A perfect example of the "inside the Beltway" fawning punditocracy (a cute little oxymoron I just invented) is PBS's Washington Week. It has a rotating legion of Washington know-it-alls who know nothing. Gloria Borger is a frequent panelist. Not once has any of them talked about what is good for the country, what is good for the planet, about right and wrong, or what a "policy" or news story means. It is all about the fortunes of various office holders, candidates, and political operative in the nation's capital.

I've sent emails to the show, calling them on this superficiality, and I know others have too. At the closing one Friday night, the show host Gwen Ifill invited viewers to send their comments, with the appeal to "be nice." No amount of criticism will change either this show or the Washington corps of self-appointed know-it-alls.

There is only one solution to this. Support other media like Salon, and give the pretenders grief at every opportunity, like Glenn Greenwald does on a daily basis.

Something I have wondered about for years may have been a factor in Everett's injury: the face mask. It was introduced in the 1950s in order to reduce the various facial injuries players were suffering - lost teeth, broken jaws, broken noses, and eye injuries. It also can put a player's head in vulnerable positions when tackling, blocking, being tackled, being blocked, and getting in pileups. The face mask acts as a lever against the head of the player. There is only one way to avoid both the facial injuries and neck injuries that make the game so risky: abolish football.

It's not likely to happen any time soon, but when our civilization has had enough of violence of all kinds: wars, domestic abuse, barroom brawls, vigilantism, bullying, police brutality, supermax prisons, travel in motor vehicles, and sports like football, hockey, boxing, and stock car racing - injuries like this will be a thing of the past. The side business dog-fighting is not far from the brutality of other sports. It is merely a step further in the Roman Coliseumization of spectator sports in the "USA." When we lose interest in football we will know we have changed as a people.

Arguments can be construed endlessly in favor of analyzing the Bush "presidency," but even a critical examination amplifies Bush as worthy of treatment as something above the level of criminal insanity.

Any Joe Blow off the street could do as good a job as Bush has in the nation's highest office. "The most powerful man on Earth," could be studied ad absurdum if an average panhandler were plunged into the office, with similar results to what has been written about Bush. Words, words, and more words.

I see one "editor's choice" letter challenges "leftists" to be less Bush-hating. I do not follow the religion of "left" versus "right." This religion, similar to other religions, is based on a metaphor, the imaginary horizontal spectrum that supposedly accounts for all perspectives and identities in the political sphere of human interaction. The spectrum does not exist, except in the imprisoned minds of dependent citizens.

I also don't hate Bush. He's a sociopathic criminal, but I don't hate him. He should be in jail for the rest of his life, but you don't have to despise him to come to that conclusion. All you have to do is have some standards for human behavior. If a man lies a country into mass murder, placing him in a jail cell is the civilized thing to do. We don't need to hang him in the fashion of terrorist snuff videos, like we enabled the "Shiite" execution squad to do in "Iraq." We just need to bring him to justice.

Bush's crimes are plenty. Stolen elections, active negligence before the September 11, 2001 attacks, invasion and occupation of "Iraq" based on lies, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, domestic spying, the active negligence before and after Hurricane Katrina, the criminalization of the Justice Department, and the profiteering of the "Iraq" war. I probably left a few crimes off the list.

We need to understand Bush like we need to understand Ted Bundy. We need to understand him like we need to understand John Gacy. We need to understand him like we need to understand Jeffrey Dahmer. What we don't need to do is understand him as some good-ole-boy who means well, but isn't curious. I can understand a writer's need to make a living, and to be perceived as being insightful and pertinent. But trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear does no one any good, not even Bush. It's a form of enabling, of co-dependency, and ultimately does the country a disservice.