wallace and "Bull" Connor as he rummaged through his racist Grandma's dresser drawers. It had a lasting impact on his young, impressionable, yet already noble mind.

It is no wonder then that in his time of trouble dealing with the cynically manufactured 'Bittergate' uproar and his clunky performance in the Philadelphia debate, it is not to be wondered at, I say, that he would reach deep down into his soul and do a Pueblo with a subtle dash of Pastorization. See for yourself. The video is quite unambiguous.





Just awesome. He da Maaan or what? What style! Such aplomb! The sheer sheerness of it all! Gives ya goosebumps in the brain, don't it? The classy way he brushes one of the crumbs of comfort thrown by the audience from his cheek with a deft but gracefully languid flick of his elegant middle finger while at the same time pointing Heavenward to indicate the ultimate destination to which he intends to lead Americans.

Observe with awe the manly yet strangely sensitive manner in which he mimics opening the door to America's new Golden Age with his clenched but always supple fist, a technique that's obviously second nature to him after twenty years of studying Jeremiah Wright, the past master of oratorical fisting.

The crowd, obviously hypnotized out of their true selves, yowl with a laughter rarely heard from mature adults when confronted with such a display. A smiling middle aged lady glances appraisingly at her companion to judge the propriety of her own mirth. Others applaud rapturously. Still more cry out for an encore. Obama chortles along with them, his features set in the sly, knowing look of saucy glee we all remember from the moments of our adolescent enlightenment.

I'm aghast. Agog. Agape even. I knew that we had but scratched the surface of the Senator's phantasmagoria of talents, had not yet even begun to plumb the depths of him. He would, I knew, continue to reveal more and more of his quite unique character. Sure enough, he here puts on show a side of him which leaves the much berated ex-President Clinton and his wife far far behind in terms of the behavior and attitudes for which they were heretofore considered untouchable.

No more. The crown has been swiped from the collective Clintonian head. The lurid torch has been passed on to a new generation of Americans born in the Sixties, tempered by the Hawaiian sun, disciplined by a hard and bitter Ivy League education, proud of their country for the first time in their adult lives.

Up till now the mere mention of the name Clinton has inspired millions to beseech the Lord to relieve the indefatigable couple of the awful burdens which they have taken on with a zeal last shown only by certain well-remembered European politicians in the last century.

After this extraordinary exhibition, which truly sets him apart from any political leader we know, it is certain that Barack Obama will be the object of even more devout prayers on the part of many mesmerized Americans. Surely in their wildest dreams they never imagined that such a one as he would seek the highest office in the land and the most powerful position in the world.

Yes, now we see what his devotees have always proclaimed: Barack Hussein Obama is truly unique. One of a kind. We all look forward with increasing longing to either the Democratic National Convention in August or election day in November, when we can fervently echo Hamlet's epitaph on his father: "All in all we shall not look upon his likes again!"

And a lusty amen to that.

It's Divorce, Captain, But Not As We Know It!

This is one of these "only in America" stories which makes the country so beloved of all those who glory in life's rich, varied, ever-new yet strangely unchanging cavalcade. Americans, it can safely be asserted, never do anything by halves. Take ball games. Every other nation on earth divides each match into two equal time periods. In the US you gotta have four.

Even baseball takes its officially ordained break not as logic dictates in the middle of the fifth inning of nine but in the seventh! And of course patrons get an opportunity for a hefty amount of shut eye at every pitching change as well. When the best two teams in the country slug it out each Fall the winners, without the slightest hint of irony or concern for semantics, are hailed World Champions!

Nothing is authentically American until it evolves into a gigantic version of what it should be. Football, a college runabout that lasted a measly hour, only became a national obsession when wiser heads came up with idea of stopping the clock every time a fan cursed one of the officials thereby turning it into a 3 hour plus butt-punishing marathon.

Other lands have dales, vales, fissures, ravines. The Land of the Free's got the Grand Canyon, Everest turned on its head. And there's Mount Rushmore - which is to chiseling stone what the same Grand Canyon is to erosion. There's even the world's fattest ball of twine that's still agrowin' courtesy of the good people of Cawker City, Kansas. Almost as awe-inspiringly huge as the amount of free time the good people of Cawker City have on their hands.

I blame it on Manifest Destiny. After setting up governance over a 200 mile strip of a land mass 3000 miles wide it takes some chutzpah to declare within two generations that the annexation of the other 2,800 miles was merely a matter of hitching up some covered wagons and giddy-uping in a vaguely western direction until you ran out of real estate. That kind of thing tends to get passed on in the gene pool. If the notoriously sex-shy Panda bear had been naturalized to the Oregon forests during the Carter Administration they'd have overrun the West as far as Colorado by now and be happily humping their way across the Mississippi by 2025 at the latest.

The same can be said for the Sixties, the decade when Timothy Leary was appointed the new Wizard of Oz and none of us - including the residents of Cawker City - were in Kansas anymore. Or have been since. This was the period when the United States was turned into a wrecking yard where the traditional social, legal and political structures of the Western World were dismantled and melted down for souvenirs, at first chaotically and then with an increasingly emboldened totalitarian thoroughness.

Martin Luther King's civil rights agitation - a completely constitutional movement to fulfill the Constitution itself by applying it unexceptionally to black citizens - became the paradoxical blueprint for the prolonged gang rape of the Founding Document that followed. What should have been the moment the Union transcended its historical origins and achieved the universality it had at its establishment claimed - "that all men are created equal" - became instead the starting point for a philosophically fraudulent and morally repugnant descent into the rancorous exceptionalism and relativist chaos we see today.

The speed with which America went from a virtuous engagement with its fundamental principles in LBJ's Civil Rights Act to the theatre de l'absurd of the prevailing social and judicial dispensation is staggering. Never have so few badgered, bamboozled and bullied so many to acquiesce in the total destruction of so much of what is necessary to live a civilized and civilizing life.

And so the most dangerous place most citizens born since the seventies have been or are likely to be is in the cradle of our race - the mother's womb. Around it cluster the medical thugees of the New Order, honing their scalpels and oiling their cranial vacuum cleaners. A grisly crew of self-styled "reproductive rights advocates", anti-death penalty politicians, puerile media hucksters, lethal feministas and airhead Hollywood engagés look on from the bleachers ready to applaud the grand slam home run of a "partial" birth abortion - hitherto known as murder in the first degree.

Motherhood, fatherhood, childhood have all been seized and broken on the wheel. Robin Hood was spared only because of his policy of enlightened wealth distribution. Marriage is now languishing in the progressivist dungeons, being daily stretched on the rack of social engineering.

It is here we enter the dark Zone of Irrationality, that bourne where the flagging Liberal Mind goes for some chow. This is a place "where nothing is but what is not" (Macbeth I, 3). However, instead of having "function...smothered in surmise", as the horrified Macbeth puts it, any surmise, however fantastical, outlandish, macabre or just downright silly, is invested with a multitude of functions.

The issue of marriage, a concept and practice easily understood because so widely practised, perfectly illustrates the reductio ad absurdam inherent in the Liberal mindset. It also demonstrates the deadly postmodern combination of unfettered self-centered emotionalism (i.e. irrationality) and ruthlessly goal-directed logic (i.e. ideology).

It invariably starts from some basic tenet of paleo-liberalism to which virtually all of us subscribe, viz. individual freedom is a sine qua non of a civilized society. From this is derived the proposition that, for instance, homosexuality should be decriminalized and homosexuals allowed to get on doing that thing they do as long as "they don't do it in the street and frighten the horses". (Which, incidentally, is why San Francisco passed an ordinance in the eighties forbidding the presence of any equine within the city limits unless suitably blinkered.)

Homosexuality enjoyed a very brief period of simple non-illegality before irrationality kicked in. Sexual deviance became rapidly valorized. Homosexuals are not, as was initially argued, "just like the rest of us" except, ahem, for a slight dissimilarity which only the terminally rednecked tend to dwell upon. Homosexuals, repackaged as 'gays', (only group members, after the pattern of 'nigger', are permitted to utter the pejorative stereotype 'queer' ) are now discovered to be in fact superior in every significant - and umpteen trivial - ways to normal men. These latter are promptly labeled 'straight' and in this way reduced to just another competing social group rather than the biological engine room of our species.

This marks the point at which the irrational and ideological merge. In the quest to normatively reconstruct social reality, normality (heterosexual relations, gender differences, marriage properly so called) is deconstructed (i.e. rendered essentially meaningless) as a mere cultural fabrication. At the same time this same normality is ingeniously recycled as a means of legitimating the abnormal. Thus gender differences have no objective reality yet women are set up as superior to men in actuality and so legally, morally and socially privileged on the sole grounds of their gender, the same category already denounced as a mere conceptual construct alone.

Though marriage in respect of heterosexuals (the only context in which it has meaning) is similarly denounced and disprivileged, the Neo-Liberal grandly declares that it is a fundamental human right of homosexuals to be allowed to enter into it! So, while less and less of the biologically capable plight their troth, great rafts of the absolutely unmarriageable are clamoring at the altar rails to be pronounced Chuck and Larry, Linda and Sue Bob.

Any such "marriage" is an ontological and physical impossibility. It is a squalid nominalist sleight of hand, abetted by brain-addled Massachusetts's judges playing the part of conjuror's assistants, complete with drum rolls, spinning bow ties and the abbracadabra of judicial mumbo-jumbo. It is the equivalent of painting a prune yellow, declaring it a lemon and popping a slice into your gin and tonic. A veritable witch's cocktail.

But the cavalcade rolls merrily on. Well, not quite merrily as it turns out. Hoodah thunk it! The one thing Massachusets Matrimony has in common with the real thing is that ever-lurking threat in all human interaction - buyer's remorse. Queer folk, having tied the knot, are no less eager to slip their leash as square folk, it appears. Divorce causes abundant problems and not just about who gets custody of Fidel, the remaining incontinent octogenarian chihuahua, his sibling, Ché, having gone to a farm in the country long ago as a result of a brave foray against a neighboring Bolivian tiger hound.

States which haven't yet passed the New England Hitching Post Law are refusing to grant "divorces" to matrimonialized gays because their union has even less legal standing than a loving father in Family Court. And Massachusetts requires that they live a year in the commonwealth before acquiring residential rights. This is causing great gay anguish.

Yahoo News reports that Cassandra Ormiston, a lesbian from Rhode Island, "who is splitting up from her wife, Margaret Chambers," is caught in this bind. "We all know people who have gone through divorces," she laments. "At the end of that long and unhappy period, they have been able to breathe a sigh of relief...[But] I do not see that on my horizon, that sigh of relief that it's over."

So here we are aboard the starship USS Boundless XS. Having already penetrated beyond the limits of the stellar dust cloud of Absurditas Extremis, it now begins its journey into the black hole named after its discoverer, Commodore D. N. Sayne. In his last transmission before he and his crew disappeared, the doughty Commodore urged all earthlings to follow him into what he called "this brave new world" of respect, harmony and unrelieved rapture based on "a socially equitable ontology" where each one of us "can be whatever it is we want to be at the exact moment we want to be it, anytime, everywhere".

Until that great day dawns hapless homosexuals like Ms Ormiston will continue to agonise over being trapped in a marriage that does not, because it cannot, exist in the world of brute facts while pining for a divorce that cannot be granted because the union it would break cannot as a (bio)logical reality be established in the first place.

The famous poet A. N. Onimous captured perfectly the painful metaphysics of such an exquisite dilemma in these poignant line:

Yesterday upon a stair
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today;
Oh, how I wish he'd go away!

Obama's Wine Turned Into Water...Eventually

The other night I was looking at the Cards playing the Astros in Houston. (I prefer the National League. The designated hitter rule is for sissies.) Anyhow, as the camera zeroed into home plate I caught sight of an old guy sitting in the front row over the batter's shoulder.

Gee, I thought, that old geezer's the spitting image of George Herbert Walker. A dead ringer for Bush 41. Bedad, says I to myself, it's true, we all have doubles running around out there somewhere ruining our reputations. Before the next pitch the camera zoomed in again and there sitting right next to the doppelganger was a grandmotherly figure who looked exactly like Barbara Bush, former First Lady and current First Mater!

I then realized that the guy who looked exactly like former President Bush was former President Bush.



Still crazy - about each other! - after all these years








The same psychological process has happened to many of us in respect of Barack Obama. When he first floated into my ken after his victory in Iowa he seemed aloof, a teeny weeny bit too pleased with himself, too nonchalantly in control. The kind of guy who would take time to brush a speck of lint from his lapel while receiving Holy Communion. I was however overwhelmed by his oratory. He had the cool easy presence and verbal mastery of John Kennedy and the moral passion and power of delivery of Martin Luther King, the two paramount English language political orators since Winston Churchill in his long ago prime.

Unlike Kennedy, King and old Winnie his appeal and impact were exclusively emotional though his essentially dispassionate persona helped him avoid the bombastic drivel speakers of that kind invariably drown in. Yet he was a phenomenon. Yes he was! Yes he was!! Yes he was!!! Against the grim humdrummery of the rest he shone like Betelgeuse.

Hillary plods along like a schoolmarm on valium before turning randomly into a screeching weird sister fresh from stirring her bubbling cauldron on Macbeth's blasted heath. For light relief she throws in her trademark goggle-eyed honk that's straight from the psych ward. McCain sounds like he's reading a translation of the Belgrade and Districts telephone directory and can't quite get his head around why anybody would be remotely interested in what he's saying. His sparse tenor marches to its own drum, rising and falling with utter disregard for the natural rhythms of the words and phrases. His pauses, when not entirely random, come either a beat too late or a beat too early to effectively underscore his points. In other words he's a truck where Obama's a De Lorean as John De Lorean's imagination meant it to be.

Edward's simply an idiot. Even if he spoke as Demosthenes of old we'd all still be infinitely more uplifted by the yowling of raunchy cats. Of course he doesn't speak like Demosthenes, he simply motormouths and the less said the better. Huckabee is an excellent stump speaker and would make a great warmer-upper but he's too deliberately aw-shucks folksy to achieve anything other than conning you into liking him for the hometown boy he most emphatically ain't.

And Romney - well, Mitt doesn't do speaking as such. He just talks. And talks. And talks. And never says anything that you believe he believes in. Nor anything that you believe he believes you believe he believes in. It's all a vacuous waste of God's good air. As for Rudy - remember him? The quondam sure thing. He's that unique, once in a lifetime creature, a real live genuine Noo Yawkah who actually gives a toss what people think of him.

He's like an old time carney outside the Headless Boy tent on Coney Island pleading with the distracted candy floss munchers strolling by to step in and see the most fantastical, the most stupendous, the most mind-boggling sight ever seen by man, woman, child or Denis Kucinich. In other words he too whiny, too persistent and way too needy to give any thought to the mechanics, not to mention the art, of public speaking.

That's my excuse for being bowled over by Obama's victory speech in Des Moines. What's yours? He seemed the real deal. I overlooked the fuzzy generalities and, as I was meant to do, supplied my own details to fill the policy vacuum. I pushed aside the almost sinister way he'd pause and peer through slitted eyes down his nose at the adoring crowds like a hungover Shaka Zulu surveying his Impis the morning after the night before.

I even thought himself and Michelle looked the part - young, handsome, dynamic, in love. A bit like Al and Tipper in '92 before Bill, Hillary, Inventing the Internet, Global Warming, the Oscars and the Nobel Prize had taken their toll. I wasn't yet on the bandwagon, mind you. Obama was, after all, a Democrat. Yet he didn't slither like a snake, snap like a crocodile and lie like a used car salesman so maybe he was a New Democrat like Bill Clinton was supposed to be but , dare I to hope, sincere. A triangulator who had transcended triangles and now dealt in more complex, more inclusive, more insightfully subtle political trigonometry. A guy who genuinely had the good of the country - all the country - and its people - all its people - at heart.


Al and Tipper
feelin' kinda chipper







The brave new world which now seemed even distantly possible gladdened my soul. I realized how sick we all were of the tawdry politics that is the stock and trade of Washington and all the varmints, small, large and gigantic, who infest the place. The sniveling lies, the monumental hypocrisies, the mean stratagems, the cynical ploys, the piddling personal power plays, the partisan parliamentary ambuscades, the prancing, promenading and posturing, the phony sympathy, the banal pandering, the whole three ring circus of fakery, fornication and fortune hunting, the sheer and utter persiflage of it all! Not to mention the galactic waste of money distrained from the pockets of the tens of millions who by their daily toil actually keep the country going.

In the midst of all this George W. Bush seems - is - a obelisk of decency and honor. For all his faults he is a sincere man and as honest a leader as can be considering the Gommorah over which he presides. This, despite his limitations, is the reason the American people chose him - twice.

Obama also seemed sincere, decent, honorable but without the limitations of the increasingly ineffectual President. The junior Senator from Illinois had the soul of a visionary, the heart of a healer and the tongue of a poet. He promised to bring us to a place in which we had long ceased to believe, a Shangri La - but a real one - where harmony, mutual respect and brotherly union were not only possible but so palpable we had merely to reach out and pull the lever for him in the Fall and such a transcendant renewal of the Nation would come to pass. How our palms began to itch for that shining lever.

Then spake Michelle. "For the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country!" We frowned, bemused momentarily, but like a husband who hears his loving wife call out the name of another in her sleep, we shook off our unease. The alternative was too appalling. It was a thing of nothing. She misspoke. Over-egged the pudding in the heat of the campaign. Happens all the time. However those who never felt the power of Obama's vision or were professionally required to ignore it clamored for an explanation. We thought them mean-spirited, petty. Way too cynical.




Ain't she sweet?




Michelle, reluctantly, spoke again, dignified, defiant. She "clarified" her remark by repeating it! We frowned some more. Our tiny newly born unease, mewling in its basinette, grew suddenly into a pre-school misgiving, sturdily toddling about our living room. Like my catching sight of the former President's "look-alike" we refused to accept what our mind was telling us. We fashioned an array of convenient fables to explain it away.

Then instead of the familar comforting features of Barbara Bush, our attention was rivetted by the bizarre rage-contorted countenance of Jeremiah Wright spraying his savage spittle. It was like being slapped in the face with a catfish still slick with the slime of its native habitat. Our toddling unease became in a flash a college going disillusionment. Obama's Philadelphia speech was its graduation ceremony.

Isn't it wonderful how reality intrudes like a foreclosure notice into our carefully, dare I say willfully, fabricated dreams of borrowed bliss? As we looked at the macabre spectacle unfolding in the pulpit of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago all the straws in the wind came together and buried not our belief in politics and politicians - that had long since breathed its last - but rather our desire to believe.

And there were enough straws to make a hefty hay rick. Obama's haughty demeanor and attitude of inbred condescension. His disinvitation of his pastor, mentor, friend, and "uncle" at his campaign launch. His cosying up to Weatherman Bill Ayres who makes Ted Kaczynski seem quite a decent sort. His awkward tango around the Farrakhan endorsement in the debates until Hillary nailed him on it. His declaration that he had never heard Wright say boo to a goose. His subsequent declaration that he had been present at several quite energetic goose boo-booings. His ritual sacrifice of his white grandmother with a calculated coldness that would have made an Aztec High Priest proud.

William Ayres, distinguished
Professor of Education
at the University of Chicago.



"I can't wait to set the timer...I mean, pull the lever next November 4 for my comrade in arms, Barack Obama."

The passing days have subsequently served only to confirm this reality to all but the terminally self-deluded and those many for whom political exigencies are always greater than the duty of truth telling. Barack Obama is indeed a New Democrat but only in the sense that we haven't seen his likes rise so high for a very long time. You have to go back, way back as far as George McGovern to find such a Way Out Far Left Dem rise to such Presidential prominence.


The Irresistible
Force Meets The
Unelectable Object



To give his due to that strangely effete Son of Erin, poor George wasn't a monumental hypocrite. In fact he wasn't a hypocrite at all. He was one hundred per cent WYSIWYG: a naive Left Wing Idealist who believed that the essential milky goodness of a noble humanity would triumph if only the nasty war-mongering capitalists would go away, far far away, and take their horrid running dogs in the GOP with them.

George of course lost in the biggest landslide since the one that wiped out the dinosaurs but there is little comfort there for us. Not only is Obama a specious and remarkably proficient political operator with an arresting presence and a natural talent for grand set-piece oratory he is temperamentally and intellectually well suited to the great masquerade in which his whole campaign is grounded.

Unlike McGovern who regarded himself as a mere standard bearer around which the disaffected Democratic masses would willingly and actively gather, Obama sets himself up as an Uber-Leader come from on high to create a grand coalition not so much of the willing as of the willing-to-be- enchanted, a docile yet fervid mass of fanatical supporters for whom nothing he does is wrong because it is he who does it.

Now, where have we seen that before? Here's a clue.

Even more significantly, the country, nay, the world has changed fundamentally since McGovern floundered haplessly into oblivion in 1972. The Western Tradition of free, informed and rational political discourse still prevailed back then. The essential institutions of state and society were still coherent and interconnected by an agreed and cogent system of moral, social and civic values and norms in which the population at large not merely acquiesced but which were an integral part of the personal ethos of the vast majority of citizens.

Today the soul-eating viruses from the Sixties have had ample time to do their terrible work. The public discourse has declined so much from rationality that Al Gore stands as a Nobel laureate alongside Albert Einstein and Willie Yeats. Global Warming is not merely one of many scientific hypotheses but rather an hysterical quasi-religious cult complete with dogmas, incantations and solemn excommunications which even the likes of George Bush and John McCain feel constrained to engage with.

Dear Old Willie looking especially grand.

The greatest poet of the 20th century won the Nobel Prize in 1923 long before it began to rival a Ché Guevara T-Shirt as a Left Wing fashion accessory.



Marriage and consequently fatherhood are mere remnants of a savage paternalism which the tide of progress will shortly sweep away. Self-help gurus are the new hierarchy of an infantile postmodern spiritualism while God and any mention of Him or any sign, symbol or artifact likely to connote His existence are excluded from the nation's classrooms with a zeal heretofore exhibited only by the brainwashed apparatchiks of state sponsored atheistic Communism.

The schools themselves are fallen prey to the suffocating group-think that permeates all the federal and state bureaucracies from sole to scalp and the curriculum is expressly designed to indoctrinate America's children in the fractious factional socialist verities of modern pedagogy. This can only be done, of course, by denying them a real education which would by its nature enable them to easily see such a squalid exercise in social engineering for what it is.

This, therefore, is the Age Of the Easily Duped and Obama is its King.

And we are duping ourselves if we fail to take seriously the likelihood that come next November he may also be its President.

Postcards From The Edge...The Ethnic Cleansing Of America

Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill) floating above a monster rally of heavily armed, Bible-wielding white trash protectionists outside Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

Having rebuked the awestruck mob for their religious sectarianism, racial bigotry and murderous gun mania, the future President instructed them all to bathe in the cleansing waters of the nearby Susquehanna river while singing the inspirational Civil Whites anthem "We Have Been Overcome".

Declaring "first you shall see me, then you shall not see me", the Senator, taking advantage of a fresh tail-wind which had miraculously sprung up, set off for the Mid-West where he is confident he can wean the white masses from "the destructive reliance on guns and God which has been the plague of this mean country of ours since its ill-starred foundation so long ago in slavery and theistic dogma".







The Susquehanna, named from an Algonquin word meaning "Secular Mind-Broadening Waters Of Disarmament".

It was here that native Susquehannock warriors, as part of a traditional ethnic purification rite, immersed their white captives prior to using them as beasts of burden.



Senator John McCain (R-Arz) together with his wife Cindy and daughter Meghan bursts into spontaneous applause as Senator Obama passes overhead on his mission "to bring ethnic cleansing to fly-over America".

The Democratic front-runner is careful to maintain an altitude of less than three hundred feet at all times to conform to FAA regulations concerning non-mechanical, self-propelled aerial bodies.

Afterwards before a small lukewarm crowd of distracted supporters, McCain said that, though the result can "never be in doubt", he is determined to continue his campaign to the "inevitable bitter end". Speaking in an uncharacteristically exalted fashion, the Republican no-hoper declared that it is "vitally important that the American people are given a choice in the Fall so that there will be no doubt about Senator Obama's overwhelming democratic mandate when he enters upon his great work as President".



Mrs Roberta McCain, 96 year old mother of the Arizona senator, pictured here signing up to a 12 Step Program to help her overcome the baseless fears and narrow-minded dread that has blighted her life as a Typical White Person.

She told reporters that "John said that if I didn't enrol in the program Senator Obama would insist that one of my grandchildren throw me under that danged bus they all keep talking about".



As part of her recovery the "typical white grandmother" is introduced to basketball greats Shaquille O'Neill and Kobe Bryant.

"Once she can pass these dudes on the street without swallowing her dentures," chuckled Program director, Jamaal Ali Ka Shazaam, "she'll be ready for what we call 'The Jesse Jackson Experience'. This is where gangsta rappers stalk her on the empty backstreets of Chicago from midnight till 2 a.m. If the old lady can get through that without hoping the guys crouching in the shadows behind her are white, she graduates."


The infamous "Star of Bethlehem" photograph.

It was e-mailed from inside the McCain campaign to the Drudge Report in an attempt to lay claim to the Messiahship which is in fact the unique possession of Senator Obama alone.

Within minutes of its publication by Matt Drudge, the notorious Republican shill, eagle-eyed astronomy experts on The Daily Kos, the renowned independent political blog famed for its objective and nuanced reporting, revealed the picture to be a fraud.

"By means of a painstaking comparison with imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Giotto Probe," said Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas "we were able to establish beyond a shadow of a doubt that the object above McCain's unpleasingly narrow conservative head is not in fact a bona fide heavenly body but rather a crass and crude attempt at replicating a particularly mediocre solar luminosity in the Alpha Centauri galaxy."

A crestfallen Rick Davis, McCain head honcho, expressed his "full, abject and absolute contrition" for such "a blatant, unforgiveable breach of etiquette" which he pleaded had been carried out without the knowledge of "the candidate or anyone else in the campaign". The guilty staffer, Rem Brandt, a sophomore from Texas Christian University, has been fired.

UPDATE: It has since emerged that Rem Brandt is a nom de guerre of Van Ryan, an executive member of the National Committee of the NRA and author of the red states bestseller The Immaculate Conception: How The Daily Rosary And Your Family Arsenal Can Seal The Borders And Keep America White.


Senator Joe Liberman (I-Conn) and Senator Lindsey Graham (R-NC) are forced to admit that John McCain insists on at least one of them accompanying him everywhere he goes because of the GOP candidate's overwhelming fear of encountering people of color.

"His tendency to utter racial and ethnic stereotypes all day every day," confessed a shamefaced Lieberman, "would even make my typically Jewish grandmother cringe."

Lindsey Graham was equally forthright stating that McCain's "utterings" have so repelled his own grandmother that she is voting for Barack Obama even though "she hasn't held down a job since her sixty fifth birthday, keeps a loaded revolver on the nightstand alongside her Bible and is as white as processed flour".

In a further development all three senators agreed that between them they have the charisma of three month old washed up seaweed. A campaign spokesman further explained that Senator McCain "as just a reg'lar white guy" completely accepts that "he don't have no mojo".