Maybe anyone CAN grow up to be President

The beauty of a George W. Bush "presidency" is that it really lowers the bar for all kinds of complaints against future Democratic candidates. Now, the GOP can't with a straight face accuse anybody else's candidate of being inexperienced, stupid, a draft dodger, slow, a cocaine user, dim-witted, spoiled, obtuse, callous, thick, a product of the Ivy League, dense, a liar-under-oath, simple, corporate-controlled, vacuous, a convicted criminal, empty-headed, ideological, or dumb as a bag of hammers. Bush has taken all of those accusations off the table as disqualifications for the job of president. So, the GOP has decided it is ok for the president to have any or all of those qualities, and we certainly won't have them hypocritically railing against anyone else for those qualities. Or will they?

Two arguments you'll hear against the candidacy of Edwards are that he is inexperienced, and that he is (or rather was) a trial lawyer. The pace and the ferocity of the attacks against Edwards when he announced he was running indicated that the GOP is scared out of their wits that Shrub will have to run against him. Is he inexperienced? He has exactly, exactly, the amount of public service under his belt that Dim Son did when he ran for president, so I guess we can't count on the GOP not to be hypocrites (huge surprise there). He was also a trial lawyer. Trial lawyers have been vilified in our culture. One of the big reasons for that is that big corporations hate them. Trial lawyers represent one of the last ways that individuals can exert themselves in a meaningful way against the power of huge corporations, and so they are a particularly hated group by people who want concentration of power. "Trial lawyer" has become a hated epithet. But when you think about what many of them actually do, they don't seem so bad. Edwards was instrumental in a lawsuit against a company that made pool drains that sucked the innards out of children. I guess the GOP is pro-innards-sucking pool drains. Or something.

But wait, you are being recorded as saying (please see "So you are living in a police state" if you haven't already) - "lying under oath? I know the GOP had a fit when they were accusing Clinton of lying under oath, but I haven't heard of W lying under oath". That is because of the magic of our conservative media. Here are three articles on "FuneralGate", what should have been a scandal from Bush's term as Texas governor, which went highly underreported in the campaign, and which makes Bush a perjurer.

Blog Watch

There is an excellent new Blog by David Niewert called Orcinus.

Gasbag Watch

A cheery article on the Rush boycott.