It does seem evident that Cheney is the central madman in the vast right wing conspiracy that is the Bush administration, and it sounds from the article as though his own self-aggrandizement is the point of all of these efforts. We can only hope that he eventually brings upon himself all the pain and grief that he has brought upon others. Liberals and moderates must learn from Cheney's career that we can never compromise with someone like him. He must always be smashed flat and smashed flat again and then smashed flat yet again until he goes away and never comes back (what a nice thought that is!)

My son has ADD. I was known as out to lunch, oblivious, inattentive, and lost in the clouds when I was a kid, but I now think I probably had a bit of ADD. EVery one of my male cousins was disruptive, hard to handle, over-active, and mischief-making. As adults, most of us are successful and hard-working (one is a former crack addict, but he is the longest lived crack-addict anyone knows). Fact is, history is full of kids, mostly boys, who can't conform to school. When my partner was in school (in the 1940s and 50s), they put a dunce cap on his head and made him sit in the corner. When one of my best friends was in school at the same time, they just sent him out into the hall and let him sit there-when he was in sixth grade, a teacher discovered that he didn't know how to read. Children in school used to be routinely caned, whipped, humiliated, and expelled if they did not or could not conform. When people begin talking about how these children should just "try harder", that is the slippery slope they are starting down. When my son was in 5th grade, I put him on meds. They haven't worked wonders, but they have made an improvement. The fact was, he was driving his teachers crazy. When he started taking the drugs, he stopped driving them crazy. He wasn't driving me crazy, but I come from a family where running at top speed back and forth from one end of the house to the other is no big deal. School is school, boys are boys. In some generations, they get whipped for being boys and in some generations they get drugged for being boys. Which would you prefer? My son takes ritalin for school and not at home or at camp, where he is very physically active. He knows the difference between the two states. I see the ritalin as a way of giving him a taste of concentration, success, and conformity. (We haven't had any negative physical side effects) If my cousins had had access to ritalin, maybe their lives would not have been so hard and dangerous. At any rate, given who we are, these are the choices we have to make. I hear there are nice, naturally quiet and well behaved boys out there. Never knew one very well.

This alliance between Jews and Evangelicals is something I do not get. Isn't what the Evangelicals imagine, namely the rapture and the end of days, simply another, larger version of the Holocaust? Isn't it the ultimate Holocaust? It grows out of the same writings and the same long-standing European anti-Semitism that the Holocaust grew out of. To embrace it in any way seems crazy and desperate to me, almost a suicide wish. Does Isreal think that the Evangelicals would lift a finger to help them if something that looked like Armageddon appeared to be at hand? Don't they realize that in fact, the rapture believers would go ahead and pull the trigger? This is an alliance that could destroy the world, and if it did, Israel would go first. That is the point of what the Evangelicals believe.

Rebecca--

John Ross is a ring-wing survivalist gun nut in the Richard Mellon Scaife, inherited wealth mode. Check his web-site! Nothing he says about male/female relations is based on actual experience. Find someone at least a little more respectable.