Pictures from the New Orleans neighborhood of my upcoming serial killer-savior novel, Ava.

A lot of debate has been going on about Afghanistan. With the Taliban digging in, the Pakistanis pushing hard and new questions about troop increases, everyone’s wondering what to do with the war we swept under the carpet.

My advice is what it always has been: Learn from the greatest - Alexander the Great.

Alexander would bastardize a modern saying, “Go big or go home.” The way to win in Afghanistan, following in his bloody sandal prints, is to Go Big, Then Go Home.

Afghanistan will never embrace “enlightenment” by Western values. They will embrace our cash. But touch their burkhas, child prostitutes and opium without properly buying them all off, and look out. The best we can hope for is getting a pack of honor-killing, clannish mercenaries on our side.

That has not changed since Alexander’s time. Neither has the threat Afghanistan poses. Turn your back on those bandits at your peril.

So the thing to do now, is to link hands with Pakistan in hitting them as hard as you can. Don’t cut corners - take a page from the famed “Surge” and give the combat commanders at least somewhere near the amount of shooters they want. Then give the Talibs, foreign fighters and local gunslingers a chance to cut terms.

It’s the only way to safe face and keep the coin flowing. Anything less, and you risk Kabul becoming gory sequel to Saigon. But for the sake of American fighting power and Afghani civilians everywhere, make sure you plan on going home after you go big.

I conducted an interview with Jocelin Donahue, an Imperialist-era history scholar who just happens to be an Indy film star, lately lighting up the brooding frames of Ti West’s The House of the Devil.

Check it out here at the one, only, absolutely awesome Pretty-Scary, site of women in horror, by women in horror.

Jocelin Donahue is a thoughtful actress. Thoughtful films would be her genre: The former NYU Sociology-History undergrad has starred in period pieces like The Burrowers, a horror-western that was as much about settling the wilderness of the West as about what beasts lurk beneath that harsh terrain. She has been in abstracted short films like The Masquerade and Express 831. Sitting with me in a room at the Four Seasons, draped in the catalog-sharp attire that befits her past career as a model, Jocelin tells me she is drawn to acting because she is fascinated by the formation of identity.

Stem cell research finally pays off big:

Scientists have developed breast implants grown from the client directly. The key is stem cell research, which serves to make the implants stable.

Successful trials have already been carried out in Japan producing breasts that look and feel smoother than those from conventional cosmetic surgery using implants. Apparently using stem cell technology means that the fat grows its own blood supply and becomes part of the breast.

Why am I entirely unsurprised that the Japanese developed this first?

Can’t wait to see what the folks who brought you used-school-girl-panties vending machines will do with stem cells next.

Holy O.M.G., Batman!

It looks like teens were sending naughty pix and messages to each other!  This kind of aggression against the near-certainty that they’d reach the Age of Majority absolutely innocent of carnal knowledge cannot stand.

Fortunately, cops were quick to act, and will likely bring child porn charges against the offending teens.

Ruining their lives with a jail sentence and lifelong sex offender tag - now that’ll teach those teens to do adult stuff!

I am back in the online word circuit. This blog will be used as billboard for what I’m up to. Political opinions may still soil the screen. If so, my apologies in advance. I will not be kind. The time for kindness ended when the greatest economic crisis of our age was answered by a pissing contest from all directions.

So what am I do? I take a page from our “Elected Representatives” and I, who cannot do, criticize.

I wrote this recent review of Jennifer’s Body, for my friend Heidi Martinuzzi’s take-no-prisoners, women-in-horror site, the incomparable “Pretty-Scary”:

I also reviewed the straight-to-video Infestation, one of the better survival horror comedies I’ve seen in awhile. Check it out on Pretty-Scary.

As for other projects … I’m certain to go back to politics eventually. For now, my analysis can be summed up neatly.

My future is less about macro-level misery: Watch this space for serial murder.

Of all of the things to catch up with in the political cosmos, I’m going to be bringing my blog back to life with a spirited discussion about the Kurds.

“Why the Kurds?” you ask.  Because, out of the entire deck making up the house of cards of global politics, the Kurds are the card that could send the whole thing crashing down.  Not the situation in Afghanistan; that’s a sticky wicket we won’t be batting out of soon.  Not the turbulence of retrenching rogue states like North Korea and the Russian Commonwealth; those bad boys can be bought off or it’ll come to blows way down the line.  Not even the global economic crisis - on that point, I assure you we’re heading south in the months to come, and the best we can hope for is a parachute.

But the Kurds could topple the whole mess even faster.  They are the weakest link.  And while everything else is sliding down, it is the Kurds who can pitch us over the edge in the months to come.

The reason why, is because the Kurds have long been the red-headed step child of the Gulf region.  Allies against Saddam by virtue of necessity, they went back to doctrine-based in-fighting as soon as the statue fell in Baghdad. They have since resisted any form of democratic control - from the Iraqi capitol or from the possibility of local parliaments. Now that elections have taken place, the Kurds stand to be as marginalized a party in politics as they were ethnically.

This leaves them ready, willing and able to do what they’re used to - take up arms and seize back their scrap of land from the Iraqi state, our ostensible ally.  Things could turn into a shooting war very soon.

So what? Well, it wouldn’t just be an internal conflict.  Iraq isn’t the only nation that the Kurds seek to draw into a firefight.  The Kurdish claim to space extends over two other states the USA definitely doesn’t want caught in this tug of war - one because it’s an ally; the other because it’s as close to a sworn enemy as America gets these days: Turkey and Iran.

Israel may be the US media sweetheart of the Middle East, but it’s Turkey that bends whenever the US asks an ally in the region to grab ankles. Though we couldn’t sign them up for full access rights when the Coalition of the Willing was preparing to tangle with Saddam, Turkey allows us everything from military bases to political crackdowns.  The few lines in the sand they draw and mean it involve their dealings with ethic minorities inside their borders - most significantly, these days, the Kurds who’re trading bullets and bombs with them over the southeast end of their country.

Iran is also locked in skirmishes with Kurds from time to time.  And Iran would be none too keen on having to grapple with the USA - or a US ally - in the Kurdish-run regions of its state.

The likelihood goes grim, and it goes like this: The Kurds resist the Iraqi capitol.  The Iraqis respond with military force.  In order to do so, they need to attack into Iran and Turkey.  Iran and Turkey mobilize in kind.

The result is a super-sized Charlie-Foxtrot in a state where the US was just beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel.  It means having to talk at the same table with Turkey and Iran.  It means a possibility of permanent instability in Iraq’s north.

So, no, it doesn’t mean you’ll be bankrupt.  It doesn’t mean global nuclear warfare.  But it does mean that yet another flashpoint could flare up in a big way, at a time when the US desperately needs a way out.

For the better part of the last month, I have been simply stunned by the change that the American electorate brought into being. I have been beyond commentary. I’ve just been admiring.

America, there is no overstating how profound the choice of Obama was. It means so much in terms of civil rights, meritocracy and decency in political discourse. But most significantly are two changes that will be taking place with such rapidity and intensity, we will soon hardly recognize our world.

One is the impact on America’s body politic – an impact that will, after generations of division, bring us together. This may sound simplistic, but you can see it happening already: Obama has, through his choices of advisors and vision for legislation, begun to dispel the notion of an opposition party. Now there are two parties, cooperating, and the fringe that clings bitterly to the politics of the past.

A recent NPR interview with a Republican strategist spoke directly to this phenomenon: The strategist talked about how Obama has co-opted many of the issues of the Right. Among them are reducing wasteful spending in government, defending gun rights, reducing abortions and taking a new, effective stance against terrorism and greater threats to American security. The strategist lamented this, given that these priorities of policy demands that Republicans either hold to their values and work with the administration, or take a more “conservative” stance socially in order to distinguish themselves.

We’ve seen it happening over the last month. Moderate conservatives such as those I’ve identified here on the blog are speaking with cautious favorability of the promise of Obama’s leadership. Meanwhile, staunch conservatives such as Norquist and Dobson are retrenching, trying to drum their flagging base into a more fervent condition with the old, campaign tropes of Obama being some manner of nebulous, foreign threat. The latter perception will not last long, and the former will find leaner numbers as people are clearly put off by the militant social conservatism of the far Right.

Perhaps the most corrosive element to the efforts of the Right to distinguish themselves as a firm opposition is the fact that Obama has seized upon some of the best talent of the middle. On the middle-right, we see figures like General Brent Scowcroft, Bush I’s NSA, and men like Paul Volker and General James Jones being brought in to be principal advisors to Obama. Secretary of Defense Gates being a holdover underscores this prevailing attitude of the Obama administration – that pragmatism and merit trumps political alignment.

So the statement is clearer now than ever: Obama wants the people of quality, the people with ideas, not political hacks. Even his appointment of various Clinton operatives suggests this – he wants the people, like Rahm Emmanuel, who can produce results.  Above all, 

Politics as we knew it in the spin-heavy, partisan, mercenary ways of the last twenty years is over.

Secondly, the major change will be in the globe. And unlike the post-partisan attitudes of the administration’s public veneer, this is a change that only the select that voted for Obama will be able to take credit for.

For yes, Obama’s politics will be one of unity, but it was the moment of his election – and that alone – that inspires the rest of the globe’s change.

That instant proved to the rest of the globe that America will no longer be taking a turn for the regressive. In the moment of electing Obama, a vast percentage of the electorate declared that America is still a nation of firsts in civil liberties.

We are now first in a man of color leading a major Western Empire. We stood for a first when it came to embracing a multi-cultural man. And we were first to confront the greatest ill of our past – slavery – by appointing a black man as our President.

This is no mean achievement: For the last eight years, the world has been waiting for us to seize the reins of progressiveness that we had led the charge with for the last century. Recognize, America, that in the era of World War II, we stood for grand values that inspired populations across the globe:

We stood for being prudent while still supporting the unfortunates in our society, as with the New Deal. We stood for placing the protection of the minority over the demagoguery of the majority, as with the civil rights movement. We led the globe in international organizations that helped the needy and could intervene if necessary in a crisis, as with the UN and NATO. And above all, we stood for the ideal that all men were created equal.

Now, electing the colored child of a single mother from the lower middle class, those that cast a vote for Obama have reminded the globe that we are still the champions of those values – those values that, above our prosperity and our custodianship, the world held dear.

We declared the era of state-sanctioned torture is over. The era of profligate corporate welfare at the expense of the masses is over. Isolationism and adherence to regressive international ideas, is over.

But this message was spoken only by those who voted for Obama – that is the honor that his supporters alone bear. For even though the opposition can support or curtail the events of the future, they cannot claim to be party to the awesome statement in favor of civil rights and global liberty that Obama represents.

They fought it; some hard, some casually and some tacitly, but all of them were opposition to it. They are numbered among those that fought the best of history – the judges who voted for segregation on the Supreme Court during Brown v. Board of Education; among the supporters of poor Goldwater who stood for separate facilities being allowed as States Rights; among those who passed Constitutional reforms against interracial marriage.

In light of this separation, I will be changing the title and mission of this blog. With an administration that I clearly favor in power, there is no playing the moderate. I chose my side in this election, and though I chose it because it was biparistan – even post-partisan – I will not pretend to not be aligned. I made my choice and chose to stand for liberty and progress.

I welcome those that stood against it, against the greatest values to ever inspire the globe, to work with me in this new time of unity.

I was ardent for change. I fought ardently against those who fought against it. I will be ardent to enact it the only way we can – together.

Since 8:00pm PST on November 4th, 2008, my mind has been preoccupied with a certain soaring sensation. Considering its hard to be lyrical or profound while flying, I’ve yet to produce a fitting denouement to the awesome, world-altering events of Barack Obama’s victory in the Presidential race.

In nod to this happy incapacity, and in fun-loving spirit, I present the kind of weirdo video that gets spread around the Internets for your brief viewing enjoyment:

To paraphrase Nixon, “If the President’s dog does it, it’s not illegal.”

I suspect - and hope - Barney lives to be deceptively benign-looking another day.

This is neither the crest of the wave, its source or its break, but the view from here is glorious all the same:

Unnoticed under the fireworks and fanfare of the election, a significant military development lit up the Middle East desert in a brief, surgically-shaped flash: The United States military attacked Syria.

Official media in Damascus reported earlier that the helicopter-borne troops from Iraq launched an assault on a building site in Al-Sukkiraya village, which lies just eight kilometres (five miles) from the border on the Euphrates river and close to the Iraqi town of Al-Qaim, a stronghold of Al-Qaeda and other insurgents.

Despite the hundreds of civilians who turned out for funereal processions and anti-American chanting the day after the assault, I see this assault into Syria as a good thing. The Global War on Terror demands a certain fluidity when borders are concerned, with one crucial caveat: We can’t use so much force that the nation whose sovereignty we violated actually begins to go into war mode against us. As strapped for cash, grunts and allies as we are, we can’t afford Syria beginning to shift into a massive anti-American paramilitary campaign, let alone slapping down a declaration of capital-W “War.”

But just as war is defined as “diplomacy by other means,” diplomacy is an important instrument of war. And so, just as we have to recognize the permeability of borders in a global war against a non-state actor like Al-Qaeda, we have to recognize that there are too legitimate militaries on either side of each border.

This operation underscores the unilateralism - the go-it-alone approach - of the Bush administration. Duplicitous as they are distrustful, they pour billions of our tax dollars into military aid for nations like Pakistan and Egypt, while using the other hand to slip SpecFor in through the back door for off-the-books strikes like the one on October 27th. This has to change.

Fortunately for America’s future as a military hegemon, we have a powerful change agent: General Petraeus.

…Petraeus proposed visiting Syria shortly after taking over as the top U.S. commander for the Middle East.

The idea was swiftly rejected by Bush administration officials at the White House, State Department and the Pentagon.

Petraeus is, as I’ve mentioned, the Pompey Magnus of our times - a cunning general, as superb in organizing as in personal glory, who realizes that war doesn’t mean an end to the “carrot and stick” approach of diplomacy; just bigger sticks and carrots. He bought off the Big Bad in Iraq - the Sunni militias - and so won them to our side; he out-manuevered the pro-Ayatollah Iraqi regime and swept their Iran-backed security forces out of power; he’s seen to the isolation of al-Q in Iraq.

Now he has his sights set on getting the Syrians on the right team and playing hard for our “big win,” looking to get Syria policing its own borders along with us, rather than against us. And with a man as persistent as Petraeus, there’s hope for the future despite the lock-down of the present Administration.

Petraeus would likely find a more receptive audience for his approach in an Obama administration, given Barack Obama’s views on the need to engage America’s enemies.

So keep those fingers crossed even tighter for an Obama victory three days from now, dear reader. Not only would it mean the views of most prudent economists and strategists will be vindicated, rather than quashed as under a McCain-Palin rule.  It would mean that our best General, our best hope to untangle the gory agonies we trod into overseas, would be listened to rather than used as a showpiece.

I was intending to write on the US raids in Syria today, exploring the implications and extolling the boldness of American armed forces.  Then Christmas came early.  My favorite center-right magazine, the aptly named The Economist, endorsed Obama.

I was a bit surprised, I admit.  The flagship issue of The Economist is globalization, and they worried about the potential protectionism of an Obama presidency.  But as the article indicates, the qualities of competency and integrity trumped any one issue in this race.  I post it here, in entirety, for your benefit:

It’s time

Oct 30th 2008
From The Economist print edition

America should take a chance and make Barack Obama the next leader of the free world

AP

IT IS impossible to forecast how important any presidency will be. Back in 2000 America stood tall as the undisputed superpower, at peace with a generally admiring world. The main argument was over what to do with the federal government’s huge budget surplus. Nobody foresaw the seismic events of the next eight years. When Americans go to the polls next week the mood will be very different. The United States is unhappy, divided and foundering both at home and abroad. Its self-belief and values are under attack.

For all the shortcomings of the campaign, both John McCain and Barack Obama offer hope of national redemption. Now America has to choose between them. The Economist does not have a vote, but if it did, it would cast it for Mr Obama. We do so wholeheartedly: the Democratic candidate has clearly shown that he offers the better chance of restoring America’s self-confidence. But we acknowledge it is a gamble. Given Mr Obama’s inexperience, the lack of clarity about some of his beliefs and the prospect of a stridently Democratic Congress, voting for him is a risk. Yet it is one America should take, given the steep road ahead.

Thinking about 2009 and 2017

The immediate focus, which has dominated the campaign, looks daunting enough: repairing America’s economy and its international reputation. The financial crisis is far from finished. The United States is at the start of a painful recession. Some form of further fiscal stimulus is needed, though estimates of the budget deficit next year already spiral above $1 trillion. Some 50m Americans have negligible health-care cover. Abroad, even though troops are dying in two countries, the cack-handed way in which George Bush has prosecuted his war on terror has left America less feared by its enemies and less admired by its friends than it once was.

Yet there are also longer-term challenges, worth stressing if only because they have been so ignored on the campaign. Jump forward to 2017, when the next president will hope to relinquish office. A combination of demography and the rising costs of America’s huge entitlement programmes—Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—will be starting to bankrupt the country. Abroad a greater task is already evident: welding the new emerging powers to the West. That is not just a matter of handling the rise of India and China, drawing them into global efforts, such as curbs on climate change; it means reselling economic and political freedom to a world that too quickly associates American capitalism with Lehman Brothers and American justice with Guantánamo Bay. This will take patience, fortitude, salesmanship and strategy.

At the beginning of this election year, there were strong arguments against putting another Republican in the White House. A spell in opposition seemed apt punishment for the incompetence, cronyism and extremism of the Bush presidency. Conservative America also needs to recover its vim. Somehow Ronald Reagan’s party of western individualism and limited government has ended up not just increasing the size of the state but turning it into a tool of southern-fried moralism.

The selection of Mr McCain as the Republicans’ candidate was a powerful reason to reconsider. Mr McCain has his faults: he is an instinctive politician, quick to judge and with a sharp temper. And his age has long been a concern (how many global companies in distress would bring in a new 72-year-old boss?). Yet he has bravely taken unpopular positions—for free trade, immigration reform, the surge in Iraq, tackling climate change and campaign-finance reform. A western Republican in the Reagan mould, he has a long record of working with both Democrats and America’s allies.

If only the real John McCain had been running

That, however, was Senator McCain; the Candidate McCain of the past six months has too often seemed the victim of political sorcery, his good features magically inverted, his bad ones exaggerated. The fiscal conservative who once tackled Mr Bush over his unaffordable tax cuts now proposes not just to keep the cuts, but to deepen them. The man who denounced the religious right as “agents of intolerance” now embraces theocratic culture warriors. The campaigner against ethanol subsidies (who had a better record on global warming than most Democrats) came out in favour of a petrol-tax holiday. It has not all disappeared: his support for free trade has never wavered. Yet rather than heading towards the centre after he won the nomination, Mr McCain moved to the right.

Meanwhile his temperament, always perhaps his weak spot, has been found wanting. Sometimes the seat-of-the-pants method still works: his gut reaction over Georgia—to warn Russia off immediately—was the right one. Yet on the great issue of the campaign, the financial crisis, he has seemed all at sea, emitting panic and indecision. Mr McCain has never been particularly interested in economics, but, unlike Mr Obama, he has made little effort to catch up or to bring in good advisers (Doug Holtz-Eakin being the impressive exception).

The choice of Sarah Palin epitomised the sloppiness. It is not just that she is an unconvincing stand-in, nor even that she seems to have been chosen partly for her views on divisive social issues, notably abortion. Mr McCain made his most important appointment having met her just twice.

Ironically, given that he first won over so many independents by speaking his mind, the case for Mr McCain comes down to a piece of artifice: vote for him on the assumption that he does not believe a word of what he has been saying. Once he reaches the White House, runs this argument, he will put Mrs Palin back in her box, throw away his unrealistic tax plan and begin negotiations with the Democratic Congress. That is plausible; but it is a long way from the convincing case that Mr McCain could have made. Had he become president in 2000 instead of Mr Bush, the world might have had fewer problems. But this time it is beset by problems, and Mr McCain has not proved that he knows how to deal with them.

Is Mr Obama any better? Most of the hoopla about him has been about what he is, rather than what he would do. His identity is not as irrelevant as it sounds. Merely by becoming president, he would dispel many of the myths built up about America: it would be far harder for the spreaders of hate in the Islamic world to denounce the Great Satan if it were led by a black man whose middle name is Hussein; and far harder for autocrats around the world to claim that American democracy is a sham. America’s allies would rally to him: the global electoral college on our website shows a landslide in his favour. At home he would salve, if not close, the ugly racial wound left by America’s history and lessen the tendency of American blacks to blame all their problems on racism.

So Mr Obama’s star quality will be useful to him as president. But that alone is not enough to earn him the job. Charisma will not fix Medicare nor deal with Iran. Can he govern well? Two doubts present themselves: his lack of executive experience; and the suspicion that he is too far to the left.

There is no getting around the fact that Mr Obama’s résumé is thin for the world’s biggest job. But the exceptionally assured way in which he has run his campaign is a considerable comfort. It is not just that he has more than held his own against Mr McCain in the debates. A man who started with no money and few supporters has out-thought, out-organised and outfought the two mightiest machines in American politics—the Clintons and the conservative right.

Political fire, far from rattling Mr Obama, seems to bring out the best in him: the furore about his (admittedly ghastly) preacher prompted one of the most thoughtful speeches of the campaign. On the financial crisis his performance has been as assured as Mr McCain’s has been febrile. He seems a quick learner and has built up an impressive team of advisers, drawing in seasoned hands like Paul Volcker, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers. Of course, Mr Obama will make mistakes; but this is a man who listens, learns and manages well.

It is hard too nowadays to depict him as soft when it comes to dealing with America’s enemies. Part of Mr Obama’s original appeal to the Democratic left was his keenness to get American troops out of Iraq; but since the primaries he has moved to the centre, pragmatically saying the troops will leave only when the conditions are right. His determination to focus American power on Afghanistan, Pakistan and proliferation was prescient. He is keener to talk to Iran than Mr McCain is— but that makes sense, providing certain conditions are met.

Our main doubts about Mr Obama have to do with the damage a muddle-headed Democratic Congress might try to do to the economy. Despite the protectionist rhetoric that still sometimes seeps into his speeches, Mr Obama would not sponsor a China-bashing bill. But what happens if one appears out of Congress? Worryingly, he has a poor record of defying his party’s baronies, especially the unions. His advisers insist that Mr Obama is too clever to usher in a new age of over-regulation, that he will stop such nonsense getting out of Congress, that he is a political chameleon who would move to the centre in Washington. But the risk remains that on economic matters the centre that Mr Obama moves to would be that of his party, not that of the country as a whole.

He has earned it

So Mr Obama in that respect is a gamble. But the same goes for Mr McCain on at least as many counts, not least the possibility of President Palin. And this cannot be another election where the choice is based merely on fear. In terms of painting a brighter future for America and the world, Mr Obama has produced the more compelling and detailed portrait. He has campaigned with more style, intelligence and discipline than his opponent. Whether he can fulfil his immense potential remains to be seen. But Mr Obama deserves the presidency.

As a political junkie, I’ve been put into the equivalent of a K-hole by this last week of politics. Between the high hopes and the dire stakes, my veins are pumping pure, pixelated China White.

On the off chance you’re feeling the same, I thought I’d share this soothing session between Obama and Charlie Gibson. It displays the earnest, visionary bi-partisanship and prudence that drew me to Obama’s campaign nearly two years ago.

McCain’s appearance on ‘Meet the Press’ was a pleasant Sunday morning experience, akin to tea and crumpets. The genial affair was like one would visualize an after-dinner political chat between the kindly uncle and the wound-too-tight uncle.

Geniality took a sharp dive, of course, when McCain felt the heat on his feet. As soon as Brokaw brought up the perks and tax adjustments of his plan, McCain decided instead to insult Obama’s.

In classic form, he lied at every turn - so many turns it felt like ‘Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.’

Obama would fine small businesses on health care. Lie. Obama would fine people with children who don’t get health care for them. Big lie. Obama voted to raise taxes. Little lie; at least a substantial and slanderous crimping of the truth. Obama loves raising them taxes. Lie.

This kind of soiled the air, and Brokaw was not afraid to wade into the muck. As soon as McCain floated out his quavering jab about “spreading the wealth around,” Brokaw threw right back into his face two facts that wiped the color right out of it:

One, Reagan raised taxes during a recession, and scholars believe it saved the economy. And two, McCain’s own plan “spreads the wealth around” plenty, with massive nationalization plans, buying of failed mortgages and bailouts that would have Lenin winking approvingly right back at Sarah Palin.

McCain just continued to lustily beat the red baiting drum. But I think any creature with higher brain function and an honest heart got the point - by his own definition, he’s as much a Commie, if not more, than Obama.

Of course, the real point is that such characterizations are almost as insipid as they are unhelpful. Socialism - get your gasps out of your system, as I’ll be saying it alot - is a vital part of our nation. It been since Das Kapital and similar tomes inspired people to such radical movements as:

Public fire departments. Public education. Public law enforcement. Public roads.

And of course, the huge elephant in the room is that every medicare, medicaid, social security, disability or unemployment recipient has Karl Marx as the Godfather of their livelihood. If it hadn’t been for hordes of unwashed and fiery-headed intellectuals marching in the streets against the billy clubs and mercenaries of the 19th and early 20th century rich, the state wouldn’t be dropping so much as a penny for the sake of the wounded, the helpless or the elderly.

So McCain’s snide remarks are dumb, and a barb in the shoe of any path to policy in this nation - whether to the left or the right. Without giving due humility and appreciation to the contributions of the state to the free market and society, nobody can think in the appropriate terms to run a country.

For the road we walk was paved by revolutionaries and all manner of unsavory characters. And even if we had a flat tax and paid for the barest of our entitlement programs, we would still be “spreading the wealth around.”

We are guided with that honesty, or, like John McCain, we’re getting in the way.

I’ll just say this, to begin:

The notion of equivalence in all instances is not only a political danger, but a grave moral one.

I’ll leave the rest to Rick Sanchez: