Bye, bye.

I do not agree that President Obama fits there and quite unhappy about the "not a dime's worth of difference" between the two parties meme that seems to be making a comeback.

Even accounting for the flaws of the current leadership (starting with Sen Reid's welcoming Sen Lieberman "back" as a "Democrat") there are substantial differences between the Republican and Democratic parties.

Control means more than what we have seen so far. Control means committee chairmanships, and subpoena power. If you forgot what they did in the 1990s to waste time and slide us close and close to the mess we are in now, think back to impeachment and travelgate and so on and so forth.

Yes, I will not mourn the loss of Sen Lincoln and Sen Ben Nelson is, except for organizational purposes, a Republican.

If you think that "organizational purposes" are unimportant though, think again and I deeply hope we do not have to find out how wrong you are.

So, Gov Crist is acceptable to me, as long as he would vote for the Democrats to control the Senate. Voting for a candidate who cannot win simply because he is a "real Democrat" will help Republicans to control the Senate.

If you think the path in Iraq is the same as it would have been under the prior president, you are wrong.

If you do not see that the health insurance legislation is, while not close to being perfect, is a major step forward, you are blind.

If you think this administration has favored Wall Street over Main Street, you are FOX News' favorite type of person.

Part of what is now called the Republican Party was still hanging around as faux Democrats (boll weevils, they were called) and they ran the place even though Speaker O'Neill was its personification.

They killed off the New Deal and worse, they convinced the American people that the New Deal was bad. When Democrats finally got the White House back, President Clinton (another 1950s type Republican who claimed to be a Democrat) put the final knife in it---though thank FDR and God, some of it has survived the onlslaught) by agreeing with the Reagan people that government is no longer able to help those who need it.

The reality was that a relatively small, but vocal group---Col Lindbergh notably among them---made our entry into the war politically difficult and, of course, we had no reasonable military at all, as war broke out.

The President bent our supposed neutrality every way possible, including, when he felt politically able to do so, the barely legal "lend-lease" idea where we did not actually "arm" a belligerent, in violation of neutrality, but made supposedly arms length trades with them.

It was a scam---but for a great purpose, and necessitated by the craziness that passes for political thought in this country. His announcement of the idea,, and the firehose analogy is the work of a genius from my point of view: http://www.emersonkent.com/speeches/lend_lease_press_conference.htm

The tea partiers of the time were filled with their usual conspiracy crap---the same thing they do today. Some of them peddled the idea that FDR engineered Pearl Harbor itself, or at least looked the other way and permitted the Pacific fleet to be destroyed and sailors and Naval officers killed--- as absurd as calling the current President a secret Muslim, but facts never get in the way of these people.

No progress since then, really. Auden would be shocked.

I will admit that after listening to Secretary Powell's presentation to the Security Council, I was starting to accept the idea that war was required. Hussein's flipping the bird to the weapons inspectors, his constant violations of the agreement reached with General Schwarzkopf after the Gulf War, an agreement which itself was shameful in that it turned our back on the Kurds we had instigated to fight Hussein only to change our minds when the wiser heads in the Bush I administration realized how big a mess an invasion of Baghdad would be, all convinced me the guy was uncontrollable and that he was close to acquiring dangerous weapons.

When, though, it appeared we had convinced no other country that what our government was saying was so, was actually so, with even Canada dissenting from that view, that I began to question all of this. I had a hard time believing that Secretary Powell, a former chairman of the joint chiefs, would peddle political horseshit but, alas, he did.

I am not one of those conspiracy types who will not believe our government no matter what, and, as idiotic as the younger Bush was, it was hard for me to accept that he would urge a war without any basis whatsoever.

But he did.

So I can forgive the Tweet-man for his swooning over his President. By then, he was incapable of fooling me, and I cringed at everything Tweety said.

But that was a long time ago.

"Their" schools are public schools. They want to teach Christian doctrine there and use my money to do so. Sorry.

I did not want my tax money spent on a war in Iraq. I was outvoted.

Go and be gone with you. Bring back your flag, sing your dixie song and waddle into oblivion. The rest of us will do much better without them.

I will never give up and I know you won't either. I cannot see the way out of these many messes, but there must be one.

And, Joe Wood's comment reminds me of just how much of a missed opportunity came from the aftermath of 9/11. That is a tragedy right up there with the nightmare of that horrible day itself.

Yes, I was making fun of the phrase "Native American." I am one. Whatever the phrase has come to mean, the children of people from elsewhere are Native Americans today. One nation (under God, or not, as one wishes).

I do not oppose the celebration of one's ethnicity. I am mortified by its use to separate one American from another.

And Bwakfat: we were born in the hospitals of the same name. Yours on Second Avenue; mine at the corner of Brookline and Longworth Avenues in Boston.

The civil rights and voting rights bills passed as much in memory of President Kennedy as anything else. I am not sure they were "accepted" any more than do I think President Obama's supporters "accepted" the idea of a black president. It just happened.