Has anyone other than me wondered why McCain looks like he has a plug of tobacco in his mouth? His pictures from his youth don't indicate any jaw swelling, so maybe he has some kind of disorder of the jaw joint, if that's what it's called.

Or maybe it has something to do with what he says when he opens his mouth. John McCain would not have been a candidate for the Senate had he not been a prisoner of war. Had he not been elected on the basis of having been a prisoner of war, he would not now be considered a viable candidate for President of the United States. That's a pretty odd qualification, but I suppose it's a better qualification than desertion.

I hope McCain is the Republican candidate in 2008. He has nothing to offer except fakery, and the country is somewhat wise to fakery these days. Giuliani is a bit more slick, and his fakery might fool enough people to get him elected, so it would be better if McCain were the candidate. Whoever the candidate is, he or she will only have the tired Republican talking points that are finally being discredited: tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, police state, subsidization of large corporations, military adventurism, billions in money and weaponry for Israel.

What will be interesting to see how the mainstream media spin McCain into a hero's hero, man of the people, fighter for truth, justice, and the American way. His membership in the Keating Five will be ignored or cleansed, depicted as the inspiration for his courageous battle against corruption. It will be fun to watch.

If a governor can be recalled, why not a senator? I think fraud charges could also be lodged.

I think the reason Democrats don't challenge Lieberman is because they don't want him to switch parties. What they don't realize is that the momentum shift that brought them to power might just sweep over them to, and sweep them out of office.

They also haven't much of an idea what a national joke Lieberman has become. When someone as pathetic as he is makes such a fool of himself on a nationwide scale, he becomes a focus point, and the others gain new scrutiny as a result.

For the people of Connecticut the work of recalling Lieberman should be a relatively straightforward process. It would do best if initiated by former Lieberman voters. My advice is to be intentional: don't slow down until he's out of office, don't quit, don't get hustled. Joe Lieberman has joined forces with the Bush criminal operation, and as such he is a threat to the entire planet.

I have been an admirer of Garrison Keillor for a long time, but this story is way off base. What virtually no one will admit about Bush is that he is a criminal sociopath. There is no complexity there. His entire life is marked with criminality, cruelty, addiction, fakery, and bluster. Sloth should be in there somewhere, but it weaves through all his delinquency.

When I first started looking at the life of George W. Bush in 2000 it became clear that he was a person with a severe mental disorder that made him a danger to society. A shameless animal torturer in his youth, he became a shameless deserter as an adult, a shameless drug and alcohol addict, a shameless corporate criminal, and a gleeful executioner as governor of Texas.

Since then he has stolen two presidential elections, enabled the worst attacks on American soil in its history, lied the country into a disastrous war, enabled the destruction of one of the world's great cities and neglect afterward, and is now planning the invasion of another country.

He has initiated a broad range of criminal human rights violations, such as kidnapping, torture, indefinite detention without legal recourse, spying on American citizens, and blacklisting of air travelers.

In other words, George W. Bush is a completely worthless human being, unworthy of any respect, homage, or elevation to mythical status.

Which raises the question of why writers and other artists choose to anoint Bush with any kind of mystery or depth. What I have found consistent among these various mythmakers is that they use Bush as a foil for their own egos, a touchstone for making themselves look witty and sophisticated. Nothing is added to our understanding of Bush, but the artist shows himself to be clever and insightful.

Bush, who claims to have read "three Shakespeares" during one of his vacations, is nothing but a faker and a vicious criminal. The idea that he has an obsession on the order of the mythical Captain Ahab is an insult to our intelligence. Garrison Keillor ought to know better.