Rumsfeld's resignation is good news. No question about it.

We can not rest on our laurels this time, however.

Congresswoman Pelosi's call for greater bipartisanship had better be a barnum. If we had just spent the last six years to ten years dealing with the frustration of a mere party in opposition to the Democratic Party, Pelosi's clarion call would be welcomed by me as the message to seek the higher ground that I am sure it was intended to be.

A higher ground, however, does not exist when your opponent clearly seeks to permanently remove all ground from under your feet. Especially if said opponent has already been successful in removing a critical mass beneath your next step.

We are beings of a different order, like chimpanzees and rocks or fish and normal human beings, Democrats and the neoconservatives the Republicans have coddled and nurtured for several decades now, we are wholely different orders of being. This is not to suggest that we can not peacefully coexist with rocks and fish, but it is to suggest in the strongest possible terms that the appropriate relationship between us must always and forever be maintained. As normal humans we were never intended to be hidden under rocks, nor to "swim with the fishes." The fish and the rocks belong in tanks where we can learn our lessons from them in the safety of relative isolation. We venture into their world either at the end of a landing net or some well maintained scuba gear. There is simply no available oxygen for us in the world in which they seem to exist and to thrive.

I agree that we need to restore our civil liberties, our independent media and our ability to educate and sustain ourselves. But we must also face the fact that this same class of neoconservative organism was not only responsible for the last ten years of human misery and suffering, but an astounding amount of misery and suffering from the last 100 years (see D's essay on DailyKos regarding FDR's conflict with Nazi sympathizers in corporate America -- quick: before it gets pulled.).

More tangibly, this class of neoconservative individual saw to the dispatch of an American President in front of his wife and innocent children; the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy -- to name but a few. Traceably beginning with the assassination of former Director of Fort Detrick, Frank Olsen, these ugly Americans have consisently sought the enslavement of the great unwashed masses of humanity as a worthy end in itself. Do not heed their self-exhonerating rhetoric, observe their behavior. As is the case with all orders of being, one knows them by how and why they move. Or slither.

Do not stop until every last one of these odd creatures are enclosed and safely quarantined from the rest of the human race for all time. Our very survival as a species depends upon it.

Pure poetry.

What is required, however, is a harsher, more direct statement of the facts that Keith Olbermann comes close to rendering until he, too, lapses into his love of words and their English rhythms.

The plastic warrior class that has been the Bush Administration up to now has been around since before the Depression era. They continue to steal our oxygen to this day, yet we keep them around us as if they were harmless pets and able reciprocants of our progressive compassions and democratic aspirations. We use them to prove our self-evident humanity while we offer them ready access to our jugular veins. As if we have no innate sense that we are more than their parasitic phylum. As if we need physical proof of the beating of our own hearts.

These kitschy clowns are about as cuddly-wuddly as the clown in Steven King's, "It." While they might lack that clown creature's supernatural force, they more than compensate for that shortcoming with cold, hard cash and a murderous will to use power at the expense of morality and common decency.

One can not steal the shrunken head of Geronimo and come anywhere close to obtaining his spirit. Neither can one steal the freedoms given us by the Greatest Generation on the beaches of Normandy and the Founding Fathers of Philadelphia.

Unless we agree to allow such transgressions to take place.

Jail the war criminals. Now.

...pure and simple.

We have more to fear from China than from India. At least India's people are competitive and resilient enough to fight international big business for every scrap of territory they steal from the public trust. The Chinese are accustomed to an overly weighty central government and will find fascism not much different from communism. Intellectual oppression is about as demeaning as the economic variety.

I urge everyone to purchase and watch, "The Corporation." Excellent documentary. Just excellent.