My nineteen-year-old son has what I call the Bush Disease. Or maybe it's the nineteen-year-old disease and Bush has it. With a big smile of accomplishment Tommy says, "I'm gonna wash my car today, Dad," and that's it. He never washes the car because he's already gotten his satisfaction out of SAYING he's going to wash it and seeing my predictable smile when I let myself be fooled that we're actually going to be able to see what color it is for the first time in weeks. Why would he bother getting his hands wet at this point? Bush, same way. Get up there and tell people what they want to hear, listen to the applause roll over you like an orgasm, and then...forget about it. It was never going to happen anyway, but it sure was fun talking about it.

Cheney is not a killer. Yes, he'll gladly send someone else's kids to kill for him, but he's a scared little man who speaks from behind a curtain, who is protected day and night by a huge security apparatus, who can't even shoot a bird unless it's been raised for the killing and released right in front of his gun. I'm betting when he was a child he thought there were boogey-men under his bed and that fear has informed his rise to power and his use of power. Because Dick Cheney knows, were he stripped of his power and his protections, he would quiver and quail and call for his mommy to come save him. You don't have to be a psychiatrist, folks.

It was so RIGHT to have a guy with all that military in his blood to shoot holes in wimpy-ass tough-talking Bush/Cheney. That's all that was going on here. Nancy will get her chance. No one doubts her strength, intelligence or courage.

Who wants women with balls, anyway? That's like ordering a veggie-burger. You want a burger, buy meat; you want veggies, order a salad. What's great about strong, intelligent, courageous women is that they DON'T have balls to get in the way of all that.

It's the only answer. The problem with impeachment is that it's a stately, time-consuming process. The only thing that really makes sense is to drag Bush and Cheney (along with Rice) out of the White House and into early retirement. Forget criminal charges, war crimes charges, etc. Just get them out of there, now, before they do more damage.

I wouldn't have thought it’d take an article quite this long to tell Salon readers all about what it's like to read and respond at Salon. But hey, it's not like trees were cut down.

Two things: I don't think all these voices are going to make the debate "flatten out." As long as there are thoughtful and articulate voices, they will differ in their opinions and we will be entertained, informed and stimulated. I keep waiting for the letters pages at Salon to devolve into the kind of semi-literate drooling and turd-flinging one sees at the "Post Your Thoughts" areas of places like AOL, but it isn't happening -- far from it.

Second thing, and this applies to the subset of writers who are specifically journalists, if that distinction has validity anymore: I will feel that the oversight, if you will, of the writer's work by his/her readers has truly born fruit when it is simply no longer possible for a mainstream news outlet to allow one politician to accuse another of advocating that we "cut and run" in Iraq when the second politician has merely suggested that we draw down our troops in an orderly fashion in order to allow the Iraqis to fight their own civil war -- or to paint every legislator who voted to give GWB the authority to use force with having "voted for the war" (meaning, by implication, this particular war, the way it's been waged, etc.). This kind of mislabeling, of allowing the wrong people to choose, unchallenged, the vocab in which the issues are framed, is considered normal sound-bite journalism these days and I would love to see it stop.

There's nothing wrong with religion at the personal level. It is no doubt a by-product of the miraculous things our brains are capable of: connecting past and present to ideate the future; the understanding and use of cause-and-effect; the ability to reflect upon our own existence, and on and on. Our brains only feel safe when they understand everything about our surroundings and religion is the brain's desperate filling-in of blanks that cannot be filled in rationally, with concrete evidence. In like manner, romantic love can be seen as an outgrowth of our need to procreate, to protect and educate our young longer than most species, to make the often-irrational long-term commitments necessary to that goal -- combined with our tendency to make things a little more than they are, to gild the lily with fancies produced by our playful and overactive brains. Though romantic love has given rise to such abominations as the wedding industry, divorce lawyers and some really bad poetry, even the atheists aren't suggesting, so far as I know, that we get rid of romantic love along with religion. The only real -- and it's VERY real -- problem with religion is that it has given rise to political structures, and political structures are not really interested in explaining our existence or providing guidance to a better life. They are interested in what all political structures seek: power and continuity, with uncalloused hands and good wines for those who rise up the power structre. Thus, the simple animism of our primitive ancestors has been perverted, turned into the Catholic Church or Scientology or dozens of other twisted, unholy organizations that prey on people's fear and confusion. It's like an auto-immune disease, where a miraculous product of eons of natural selection is turned against the being it developed to protect. What a shame.