You Don't Gotta Have Faith

 thepilot.com

I know it’s an article of faith on the right that President Obama’s Jan. 5 announcement of various executive actions to help reduce gun violence is a tyrannical and blatantly unconstitutional overreach of power. It’s an article of faith that it’s an attempt to deny law-abiding citizens the weapons they need to keep them safe.

But faith, as defined by Paul the Apostle in the Book of Hebrews (Revised Standard Version), is “the conviction of things not seen.” And if you look at what the president actually said and plans to do … well, there’s not a lot to be seen, tyranny-wise.

First, he wants to apply the already existing system requiring a seller to run a background check on people purchasing firearms to anyone “in the business of selling guns,” including at gun shows or over the Internet.

This is an interpretation of existing law that has been supported by such screaming liberals as George Dubbya Bush, Honorable John McCain, and — oh, yes — 90 percent of Americans. At one time, it was also supported by the NRA.

But since the GOP (Grumpy Obstructive Party) has abandoned every principle or belief it ever had other than “if’n Obummer is fer it, we’s agin it,” even the massacre of schoolchildren couldn’t persuade the Republican-controlled Congress to let that pass. As right-wing icon Joe the Not-Plumber put it, “Your dead kids don’t trump my rights.” Catchy slogan, that. Maybe the NRA should put it on their flag.

Second, President Obama wants to make the existing background check system stronger and faster by hiring new examiners and modernizing the computer systems of the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). He also wants to strengthen the enforcement of existing gun laws by adding more ATF agents.

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has vowed to fight funding for these measures, which puts the GOP in the strange position of opposing effective enforcement of the existing law (see “if’n Obummer’s fer it,” above).

Third, the president wants to take steps to keep the mentally ill from acquiring firearms, a measure widely and vigorously opposed by such paragons of sanity as James Yeager, the fellow from Tennessee who declared on YouTube back in 2013 that he was going to get his gun, fill his backpack with food, and “start killing people” over the last set of proposed executive orders before anyone had read them yet.

Or the people currently barricaded with their guns inside a federal building, promising to “kill or be killed” if anyone tries to dislodge them because “God told them to.” Or Ted Nugent.

Mr. Obama’s speech did not address confiscating those people’s weapons. He does, however, want to fund expanded access to mental health care, “ensure that federal mental health records are submitted to the background check system, and remove barriers that prevent states from reporting relevant information.”

Now here, I’ll allow, we have a provision that will require some scrutiny and a light touch. While I have no problem keeping firearms out of the hands of someone who’s expressed an immediate desire to do themselves or someone else in, no one wants to see people stigmatized and excluded from firearms ownership because, for example, they were once treated for depression or an eating disorder.

As for people who frequently go on the Internet and post long, incoherent screeds in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS with LOTS OF EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!!, they should be assessed on a case-by-case basis.

Finally, Mr. Obama wants more research into “smart gun” technology that allows the gun to be fired only by its actual owner, so that, for example, some kid doesn’t accidentally shoot himself or someone else, or someone who steals the gun can’t use it. “If a child can’t open a bottle of aspirin,” he says, “we should make sure they can't pull a trigger on a gun.”

OK, Mr. President, that may be a bad example. I still struggle to get the aspirin bottle open, whereas most kids I’ve seen can do it with ease. But we take your meaning.

It’s one thing to have faith in the unseen and the unknowable. That’s spirituality. But to have faith in something contradicted by what’s right before your eyes, such as the assertion that “that speech was President Obama exercising tyrannical power to take away all our guns” — that, my friends, is pure wingnuttery.

Different Bush, Same Mistakes

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

Recently, the man they call JEB! faced off against a 19-year-old college student. It didn’t go well for him.

Former Gov. Jeb Bush was at a town hall meeting in Nevada the other day when he was confronted by political science major Ivy Ziedrich, of the University of Nevada at Reno. Ms. Ziedrich reacted to a statement from JEB! claiming that ISIS was created by Barack Obama “retreating” from Iraq.

“We had an agreement that the president could have signed,” Bush had stated, “that would have kept 10,000 troops, less than we have in Korea, that could have created the stability that would have allowed for Iraq to progress.”

Actually, Ms. Ziedrich argued, the problem goes back farther, to the time when the American-led Coalition Provisional Authority decided to disband the Iraqi military, a time “when 30,000 individuals who were part of the Iraqi military were forced out — they had no employment, they had no income, and they were left with access to all of the same arms and weapons.”

She wound up by concluding, “Your brother created ISIS.”

It was a scene reminiscent of the time Joe the Plumber, the belligerent bullet-headed dude-bro from Ohio, became a hero to the rubes and ignoramii by getting in candidate Barack Obama’s face and claiming Obama’s policies would make his taxes go up. The difference between Ivy Zierdich and Joe the Plumber is that Ziedrich actually knows what she’s talking about.

Disbanding the Iraqi forces and leaving thousands of armed and angry young men with nothing to do but form insurgent groups is now regarded by most historians as the second biggest blunder of Dubbya’s Wacky Iraqi Adventure (the first being starting the bloody thing in the first place).

The most compelling evidence that that decision led to disaster is that no one, including Dubbya himself, will now admit to being the one who made it. Colin Powell, who said it was a mistake, denied ever being consulted, as did Gen. Peter Pace, former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Condoleezza Rice claims it was a complete surprise. Dubbya told biographer Robert Draper, “The policy was to keep the army intact; didn’t happen,” adding, “I can’t remember; I’m sure I said, ‘This is the policy. What happened?’”

Stirring leadership, that.

So how did this become an issue now? Probably as a result of JEB!’s first, but almost certainly not last, gaffe of his campaign-that-is-not-yet-a-campaign-except-everyone-totally-knows-it’s-a-campaign. Asked by Fox News if “knowing what we know now,” would he have decided to go to war with Iraq, JEB! said he would — “and so would Hillary Clinton.”

On this last part, he may be right, even though Clinton at least admits her vote was a mistake.

Sadly, the Fox reporter did not follow up with the obvious questions like, “Would you also have put an entirely unqualified campaign donor in charge of FEMA, and then watched as he massively bungled the relief effort after a major hurricane before telling him he was doing a ‘heckuva job’? Would you have ignored a daily briefing titled ‘Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.’ 36 days before the late Mr. bin Laden did just that?”

JEB! later began furiously backpedaling, claiming he thought the question was “knowing what we knew THEN, would you have gone into Iraq?” Only problem with that defense is that those of us who knew what we knew THEN thought it was a terrible idea. And guess what? We were right.

Finally, JEB! threw in the towel, sulkily declaring that “knowing what we know now, I would not have engaged. I would not have gone into Iraq.” In other words, JEB! was retroactively for war in Iraq before he was retroactively against it. There’s that Bush leadership again.

Oh, and as for that claim that we had an “agreement that would have kept 10,000 troops in Iraq”? Politifact rates that as “mostly false,” adding:

“Obama inherited a timeline to exit Iraq from George W. Bush and followed it, but there was no agreement to leave a large force behind. The Obama White House considered 10,000 troops for a short time but ruled it out, suggesting a much smaller force. Negotiations with Iraq broke down, however, and there was no agreement that met conditions Washington wanted.”

Those conditions included immunity for American troops from prosecution in Iraqi courts.

So let’s review: JEB! said he’d make the same mistake his brother did, then said he wouldn’t, then lied to try to shift the blame for the current disastrous aftermath of the Iraq War away from the president who started it in the first place.

Doggone these liberals! When are they going to stop blaming George Dubbya Bush for the things he actually did?

So That's What Happened to Joe

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

Good news, everyone! Joe the Plumber has finally landed on his feet and got himself a real job.

You may remember Joe the Plumber, the lovable lunkhead from Toledo, Ohio, who made a big splash in the 2008 presidential race. Turns out, he wasn’t actually a plumber, but he got in candidate Obama’s face, and that was enough to make him an overnight darling among the rubes and the ignoramii, who saw a reflection of themselves in his bullet-headed belligerence and his imperviousness to actual facts.

For instance, despite multiple experts asserting that Obama’s tax proposals would either have no effect on or would actually benefit people like him, JtP continued to insist his taxes would go up under Obama.

John McCain mentioned Joe so many times and hosted him at so many campaign appearances that one began to wonder if he was going to ditch his running mate and put Joe on the ticket.

In the aftermath of the McCain debacle, Joe kicked around the wingnut grifter circuit for a while, picking up one high-profile gig after another. The online right-wing consortium Pajamas Media put Joe back in the headlines when they sent him as a war correspondent to cover the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, which was at the time boiling over in Gaza.

While there, Joe contributed some deathless gems of war journalism, such as saying, on camera, “I have thousands of questions, but I can’t think of the right one.”

Perhaps the high point of his career came in 2011, when he ran as a Republican for the U.S. House of Representatives against Democrat Marcy Kaptur. The low point came shortly after, when Kaptur stomped him like a loan shark collecting from a bad debtor.

After that, we heard from Ol’ Joe only sporadically, like the time he appeared in support of Arizona State Senate candidate Lori Klein and suggested that the solution for illegal immigration was “put a damn fence on the border, go into Mexico and start shooting.”

It looked like he was headed for that limbo from which no man returns until and unless he surfaces on “Dancing With The Stars” (if he’s lucky) or as a commenter or one of those “World’s Dumbest” shows on TruTV (if he’s not).

Then, from this week’s Toledo Blade newspaper, came the happy news that Joe had found employment — with Chrysler. He’d even joined the United Auto Workers union.

Wait, what? Joe the Not-Really-a-Plumber, that tireless crusader against Barack Obama and his “socialist” policies, the man who told us in no uncertain terms that “our Founding Fathers knew that socialism doesn’t work” (think about that one for a moment) is working for the company that was bailed out by the government, a move widely denounced as “socialism” by the right?

The man who appeared at an anti-union rally in Wisconsin in 2011 shouting, “Unions don’t deserve anything, you don’t deserve anything, you work for it yourself!” is now carrying a union card?

Once again, we have received incontrovertible proof, as science fiction writer Spider Robinson once said, that God is an iron. (“If a person who indulges in gluttony is a glutton, and a person who commits a felony is a felon, then God is an iron.”)

I trust I’m not the only one chuckling at the fact that, as economist Sean McAlinden of the Center for Automotive Research told The Washington Post, “[Joe] wouldn’t have gotten a job in Toledo if Chrysler hadn’t been bailed out. … The unemployment rate in Toledo would have been at 15 percent.”

But fear not. Joe still holds fast to the only principle the Republican Party has left, summed up in the acronym IOKIYAR (“It’s OK If You’re A Republican”). Asked about his union membership after his vehemently anti-union stance, Joe explained himself by saying he doesn’t have a problem with private unions, like the one he’s in.

“Private unions, such as the UAW,” he wrote on his Facebook page, “is [sic] a choice between employees and employers. If that is what they want, then who am I to say you can’t have it?”

Unions for me and not for thee. Directly benefiting from government intervention in the economy while railing against it. Yep, he’s still a Republican, all right.

Government intervention can work. It can save jobs. Unions help workers. Joe and his ilk may never admit it, but they sure take advantage of it whenever they can.

Satire Just Can't Keep Up, Again

Me, August 21st: 

It looks like it’s going to be another election filled with nonstories about whether the candidate’s tie or his lunch or his choice of hobbies makes him think he’s better than you, along with celebrations of some random ignoramus like Joe-Not-Really-the-Plumber.

Wonkette, August 25th:

Joe Wurzelbacher, better known as Joe the Plumber, is considering a run against U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur in 2012, according to Republican Party sources.

Jon Stainbrook, chairman of the Lucas County Republican Party, said there is “high-level interest in the national Republican Party” in a potential Wurzelbacher candidacy.
“We are encouraging Joe to run,” Mr. Stainbrook said. “He hasn’t made any official decision yet.”

 Not only can you not fix stupid, as Ron White said, you can't stay ahead of it.


Of course, God would have to change His mind for Joe to run.

The Dumb Starts Earlier Every Time

Latest Newspaper Column:

I know that every time there’s an election, I’m going to see things in the national media that are so silly, so shallow, so utterly dimwitted, that they’re going to make me want to bang my head on my desk until the darkness claims me and the pain goes away.

But why, oh why, does it have to start so early?

Recently, Texas Gov. Rick Perry declared his candidacy for the presidency of the country he once openly talked about seceding from. Like an entire pack of Pavlov’s dogs, the right-wing media immediately went into full-out idiot mode and started drooling over Perry as the second coming of George Dubbya Bush.

Not only that, but they did it as if that was a good thing. 

For instance, columnist Kathleen Parker, writing in the supposedly liberal Washington Post, went all squealing fangirl on Perry, telling us with breathless adoration that Perry was a real Manly Man like Dubbya, claiming that they both “have that same je ne sais quoi that corresponds to the way a confident Southern male asks a girl to take a spin around the dance floor: ‘Wanna dance?”

She went on, like a bad romance novelist describing the handsome rogue who’ll soon be ripping the bodice of the feisty heroine: “There’s something slightly lazy in the mouth, half a smile, a knowing look … Weathered, creased and comfortable in jeans, they convey a regular guyness that everyday Americans relate to. Take it or leave it, it happens to be true.”

Oh, for God’s sake. The man’s a candidate for the highest office in the land, not the king of the freakin’ prom. I had hoped that the eight-year disaster that was the Dubbya Reign of Error had at long last put a stake though the heart of this “the president needs to be a regular guy” nonsense. I’d hoped we were done with selecting our chief executive on the basis of which one you’d rather have a beer with. 

Let me tell you, folks, I am a guy you would love to have a beer with. Ask anyone who’s ever had a beer with me. I am all kinds of fun in a beer-enabled environment. I can do the half-smile and the knowing look. I’m so comfortable in jeans you have to shake me from time to time to keep me from falling asleep. But even I’ll be the first to tell you: You do not want me to be president of the United States.

Here’s the thing: Anyone who wants to be the president of the United States is not a “regular guy” (or girl), and I don’t want them to be. It is a supreme act of arrogance for anyone, of any party, to stand in front of the cameras and tell the watching multitudes, “I am qualified to be the leader of the Free World.”

Anyone who pretends that it’s anything else, and tries to convince you that hey, they’re just like you, needs to be viewed with the same skepticism as a guy offering to sell you a Rolex watch on the street.

One of the biggest problems with this country right now is that we’ve made being smart something to be suspicious of. We’ve made, “Well, I guess you think you’re pretty smart, don't you,” a legitimate retort. We’ve become a society where the phrase, “Well, I might not know much, but I know one thing,” is never followed, as it should be, with “and it’s that I need to shut up.”

But I want the president to be the smartest person in the room, any room, and I don’t really care if he or she acts like it. I want an elitist president, just like I want an elitist brain surgeon, or an elitist fireman, or an elitist Special Forces guy coming to get me out the hands of kidnappers.

I want somebody doing the tough jobs who’s a lot better at them than I’m ever going to be, and if he’s a little cocky about it, well, as the great American poet Kid Rock once wrote, “It ain’t braggin’, [bad word] if you back it up.”

It looks like it’s going to be another election filled with nonstories about whether the candidate’s tie or his lunch or his choice of hobbies makes him think he’s better than you, along with celebrations of some random ignoramus like Joe-Not-Really-the-Plumber.

It’s going to be a long campaign, not to mention another painfully dumb one.

Here Comes Wilma!

Palin resigning as Alaska gov:

WASILLA, Alaska - Sarah Palin plans to resign as governor of Alaska in a few weeks, KTUU-TV reported Friday.

Palin, the Republican vice presidential candidate in 2008, made the announcement at her home Friday morning, the station said.

Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell will take over at the end of the month, KTUU reported.

There was no immediate word as to why she will step down before the end of her first term, though some have speculated in the past that she may be interested in running for president in 2012.

Because destroying a Republican Senator's Presidential campaign through a mind-boggling combination of ignorance, incompetence and arrogance, then cutting and running before her first term is over, is the perfect springboard to the White House.

Run, Wilma, Run! Maybe Joe the plumber will reconsider. He's always been kinda sweet on Winky Wilma the Wasilla Wingnut.

Awww, Rats.

Joe the Plumber won’t run for office:

Asked if he has plans to run for public office, he replied, “I hope not. You know, I talked to God about that and he was like, ‘No.’”

Apparently, God doesn't want me to have any fun at all. 'Cause old Joe is a comedy goldmine. He makes Michelle Bachmann look like a stateswoman.

Don't Be a Flounder, Mr. Obama

Latest Newspaper Column:

You may remember the classic 1978 frat-house comedy "Animal House."

In one scene, the new pledge nicknamed "Flounder" has been persuaded by his new fraternity to allow them to take his brother's car on a road trip, in which the car is severely damaged. One of the instigators, known as Otter (played by Tim Matheson) tries to put things in perspective. "Flounder," Otter says, "you can't spend your whole life worrying about your mistakes! You messed up! You trusted us!"

(He doesn't say "messed" up in the movie, of course; think of this as the network TV version.)

Some days, I can't help but think that Otter grew up to be a Republican pundit. The "Otter Defense," as I've come to call it, has become entrenched as a Republican talking point.

It started during the Iraq war. When it became apparent that the frantic assertions by the Bush administration that we needed to invade Iraq immediately if not sooner because Iraq had WMDs turned out to be dodgy at best, the Republicans were quick to point out that Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, had voted for the war too.

Of course, they conveniently forgot that a large part of the reason for the vote was the cherry-picked intelligence that the administration had fed to them, and to us. Remember Colin Powell with his pictures of real honest-to-gosh chemical weapons bunkers? Remember Dick Cheney's assertion that "there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction"?

Then, when no WMDs turned up and it began coming out for the first time that there were indeed serious doubts raised about the intelligence, doubts that were never shared with the Congress or with us, the Otter Defense was born: "It's your fault! You believed what we told you!"

And now, as the "bailout" of the financial services industry proves to be something of a dog's breakfast, with reports of CEOs of bailed out companies buying thousand-dollar wastebaskets and executives taking junkets to Vegas and lavish bonuses while running their companies into the ground, the Otter Defense reappears once again.

I have never been any big fan of the Wall Street bailout package. You can look it up. See, for example, my columns of Sept. 28 and Oct. 5. I was, if you remember, concerned about the lack of oversight and skeptical of the claims of companies that said they needed money immediately -- but not if it came with too many strings attached.

I think we're going to get more economic stimulus out of money spent to actually build or repair things. I think we're going to see more bang for bucks that are spent on bricks and mortar and the guys who put one on top of the other than we're ever going to get by buying up complicated and shady "mortgage-backed securities."

But both sides still supported the Wall Street bailout, largely because Bush and his treasury secretary were frantically telling all of us that if Congress didn't vote for this money to be spent right that second, there'd be an immediate financial collapse of Road Warrior proportions.

Now, however, a plan hastily conceived by that same president and treasury secretary and sold to Congress under the threat of imminent financial Armageddon is somehow entirely the fault of the president who inherited it.

And why? He messed up! He trusted Bush! When he called the bailout an "outrage," then said, "But we have no choice. We must act now. Because now that we're in this situation, your jobs, your life savings and the stability of our entire economy are at risk," he was buying into the Bush line. And he was wrong to do so. After all, as Dubbya used to say, "Fool me once, shame on -- shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again."

So, Mr. President, my advice to you is this: Stop believing the Republicans. From now on, when they say something isn't going to work, remember that these are some of the same people who said the Wall Street bailout would. When they demand concessions, remember that these are the same people who got concessions on the House version of the stimulus package, then voted against the package anyway.

Bipartisanship is nice, but it requires that the other side act in good faith, and these people have showed no signs of doing so. Instead, they've fallen into lockstep behind Rush Limbaugh, who openly says he wants you to fail, and Joe the Plumber, a modern-day Jethro Bodine who's a war correspondent one day and a Republican economic adviser the next. (We look forward to Joe's next gig as a Double Naught Spy, going up to Langley to hold a press conference on intelligence policy.)

Don't be a Flounder, Mr. President. Or someday soon the Republican Otters will be saying once again: "You messed up! You trusted us!"

One Down, One Up

Latest newspaper column:

I can't say I'm all broken up over the withdrawal of Tom Daschle as the nominee for secretary of health and human services. I confess when I heard he was the nominee, my first reaction was, "Eh. I'm not a fan." And that was before the tax issues ever came up in the press.

Of course I believe everyone should pay their taxes, since I bloody well have to. But anyone can make a mistake on those and end up paying later -- with, of course, penalties and interest.

Just ask Republican hero Joe the Plumber, who had some tax problems of his own, and look what happened to him. After his brief stint as a war correspondent in Gaza, he even got invited to Capitol Hill this past week to tell the Republicans why the stimulus package was a bad idea. Heck, some Republicans are still talking about running him for vice president on the Palin ticket!

My problem with Daschle was that he just wasn't the right guy for the job. One of the biggest jobs of the new HHS director is going to be guiding this country to some kind of real health insurance reform. And that's going to take somebody with more cojones and fewer ties to Big Medicine than Tom Daschle.

Once Daschle left Capitol Hill, he was far too cozy with the sort of health-care companies and other fatcats he was going to have to take on to get any real health-care reform in this country. Daschle has talked a good game about "single payer" health-care systems, but given his post-congressional career as a "policy adviser" for a law firm that represents big companies who'd have a lot to lose -- or to gain -- by how such a system would be set up, I find it hard to trust him.

I mean, come on. The guy takes hundreds of thousands in speaker's fees from health-care companies, and then is supposed to champion health-care reform for working people? Please.

While I do respect President Obama's desire for inclusiveness and bipartisanship, it sometimes seems as if he's overlooking the fact that some of the people he's trying to bring into the fold are part of the problem. That includes a guy like Daschle, who's so often in bed with the big health-care conglomerates that he keeps a toothbrush at their houses.

Elsewhere on the appointee front, I was rather surprised at the ease with which Eric Holder, a former deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, was confirmed as attorney general.

The Republicans had made ominous noises about how they were going to give Holder a rough time. As we all know, there's nothing a wingnut loves more than a chance to dredge up Bill Clinton and blame him for all the trouble in the world, from Osama bin Laden to the current financial crisis to the heartbreak of psoriasis.

Since Holder didn't have the automatic pass that Hillary Clinton did by being a member of the Senate, it looked like he was going to be the senatorial whipping boy. And the pardon of "fugitive financier" Marc Rich was to be the instrument of flogging, since Holder had been the Deputy AG who vetted the pardon (badly, as it turns out).

But when push came to shove, Holder ate a little crow over the Rich pardon and was confirmed easily. All the Republican posturing and talking points about making Marc Rich a big issue turned out to be, in Shakespeare's words, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Maybe it's because not one but two special prosecutors a Republican Congress appointed to look into the matter failed to find any grounds to indict anyone. Maybe it's because e-mails uncovered during the course of the investigation revealed that the last donation to the Clinton Library (by Rich's ex-wife, not Rich) was provided a full year before Rich's lawyer suggested that she approach Clinton for a pardon, which made proving some kind of quid pro quo look a bit dicey.

Or maybe it was because of who that lawyer pushing for a Marc Rich pardon was: another right-wing hero named Lewis "Scooter" Libby, in his own pre-conviction, pre-sentence-commutation days.

Actually, I was sort of hoping they'd bring Rich up a lot more and that Holder would shoehorn Libby's name into at least every other sentence of his response. I'd even fantasized about a drinking game for the hearings, when every time you heard "Scooter" or "Libby" you'd have to take a drink. Alas, my dream of playing drinking games to C-Span will for the moment, remain in the realm of fantasy. (Yes, I really am that big of a nerd.)

So, Holder's in, Daschle's out. It'll be interesting to see what happens next.

Hey, I hear Howard Dean's between jobs right now.

Puzzling Questions, Part II

New York Daily News:

You’d think Joe the Plumber’s 15 minutes would be up by now. But , no, after a stint as a correspondent in Israel, he took his act to Capitol Hill today. The first order of business: giving political advice to conservative Republican staffers at breakfast, which, Wurzelbacher told us, “Went really well.” *** One thing that needs to be done, he said, is killing this stimulus package, because it’s just another example of “American government” — Republicans and Democrats — “kicking our butts left and right.” He also called it welfare.

Puzzling Question: If tax problems of Obama nominees are so all-fired important to the Republicans, why is tax dodging Joe the Plumber getting invited to advise them on the stimulus package?

Dear Santa

Latest Newspaper Column:

Once again for the holiday season, your Intrepid Columnist and his team of researchers have obtained, at great personal risk, the following documents from a secret facility high in the Arctic:

Dear Santa:

I don't know what happened. One minute it was like me and Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin were best buddies. We were like the Three Amigos. Everywhere they went it was "Joe the Plumber this," and "Joe the Plumber that," and "Where's Joe the Plumber?"

Gov. Palin even winked at me one time. I'm pretty sure it was me. I mean, I was home watching it on TV, but she had that special smile that said. "That Joe the Plumber, he's a heckuva regular, rugged, real American-type guy, what with the shaved head and the plumbin' and the not pallin' around with terrorists."

But now, Sen. McCain won't return my phone calls and Sarah -- I mean Gov. Palin -- seems to have changed her phone number. And all those creeps in the liberal media won't even let me on their shows and make stuff up about Obama and Israel anymore. It's gotten kind of lonely out here in Ohio.

So what I'd really like for Christmas is another 15 minutes of fame. If I can't have that, do you have Sarah's -- I mean Gov. Palin's -- home phone number?

-- Joe W. (the Plumber), Ohio

(Note to staff: Let's see if we can pull a few strings and get Little Joey the plumber's license he didn't have so he can be a plumber for real and not just a pretend one for a change. -- S.)

Dear Santa:

OK, ya fat [bleep], I know you're a guy who'll play ball.

I got this [bleeping] Senate seat here and it's really [bleeping] valuable. I'm not going to [bleeping] give it up for [bleeping] nothing. So whaddya say? You wanna be a senator from Illinois? It's gonna cost ya.

I want a Wii. One of the good ones, with extra controllers. And an iPod. And about a dozen of those [bleeping] Elmo Live dolls, so I can sell them to friends whose kids really want them. I bet that [bleep] Obama will be ready to deal when those kids of his start wailing for the Elmo. That'll show the [bleep].

Anyway, give me a call. But call me on my cell, because the [bleeping] office phones have this funny buzzing noise on the line.

-- Rod B, Chicago

(Note to staff: How many lumps of coal do we have in stock to give this [bleep]? -- S.)

Dear Santa:

I have been extra good this year. I didn't start a war with anyone over phony WMDs, and when it looked like a major city was going to get hit by a hurricane, I actually didn't go on vacation.

I was going to ask for a new pair of shoes, but a nice Iraqi reporter gave me his when I was there. He seemed real enthusiastical about giving them to me, too. I thought that was nice to give me a gift at the Christmas season even though he was probably one of those Islam guys.

So to show my own big heartitude at the season of giving, could you bring him some new shoes in whatever rat-infested torture chamber the new Iraqi government is keeping him in? Thanks.

-- George, Washington, D.C.

(Note to staff: I thought we were going to get little Georgie a sense of irony last year? Did that fall through? Please advise. -- S.)

Dear Santa:

I know I asked last year for a big win for the party in 2008. But wow. I mean, when we nominated a black guy with a Muslim name, I was thinking it was all over. But man, John McCain and Sarah Palin -- what a gift they turned out to be!

I'm so happy, in fact, that I really don't have much to ask for this year. I hear that the Republicans are talking about how they need to be more like Gov. Palin and keep making up scary stuff about the other guy and talking about who's a real American and who's not.

So all I really ask for, Santa, is: Please please please let them keep doing that. Because I know we haven't won much, but I'm kind of starting to like it.

-- Howard, Democratic National Committee

(Note to staff: No need to act on this one. Just let nature take its course. -- S.)

Dear Santa:

If we don't get $25 billion, right now, we're going to destroy the economy. Don't think we're bluffing, and don't think of asking how we plan to spend it. We want to keep building gas guzzlers, we're gonna do it, see? Oh, and our jets. We want our jets back. We mean it, fat boy. Dec. 26, we start tossing out bodies.

-- The Big Three, Detroit

(Note to staff: It's not going to work with me, either. I think we're going to need to order more coal. -- S.)

Look For This Buzzword Over the Next Four Years....

"Obama recession."

Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh continue to suggest that President-elect Barack Obama is to blame for the decline in the stock market, referring to the state of the stock market as an "Obama recession." In fact, analysts have refuted the proposition that the market decline has anything to do with anticipation of Obama's presidency.

Of course it's stupid. Of course it has no basis in reality. Of course, it's started before Barack Obama has even taken office.

But mark my words, the wingnuts are are going to call this nothing but the "Obama recession." Because the truth means nothing to them.

These are the same people who insisted that Sarah Palin was qualified to be President if anything happened to John McCain because she lived closer to Russia than anyone in the Lower 48. These are the people who held up Joe the Plumber as a symbol of the horrors of an Obama tax plan, even though he isn't really a plumber, his name isn't really Joe, and he'll actually do better under Obama's tax plan than McCain's, a fact that's been proven over and over.

But they just keep on lying.

This fight isn't over.