"You know you were a Bush staffer. Beyond that, you obviously don't know shit from shinola. That we all can see."

Don't you have some dog shit you can light on fire before ringing a doorbell and running away?

The more this Year presents itself the more my mind drifts 40 years back. A lot of similar dynamics going on when you factor that we as a people are very different than we were 40 years ago. There is an unpopular war, but no great protests against it - yet there seems to be a latent anger that has taken a pragmatic expression. Wonder what would take that anger to flare.

In the begining of 1968, after New Hamphire there was a sense of excitement that we the people could change what we felt then was a large repressive government that did not listen to us. Today that Government looks honest and reprentative in comparison with the sleaze that "governs" us now. By the time 1969 came along all that hope was gone. Wonder what trauma the Bush psychopaths have planned if it looks like the "war" might actually end.

The consequences of what happens this year are much more ominous that 40 years ago. We have in our cowering apathy allowed our liberties to be trimed and a President to flaut the law. It will not be easy to get back what we have without even a sense of loss given away. It is rather like the prey of a vampire bat who anesthetizes its victim so they feel nothing as their blood is drained from them while they sleep.

It is hard to pay attention. The future of the nation whimsically turning on a womans tears, not tears from violence, the fact that her children can not get an education nor health care, battering, nor because a spouse has lost his life in Iraq. Tthe tears because her ambition to be President might not be satisfied. I wonder if she cries when she thinks about the 3,000 plus who have died becasue she "did not know then what she knows now".

Those things do not seem to worry us. The complete ignorace of the idea that not knowing and voting for war is worse - not a good excuse for - than knowing and voting for war.

As I watch this war drag on and watch as so few of us want to deal with the deaths of our people or of the Iraqi people. We slap a bow on our cars and feel somehow the deaths are less tagic, less without meaning. Like a mother who puts a band-aid on a childs minor wound to make the child feel like everthing is going to be OK.

So we focus at the begining of what I fear is going to be another of those years on personality rather than the real facts. Facts like whoever we elect - if in fact that is allowed - they will have a damaged military, a developed world whose anger toward us has turned to indiference as they move ahead, and an economy that breathes shallow haulting breaths as the Federal Reserve support system attempts to keep alive what little viability there is to work with. That does not include the issues that face parents trying to raise a family with less money to work with and a money that is rapidly loosing its value.

I can not get excited about Hillary becuase she is more intested in Power than spending the time to know what she needs to know to use it.

Obama votes very differently than he talks. His inability to understand the long term damage that the "war" is doing to the country he hopes to run makes him an unlikely candidate for me. He wants to let it go on for several years more - for no good or explainable reason.

The Republicans are, well, pathetic. Not entirely unlike that marvelous Liberal Hubert H. Humphrey who was saddled with a very unpopular sitting President. He however finally found the strength to buck LBJ and almost won. The problem is that anyone of the Republicans that "buck" Bush is no better and maybe worse than he.

Huckabee wants a theocray, Romney doesn't know what he wants, Gulianni just wants to dress up and play President (I would feel more comforatble with him doing that in a dress and heels, but I fear he want to wear a Dress Uniform and his heels will be attached to Gestapo Boots), McCain is wed to the war that took another 9 lives of our servicemen today.

In 1968 my body was wounded in Vietnam, this year 2008 my soul is wounded beyond what words can express. I hope it survives this year.

Glenn

What are your thoughts about the following?

Hand counted paper ballot precincts favored Obama while Diebold op-scan counted precincts favored Clinton.

The only significant different between election results and poll results (both pre-election and exit polls) favored Clinton.

All of the op-scan machines were under the complete and exclusive control of one shady company.

The media is unwilling to consider any possibility of election fraud as an explanation for Clinton's unexpected results (regardless of the extensive evidence of voting machine fraud dating back to 2000).

If we don't have accurate vote counting, nothing else we do will matter.