Tell it to the Marines

I am posting here a column a wrote for a newspaper in Cleveland in 2002. Happy Birthday to the United States Marine Corps.

Thank You Vets (published November 12, 2002)
I had brunch Sunday with my parents at the Harp, an Irish pub on the West Side near downtown. With living across town from them added to my class and work loads, I haven't seen them very much recently. They are both retired and travel quite a bit to see my siblings who live all over the country. So Sunday was special for us all. My girlfriend and the only other local sibling were there too.

My father has six children, five sons and one daughter. When I was a kid in the 70s my mother would say that with all these boys she worried about war more than usual. She prayed that none of us would have to experience war first hand. My father was just worried about bankruptcy at the cost of putting us through college. Years later, neither horror realized, we are as close as a family can be.

More than just getting together with my family, Sunday was special for another reason. November 10 is the birthday of the United States Marine Corps. The great coincidence of history was that Armistice Day—which we now celebrate as Veterans' Day—was declared on the day following the anniversary of the Marine Corps. Separated by 143 years, the two days honor two different groups of warriors. The US Marine Corps is arguably the toughest military organization in the world, known for its tenacity in combat and its bravery under fire. By the time the World War I Armistice was declared, the USMC was legendary, gaining a new moniker during the struggle.

The German soldiers at Belleau Woods referred to the Marines who first assaulted then defended the five-mile stretch of woods as "Teufel Hunden—(Devil Dogs)." The name comes from a legendary Bavarian breed of wild dog. The Marines unofficially adopted the name as they did most insults directed at them. Five months after the battle, the war ended.
So the first Armistice Day, the cease-fire that ended the First World War fell on the day after the Marine Corps celebrated its 143d birthday.

For me the two days are linked by more than coincidence of calendar because my father was a US Marine. He enlisted in 1951 shortly after the outbreak of war in Korea. He landed at Inchon and spent the rest of the war doing his duty as a Marine. He has spoken of it very little and never directly. One time he admitted to having trouble sleeping after reading a book about a WWII winter battle. Another time he told me about a Captain who lost his legs from a mine explosion. But when asked directly about combat, he would tell a joke or change the subject.

I know at one point he was wounded, but he refused a Purple Heart. He knew that the Defense Department would send a telegram home to his mother announcing his medal. He didn't want to worry her.

Veteran's Day is supposed to honor men like my father. Men who did their duty and thought about the family at home, men who overcame incredible odds and came home.

Sitting in the Harp Sunday, I'm sure no one thought that the old guy having lunch was remarkable in any way. That's what makes veterans so special. They are just regular people even after facing the very real possibility that they would be killed in combat.

The United States is yet again poised to put lives at risk. Whether the mission is appropriate or ill advised, men and women will go into harm's way and some will not return. Those who survive will someday eat a quiet brunch with their children in an unremarkable way.

On behalf of the staff of The Cauldron I'd like to thank all veterans, the ones who saw combat and the ones who served during peace-time. Especially my dad.
______________________________________________

My father is doing well, I spoke with him by telephone today. Retired and age 75, I asked what he planned to do for the Marine Corp's 233d birthday.

"Sleep," he said. "A good Marine never stands when he may sit and never stays awake when he may sleep."

Thanks again to all the Marines past and present who continue to inspire us all. Especially my dad.

My fear of fear politics

The day before the election, I took a break from calling folks in Virginia and Ohio for Sen. Obama to get my haircut. At 42, it takes a really creative barber to make it actually seem like work, but I feel terrible when what little hair I have gets shaggy.

I went to a Hair Cuttery in the suburbs of Chicago wearing an "Obama '08" sweatshirt. I sat down in the chair and listened as my stylist, Kara, told me that Obama was a Muslim, and that she wasn't even sure he was an American citizen because no one has seen his birth certificate.

She told me that she listens to Fox News each morning. "It's like my alarm clock," she said.

Looking for common ground, we both agreed that we would be happy when the election was over because we were tired of all of the smear ads on the radio and TV.

The thing that surprised me was when we started talking about the economy. Now I don't have any independent varification of Kara's story, but this is what she told me:

"We're one of those family's that shouldn't have gotten a loan. My husband's dad died and left us $100,000. So we had $50,000 for a down payment. The mortgage company said, 'Great. Here's a house' and never even looked at whether we could afford the payments.

"We've been doing everything we can to keep up the payments," she told me. "We're behind on all our credit cards and now (DuPage) County is going to take the house if we don't come up with $4,000 for the property taxes. We tried to get the mortgage company to escrow the taxes, but they said, 'We'd need you to give us $4,000 to do that.' If we had the four thousand, we would pay the taxes with it. The county is gonna foreclose for the taxes."

She told me that her husband got hurt and missed two months of work, but since he was new to the job, they let him go rather than pay workers comp. Kara's family doesn't have health care, and she worries that if they lose the house the kids will "have to go to a school near my mom's, (which) is filled with gang bangers and drugs."

I told her about the Mr. Obama's health care proposals. We talked about the bailout and the fallout of the market crisis. I expressed my belief that an Obama presidency would help working folks more than a McCain presidency would, but Kara insisted that she was too scared of Obama's "terrorism" to vote for him.

She's been fed a steady diet of fear and cannot see past it to recognize that it is in her own interest to vote for Democrats because "they hate America." FDR was right about fearing fear. It is the fear of terror that makes it such an affective tool.

For Kara and the millions like her who are afraid, let's hope that tomorrow's dawn brings with it hope for the country and the world.

McCain doesn't support the troops

The new GI Bill overwhelmingly passed the Senate today by a 75-22 margin. One Democratic senator and two Republican senators did not vote.

The Dem who didn't vote on the resolution was Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts who was diagnosed Tuesday with malignant glioma, which is a type of brain tumor normally found in children. Although the family isn't saying so, doctors have privately said that the senator's prognosis can't be good.

The two GOP senators who did not vote were Senator Tom Coburn, R-OK, and Senator John McCain, R-AZ.

"To the soldiers and families who have sacrificed so much in this war, especially our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines from Oklahoma, I say thank you," says Sen. Coburn in a letter dated Feb. 27, 2008, which appears on his web page. Thanks from a senator doesn't pay for a single text book , let alone a bachelor's degree, but perhaps Sen. Coburn had a good reason not to vote today. There isn't anything to suggest that his absence wasn't legitimate.

But the so-called straight talking Sen. McCain wasn't available to vote for veterans benefits because he was busy interviewing candidates for vice president and appearing on the Ellen DeGeneres show.

Some commander-in-chief he's gonna be. Wow, I'll bet the kids in Iraq are hoping that Gen. David Petraeus is right and Pres. Bush is wrong, but either way they can't be feeling very confident that the leading candidate for president will bring them home soon.

Maybe he'll get Ellen to do a USO tour.

For Clinton, $11 a month is all the help we need

It's no secret by now that Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, would rather destroy the Democratic Party than concede the nomination to Sen. Barack Obama, D-IL, but when she contends that Mr. Obama is out of touch with ordinary Americans because he doesn't think that saving folks an average of $11 a month for gasoline is worth the trouble, Mrs. Clinton reveals her contempt for the working class.

According to the Department of Energy, the average cost of a gallon of gasoline in the United States is $3.60, which means that Mrs. Clinton's suggestion that a "holiday" for the Federal excise tax on gasoline would allow consumers to buy about three more gallons a month for the average vehicle.

Mrs. Clinton's campaign—and supporting 527s—are running TV ads in Indiana continuing with the mantra that Mr. Obama is out of touch with the average American.

This from the woman who once defiantly declared that her independence by saying she "could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas"—implying that was what the average married woman in America was doing—at a time when nearly two-thirds of American families had both parents working outside of the home and still hurting from the economic disaster of Reaganomics. This from the candidate who in 1999 was able to buy a $1.7 million house in Chappaqua, N.Y. with a loan guaranteed by someone else's collateral. How's that for being in touch with the American people?

Every aspect of Mrs. Clinton's attacks on Mr. Obama seem to come for the GOP play book, and yet she sees nothing disingenuous about suggesting that the media has treated her unfairly.

It ain't over til it begins

A week into the Major League Baseball schedule and all of the experts are perplexed. Sports reporting has become as silly as political handicapping.

In the American League Central, Detroit was picked to win it all. They'll have to win one first. The Kitties' much vaunted pitching staff is oh-fer and the offense might be better off if it hit from a tee. The White Sox—picked to be cellar-dwellars—are sitting on top after a sweep of the hapless Tigers.

The AL East is topped by Baltimore and Toronto with the defending champ Sox tied for third with the Yankees. It is so bad in the East that ESPN has taken to commenting on how much the cold costs older pitchers like Mike Mussina.

Only in the AL West are things close to as expected, but the experts can't crow about that because they've discounted the West for years.

The National League is in similar turmoil.

The Mets are on the bottom in the East even after adding Santana, the Torre-led Dodgers are also-rans in the West, and the Central is led by the Brewers and the Cardinals.

All this does is prove that paper strength is meaningless and that the season has to be played to find a winner.

In the end, the Tigers may take the American League and the long beleaguered Cubs may get a second title in a century, but the season is still 162 games.

For over 100 years, baseball commentators have been making wild predictions, but it seems like the modern experts are offended when the on-the-field play doesn't follow the script they've written. Sports reporting has become driven by ratings and rantings instead of love for the play.

The model for this kind of reporting comes from American football where the short season makes every game a potential season ender. But baseball—more than any other sport—can't follow that model. The season is too long, the climatic conditions are too varied, and the number of teams is too great for anyone to say with accuracy that one series in April has any meaning.

As a writer and a fan, I like April games because they are filled with potential if not necessarily with portent.

Fabula-vérité; Fake Memoirs and Outraged Critics

The story is so familiar that it has become a cliché: a memoir is published to great critical acclaim one week followed by revelations of fantastical lies and misrepresentations. Recent weeks have been considerably cruel to groups whose stories have been appropriated by poseurs.

Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, by Misha Defonseca, was published in 1997 and revealed as a fake last week, though questions of its authenticity have persisted for years. The author's undoing came now because her book was made into a film in France that premiered in January.

Today comes the news that a new memoir, Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival about the life of a young girl growing up as a foster kid in South Central Los Angeles, is also untrue. The New York Times had reviewed it with great gusto, did a feature on the author and even printed the first chapter of the memoir. The newspaper's website had a slide show accompanying the feature story.

The author of this latest fabula-vérité, Margaret Jones (nee Margaret Seltzer) who wrote in great detail about the life on the mean streets of the city, grew up in the affluent suburb of Sherman Oaks and was undone by her older sister according to published reports.

The book has been recalled and is certain to set off rounds of lawsuits. As of this morning, the author's website and MySpace page were still functioning, but they'll either languish unchanged or be removed as the fervor over the foisting of fiction as fact foments.

The interesting thing about both stories is that there are compelling tales behind the lies. Ms. Selzer is in fact an activist working to end gang violence. The parents of Ms. DeFonseca (nee Monique De Wael) were members of the Belgian underground during World War II and were executed by the Nazis. But those stories weren't the ones they chose to tell, instead creating fantastical biographies of children who never were.

Blake Eskin of Slate rightly calls the appropriation of the stories of Holocaust victims an "affront," but Mr. Eskin's outrage could easily be extended to the appropriation of stories of gang life in Los Angeles.

The authors of both of these fictions have justified their appropriations. Ms. De Wael has portrayed herself as a victim of Nazi atrocities who concocted this story as a survival mechanism. Ms. Seltzer said that she "felt there was good that [she] could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it."

Neither defense holds up to scrutiny. Ms. De Wael first told her story to a synagogue full of people memorializing the victims and survivors of the Holocaust. Ms. Seltzer claims to have graduated the University of Oregon, which she did not. Both women are storytellers with all of the attendant meaning of the term.

The belief is that publishers and editors embrace these stories not because they are well-told or well-written but because they are believed to be true. Readers think, "Isn't the fictional story of a girl walking across Europe with the aid of kindly wolves during the horror of the Second World War compelling enough to find a place in the catalog? Isn't the story of a young outsider thrust into the middle of a virtual war zone interesting enough to gain an audience?"

The authors play on the desire of people for truth. As a storyteller myself, I am often asked by readers if something I've clearly marked as fiction is true. People will listen to fantastic stories at cocktail parties and never once call someone on an obvious fabrication.

It all reminds me of the bunkhouse scene in the 1972 film "The Cowboys" starring John Wayne and Roscoe Lee Browne.

Mr. Browne's character, Jebediah Nightlinger, is the cook hired by Wil Andersen (Mr. Wayne's character) for an upcoming cattle drive whose cowhands are all school boys. Mr. Nightlinger has just entered the bunkhouse, which "smells of boy."

The dozen or so boys are curious about him, but—after several quite impertinent and quite personal questions—declare that he's just like them.

Mr. Nightlinger laughs and proclaims that his father was a "brawny Moor" who was "six feet six inches tall" with his head "bound in a red velvet cloth." The father captured a woman, "ripe and dark" and carried her off into the night.

"They came to a castle, he knocked down the door with stump of an oak tree, and he killed everyone inside just so they'd have a place to rest. Later, while she slept, he walked the parapets and he became a king," he says.

"Is that true," the youngest of the boys asks.

"If it isn't, it ought to be," Nightlinger says.

Writers—especially unscrupulous ones who declare themselves memoirists—will always benefit from the little boy in all of us who is desperate to believe that it is true.

Obama reminds people of RFK—as a target

My mom is from a politically influential in Ohio. Her father, an immigrant from Italy, was a county prosecutor in Cleveland. His younger brother was the mayor for years. All three of her brothers were judges—the oldest was the chief justice for the state's supreme court. Her first cousin was the state's attorney general. One of her nephews is an appellate court judge, another nephew is a city councilman. One of my mother's nieces is running for judge this election (If she wins the primary next week, my cousin is almost certain to win the general election.).

So when my mother expresses a doubt about a Democrat, I usually listen a little more closely than when Max Schmuckatelly says the same thing. Yesterday morning, she told me that she's afraid of the outcome of Ohio's March 4 primary. Her big fear is that if Sen. Barack Obama, D-IL, wins big next week and becomes a virtual lock for the nomination, then he will be killed—"just like Bobby Kennedy," she said.

That fear, one that I really hadn't considered since last year when Mr. Obama first announced his candidacy, was reinforced when I was reading the New York Times this morning. The story echoed one that appeared Friday in the Washington Post. A quick look at the blogosphere, and it's all over the place. When I asked my mother why the idea occurred to her, she said that she'd heard it from "somewhere," which in her way means that one of her brother's said it.

The notion of Mr. Obama's being a target seems so crazy to me that I'd sooner believe that President Bush is planning a coup before November.

The fact that it's being said—and has legs in some pretty credible news outlets—seems to me to indicate that race and its ugly twin racism still play an visceral role in American politics. Add Fox's Bill O'Reilly's "investigation" into the need to lynch Mr. Obama's wife, Michelle, and one would think this is 1968 not 2008.

Won't the goddam 60s ever end?

Some are more equal than others

I remember 1984. It was the first year that I voted, and as a Democrat it was a lesson in humility. Walter Mondale—the presidential nominee who lost in 49 states—had not been my choice in the primaries, but I supported him in the general election because I didn't think the working class in this country could survive another four years of Reaganesque government.

I was torn in the primaries between a personal hero—Sen. John Glenn, D-OH—and the rhetorical magic of Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr. I was drawn to Rev. Jackson with each speech I heard, but I listened to folks I respected—elected Democrats and local party officials—who told me that Rev. Jackson couldn't win a national election. Their reasoning was based on more than race, it was based on the reverend's divisive political rhetoric from the past.

Mr. Glenn was different. He was a Marine fighter pilot, an astronaut, a centrist and had served in the US Senate for a decade. The fact that I was from Ohio made it rather easy for me to get behind Mr. Glenn so I canvassed for him in the run up to the Ohio primaries.

Whether from a plethora of good choices or from the lack of a leader able to unite the party, the Democratic convention opened without a clear choice for the nomination. It was the first time the superdelegates—created after the debacle of the 1980 convention—were called upon to assert their leadership. The result of the convention and the new power of the superdelegates was the choice of Mr. Mondale for the top job and a virtually unknown running mate—Rep. Geraldine Ferraro, D-NY—whose biggest contribution to the party was the creation of the superdelegate system.

The Reagan win that November was the nearest thing to a sweep this country has ever seen. He carried all but Minnesota and Washington, DC. Mrs. Ferraro's presence on the ticket couldn't even deliver her home state of New York. So much for the wisdom of the superdelegates.

In today's New York Times, Ms. Ferraro—still a superdelegate by virtue of her place on the ticket in 1984—lays out her rationale for obviating the popular vote, dismissing primary elections and caucuses, reversing rules established by the Democratic Party and adopting a Kremlin-like nominating process in an Op-Ed.

Her logic is filled with holes, and her desire to please the party elite meshes so nicely with what the right wing has said about the party that one begins to worry.

In spite of the evidence from the general election of 1984, she says that the superdelegate process worked. She authored the "longest platform in Democratic history, a document that stated the party’s principles in broad terms that neither the most liberal nor the most conservative elected officials would denounce." Ms. Ferraro is saying that the overwhelming majority of voters choosing the other guy wasn't as important as the fact that the superdelegates were pleased with the party platform.

She disputes the validity of excluding Michigan and Florida in spite of the state parties defiance of the DNC, but dismisses the importance of primaries and caucuses because they "do not necessarily reflect the will of rank-and-file Democrats." If that is the case, why should the results in Michigan and Florida matter?

Ms. Ferraro claims it would be "shocking if 30-percent of registered Democrats...participated" after admitting that she's impressed by this year's turnout. She says that primary turnouts are notoriously low. Low or not, these same primaries made it possible for her to ascend to a vice presidential nomination and helped pick a candidate in the 2o years since the DNC developed the superdelegate system.

According to Ms. Ferraro, the purpose of the superdelegates—to eliminate fractious politics at the convention— worked in 1984. How will denying the popularly elected candidate—as she advocates doing—help eliminate fractious politics? Those thousands of rank and file Democrats who have given $25 here, $100 there to Mr. Obama's campaign—the little guys that the Democratic Party has long claimed to champion—will effectively be told that big money matters, not the will of the little man.

For years the knock on the members of the lower economic echelon has been that they vote against their own interests. So here they are, city people, suburbanites, college students and bloggers, donating time and money to a candidate who appears to have their interests in mind and they are being told that "the superdelegates were created to lead, not to follow. They were, and are, expected to determine what is best for our party and best for the country."

In the words of George Orwell, Ms. Ferraro is effectively saying, "All Democrats are equal, some are just more equal than others."

Times' columnist ignores truth, gives McCain a pass

Nicholas Kristof is an award-winning New York Times columnist who helped focus American attention to the ongoing tragedy in Darfur and the power of microfinance for single women living in poverty throughout the emerging world. He is admired by many as a champion of progressive ideology.

So it comes as a complete shock to read his column on Sen. John McCain, R-AZ, in the Feb. 17th issue of NYT. The title, "The World's Worst Panderer," might lead one to think that Mr. Kristof is criticizing Mr. McCain for pandering to the conservative wing of the GOP. In fact, Mr. Kristof is commenting on the poor quality of Mr. McCain's ability to pander.

It's a clever use of language and certainly the column itself is not going to make it into Mr. McCain's campaign literature, but Mr. Kristof does his readers a disservice by continuing the myth that Mr. McCain has been consistent on the issue of torture.

Mr. McCain's public statements about torture have taken on a place in popular culture because they fit neatly within the narrative that exhorts the virtues of American individuality and justice. Mr. Kristof repeats this thread in his column.

But the tread has been broken. Mr. McCain is not against torture now that he's trying to convince the right-wing of the party to get behind him and preserve the White House to the GOP.

This week, Mr. McCain opposed a bill that would make it illegal to use interrogation measures such as "beating, electric shock, burns, or other forms of physical pain to an individual."

Now that he is virtually assured of the nomination, he decides that principle can be sacrificed for the record. His vote was meant to be a signal to the right that he would play ball. And given that Mr. McCain knew that the White House had promised to veto the bill, there is no way that he can claim that his vote wasn't pandering.

Why would Mr. Kristof give Mr. McCain such a pass: Is the Pulitzer-prize winning journalist getting lazy in his dotage?

At the end of the Academy Award nominated film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, newspaper man Maxwell Scott (played by Carleton Young) is confronted with a choice to print the truth about a legendary western senator (played by Jimmy Stewart) who gained his fame for standing up to and gunning down a local outlaw. Scott decides not to run the truth that someone else actually killed the outlaw. Apparently both the fictional newspaperman and Mr. Kristof hold the same sentiment.

"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

Gone Fishing: Another Internet Scam!

This message showed up in a Yahoo e-mail on Saturday, 16 February.




Most are so inured to fishing scams from West Africa (Dear trusted colleague, Representative Needed, Kindest Regards, etc.) that they just mark them as Spam and go to the next message.

People familiar with the scam don't even read them anymore because after a while it gets to the point where one can spot the fishing expedition simply by the sender's e-mail address.

The .gov TLDN (domain name) caught the attention of the recipient here. Several things are wrong with this e-mail that clues the reader that it is a scam, but the biggest clue besides the scant graphics is the way the number of the supposed refund is written using a comma. The inexact grammar is another clue, but overall this is a pretty good fishing scam.


The click-through takes one to the following page:



The page looks pretty good except that Firefox recognized it as a scam and the browser sent a warning. The next screen asks for credit card information and so on. The actual TLDN for this website is .ro, which indicates that the scammer is in Romania.

Why vote at all?

It's hard for many Americans who paid attention to the last two general elections for president to stomach what's going in the Democratic Party with the possibility that superdelegates will ultimately decide the nominee and once again rob the majority of voters their popular choice.

But now comes the news that votes for Sen. Barack Obama, D-IL, in the New York City primary were not counted at all. In an election where apparently every delegate will count, Mr. Obama's actual results from New York must be calculated. Although officials claim that nothing sinister was at play in this undercount, there still lies the specter of a fix.

As the late Court of Appeals Judge Anthony J. Celebrezze, Sr. used to say, "The appearance of impropriety is improper."

If both sides are willing to win no matter what, then why have elections at all? Let the men in the smoke-filled rooms decide it.

Tortured language and the New York Times

As further proof that the mainstream media is the New York Times' reporting of today's passage of Senate bill 1943, which would prohibit the use of any interrogation technique not permitted US Army Field Manual for Human Intelligence Collector Operations.

Included among the acts prohibited by this bill is the torture technique called waterboarding. It also specifically prohibits "beating, electric shock, burns, or other forms of physical pain to an individual." Torture is not permitted. Period.

The Times referred to these as "other harsh interrogation methods." The language comes straight from the White House. The Bush Administration has repeatedly argued that the United States does not use torture, but only by torturing the definition of what is torture. The mainstream media has apparently adopted that definition.

President Bush will veto the bill because it “would prevent the president from taking the lawful actions necessary to protect Americans from attack in wartime.” The mainstream media doesn't point out that under the Constitutional system in the US, Congress tells the President what is lawful. Accepting the logic that this law is unlawful is as ridiculous as saying that the US is at war.

There has been no Congressional declaration of war, the US is not opposed by any government or nation, and there has been no national mobilization. The US is not at war.

* * * * *

On a different note, the 51-45 vote fell relatively along party lines with a few senators crossing the aisle to vote their consciences. One notable exception to this conscience voting was Sen. John McCain, R-AZ, the "defacto nominee" who in spite of his vehement and vituperative opposition to torture, voted against a law explicitly prohibiting torture. If that's not pandering to the GOP base, then what is?

When does the media hold GOP feet to fire?

In his victory speech after sweeping the so-called "Potomac Primaries," Sen. John McCain, R-AZ, took the opportunity to trot out an old GOP talking point about the Democratic Party.

According to Mr. McCain, the Democratic nominee to be the next president would “promise a new approach to governing but offer only the policies of a political orthodoxy that insists the solution to government’s failures is to simply make it bigger.”

Coming from a group that cedes the Bill of Rights to the executive branch, has created the post-WWII national debt, created the largest federal bureaucracy since the 1930s, and spent more money on the boondoggle in Iraq than the US spent in more than a decade in Vietnam, this kind of folderol is rarely challenged by the media.

There seems to be an active group think in the media that allows certain story lines to continue without challenge.

For example, the conflation of the occupation of Iraq with the so-called war on terror is not only not challenged, news outlets speak of it as fact. The GOP has been pushing the notion that withdrawing from Iraq is equivalent to capitulation to al Qaeda to the point that arguing for immediate withdrawal is considered irresponsible.

What happened to the Fourth Estate? There seems to be two forces at work here: the consolidation of media ownership and the media's fear of bias.

The consolidation of ownership has been well-documented, but its influence on reporting is anecdotal at best. No objective measure can be made of the decisions to air or kill/print or spike a story. Reporters will tell tales of having a publisher screaming about a story. Almost every journalist knows someone who was disciplined or fired for working a story that the powers that be didn't like.

More insidious is the media's fear of appearing biased. Even the clearly right-wing Fox News pays some homage to the notion of objectivity. Note the presence of Juan Williams on its Sunday morning programming and the continuing saga of Hannity and Colmes.

But to be fair, those on the right are far less concerned with fairness and accuracy as their counterparts on the left. Most newsrooms are not political monoliths in spite of what most Americans believe (e.g., "The New York Times is liberal, the Washington Times is conservative."). There are as many opinions in the average newsroom as there are in the country. But what is evident is that journalists who are politically left go out of their way to give the right a voice. These journalists are so sensitive to accusations of bias that they go into paroxysms of self examination at the mere suggestion that something wasn't fair. To challenge someone on facts is now seen as having a bias; therefore, reporters don't do it with any frequency.

The GOP knows this, and it continues to manipulate the media to report things as it wants. The answer to the question is never.

The numbers don't matter for Dems, it's just Political Idol

Sen. John McCain, R-AZ, has won 17 state caucuses and primaries, 9 more than Gov. Mike Huckabee, R-AR. That margin is enough for pundits and 24-hour news outlets to declare him the victor for the GOP nomination for president. Never mind that there are still big states out there that have yet to be decided, never mind that Mr. McCain's famous temper could still get him into trouble, never mind that the right-wing of the party hates him: Mr. McCain is the nominee these voices bombard voters in the as-yet-to-be-decided states.

While it might not be fair for them to make this declaration, they can argue that with all these victories and delegates piled up, momentum is on Mr. McCain's side.

The problem is that none of these same folks would argue that Sen. Barack Obama, D-IL, is the presumptive Democratic nominee. In fact, even though he has won 23 of the 36 contests so far, many news outlets have him trailing or only slightly ahead of Sen. Hilary Clinton, D-NY, in delegates. Nary a mention of the resounding wins that are falling into Mr. Obama's tally. The media doesn't seem impressed with the 25- and 30-percent margins of victory. They instead focus on the demographics of the voters who support Mr. Obama or Mrs. Clinton. Add to this the pundits propensity of referring to the two Democratic candidates by their gender and race.

One would suspect that the long discussed liberal media is well and truly dead. Liberals everywhere are supposedly celebrating this turn of events: That the next Democratic presidential nominee will make history.

This notion—and indeed this storyline—infantalizes the American voter. The serious issues that are being discussed by both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama don't make us vote. The desire to replace the politics of the Bush Administration isn't the factor. According to the mainstream media, Americans are voting for Mr. Obama for the same reason that they vote for American Idol: the chance to make history.

The media isn't liberal or conservative, it's juvenile.

Democratic Party to Disenfranchise Americans

So it looks like the popular vote means nothing to the Democratic Party. With all the talk of superdelegates and proportional distribution of delegates, it appears that no matter what the people decide, the party leadership is determined to give the nomination to Sen. Hilary Clinton, D-NY.

Of the 303 superdelegates that responded to the New York Times, 204 have committed to Mrs. Clinton.

In spite of all the work done by groups like the People for the American Way and MoveOn.org to stop any repetition of election stealing tactics of the last eight years, it looks like the Democratic leadership doesn't believe in fair elections.

American democracy is a myth. During the 70s, apathetic nonvoters frequently argued that one vote doesn't matter. These folks would argue that all politicians are crooked and elections don't matter. Unfortunately, the evidence is mounting that they were right.

If Sen. Barack Obama, D-IL, continues to win primaries and caucuses like Nebraska and Washington but loses the nomination to Mrs. Clinton anyway, it will take more than 40 years before people will believe in the system again. By that time, who knows what America will be.

Gore will endorse Hillary

With the Kennedy's getting headlines this week for endorsing Sen. Barack Obama, (D-Ill.), speculation has begun as to the two big endorsements left in the Democratic camp: Who will get the backing of former Vice President Al Gore and former presidential candidate John Edwards.

The endorsement of Mr. Edwards would certainly be a coup for Mr. Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton, (D-NY), but the voters who have backed Mr. Edwards had the chance to pick both candidates and chose otherwise. These voters are pushed into the unenviable position of having to choose the candidate they find to be the lesser of two evils—sort of where the whole country was in 2004. Popular wisdom suggests that Mr. Edwards will sit on his endorsement for many weeks and may not say anything until much closer to the convention in Denver.

But Mr. Gore will not hold his endorsement much longer, especially with almost half the country due to vote next Tuesday. He will likely announce his support of Mrs. Clinton in the next few days if it appears that her standing suffers now that it is a horse race.

Why the certainty about who Mr. Gore will endorse? Follow the money.

Mr. Gore's television network, Current_TV, is financed by supermarket magnate Ron Burkle and Steve Rattner of the Quadrangle Group. Both men are big supporters of the Democratic Party and each has ties to the Clintons.

Former President Bill Clinton has ties with Mr. Burkle in business and in politics. They two appear to be friends.

Meanwhile, Mr. Rattner is married to Hillary Clinton supporter and Democratic Party bigwig, Maureen White.

Can there be any doubt that Mr. Gore will support Mrs. Clinton?

It's like there is a vast left-wing conspiracy against Mr. Obama.