Well–excuse me, I was channeling Travus T. Hipp–last week I had to admit that all my election predictions were wrong, so this week I’m entitled to a little, "I told you so." No sooner had I uttered the words, "You aint seen nothin’ yet than the Bushwhacker tells the world that now he has a mandate. Never mind that he’s been behaving like he had a mandate for nearly four years, now he says he really has one, and he immediately sends the Marines on a full-bore assault to take a major city in Iraq because some people we call insurgents are supposed to be there.

So we banished the evil dictator, then we go around having shootouts with anyone who wants to pick a fight with the occupying army; now we’re turning an entire city into a war zone, when the guy impersonating the President said the war was over a long time ago. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only person who thinks none of this makes any sense, at least not in the context which is explained to us by the mainstream media and the Bush Administration. Freedom and democracy is the message at home, and the message to rest of the world is that we’re going to shove your freedom and democracy down your throat with military force. Then there’s that little thing about oil. The common wisdom is that the US is blowing up Iraq just to take the oil, and I think even the people who voted for Bush believe that. They just don’t care. They think that invading foreign countries for oil is perfectly reasonable foreign policy.

But I’ve also heard people say that the oil actually is just the secondary consideration, that the real reason for colonizing Iraq is to establish military bases from which the US can intimidate and control the entire middle east. I’m not hearing a plausible explanation of why the US would want to do that. Iraq is said to have a lot of oil, and US companies obviously are going to take it, and Saudi Arabia probably has even more oil, and US companies already are getting all they want from that source. I’ve heard people say that the US wants to get the untapped oil resources in the southern part of Russia and pipe the crude all the way to the Persian Gulf, but that would involve Iran. Is the Bush crowd planning to move the war to Iran after they think Iraq is secure?

I don’t know. I need your help, listeners. I need to hear an explanation of US policy in the middle east that actually makes sense. We’re sure not getting it from the media. One thing I can predict with certainty: the price of gas in the US is only going higher, no matter how much crude US companies can buy or steal from the other side of the world.

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As if the election last week wasn’t a blunt message, the story about Arlen Spector really pounds home the point about how the right wing, fundamentalist Protestants have seized the political process. Although Spector is a Democrat, he has maneuvered himself into a position to become the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the committee which reviews Presidential appointments to the Supreme Court. As such, Spector made a public statement which was widely regarded as a warning to Bush not to nominate someone with an anti-abortion agenda. The response was loud enough that Spector tried to backpeddle a couple of days later, and now the Republicans are threatening to block his appointment as chair of the Judiciary Committee. Considering the recent health problems of William Rehnquist, and the advanced age of some of the other Supreme Court justices, Bush may have an opportunity to stack the court his way in his second term, and despite his sly and elusive denials, it appears obvious that overturning Roe vs. Wade is part of the legacy he wants to leave.

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Enough politics, let’s move on to crime, assuming there’s a difference. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned any of these crimes before, but I loved the story about how a gambling web site in Costa Rica is taking bets on the outcome of murder trials involving Scott Peterson, Robert Blake and Phil Spector (no relation to Arlen). In case you’re interested, the odds are 2-3 favoring guilty for Peterson and 6-5 that he gets the death penalty. The odds are 5-6 favoring guilty on Blake, 2-3 for guilty on Spector, and 1-2 for guilty on Michael Jackson. The guy who’s running this operation was asked if he thought it was ghoulish. He replied that it’s no more ghoulish that executing people.

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I saw a story reprinted from the Baltimore Sun about what you might call research on marijuana. Actually, there’s no shortage of that already in the books, but research is like political polling. If you phrase the question right, you can get whatever result you want. The research described in this story wasn’t designed to discredit the herb, it was about using the active ingredient, THC, to manufacture prescription drugs for the treatment of the same conditions people are treating now by smoking the stuff. Get the picture? The stuff that grows out of the ground is illegal, but if a pharmaceutical company can make a buck, it’s a great treatment.

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Finally, a story that demonstrates just how strange politics can get. In a school district in Orange County, a relatively well known parent, president of the PTA, ran for the school board. His only opponent was a guy no one knew , didn’t spend a nickel, didn’t make any campaign appearances, didn’t respond to any inquiries from journalists or the school district, didn’t answer any phone calls and didn’t respond to knocks on his door. He won by a wide margin. There may be a message here for Presidential politics.