I Don't Understand

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I like to think of myself as a reasonably intelligent guy. I'm no Einstein, of course. Just ask my wife and kids. But I can generally figure stuff out.

Lately, though, it seems that the more I see going on around me, the less I understand. For instance:

*Hillary Clinton's major hope for winning the Democratic nomination is based on the idea that she'll ask high-ranking party members, the so-called "superdelegates," to ignore the popular vote, override the number of pledged delegates, and provide the party with what some of her supporters have called "adult leadership" to keep the stupid voters from picking a nominee that might not be "electable"-- as defined by the Clintonistas.

I don't understand how someone who does that gets to call anyone an elitist.

* In 2006, the Democratic Party's rules committee made a rule that only four states -- Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina -- could hold primaries before Feb. 5. Florida and Michigan defied the rules.

They were warned if they didn't reschedule their primaries, they'd be stripped of their delegates. They didn't change. They were stripped of their delegates. The Clinton campaign never said a word.

Now, with things not going her way, another tactic in Hillary's victory strategy is to basically browbeat the party into telling those states, "All is forgiven, your delegates will count, or at least the ones I got when I was the only one on the ballot other than Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel."

I don't understand how she expects the Democratic Party to embrace a solution that will pretty much guarantee that future attempts to tell states not to jump the line will be greeted with hoots of laughter. The party lets Michigan and Florida get away with that, and some states will be holding their primaries at Halloween.

* don't understand why the Clinton campaign has done everything but demand that Barack Obama shoot the Rev. Jeremiah Wright in the head for his comments that God will "damn" America for its racism and its treatment of blacks, but has been notably silent on a prominent John McCain supporter, the Rev. John Hagee.

Hagee has said -- not just once, but several times -- that Hurricane Katrina was "God's judgment" on New Orleans for its own sinful ways. He's also said that the Catholic Church was a "great whore" and a "false cult system."

McCain has said he "welcomes" Hagee's endorsement, which means, I guess, that he's decided to write off Louisiana's electoral votes and he's not all that enamored of Mississippi, either, to say nothing of the nation's millions of Catholics.

Of course, McCain is probably counting on the press never asking him about this, which they probably won't, and that's another thing I don't understand.

*John McCain's plan for the economy seems to be "Make the Bush tax cuts permanent." Of course, tax cuts seem to be the Republicans' answer to everything including budget deficit, budget surplus, economic boom, recession, crabgrass, acne, and the gum disease gingivitis.

I don't understand why tax cuts are supposed to be so good for the economy, years of Bush-sponsored and Republican-Congress-approved tax cuts don't have us all wearing mink underwear while driving Rolls Royces fueled with 25-cents-a-gallon gas.

And before you blame the "Democrat Congress," let me remind you: Those tax cuts are still in effect.

* McCain and his people are mightily put out at ads being run that show McCain repeating his assertion that it was OK with him if we stayed in Iraq for 100 years. What he meant, he keeps saying testily, is not that he wants 100 more years of war. What he says is that he envisions a presence in Iraq like the one we have in Germany or Japan.

I don't understand how anyone who doesn't realize how different those circumstances are from the Iraqi quagmire gets to call anyone else "naïve" on foreign policy.

*I don't understand why so-called "experts" like New York Times columnists William Kristol and Thomas Friedman, both of whom have been so consistently wrong on pretty much everything having to do with Iraq, now get to appear on TV and pontificate about Iran.

In a sane world, the only appearance these dolts would be allowed to make in public would be with dunce caps on their heads while being pelted with old food. And yet they seem to make a tidy living at being consistently wrong about the length of the war, the reaction of the Iraqis to an occupying power, the reaction of other Arab countries to the invasions, etc., etc.

I'll tell you what, ABC and CBS and NBC and Fox and MSNBC: I'll go on your shows and be consistently wrong for half what you're paying these bozos.

Help me out here, folks?