Calhouns Can(n)ons

Well, Now, The Question Must Be Asked

You know how any time a woman runs for higher office, say like for the President, there’s all these snide remarks about how, Oh, she couldn’t possibly be President, she’s too emotional or flighty or suffers from raging hormones and in a fit of PMS would hit the red button and blow the world up, and so forth?

Well, now we really have to ask the unasked question: Are men fit for higher elective office? Or do they all have problems with their zippers, you know, a hormonal thing that renders them helpless slaves to raging erectile function that shuts off the blood supply to the brain. Talk about hitting the red button and blowing the world up.

So, once again, we get the sorry spectacle of some guy doing the weenie perp walk, humiliated wife and kiddies standing by his side, claming, Aw, My BAD! And pretending that what he suffered from was a “serious error in judgement.”

In this case, the weenie walker is Senator John Edwards. And it’s apparently clear that his “error in judgment” wasn’t referring to his affair in 2006, it was having an affair in 2006 and THEN deciding to run for president.

That’s not an “error” in judgment. That’s a grotesque, breathtaking, utter LACK of judgment. Not to mention a stunningly large supply of hypocrisy. I mean, remember the moving testimonials to his courageous little wife, who is battling cancer, the weepy parading of his dead kid during his recitations of how much he loved his family. His being asked about marital fidelity and saying, “It’s fundamental to how you judge people.” Ah, yes, it fairly touched the heart, it did.

Well, Mr. Edwards, meet Mr. Eliot Spitzer, meet Mr. Bill Clinton, meet Mr. . . . . .

And I gotta ask again: Are men fundamentally unfit to hold any high office because are they so subject to overwhelming, mindless zipper attacks at unpredictable times that they simply can’t be depended on to keep their eye on the ball . . . the nuclear one, that is?

And Now, It Must Be Asked, Part Duh

Mr. Bruce E. Ivins, the microbiologist who committed suicide when the FBI was closing in on him as being the anthrax killer, apparently suffered from various mental illness for years. From newspaper reports, he was under treatment for a bi-polar disorder, was suspected of possibly suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, was on medications and was in therapy and group therapy, had co-workers reporting at least among themselves that he was disturbing, troubled. Yet he continued to work unhindered in a BIO WEAPONS LABORATORY with, apparently, no restrictions.

And no required annual urine testing, physical exams, psychological exams. Not even the kind that are required by airline pilots to make sure that they’re in good enough physical and mental health to be trusted with the lives of, oh, say three hundred people.

Yet there’s Mr. Ivins, with access to deadly biologicals, working for the government in a top secret agency, who slipped into madness with no one the wiser.

In an L.A. Times article, Senator Charles Grassley, is demanding a Congressional inquiry, stating that “The FBI has a lot of explaining to do.”

You can say that again. Add in the news report at the time that claimed that the anthrax sent out to various people at the time contained a substance that was used in Saddam’s germ warfare program, thereby attempting to link, in the public mind, the connection between Saddam and 9/11, then add in the fact that apparently ABC news, for one, was told that the anthrax did NOT contain that particular substance but failed to inform the public, all of which helped make the phony case for war, and yes, some serious questions do need to be asked. Like who was the news”source” for ABC’s anthrax report? Maybe the same “source” that was behind the forged letter that various CIA spooks are now claiming came from the White House, another phony “connection” between Saddam and 9/11?

Yep. Lots of questions.

And Now A Final Question for this Lovely Saturday Morning.

Out of the disgrace of Guantanamo, the disgrace the Bush administration has made of the Geneva Conventions, the disgrace the Bush administration has created with their Feith/Yoo cooked up, twisted legalisms justifying torture and the perversion of the Constitution, will it be the Military who will turn out to be the real heroes of this disgraced country?

Like the military tribunals and judges and lawyers who just finished trying Salim Hamdan, Osama Bin Laden’s driver and during that trial insisted on a minimum standard of justice, a minimum standard that this administration was willing to throw away in their gleeful rush to the “dark side.”

And, of course, the one Supreme Court justice who held the thin line for the sake of the Constitution against the four who would see it trashed in the heat of passion and fear and a general failure of cool judgment.

That Supreme Court ruling, ensuring that the minimum standards concerning habeas corpus still stood, was a repeat of the scene from the play, “A Man For All Seasons,” wherein Sir Thomas More’s future son-in-law, in his zeal to root out heretics, demands the laws be changed:

More: “Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”
Roper: “I’d cut down every law in England to do that!”
More: Oh? And when the laws law was down, and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast – man’s laws, not God’s – and if you cut them down – and you’re just the man to do it – d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.”

That’s what the American people were so willing to forget in their own rush to the dark side. It is their own safety that the Constitution protects.

And Finally, As I Began, I’ll Close With This Nice Saturday Aphorism

Every Saint has a past
Every Sinner a future.