Have you ever wondered why, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, we have deficits? Have you ever wondered why, if all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes, we have inflation and high taxes?

You and I don’t propose a federal budget. The president does. You and I don’t have the Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations. The House of Representatives does. You and I don’t write the tax code. Congress does. You and I don’t set fiscal policy. Congress does. You and I don’t control monetary policy. The Federal Reserve Bank does.

One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one president and nine Supreme Court justices — 545 human beings out of the 235 million — are directly, legally, morally and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country.

I excluded the members of the Federal Reserve Board because that problem was created by the Congress. In 1913, Congress delegated its Constitutional duty to provide a sound currency to a federally chartered but private central bank.

I excluded all but the special interests and lobbyists for a sound reason. They have no legal authority. They have no ability to coerce a senator, a congressman or a president to do one cotton-picking thing. I don’t care if they offer a politician $1 million dollars in cash. The politician has the power to accept or reject it.

No matter what the lobbyist promises, it is the legislation’s responsibility to determine how he votes.

A CONFIDENCE CONSPIRACY

Don’t you see how the con game is played on the people by the politicians? Those 545 human beings spend much of their energy convincing you that what they did is not their fault. They cooperate in this common con regardless of party.

What separates a politician from a normal human being is an excessive amount of gall. No normal human being would have the gall of Tip O’Neill, who stood up and criticized Ronald Reagan for creating deficits.

The president can only propose a budget. He cannot force the Congress to accept it. The Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, gives sole responsibility to the House of Representatives for originating appropriations and taxes.

O’neill is the speaker of the House. He is the leader of the majority party. He and his fellow Democrats, not the president, can approve any budget they want. If the president vetos it, they can pass it over his veto.

REPLACE SCOUNDRELS

It seems inconceivable to me that a nation of 235 million cannot replace 545 people who stand convicted — by present facts — of incompetence and irresponsibility.

I can’t think of a single domestic problem, from an unfair tax code to defense overruns, that is not traceable directly to those 545 people.

When you fully grasp the plain truth that 545 people exercise the power of the federal government, then it must follow that what exists is what they want to exist.

If the tax code is unfair, it’s because they want it unfair. If the budget is in the red, it’s because they want it in the red. If the Marines are in Lebanon, it’s because they want them in Lebanon.

There are no insoluble government problems. Do not let these 545 people shift the blame to bureaucrats, whom they hire and whose jobs they can abolish; to lobbyists, whose gifts and advice they can reject; to regulators, to whom they give the power to regulate and from whom they can take it.

Above all, do not let them con you into the belief that there exist disembodied mystical forces like "the economy," "inflation" or "politics" that prevent them from doing what they take an oath to do.

Those 545 people and they alone are responsible. They and they alone have the power. They and they alone should be held accountable by the people who are their bosses — provided they have the gumption to manage their own employees.

This was written in September 1985.

Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.

© 2008 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

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This is the last Charley Reese column, as the author is retiring.

Years ago, the first time I saw my friend Brother Dave Gardner after he had survived a plane crash, the comedian smiled and said, "The devil like to got me." That’s a good explanation for my last trip to the hospital.

I’ve been running a footrace with piled-up years and bad living habits, and they have pulled even and will soon be ahead. I know it may not seem to normal people that writing three columns a week requires any hard work, but it does require energy to do the research and an alertness of the mind that I can no longer muster. Hence, this will be my last column.

It’s been a difficult decision to make. In one sense, I’m not sure there is even a Charley Reese without the column, but I would rather quit now than to reach a point where the editors and readers know that I should quit. Those of you who have read my column have made me a sort of guest in your home, and I don’t want to overstay my welcome.

I don’t intend to croak, but that’s not something we can control. I have some tidying up to do. One of the things I have to do is to say a heartfelt thanks to the readers and to the editors. I’ve stirred my share of controversy, and the easiest solution to controversy is to simply drop the column. I greatly admire those editors who stuck with me. I deeply appreciate the loyalty of my readers. The sales reps and the staff at King Features are the best in the business. I feel honored to have been associated with them. To them, freedom of the press is not a slogan.

I’ve had a good run. In 1955, when I started as a reporter, newspaper city rooms were full of tobacco smoke, alcoholics, gluepots, steel rulers, copy pencils and typewriters. There was a lot of profanity and an occasional fistfight. Editors excelled in sarcasm. But they taught me how to write clear sentences.

One afternoon when I reported in, I asked an editor if he would like to get a cup of coffee. He glared at me and said, "Reese, I just spent $15 getting a buzz on, and I ain’t about to ruin it with a (expletive) 10-cent cup of coffee."

Today’s newsrooms look more like insurance offices. Computer keyboards don’t make much noise. If the reporters smoke anything at all, it’s not tobacco. Instead of greasy grills, most newspapers have salad bars. I’m sure H.L. Mencken would have seen salad bars as a sure sign of decline.

John McCain can have the last laugh, since I’ve said several times that he’s too old to be the president. He is, even if he is more durable than I am. There are some who will celebrate my going, and it galls me to give them that pleasure. I was never ambitious, but I’ve always been competitive and pugnacious.

At any rate, it’s a great time to be an American. George W. Bush, who turned out to be a gift to comedians but a blunderer of the first order, will soon be out of office. It is historic and a good sign that a black man, Barack Obama, can win the nomination of a major party. When I started in the business, the South was still segregated, and blacks were invisible both as employees and as subjects of news stories, with the exception of crime stories.

The great advantage of a free society is the capacity to self-correct itself. You’d think dictators would have figured that out, but if they are not paranoid when they seize power, they become so trying to hang on to power.

Well, enough random thoughts. My goal as a columnist has always been to stimulate and, if necessary, provoke people into thinking for themselves. If we fail to do that, a free society won’t last. I wish you all a fond farewell.

Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.

© 2008 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

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Furthermore, if neoconservatives came from an American tradition rather than a Trotskyite tradition, they would understand that America itself is not a democracy. Benjamin Franklin emerged from the Constitutional Convention and a lady asked him, "Well, Mr. Franklin, what kind of government have you given us?" He did not say democracy. He replied, "Madam, we have given you a republic — if you can keep it."

A republic and a democracy are two different animals. A democracy, which can actually work only in a very small country, allows citizens to vote on every issue. A republic allows citizens to elect representatives, who then use their own judgment to decide issues. If the citizens disagree with the representatives’ decisions, they can replace them at the next election.

Furthermore, mere elections are not what define America’s unique form of freedom. Today, practically every country in the world has elections, most of dubious validity. What most countries lack is a commitment on the part of their individual citizens to the concept of human rights, which cannot be legitimately abrogated by government.

For us, that concept took centuries of thought and conflicts to mature. It began at Runnymede when some barons presented a British king with demands that became known as the Magna Carta. It placed limits on the king’s powers and defined certain rights not only for the aristocracy but for the common folk, too. And the barons were there with their swords to make sure the king understood that it was not negotiable.

A great deal of blood was shed and words written and spoken before the concept matured. Today it’s found mainly in what in politically incorrect days were called the Anglo-Saxon countries — the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand. Our form of freedom is a gift from our English-speaking ancestors. In other parts of the world, government went off in different directions, even those we consider more or less free. But their concept of freedom is not the same as ours.

Ours is best summed up in the Declaration of Independence. All men are given unalienable rights by God. The sole purpose of government is to protect those rights. When a government instead abuses those rights, then the people have the right and the duty to overthrow it and create a new government.

Some Americans today are so stupid and/or ignorant of their country’s history that if you asked them if people have the right to overthrow a government, they would reply in the negative. I had a professor who asked that question, and in a class of more than 30 students, only four of us said "Yes."

For God’s sake, if you’re going to claim to be an American, at least read the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Federalist Papers. A good history of England and America certainly wouldn’t hurt.

Our concepts of a free society are as foreign to the Arabs (and the rest of the non-Anglo-Saxon world) as Arabic and Chinese are to us. If Allah wills, they might evolve their own version of a more or less free society, but it will not be like ours. And they darn sure are not going to accept anything imposed on them at the point of a gun by "infidels."

George W. Bush is dead-wrong to believe he’s been anointed by God to spread democracy. He was merely barely elected to serve the people of the United States in accordance with our Constitution. Even that appears to be more than he can handle. But if he tries to lead a crusade against the Muslim world, he will meet the same fate as the earlier Crusaders — defeat and disgrace.

Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.

© 2008 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

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Every now and then, the rumor arises that I have a Palestinian wife. Some of my kin were highly amused by a debate on that subject that was being conducted by letters to the editor in their local paper recently.

Apparently, it does not occur to anyone simply to ask me. As a matter of fact, I don’t have a wife. I’m a widower, and the one wife I had was a sweet Midwestern girl of Methodist, German and Swedish extraction. I don’t have a Palestinian mistress or girlfriend. I don’t even have a Palestinian bowling pal.

The recurring Palestinian wife rumor, I believe, is a result of some people finding it impossible to believe that an American would have any sympathy for the Palestinian people without an ulterior motive. That is a credit to the effectiveness of the Israeli propaganda machine, which has, for more than 50 years, stereotyped Palestinians as a wild, violent people. It is a stereotype helped greatly by the news media, which rarely reports in depth on anything foreign, and by Hollywood, where lately the venerable Nazi has been replaced as the chief villain by the Arab terrorist.

Actually, Palestinians are a gentle people. If you get to know some and hear their side of the story, you will feel sympathy for them, too, unless you have a flint heart. The Palestinians were run over by history. I know that various ethnic groups in the United States fiercely contend for the title of victim, but the Palestinians had it imposed on them.

There was nothing they could do when the Ottoman Empire absorbed their land. There was nothing they could do when the British Empire took their land away from the Ottoman Turks at the end of World War I. There was nothing they could do when the British Empire created the Palestine Mandate. There was nothing they could do when the British Cabinet, for reasons historians still argue about, decided Palestine would make a nice national home for European Jews when and if the British Empire ever decided to give up its occupation of Palestine.

That it did in 1947, after considerable encouragement by Jewish terrorist organizations — the Irgun, led by Menachem Begin, and the Stern Gang, led by Yitzhak Shamir. Yes, Jews used terrorist tactics against the British occupation, and now Palestinians are using terrorist tactics against the Israeli occupation.

In 1948, about 700,000 Palestinians were made refugees and then told they could not return to their homes. Their homes, land and businesses were eventually confiscated. In 1967, Israel seized the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, the Golan Heights from Syria and the Gaza Strip from Egypt. These are now the "occupied territories." The state of Israel has no legal claim to even 1 square inch of any of this territory, but with the backing of the United States it has been able to tell the rest of the world to go stuff it.

Palestinians appreciate the irony of the fact that the United States went to war allegedly to get Albanian refugees back into Kosovo and went to war twice against Iraq allegedly to enforce United Nations resolutions. Of course, we’ve done nothing for the return of the Palestinian refugees, and we’ve ignored the fact that Israel is in open defiance of more than 60 United Nations resolutions. We’ve also ignored the fact that Israel is the only country in the Middle East that really does have weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear bombs.

For us, it’s all about domestic politics. I’ve never heard of a Palestinian donor invited to spend the night in the Lincoln Bedroom.

All Americans should feel a great deal of sympathy for the younger generations of both Palestinians and Israeli Jews. These young people were born into a conflict started by people long dead or now in their dotage. The issue is simple: It’s land. Both sides are dying over land. Unless some outside power forces an agreement on them, they will go on dying, generation after generation after generation.

You don’t need a Palestinian wife to feel sympathy for these people. All you need is to know the facts. Learn the truth, and you will feel sympathy for Palestinians — but not very proud of American Middle East policy, which is a continuing failure driven by greed and cowardice on the part of American politicians. The hypocrisy of it has poisoned our image around the world.

Note: Charley Reese is on medical leave. Until he returns, we will be running "The Best of Charley Reese."

Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.

© 2008 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

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One of my favorite Southern things is what we call a Three-B night: bullets, beer and barbecue.

Of course, the beer and the barbecue follow the shooting of the bullets at the gun range. Alcohol and gunpowder are a dangerous mix. But Three-B is a social activity I highly recommend. Good friends, a little target shooting and then a repast of spicy barbecue and cold beer is a fine, fine way to spend an evening.

God, I love the South so much I can’t stand it.

I’ve been thinking that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get one of those recreational vehicles and then just travel from one bluegrass festival to the next. Traveling around the South is like a never-ending feast. It’s jammed full of beauty and interesting folks. And down South there’s always a gun range not too far away — or, for that matter, a gun.

I’ve no doubt that God created the South for the sole purpose of the good life, and it’s too bad that the devil came along and made us all have to waste so much time working. You do remember, I hope, that when that foolish Eve listened to the snake and the even more foolish Adam listened to Eve, the punishment was that they would have to go to work. And us, too.

In the morning, when you’re hauling yourself out of bed to go to work, just remember that it is Eve’s fault. She had paradise, but, being the mother of all women, she was, of course, not quite satisfied. It’s one of those traits that is both annoying and charming at the same time.

I knew a fellow once whose wife was like that. He would buy a house and live there for no more than two years before his wife would be on him to move. Fortunately, he ran some waterfront bars and a bail-bond business and made a good bit of money. But I swear, I think the poor man must have bought six houses and moved seven times in the same city. A divorce would have been cheaper.

At any rate, true Southerners resist the curse of work as much as they can. I had some kin who just quit whatever job they had when the hunting season opened. I guess they figured they could always find another job, but a day missed hunting is a day missed forever.

A friend of mine in Louisiana who works on the offshore oil rigs said that the foreman, a fellow from Ohio, came up one morning and said:

"You guys could be earning all the overtime you want. We’ll let you work 60 or 70 hours. How come you guys only work 32 hours a week?"

"Cause," my friend replied, "we can’t get by on 24."

If you’ve ever been to Cajun Country in Louisiana, you’ll understand. Those are people who know how to enjoy life. They are famous eaters.

One of my favorite lines of history is the remark of a Virginia lady about the 10th Louisiana Regiment, which fought for Marse Robert in the War of Northern Aggression.

"The 10th Louisiana," she said, "eats everything in its path."

A more contemporary story some folks say is true is one in which two Cajuns, Mr. Hebert (pronounced "Abear") and Mr. Quibideaux, spied a flying saucer land in a swamp. The ramp came down, and a little green man walked out.

"What’s that?" inquired Hebert.

"I don’t know," said Quibideaux, "but get the rice started."

Well, actually that isn’t a true story, but it is a good example of Cajun humor.

I have to remind myself that folks up North have some fantastical ideas about the South due to those Hollywood writers who snort coke and love stereotypes. We are really the most normal people on earth, and as Hodding Carter once said, we will be polite right up to the point we get mad enough to kill you.

Note: Charley Reese is on medical leave. Until he returns, we will be running "The Best of Charley Reese."

Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.

© 2008 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

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"It is well that war is so terrible," Gen. Robert E. Lee said, "or else we might grow too fond of it."

"War is hell," Gen. William T. Sherman said to a graduating class of a military school.

So statements by the last of the Christian knights and the first of the 20th-century warriors (Sherman was ahead of his time) illustrate the ambivalence that war causes. It is, especially seen from a distance or through the sanitized lenses of America’s lap-dog television networks, an exciting adventure. It is the ultimate sport — the animal kingdom’s most ferocious predators locked in a struggle to the death. Brave young men risking all to fight for their country — or so they’ve been told, though the real reasons are usually quite different. It is a natural impulse to cheer for our side.

But as much as I love Lee and despise Sherman, Sherman was right. The glory of war is all moonshine. It is pure hell. That’s why the American networks censor, without even being told, the ugly images of war. That was the case when they decided not to air the pictures of dead Americans that Iraqi television made available and that were broadcast globally by Al-Jazeera, the independent Arab television network.

That was the wrong decision. It is not the job of journalists to protect the sensitivities of people or to participate in American propaganda. Those ugly pictures of young Americans, their faces mutilated by bullets and shrapnel, are the true face of war. That’s what war is: death, mutilation and destruction. Why hide from Americans what they wanted? The polls say 70 percent or more support war. Well, you should be willing to look at what you support — all of it, not just a censored, prettified version of it.

Yes, indeed, it is horribly hard on families who lose loved ones or see them taken into captivity by an enemy that we know is both dangerous and often brutal. That’s why I actively discouraged all three of my children from joining the military, even though I served in the Army. Politicians start wars, and I no longer trust American politicians to do the right thing. In fact, I’m 95 percent certain that a majority of them will do the wrong thing. They waste precious American lives and think they can get away with it by uttering that awful clich "our heart goes out to …" What the hell does that mean? Whether your heart goes out or stays in isn’t going to the ease the pain of loss, restore life or heal the mutilated. After you’ve sent young people to war, it’s too late to be sorry when they get killed.

In these Orwellian times, governments and corporations go to extraordinary lengths to disguise reality. Our ancestors were much more in touch with reality. They believed in capital punishment, but they didn’t hide it away in a prison. They had public executions, and people came out to see them. We should do that, too. We should always be willing to face what we want. That’s the only way we can learn if we truly do want it and are not just enamored of an abstract idea.

On the receiving end of our bombs and missiles is torn, bloody and burned flesh. But our military bureaucrats routinely refer to "packages of targets" or "sorties," as if human beings weren’t involved at all. It’s true that this time we are trying to avoid civilian residences and civilian facilities, but it is not out of any concern for the Iraqi people. We are doing so because this time we plan to occupy the country, and the fewer facilities destroyed, the fewer we have to rebuild. In Gulf War I, where no occupation was contemplated, we mercilessly bombed civilian areas and facilities and then boasted with an unbecoming smirk that we had "bombed Iraq back to the preindustrial age."

The best way to support the troops is to put pressure on the politicians to end this war and bring them home alive.

Note: Charley Reese is on medical leave. Until he returns, we will be running "The Best of Charley Reese."

Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.

© 2008 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

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What follows are a few of the basic premises on which I base my thinking. You might or might not agree with them, but may I suggest that you make a list of your own basic premises. It will help you clarify your thinking.

1. Government is inherently incompetent, and no matter what task it is assigned, it will do that task in the most expensive and inefficient way possible.
2. The American government is corrupt from top to bottom.
3. If you rely on the mass media to inform you about your community, state and nation, you will, with rare exceptions, be woefully ignorant of what is really going on.
4. The universal franchise is a bad idea. The notion that the destiny of the nation should be put in the hands of ignoramuses, parasites, boobs, party hacks and idiots is absurd on its face.
5. Public education in America is a failure and is so flawed it cannot be reformed.
6. Not much has changed in the past 5,000 years of human history.

All of that might sound cynical, but it really isn’t. True conservatives have argued for years that government, even a benign one, is like a clumsy, retarded giant, and therefore you have to be careful to limit what tasks you assign it.

You can make a career out of just criticizing obvious bloopers committed by the various departments of government, because they all commit them. The Romans built roads that are still around, but states today continue to build roads that will pothole and crack within a year, sometimes sooner. Look at the federal airport-security people. They take nail trimmers away from grandmothers but allow real weapons to get through. And so on and so on.

As for the news media, since most media companies are now controlled by a handful of corporations whose sole interest is in maintaining a high profit margin, you are getting mostly fluff instead of hard news. Hard news is labor-intensive. It is cheaper to go with the fluff.

Thomas Jefferson’s theoretical belief in a free press soon foundered on the reality, and he came to despise it. He advised one young man never to read newspapers, since it was better to be ignorant than misinformed.

As for government corruption, it’s all around us. Sure, there are honest public officials, but the system itself is corrupt. It now requires so much money to run for office that the field is narrowed to bored millionaires and office-seekers willing to take as much money as they can from anywhere they can get it. That’s why Congress pays no attention to the people. It pays attention to the suppliers of campaign funds — not to mention junkets, fancy vacations and off-the-radar business deals.

As for the universal franchise, the problem with that is obvious. People who wish to vote should at least be required to pass the same test given to immigrants who want to become citizens. A lot of voters are not even sure what state they live in — or what century, for that matter. How can people who are ignorant of history, economics and basic science make an intelligent choice for a national leader? They can’t. They will go with the demagogue.

And, of course, it is public education that is mass-producing these ignoramuses. Imagine people completing 16 years of formal education and not knowing how to spell, punctuate or use their native language correctly. Imagine college graduates who know virtually nothing about their country’s history or geography.

As for the final premise, it is simply a reminder to utopians: Human beings are selfish, flawed and fallible animals. They always have been, they are now, and they always will be. Therefore, any human institution, public or private, will reflect those flaws. If you want perfection, plant a rosebush.

Note: Charley Reese is on medical leave. Until he returns, we will be running "The Best of Charley Reese."

Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.

© 2008 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is dead, and the world is a far poorer place. He was a giant of the 20th century. He stood up unarmed but fearless and defied the mighty Soviet Union until it had no choice but to spit him out into exile.

Amidst all of the well-deserved eulogies he has received, the greatest compliments were paid to him by the communists. They hate him still and vomited vitriol when they heard the news of his death. The communists, at least, recognize the man who did more than any other one man to kill their empire and expose their philosophy for the poison that it is.

After Solzhenitsyn’s exposure of the gulags, not even the most cynical American Marxist could get away with the same old lies that there were benevolent things in the communist system and that Josef Stalin was anything but a paranoid killer with more blood on his hands than Adolf Hitler.

Solzhenitsyn can be best appreciated in context. He was born in 1918. His father died before he was born, and his mother raised him in Rostov-on-Don, an industrial city in southwest Russia. He graduated with a degree in mathematics and went into the Army when the Germans invaded in 1941. He was a captain in the artillery. Stalin’s secret police snatched him out of the front lines and arrested him for having written some unflattering things about the dictator in a private letter to a friend. He was sentenced to eight years in the labor camps.

He developed cancer, and before his sentence was complete he was sentenced further to permanent exile. After Stalin’s death, he was able to teach and continue his writing, which he had done secretly in the camps. A brave Russian publisher got his novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in print, but the communists immediately clamped down. He was a leading dissident and resorted to private printings and to slipping his manuscripts out of the country. In 1973, The Gulag Archipelago, his graphic description of the prisons and Soviet tyranny, was published. The following year, he was arrested for treason and exiled.

He lived in Cavendish, Vt., from 1975 to 1994, when he ended his exile. While in the U.S., he made several stinging criticisms of the West’s weaknesses and what he saw as capitulation to tyranny. This did not endear him to the American Establishment, and, of course, American communists were busy spreading their poisonous lies.

Solzhenitsyn’s great mind and his complex thoughts can’t be summarized easily, but he is certainly worth reading. His criticisms of our Western culture were valid. He never criticized the American people, but aimed at the elite who, at that time, were compromising with tyrants all over the place and spouting a materialistic philosophy. Jimmy Carter practically dismantled America’s defenses, pardoned draft dodgers, betrayed American allies and seemed to embrace leftist guerrillas. One part of history Americans need to know is how much material aid was given to the Soviet Union by America. The largest truck factory in the world, located in Russia, was financed by Western banks. All kinds of aid, financial and political, helped to prop up Stalin’s regime.

The key to understanding Solzhenitsyn is that he was a devout Christian. That never got much play in the American press, but he never played the part of a professional Christian. Nevertheless, his Christian beliefs were deep and are at the root of his thinking.

He was an admirer of Vladimir Putin, as I am, because he recognized that Putin was saving Russia from disintegration. Solzhenitsyn believed in a moral and spiritual regeneration. Read some of his books, and I think you will see that he well deserved the Nobel Prize that he received.

Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.

© 2008 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

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The International Herald Tribune recently published an article about a new Army medical book on trauma wounds. The reporter said that "the gruesome photographs illustrate the grim nature of today’s wars, in which more are hurt by explosions than by bullets, and body armor leaves many alive but maimed."

That’s a nave statement. Probably since World War I and certainly since World War II, explosions have killed more people than bullets in most wars. As for the maimed, since time began there have always been more people wounded than killed in wars. In the War of Northern Aggression, 140,415 Yankees were killed in battle and 281,881 were wounded. More than 200,000 died of "other causes," which usually was disease.

Body armor is about as old as war itself, and the bureaucratic label "improvised explosive device" is just government-bull language for booby trap. Booby traps also are old. The only thing new is the bureaucratic language, which the press, like a parrot, repeated.

I’m not knocking the reporter. His story about the medical manual was well-written. It just struck me that every generation seems to go through the ritual of discovering sin for the first time. The present younger generation is seeing war for the first time in Iraq and Afghanistan. As wars go, they aren’t much. In five years, we’ve lost a little more than 4,000 souls. The single battle of Okinawa killed 7,600 Americans on land, and another 5,000 were killed at sea by Japanese suicide bombers. Nor should we forget Hiroshima, where 80,000 people died in about 10 seconds.

Altogether, some 55 million people died in World War II, and that war, at least for us, lasted only four years.

War indeed is grim and horrible, and it’s no surprise that nearly all governments try to hide the horror from the civilians back home. As long as war is a parade with flags and bands and bumper stickers, it doesn’t seem so bad. On the field of battle, strewn with body parts, excrement, blood and the smell of burnt flesh, it becomes a pretty hard sell for the military public-relations types.

The human species being what it is, pacifism is suicide, but every single American should be against war except as the last extreme resort. Getting rid of Saddam Hussein was not worth 4,000 American dead and another 29,000 wounded. He had no weapons of mass destruction, and he was definitely not an imminent threat to the United States. The Iraq War is one for which George W. Bush and Dick Cheney should not be forgiven. There was no excuse for ordering it. The American troops didn’t die for freedom; they died because Bush didn’t like Saddam or because the American Establishment wants permanent military bases on a big pool of oil.

I said during the buildup to war that it’s too bad we couldn’t stage an old-fashioned duel, strip Bush and Saddam down to their shorts, give them each a bowie knife and lock them in a dark room. Politicians have become more reckless as they have become less accountable for their sins. At least Saddam has paid for his.

Harry Truman was fond of saying that the only surprises are the history you don’t know. Though these latest photographs of torn bodies shocked the reporter, wars have always torn up bodies. I recall the photographs in an older Army medical book that you wouldn’t want to look at over lunch. I expect every battlefield presents a grim picture — men hacked to death with swords and axes no doubt were not pretty to look at. Or, for that matter, people stepped on by elephants or eaten by lions.

I’ve noticed one thing about all the dead bodies I’ve seen: It’s obvious the person who once inhabited the body is no longer there. It’s a good argument that there is such a thing as a soul. Whatever the mystery of life is, you can tell when it departs by the change in the appearance of what’s left behind.

Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.

© 2008 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

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Despite all the blather about democracy, we did not invent it, do not support it and have, during the recent administration, become less democratic than we were before.

We are and always have been too large a country for a true democracy. That’s why the Founding Fathers created a republic. In a true democracy, the people would decide practically all the issues. In a republic, the people delegate that power to elected representatives who serve for a fixed term.

A republic is a good form of government provided the people pay attention, fairly judge the performance of their elected officials and boot ‘em out of office when they don’t cut the mustard. It is a good form of government provided the best people, not the worst, offer themselves to serve in public office.

Our government really does not support democracy, except rhetorically. When the Palestinians had a free and fair election and chose Hamas members to man their government, we refused to recognize the new government. Apparently, the Bush administration’s definition of a free election is one that provides the results the president wants.

Most of our "allies" are far from democratic. Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states are all authoritarian in one form or another. Ironically, Iran does have an elected government, but there again, it’s one Bush doesn’t like. Poor Hugo Chavez in Venezuela has been elected and re-elected, but still gets called a tyrant by Bush’s step-and-fetch-its. China, which is a stern one-party dictatorship, seems to find our favor.

I’d say that if you are a dictator seeking the favor of the United States, you must offer financial incentives, be a supporter of Israel or volunteer for lap-dog status.

If you dare indicate that you are interested in the welfare of your own people and your own nation, you are likely to end up on the president’s bathroom list. This basic rule of foreign policy doesn’t seem to change regardless of which party occupies the White House.

It also should be noted that people keep insisting that Iran give up weapons it doesn’t have while remaining dead silent about the nuclear weapons Israel does have. If our government were truly interested in nuclear nonproliferation, it would support a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East that includes Israel and would not be making deals to increase the nuclear capability of India.

So, the second rule of American foreign policy is that hypocrisy and expedience trump principles.

Internally, we have become decisively less democratic. The present administration has a bad habit of questioning the patriotism and loyalty of people who disagree with it. It spies on everybody without any judicial restraint. It has riddled the government with partisans who are incompetent. It is the most secretive administration in American history. It lies like a drunken fisherman. It puts people in jail and holds them incommunicado without charges. It tortures people. It is contemptuous of the Constitution and especially of the principle of checks and balances.

Congress is too cowardly to do it, but George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are a lot more likely to deserve impeachment than Bill Clinton was. Clinton lied about his private sexual peccadillos, while the Bush administration seems to lie about everything. Clinton lied to prevent a war with Hillary, while the Bush mob lied to get us into a war in Iraq. A big difference, I’d say.

Thomas Jefferson did not believe that one generation had the right to burden another with debt. Our $9 trillion federal debt is a burden on generations too numerous to count. This is almost as serious a civic sin as lying our way into a war.

We seem to be following the familiar path of history where republics slide into empire and eventually a fascist dictatorship. Too bad that freedom, like a good wife, is most appreciated in its absence.

Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.

© 2008 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

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The presidential campaign is getting nasty in its last 100 days. Actually, that’s not a surprise. The campaigns always do. They always have, going back to the days of the early Republic. They probably always will.

It is a mistake to expect intelligent discussion of the issues in a political campaign. Even if such a discussion took place, the press would probably ignore it as being too dull to bother with. People like to say they don’t approve of negative campaigning, but that’s one of those cases where words and reality don’t match.

American campaigns feature demagoguery, and there is a fairly well-thought-out reason for it. Years ago, a manual for winning elections explained that modern campaigns are aimed at what is called the "apathetic middle."

The theory is that there are a certain percentage of people who will vote Democrat no matter what and a certain percentage who will vote Republican no matter who is on the ticket. Usually these hard-core partisans are not enough to constitute a majority. Each candidate therefore strives to get enough of the apathetic voters to add to his partisan base and achieve a majority.

Since these people in the apathetic middle don’t really care that much about voting or politics or the issues facing the country, the candidates resort to demagoguery, which in modern times is often a collection of promises: "I will win the war, reduce the price of gasoline, balance the budget, fix Social Security and Medicare, stop global warming and see that every American has a decent job."

Couched negatively, "My opponent will lose the war, is responsible for high gasoline prices, will spend us into bankruptcy and will do nothing to fix Social Security or stop global warming."

Well, at least these days our candidates don’t have to fight duels. Andrew Jackson’s opponents conspired to get him into a duel with an expert marksman who had killed 20 or more opponents. Fortunately, Jackson survived. Alexander Hamilton was killed by Aaron Burr. Both men were Revolutionary War heroes. Terrible things were said about both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson during their campaigns.

So, comparatively speaking, Sen. John McCain’s claim that Barack Obama would rather shoot hoops than visit wounded troops is rather mild, though false.

Another example candidates have to remember are the speeches of Brutus and Marc Antony in Shakespeare’s "Julius Caesar." After Caesar’s assassination, Brutus makes a factual, well-reasoned speech. Antony demagogues the heck out of it, and the mob goes after Brutus. As injurious to the commonweal as demagoguery is, reason has a difficult time competing against it.

American elections seem to be decided on the basis of emotions fueled by demagoguery, not reason. Look at the last one. George Bush, who spent the war safe in the Texas National Guard, convinced Americans that he would be a better commander in chief than John Kerry, who had earned medals for bravery in combat. Kerry’s anti-war rhetoric after he came home from Vietnam came back to haunt him.

It’s quite clear that the Republican strategy for this election is to attack Obama as inexperienced, unpatriotic and possibly dangerous. It might work, provided McCain doesn’t go bonkers in public or ramble on about his grandchildren during the debates. Obama may well play Brutus to the Republicans’ Antony-like mud machine, proving once again that intellectual explanations can’t compete with snappy sound bites.

I disagree with much of what Obama believes, and I’m afraid McCain might wake up grouchy one morning and start World War III. Like everyone else, though, I’m stuck with the choice our two worn-out, dysfunctional political parties have given us. Ah, well, the Earth is still a beautiful place. Let us all smell the roses while we may. No matter who wins, there’s not likely to be any great changes.

Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.

© 2008 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

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Hopefully, the next president, whoever he is, will have sense enough to realize that an anti-missile site in Eastern Europe is not worth rekindling the Cold War with Russia.

Though the press pays little attention to it, the Bush administration has already practically wrecked relations with Russia by insisting on adding the Eastern European countries to NATO and siting his anti-missile system in the Czech Republic and in Poland. The Russians are right that it represents a threat to their security.

President Bush’s lame excuse that the system is designed to protect Europe from Iranian missiles is no doubt another deliberate lie. I can’t think of any reason whatsoever for Iran to attack Europe, and I’m sure the Iranians can’t, either. Iran hasn’t attacked anybody for more than 100 years. They would have absolutely nothing to gain by firing a few missiles at Europe. It doesn’t make any sense at all.

Nor does it make any sense to add the small countries of Eastern Europe to NATO. This was a war-fighting alliance set up at the end of World War II specifically to deter and, if necessary, go to war with the Red Army. The Soviet Union set up its own alliance, the Warsaw Pact.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia withdrew its army from Eastern Europe and dissolved the Warsaw Pact. The United States should have dissolved NATO. Its sole purpose vanished with the Soviet Union. It has no enemy, unless fools in the U.S. create one. The American politicians have used it in the Yugoslavian Civil War, and now has it involved in the Afghanistan insurgency. Why the Europeans put up with this nonsense is beyond me.

As for including little countries, that’s a strategic blunder. Do you think that if the Russians one day launched nuclear missiles at the United States that Poland and Lithuania would go to war against their large neighbor? Will France become a nation of teetotalers?

In fact, including small countries in military alliances is worthless posturing. All you do is allow the little country to get you into trouble by its bad behavior. The little country is confident that its big ally will rescue it if it goes too far in antagonizing its larger neighbors. It’s like a spoiled brat with a bodyguard. Sixty years after its founding, Israel is still at war with most of its neighbors precisely because it has no incentive to make a sensible peace. Why should it? It has its American attack dog. The only peace treaties it has signed are with Egypt and Jordan, both of which the U.S. bribed to make peace. Bribe or not, in both cases it’s a cold peace.

Believe it or not, we are not at war with any nation at the present. We made war on Iraq, but that has long since become nothing but an occupation. We are occupying or trying to occupy Afghanistan, but other than that, we are not at war. Why then do we need military alliances? Why do we need troops in Korea, Japan and Germany? Or, I hasten to add, Iraq and the Persian Gulf?

President Bush’s war on terror is a false metaphor, and a dangerous one at that. There is no terrorist army or air force. There are some gangs of criminals. What the president did when he adopted this specious metaphor about a war on terror was to commit the United States to perpetual war. Ask your local warmonger how he defines victory in the war on terror. Ask why when Iraq was very violent we couldn’t leave, and now that it’s less violent, we can’t leave. Ask him how he defines victory in Iraq or in Afghanistan.

We really have neither a republic nor a democracy. We have a war state and an empire. We should pull the plug on both.

Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.

© 2008 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

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Sen. John McCain, already confused about Sunnis and Shiites, now is confused about geography and recent history. Take it from a gray-hair, the guy is too old to be trusted with the presidency.

The press has been kind to McCain, not even reporting some of his gaffes, apparently on the grounds that "Well, he’s an old guy, so he’ll occasionally misspeak." On his last trip to the Middle East, he got his Sunnis and Shiites confused three times in one day. More recently, he referred to the Iraq-Pakistan border, which, of course, does not exist. Now trying to claim credit for the misnamed surge (actually, it was an escalation of troop levels), he’s got his history confused. He claimed the Sunni tribes’ decision to fight al-Qaida was part of the surge.

The Sunni tribes turned against al-Qaida before the extra troops were even authorized, much less had arrived. Incidentally, the sheik that McCain claimed we protected was assassinated. The presence of the extra troops can probably be credited with encouraging the Mahdi Army to stand down. That certainly contributed to a lessening of the violence.

As Sen. Barack Obama freely and publicly acknowledges, while the extra troops helped quell the violence, it was not the sole cause of the drop in violence, which is what McCain and some members of the press want Obama to say. One of the big flaws of American journalism today is the urge by many to play "gotcha" games over semantics.

As for McCain’s rhetoric, it’s pathetic. He demonstrates no sound knowledge of the Middle East or of any other part of the world. He showed bad judgment from the beginning by backing an invasion that was, lest we forget, illegal, unnecessary, horribly mismanaged, wasteful of American lives and treasure, justified with lies, and a strategic blunder of the first order. If that’s what people want in a commander in chief, then God have mercy on this country.

Forty years ago, McCain was shot down and made a prisoner of war. In refusing an early release, he acted with courage and honor. Being a fighter pilot and prisoner of war, however, does not qualify anyone to be president. One of our greatest fighter pilots who also went into politics is sitting in a federal prison for taking bribes. Some of the greatest fighter pilots of all time, measured by their number of kills, wore the uniforms of America’s enemies. Proficiency in arms has more to do with eyesight and reflexes than with strategic thinking and general knowledge of history and economics.

The presidency is a civilian job. The Founding Fathers included the duty of commander in chief precisely to ensure civilian domination of the military. The president seeks advice from his generals and admirals, but he is not bound by their advice. One should remember that our professional warriors are technicians whose vocation is killing people and destroying property. But they can kill and destroy only on the orders of the civilian president and the civilian Congress.

If we had a president who would slavishly do everything his generals suggested, then we would no longer have a civilian government but instead a military junta. The military people have only to concentrate on their mission. The president has to concentrate not only on the mission, but on the world at large, and on domestic problems and priorities. We don’t want idiot civilians making tactical decisions, as happened in the Vietnam War, but we also don’t want generals setting strategy and policy for the United States. The generals in Iraq are there because the civilian government sent them there. When the civilian government decides they should leave, then their duty will be to shut up and leave.

Harry Truman reminded Americans of that when he fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War. MacArthur was a lot more famous than any general in Iraq or Washington, but he was insubordinate, and Truman canned him. That’s the duty of a commander in chief — to make sure the generals don’t forget that the boss is the civilian president.

Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.

© 2008 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

Charley Reese Archives

Our sole interest in Afghanistan should be to get Osama bin Laden. After that, we should bring our guys home. It’s none of our business what kind of government Afghanistan has or if it even has a government.

In case you’ve forgotten, the northern warlords seized Kabul after the Russians left. Their looting and brutality caused many Afghans to look with favor on the young men of the Taliban. The Taliban whipped the warlords and began to rule the country with their iron-fisted version of Islam.

It’s no mystery why they extended a welcome to bin Laden. He had played a prominent part in the fight against the Soviets. He was a wealthy young man and could easily have spent his time in the world’s best resorts. But he picked up a rifle and his checkbook and fought against the Russians.

So when the Bush administration demanded that they hand over bin Laden, the Taliban refused. It was in part a matter of hospitality. The laws of hospitality in that part of the world obligate you to defend your guests. The Taliban didn’t have a chance. The country had been in a state of war for nearly two decades, and much of it was just rubble salted with land mines.

We bribed the warlords to provide the ground troops while our air power, guided by Green Beret or Seal spotters, bombed the bejeebers out of them. The Taliban had no air defense. It was all over pretty quickly, except for two big flubs.

The leader of the Taliban escaped, as did bin Laden. By then, the Bush administration had turned its attention to Iraq and Saddam Hussein, who had no truck with terrorists or with the attack on the U.S. Saddam supported the Palestinians in their struggle for independence, but he disliked the Syrian government and hated the Iranians.

Nevertheless, the Bushies were determined to invade Iraq, and consequently both the Taliban leader and bin Laden remained free. And they are still free. The kernel of this nut is that the people who planned the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were inconvenienced but not punished. In the meantime, President Bush’s obsession with Saddam cost 4,000 Americans lives and landed us in a quagmire.

Now, five years later, the Bush people are wringing their little hands that the situation in Afghanistan has gone to Hades, and in typical American fashion, both Bush and Obama seem to think the only answer is more troops. It’s funny, in a morbid sort of way. Bush was wood-post ignorant of Iraq, and apparently Obama is wood-post ignorant of Afghanistan.

The Afghans are a people who rather enjoy fighting. It’s been said that if they run out of foreigners to fight, they will fight each other. It would take more troops than we have to occupy Afghanistan, which is about the size of Texas. It is run by the warlords and is a major producer of opium. Corruption is rampant.

Obama needs to be forced to come clean and spell out in specific detail exactly what he wishes to accomplish in Afghanistan and how much blood and treasure he’s willing for the American people to spend to get it. He needs to be forced to tell the American people what, if any, benefits they will get in exchange for the lost lives and tax dollars.

Obama is younger, smarter and better educated than John McCain, but that said, he is your standard political liberal and opportunist. Swapping one quagmire for another is hardly a brilliant foreign policy.

Charley Reese was a journalist for 49 years, reporting on everything from sports to politics. From 1969—71, he worked as a campaign staffer for gubernatorial, senatorial and congressional races in several states. He was an editor, assistant to the publisher, and columnist for the Orlando Sentinel from 1971 to 2001. He wrote a syndicated column which is carried on LewRockwell.com. Reese served two years active duty in the U.S. Army as a tank gunner.

© 2008 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

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Like a lot of Americans, I have occasionally received e-mail letters from Nigerian con artists. Nigeria is apparently to Africa what Fort Lauderdale, Fla., is to the United States — the capital of con artists.

My favorite con is when some guy claims to be a banker who has discovered that I’m the last surviving descendant of a wealthy Reese. What the con man doesn’t know, of course, is that I’m quite familiar with my branch of the Reeses, and that the first time I got a raise to $100 a week, I became the rich relative.

I’ve always thought that conning people out of their money should not be considered a crime. After all, for a con to work, the victim must be either stupid or greedy. No force or threat of force is involved. The victim is simply persuaded to part with his money because he hopes to gain wealth he doesn’t earn. The con story is usually far-fetched, but greed seems to overwhelm judgment.

Perhaps it is rooted in the original curse of mankind that to live we have to work. All people do, even those who live in some form of paradise. Even when the Jews were being fed by manna from heaven, they still had to pick it up. This necessity to labor leads some, perhaps all, to harbor dreams of finding a way to gain wealth without the expenditure of great energy.

That’s what motivates the person to drop a coin in a slot machine or fork out a buck for a lottery ticket. It is what motivates presumably intelligent and well-educated people to invest in Ponzi schemes or to buy nonexistent gold mines or franchises. It’s the main cause of stock-market bubbles. Even people who hand their money over to preachers who are obviously living a lifestyle more akin to a corporate mogul than to a man of God are probably hoping to buy a cheap ticket to heaven.

I don’t believe the power of the state should involve itself. The police have enough to do chasing down criminals who use force or the threat of force. Victims of con artists should be told to learn from their bad experience or, if they are determined to find the culprit, hire a private detective at their own expense.

I once read of a case in Miami where a financial adviser lost all of his client’s money. Unfortunately, not only did the adviser not know a lot about investing, he also didn’t know a lot about his client. Turns out his client was a hit man in the Witness Protection Program. He shot his financial adviser to death. That did not get the hit man’s money back, but perhaps it did offer him some psychological reward.

That’s the marvelous thing about the human race: It’s infinitely varied. You never know who or what the next person will turn out to be — a saint or a monster, a hugger or a puncher, a genius or a moron. That’s why history is the best story ever written. It has everything — war and peace, villains and heroes, brilliance and stupidity, horror, excitement, nobility, love, hatred, tolerance, bigotry, beauty, ugliness, violence and tranquility. No novelist could create a world as varied and as interesting as the real one.

Some people occasionally speculate as to why God created the Earth and the human race. No disrespect intended, but perhaps he did it for his own amusement. Perhaps we are all actors in a never-ending celestial soap opera with an audience of one. Should that be the case, then all of us should hope to make God laugh or smile rather than cry or rage.

Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.

© 2008 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

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Teddy Roosevelt was the first president to leave the continental U.S. It’s too bad he wasn’t also the last.

Politicians and celebrities with an urge to see black poverty only need to visit the Mississippi Delta or some of the neighborhoods in American cities. If they yearn for more exotic poverty, all they have to do is visit the Indian reservations that do not have casinos. Any disease they are hot to trot to cure can be found right here in the good old U.S.A.

Depressed economic conditions? We have them. Crumbling infrastructure? We have that, too. Hunger? Yes, that too. Inflation and weak currency? Present right here. Corruption? Our politicians can hold their own in that dubious category. Orphans? There are plenty of those, too. There is simply no need to travel. Any bad or sad thing you wish to see you can see here in the U.S.

We live in strange times when politicians expect to get a pat on the back for returning to Americans $300 or so of their own dollars while giving Israelis $3 billion and Egyptians $2 billion. In retrospect, the Marshall Plan, which helped rebuild Europe after World War II, was a bad idea, because it planted the seed in our politicians’ minds that they could substitute money for a sound foreign policy.

I’ve never forgotten the words of a Salvadoran friend during their guerrilla war. "We can’t afford to kill the guerrillas," he said. "There are only 7,000 of them, and your government is paying my government a million dollars a day to fight them."

Some of those held at Guantanamo Bay are there because the U.S. offered cash for members of the Taliban or al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Some of the more enterprising gunmen would just grab some poor jerk off the street and turn him over to the Americans. Why not? The Americans wouldn’t know the difference. The CIA has always had more money than brains.

Much of the so-called success of the surge in Iraq is because some al-Qaida people killed the wrong tribal leader and the Sunnis turned against them. After the Sunnis started killing al-Qaeda people, the U.S. came rushing in and started paying the Sunnis to kill al-Qaeda instead of Americans. What do you think will happen when we stop paying them? What do you think will happen when it becomes clear that the Shiites are not going to allow the Sunnis any meaningful role in government? The trouble with buying allies is that they are always for sale. You can’t really buy loyalty. You can only buy services.

I wish I could collect a bunch of cowboys so we could round up all of the Washington politicians, hogtie them and brand their foreheads with the words "America First." They are, after all, American politicians, elected to serve the American people. There is nothing, not a word, in the Constitution that authorizes them to help any foreign nation in any way whatsoever. Foreign aid, in all its many forms, is clearly unconstitutional. For the first 200 years, the only things we gave foreigners were hot lead and cold steel.

Don’t get me wrong — I have nothing against foreigners. We can’t blame them for milking us out of every dollar they can as long as we continue to elect stupid or corrupt politicians. You needn’t pay any attention to all this global baloney you hear. The world has always had a global economy. Why the heck do you think Columbus sailed over here and Marco Polo walked to China? Global trade does not require treaties, alliances or military forces stationed overseas. It does not require our muck-brained Congress to turn over its constitutional duty to regulate foreign trade to the executive branch. It does not require our Supreme Court to even know what foreign laws say, much less apply them to Americans.

Damn, but I despise politicians.

Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.

© 2008 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

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About the only industries the American government is skilled at creating are the war industries and the smuggling industries.

The fiasco some people call the "war on drugs" is proof positive that most people learn nothing from history. What happened when the government outlawed the sale of alcohol? It created organized crime, vast organizations that smuggled booze into the country and set up wholesale and retail distribution of it. Since criminal organizations are denied the benefit of the law for settling disputes, you got gang wars for turf and distribution rights.

Prohibition, as it was called, was supported by the same barnyard-style rhetoric that you hear about drugs. Enormous government organizations were formed to fight illegal alcohol. Corruption became rampant. It became a standard joke that the big supporters of prohibition were the cops and bootleggers. The American public finally got fed up with corruption and hypocrisy, and repealed the amendment that had created Prohibition.

The politicians were smarter the next time. They didn’t use a constitutional amendment for outlawing drugs, which would give the people a choice to reject it. They outlawed them by statute, and it is a well-known fact that the group with the least influence on the legislative process is the American people.

The exact same thing happened that had happened with prohibition. Organizations were formed that smuggled drugs into the U.S. and set up wholesale and retail distribution systems. Law enforcement expanded, and so did corruption. Illicit money in vast quantities always breeds corruption.

The illegal drug business boils down to a retail industry. There are suppliers and wholesalers, but in the end the money comes from the individual users. Therefore, if your local gendarmes tell you there are a lot of drugs in the area, but they can’t find them, you need to ask this question: How is it the customers can find them, but you can’t? You need to look closely at drug arrests. If they are all street sellers, then you’ve got a problem. Chances are, the suppliers are paying somebody off.

Never underestimate the power of money to corrupt, especially when it’s untraceable and tax-free.

Like the earlier gangs in Prohibition days, drug gangs can’t go to court to settle disputes, so you have killings. As long as one drug dealer is killing only another drug dealer, the cops shouldn’t even bother to investigate. A lot of today’s criminals, however, can’t shoot straight and often hit innocent people. Those criminals should be caught and executed.

The real answer lies in one of two alternatives. Alternative one is to crack down hard and levy severe penalties on users. The present policy of giving users a slap on the wrist, especially if they are celebrities, just creates a market. No amount of law enforcement will keep drugs out of the hands of eager customers with money. For one thing, drugs like marijuana, cocaine and heroin are dirt-cheap to produce. Drugs flow to the market. Eliminate the market and the drug flow will cease.

Frankly, if I were a cop in Colombia, I’d be darned if I would risk my life to stop drugs when I can see celebrity drug users in the U.S. going free with a smirky smile.

The second alternative is to legalize and regulate drugs. These drugs are so cheap to produce that they can be sold legitimately at a far lower price than illegal drugs. The whole illegal-drug business would go bust. If addicts could buy their drugs at a reasonable price from a noncriminal enterprise, then you would eliminate the necessity of addicts having to commit crimes to feed their habit. You could also provide education and treatment in a noncriminalized environment. You would eliminate a lot of corruption, and you could greatly reduce the prison population.

To continue as we are is to fulfill the definition of insanity and chronic stupidity by repeating the same acts that result in the same repeated failures.

Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.

© 2008 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

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"It was just the right thing to do." That’s a phrase one hears fairly often these days. It’s usually said in explanation (or justification) for something someone has already done. Trouble is, the phrase "right thing to do" begs this question: What exactly is the right thing to do?

If all 300 million of us agreed as to what exactly are the right things to do, we’d have blissful unity in our beloved country for the first time since the founding of the Jamestown colony. That will never happen, though. As with pacifism, achieving perfect unity is like expecting a wolf to become a vegetarian.

Granted, a few people may not know what ought to be done, but the rest of us — Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, atheist, Democrat, Republican, conservative, liberal, libertarian and whatever — all have our own ideas as to what is the right thing to do. And so it has always been. The meetings of the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention were not love-ins. There were plenty of intense disagreements and hot arguments.

A free society promises many things, but uniformity of opinion is not one of them. Uniformity is a specialty of dictatorships. When Joe Stalin was alive, everybody who wanted to stay alive publicly agreed with him. The same was true of Saddam Hussein. Tacitus said of the Romans that they make a desert and call it peace. Dictators scare the bejeebers out of their people and call it agreement.

All we Americans have to do is learn to disagree in a civil manner. That’s not easy for some folks. Some people can barely open their mouths or put pen to paper or keyboard to bytes without insults, bad names and bad words pouring forth. In extreme cases, it’s like experiencing a broken sewer pipe. It’s too bad, because some of these people might have some good points to make if they didn’t drown all their thoughts in vitriol.

The intention is often to intimidate those who disagree with them. Nobody who claims to be an American should ever allow himself to be intimidated by anybody for any reason. To forfeit the right of free speech out of fear should be unacceptable in the United States. A million or more Americans didn’t give their lives so Americans could become sheep. It is especially shameful to be a sheep in America, because nothing bad is going to happen to you for speaking out. You may be slandered or questioned, but you won’t be tortured, shot or imprisoned.

How’d you like to be standing in a long line before God on Judgment Day hearing the stories of people who confronted evil and paid for it with their lives? And all the time knowing that when your turn comes, you’ll have to say, "Well, I never spoke out against the wrongs or injustices I saw in my country because I was afraid somebody would call me a bad name or not invite me to tea."

People who live in a free society but don’t avail themselves of their freedom are like people dying of thirst while standing in a pool of sweet water. You are free. You have unalienable rights. Use them. If you don’t use them, you might as well not have them. They exist only in use. Even dictatorships will let you babble on about trivial matters such as sports and entertainment.

But the men who pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to the concepts of freedom expressed in the Declaration of Independence were not taking those risks so people could gossip about inconsequential matters. They did not write the First Amendment for the benefit of pornographers and nude dancers or dirty-mouthed comics. The First Amendment is there to ensure a free discussion of political and other ideas that are important to establishing a civil society, and to pursue truth.

Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.

© 2008 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

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The only presidential poll that matters is the one on Election Day, when voters will put an end to what seems like an endless campaign. I don’t see much point in speculating about who’s ahead on this or that day or parsing every word the candidates utter.

All we know for certain is that on Nov. 4, either Barack Obama or John McCain will become the president-elect, God willing and the Creeks don’t rise. None of the minor candidates on the ballot has a chance. If you wish to waste a vote on one of them and it makes you feel better, go ahead, but the man who will affect your life during the next four years will be either Obama or McCain.

Neither man has much executive experience. They are the CEOs of their campaigns, and McCain had some experience as a squadron commander in the Navy. Both men have spent all of their political careers in the legislative branch.

That fact has this bearing on the subject: The essence of the legislative branch is compromise. Good legislators know how to compromise because they know that without compromise nothing will get done. You might want to keep that in mind as both men modify their positions. Accusing politicians of flip-flopping has become a rather worn political weapon, but the fact is, both men are used to compromising, and that always involves at least a slight change of position.

I would think that at least those of you who share my displeasure with the Bush administration would have had enough of a president who refuses to compromise or change his position. The world is in a constant state of change, and quite often our knowledge is constantly changing. It is only sensible to assess the situation as it is in real time before making a final decision. That means it is difficult to say with certainty in July what you will do next February.

Who knows what the situation will be next February in the economy, in the wars and in domestic affairs? Other than my assumption that the weather will be cooler, I certainly don’t know what the world will be like or if I will even be around to see it. We humans have a tendency to delude ourselves that we are much more in control than we actually are.

The custom of some Muslims of adding "In shaa’ Allah" (if God wills) to the end of most of their statements of intention is a good one. It is a reminder that all plans are, in fact, contingency plans, subject to interruption or changes because of things we don’t control and can’t foresee. The old Southern expression "God willin’ and the Creeks don’t rise" says the same thing. I grew up thinking that phrase referred to flooding creeks, but someone corrected me. It refers to an uprising of the Creek Indians, which in the 1700s and early 1800s could put a crinkle in anybody’s plans.

One other caution about politicians: The devil is not only in the details, but in the definitions, and politicians are experts at saying things without defining their terms. "Reasonable gun control," for example, depends entirely on what you define as reasonable. A total ban on handgun ownership was thought reasonable by the pooh-bahs in Washington, D.C. I think banning firearm ownership by convicted felons is reasonable, provided they are not branded as convicted felons for their whole lives. A "phased withdrawal of troops" depends on what you mean by phased — so many a month or so many a year? No permanent bases in Iraq can mean bases for 50 years. That’s not permanent.

It’s sad that so many of our political leaders and our own government have adopted the habit of trying to mislead us or at least to hide the truth from us. Maybe we can break them of that habit — God willing.

Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.

© 2008 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

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Once again, I suspect we are stuck with $4-a-gallon gasoline for the foreseeable future. That’s $4 and more, I should say. I see nothing on the horizon that would lower the price. Certainly the political rhetoric coming from both Democrats and Republicans will not do it.

There are several roosting chickens that are the cause of the high price. First, there is the devalued U.S. dollar. Our dollar is just piece of paper, backed by or tied to nothing. Therefore, its purchasing power depends in a large part on how many dollars are in circulation. When lots of dollars chase relatively fewer goods, prices go up. We call that inflation. When there are more goods than dollars to buy them, prices go down. We call that deflation.

For many years now, Congress has been spending more than it takes in. That excess is borrowed from the Federal Reserve, which creates its money out of thin air with a keystroke. The borrowed dollars are then spent into the economy, along with all the borrowed dollars spent by the private sector. While the money supply can be increased with a keystroke and a vote in Congress, goods and services have to be created by labor and capital. It’s no surprise that there is soon more money than there are goods and services.

People with oil to sell want to compensate for the lost purchasing power of the dollar, so that’s part of the price increase. That’s chicken No. 1.

Demand is chicken No. 2. When demand exceeds supply, the price will be bid up. Right now, supply meets demand, but not by a large margin. This makes buyers of oil nervous. When American and Israeli war nuts yak about bombing Iran, the price of oil tends to be bid up. Ditto when rebels in Nigeria sabotage or attempt to sabotage oil production in that country. With the narrow margin between supply and demand, any political instability that threatens to disrupt supply will affect the price.

Also pressuring the demand side is the growing industrialization of countries like India, China, Brazil and Russia.

Chicken No. 3 is a shortage of refining capacity. This is due mainly to environmental laws, especially those that encourage lawsuits, and to the not-in-my-backyard mind-set. It is such an expensive hassle to build a refinery that not enough have been built.

In my childhood, I lived a short walk from the world’s largest refineries. The air stunk, but we got used to it. People in Port Arthur, Texas, used to say it was just the smell of money. A basic fact is that you cannot have both a pristine environment and an industrialized economy. A compromise has to be struck. When America was largely a pristine wilderness, it was a dirt-poor country.

The final chicken is a concept called peak oil. Peak oil is when you’ve found all the oil there is to find, and production begins an inevitable decline. That’s when the bidding war will really get hot — possibly hot enough to ignite real wars. Nobody knows for sure when the world will reach peak oil, but more and more people are beginning to see it in the relatively near future. That’s probably the true reason for the U.S.’s heavy military presence in the Middle East.

I call all these factors chickens that have come home to roost because they have all been known for decades. For you young folks, let me tell you that politicians in Washington have been talking about the energy crisis, energy independence, etc., since the 1970s, and their talk has produced nothing. Vibrating one’s vocal chords does not turn a shovel of dirt or drill a half-inch.

So I will make one prediction: As the cost of energy continues to rise, the influence of extreme environmentalists will decline. If Americans can’t have both, they’ll choose the smell of money over fresh air.

Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.

© 2008 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

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America’s court system has been broken, abused and perverted by lawyers, judges and legislators.

You would think that at least the lawyers and judges, who use the system to make a comfortable living, would have an interest in preserving it. Instead, they are the main abusers of it.

These thoughts are prompted by the execution of Mark Dean Schwab, a 39-year-old psychopathic monster who kidnapped, raped and murdered an 11-year-old boy. The problem is that it took 16 years after his conviction to execute this piece of human dung thanks to laws, lawyers and judges. It’s not justice. Neither is lethal injection. How in God’s name did we become so squeamish that we have to provide a peaceful, painless death to vile and vicious criminals?

Schwab wasn’t so kind to his victim, Junny Rios-Martinez, a little boy who would have made any parent proud. I’m very proud of this boy’s father, who attended the execution. The boy’s father said he had vowed that his would be the last face Schwab would ever see.

Schwab was released from prison early in 1991 after serving half a sentence for raping another boy at knifepoint. Within a month, he was stalking little Junny. At the time of his trial, he boasted that he would gladly go to the electric chair if he could have a famous child actor sit on his lap. When the end finally came, he wasn’t boasting about anything.

"Finally" is the key word. It shouldn’t take years and even decades to execute a criminal. Two years from the day of sentencing should be the final day of the perp’s life. Virtually all of the appeals in capital cases are frivolous, filed by opponents of the death penalty who simply are trying to wreck the system.

Let’s get our thoughts in order concerning the death sentence. Everybody dies. Everybody is condemned to death from the day of his or her birth. Thus, executing a criminal isn’t doing anything to him that won’t happen anyway. Good and decent people get death sentences every day from their doctors, and there are no appeals or stays.

When the Founding Fathers wrote the Bill of Rights and prohibited cruel and unusual punishment, it was an era when people were burned alive, torn apart, drawn and quartered or slowly killed by any number of torture devices. Certainly, they did not consider hanging or shooting to be cruel and inhuman punishment.

We should be neither hesitant nor squeamish about executing people who take the lives of innocent people, especially children. God knows, if we don’t have enough juice to protect and, failing that, avenge the death of children, then we are a poor excuse for a society.

We could provide university education to 10 children for the cost of keeping one of these dysfunctional human slimeballs alive for his natural life. I’d support a return to public hanging in the county where the crime was committed. Let the public come and see justice done. I’d even favor hiring a Saudi with a good, sharp sword to take the man’s head off. If beheading was good enough for English royalty, it should be good enough for American animals with two legs.

As for convicting the wrong person, that’s a problem with a community’s police and prosecutors and sometimes incompetent defense lawyers. Clean house. Fix that problem. Don’t use it as an excuse to stop the death penalty. Lawyers, who claim to be professionals, do a lousy job of policing their own ranks. Incompetent lawyers often end up as judges with nice vacations and pensions they don’t deserve.

One day, the American people may get fed up enough to vow to never elect a single lawyer to a legislative post. Then we might get some clear laws that protect the people rather than provide a lucrative living for lawyers and judges.

Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.

© 2008 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

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Here’s another example of how silly our presidential campaigns have become: Charlie Black, an aide to the John McCain campaign, said in an interview that another terrorist attack inside the U.S. would likely benefit McCain.

My heavens to Betsy, you’d think somebody had stripped McCain’s mother naked and thrown her out into the street. The Barack Obama campaign writhed with indignation, and pretty soon the press and eventually McCain were decrying, regretting and renouncing Black’s statement.

Why? It’s the truth. Very likely such an attack would favor McCain, since he’s painted his opponent as weak on terrorism. Black wasn’t inviting an attack. He just told the truth. He stated a fact. Anybody with common sense knows it.

Osama bin Laden would hit us today if he could, and he certainly won’t pay the least bit of attention to what American politicians have to say. Nor will he consult any of them as to the timing. He enjoys killing Americans. He will eventually find a way to kill some of us unless we kill him first.

It’s too bad President George Bush is better at mangling the English language than he is at finding terrorists. You would think the "world’s last remaining superpower" could track down one old geezer living in a cave or a mud hut somewhere around the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

I would bet money that if bin Laden had struck Moscow instead of New York, he would have been long dead by now. Some years ago in Lebanon, a Russian was kidnapped, but he was quickly released after the kidnapper’s relatives started showing up in pieces.

What the hoopla over an innocent statement by Black tells you is how lacking in substance both campaigns are. Their policy positions are as thin as a Victoria’s Secret nightgown. Neither one of them really knows how to solve the energy problem or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, nor do they know how to get us out of Iraq. Both are going to find that lobbyists are like the tar baby — hard to get away from. Both have married women who are not your typical American housewives. Both are facing the dismal prospect of trying to cut spending and keep their promises of booty at the same time.

That’s why they react to any trivial matter. They want to distract the public from the scarcity of substance.

Leave it to our broken political system to give us a choice between a young senator who has led a relatively sheltered life and a crotchety, old, retired Navy officer who believes we can bomb and shoot our way out of any problem. It looks like the infamous 2-cent future is on the horizon. (I once asked the former head of the Strategic Air Command what he thought of the future, and he said, "I wouldn’t give you 2 cents for it.")

What should concern us most is the growing trend to stamp "unacceptable" on the truth whenever it deviates from conventional wisdom, plain vanilla political rhetoric or political correctness. Politics and manners should not be used to determine the truth.

What should be unacceptable is Americans getting in trouble for telling the truth. I don’t see how we can ever solve problems if we decide some truths can be thought but not spoken.

Charlie Black was dead-on right when he said a terrorist attack would help McCain. He knows it, I know it, you know it and McCain knows it. His Straight Talk Express must have been derailed, or he would have defended Black.

At the rate these two candidates are going, I may just save some of my $4 gas and not bother to vote.

Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.

© 2008 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

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One gets the impression that there are some people in Washington who believe that Israel or the U.S. can bomb Iran’s nuclear reactors, fly home, and it will be mission complete.

It makes you wonder if perhaps there is a virus going around that is gradually making people stupid. If we or Israel attack Iran, we will have a new war on our hands. The Iranians are not going to shrug off an attack and say, "You naughty boys, you."

Consider how much trouble Iraq has given us. Some 4,000 dead and 29,000 wounded, a half a trillion dollars in cost and still climbing, and five years later, we cannot say that the country is pacified.

Iraq is a small country compared with Iran. Iran has about 70 million people. Its western mountains border the Persian Gulf. In other words, its missiles and guns look down on the U.S. ships below it. And it has lots of missiles, from short-range to intermediate-range (around 2,200 kilometers).

More to the point, it has been equipped by Russia with the fastest anti-ship missile on the planet. The SS-N-22 Sunburn can travel at Mach 3 at high altitude and at Mach 2.2 at low altitude. That is faster than anything in our arsenal.

Iran’s conventional forces include an army of 540,000 men and 300,000 reserves, including 120,000 Iranian Guards especially trained in unconventional warfare. It has more than 1,600 main battle tanks and 21,000 other armored combat vehicles. It has 3,200 artillery pieces, three submarines, 59 surface warships and 10 amphibious ships.

It’s been receiving help in arming itself from China, North Korea and Russia. Unlike Iraq, Iran’s forces have not been worn down with bombing, wars and sanctions. It also has a new anti-aircraft defense system from Russia that I’ve heard is pretty snazzy.

So, if you think we or Israel can attack Iran and not expect retaliation, I’d have to say with regret that you are a moron. If you think we could easily handle Iran in an all-out war, I’d have to promote you to idiot.

Attacking Iran would be folly, but we seem to be living in the Age of Folly. Morons and idiots took us into an unjustified war against Iraq before we had finished the job in Afghanistan. Now we have troops tied down in both countries.

China has a tremendous investment and interest in Iran and would likely see an attack as a threat to its national interests. China could strike a large blow against the U.S. just by dumping the financial paper we have foolishly allowed the Chinese to pile up, thanks to the trade deficit.

For some years now, I’ve worried that we seem to be more and more like Colonial England — arrogant, racist, overestimating our own capacity and underestimating that of our enemies. As the fate of the British Empire demonstrates, that is a fatal flaw.

The British never dreamed that the "little yellow people" could come ashore by land and take Singapore from the rear or that they would sink the pride of the British fleet, but they did both.

I suppose no one in Washington can imagine the Iranians sinking one of our carriers in the Persian Gulf. How’d you like to be the president who has to tell the American people that we’ve lost a carrier for the first time since World War II?

Exactly how the Iranians will respond to an attack, I don’t know, but they will respond. In keeping with our present policy, our attack on Iran would be illegal, since under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has the right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes.

Who would have thought that we would become the rogue nation committing acts of aggression around the globe?

Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.

© 2008 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

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It’s funny that Ralph Nader, the perennial presidential-election spoiler, is claiming that Barack Obama is appealing to white guilt. I’ve seen no evidence of that. In fact, Obama has been trying his best to run a colorblind campaign.

The truth is, except for his skin color, Obama is your standard Northern liberal. If there’s only a dime’s worth of difference between Republicans and Democrats, there’s only a penny’s worth of difference between Obama and Teddy Kennedy on matters of policy. Obama, however, is certainly the smarter of the two.

I’ve never been a fan of Nader, and I don’t see why anyone is paying him the least bit of attention. He says what he thinks will get him ink and airtime. He’s a publicity hound. There’s something perverse about people who will run for office, knowing they can’t win, but are willing to skim a few votes off one of the major candidates. Nader definitely cost Al Gore the election in 2000, so we can justly blame him for eight years of George W. Bush. As far as I’m concerned, that consigns Nader to the dung heap.

In reality, I’m not sure that there is even such a thing as white guilt. Most Northerners seem to feel self-righteous on race matters, having for years enjoyed blaming the South. Most Southerners don’t feel any guilt. I don’t. I never owned any slaves, and I was glad to see the end of segregation. What’s to feel guilty about?

Whatever profits accrued to the South as a result of slavery were wiped out by the War of Northern Aggression and Reconstruction. The South, both blacks and whites, was plunged into poverty, from which it didn’t begin to recover until World War II. While scientists were working on the atomic bomb in the 1940s in Chicago, Georgia tenant farmers, many of them, were picking cotton by hand and carrying it to the gin in mule-drawn wagons.

Outhouses, wells and oil lamps were familiar objects in my childhood. I went barefoot all summer, except for Sundays, and the only free lunches came from friends and relatives during visits. Believe it or not, people managed to survive without welfare, Medicaid or Medicare. I chopped kindling with an axe and carried in many a bucket of good old Pennsylvania anthracite coal for the fireplaces and stoves. My treasured possessions were a pocketknife, a secondhand .22 rifle and marbles.

No one I can recall considered himself poor or felt any guilt. If Obama receives any votes because of white guilt, it will be in the North or Midwest. Perhaps that is appropriate, since it was people from those regions who screwed the former slaves out of the promised 40 acres and a mule and cut a deal with the Democrats that made segregation possible.

And if there was segregation by law in the South, there was segregation by practice in the North. I grew up in a sea of black faces and played every day with black kids. There were no black ghettos in most of the South; black people lived a block from my house.

That said, was it tough being black in the segregated South? You bet. In some places, a wrong word or even a look could get you beaten or killed. Job opportunities were as scarce as voter registration. Apartheid was about the same in the South as in South Africa, although white Southerners — some of them, anyway — were naturally more polite than the Afrikaners. Schools were separate and unequal. The N-word and "boy" were constant affronts to men’s dignity. Obama and people in his age group are lucky in the year of their birth.

But we Americans are not very good at feeling guilty. If you don’t believe me, ask the Cheyenne, the Cherokee or the Sioux.

Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.

© 2008 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

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After nearly six days of almost nonstop eulogizing, memorializing and remembering NBC’s Tim Russert, there’s not much left to say — except, of course, what I’m going to say.

That consists of only three things. I wish I had known him. We should all follow his example of living each day with enthusiasm. And his unexpected death is a reminder to us all that life at best is short, and its duration uncertain.

The perception of time is a funny thing. We all know that when we are young, time seems to drag along at a sluggish pace. In elementary school, in mid-May it always seemed as if June and freedom from the classroom would never come. That 21st birthday often seems to dig in its heels and delay its arrival.

Then as we get older, time picks up speed. We have children, and bingo — they’re grown. Birthdays begin to arrive on what seems like a monthly rather than a yearly basis. Pretty soon the view ahead is shorter than the view behind. We begin to face up to things we aren’t going to do, like read the Great Books of the Western World, take up mountain climbing as a hobby or master a foreign language.

That’s when we begin to wish we had lived at a more hectic pace, but it’s too late. As the German joke puts it, "Too soon old, too late smart."

So, those of us still able can profit from Russert’s example and accept each day as the gift it truly is.

A samurai wrote a book called Hagakure a couple of centuries ago. It’s a commentary, but it also contains advice to younger samurai. The samurai were professional warriors attached to a warlord. He advised them upon arising each morning to pause and imagine their own death that day, lest they get careless or lackadaisical. Seems gloomy at first, but it’s not a bad idea. You should try it. It will help put minor irritations like traffic jams into their proper perspective. Contemplate a massive coronary, and being five minutes late doesn’t seem all that important.

Russert’s life is itself a good example. He was the son of a sanitation worker, born without any influential contacts. Yet with hard and smart work, he rose to the top of an intensely competitive business. The cynical statement that it’s not what you know but who you know simply isn’t true in most cases.

This kind of Horatio Alger story still occurs in America. Two of my closest and dearest friends, one Korean and one Palestinian, came to this country literally without a penny and unable to speak English. With years of hard and smart work, both amassed fair-size fortunes. They are both now eloquent speakers of English and tremendous lovers of America.

Too often I think we get mired in thinking about problems to the point of overlooking America’s successes. Some groups get mired in thinking of themselves as victims, which is a dead-on formula for failure. Welfare has ruined a lot of people. Cynicism can poison even holy water.

Brother Dave Gardner said, "Success is getting what you want; happiness is wanting what you get."

It is obvious that Russert was both successful and happy. He had everything he wanted, except time. But there again is another tricky aspect of time.

Marcus Aurelius, a pretty smart Roman emperor, said it doesn’t matter if people die old or young because they lose the same thing — the present. We always live our lives in the present. The past exists only as memory, and the future exists only in our imagination.

My dad died the same way Russert did: suddenly, without a day of sickness. I know that’s the way he would have wanted it. Except for missing his family, I suspect Russert is just as glad to have skipped old age and decline, too.

Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.

© 2008 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

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Barack Obama has run from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, from his own church, from Louis Farrakhan and from the Palestinians. He has allowed the Rulers of the Politically Correct to dictate his own thinking. I suggest that he join the liberal wing of the Episcopal Church.

The rulers of the PC Gospel — mostly members of the media — have decreed that anyone with whom they disagree on certain topics must be banished from the public realm.

Not everyone is as cowardly as Sen. Obama. When the American media tried to get Archbishop Desmond Tutu to denounce Fidel Castro, Rev. Tutu told them quite quickly and bluntly that they do not get to choose his enemies or his friends. He refused to criticize Castro because Cuba had assisted in the overthrow of South Africa’s apartheid government.

The fly in the thinking of the rulers of political correctness is that they ignore the basic truth that in a free society, people may disagree.

I like Reverend Wright, and I respect Louis Farrakhan. Some things they say I agree with. Some things they say I disagree with. That puts them on a par with my late wife. We didn’t always agree with each other, but that didn’t stop us from caring for each other.

Where in the Bill of Rights does it say that some ideas cannot be spoken or believed? Where does it say that people who speak certain thoughts are to be condemned and shunned? PC is BS. The PC rulers are little fascists who think they can browbeat everyone into conforming to their own narrow view of the world. And they don’t use reason. They name-call and play the guilt-by-association game. What they’d like to do is get the government to put people who disagree with them in prison.

Don’t scoff. In some European countries, if you express doubt about some detail of the official Holocaust story, you can be charged with a crime and sent to prison. That is a shameful situation, for the truth doesn’t need to be guarded by the police. It’s a warning that the right of free speech is always in danger from those who believe they have a monopoly on the truth and who prefer character assassination to reason and debate.

Obama has succumbed to the poison that infects all ambitious politicians. He tells himself he can’t do all the good things he wants to do unless he first gets elected. Then he starts compromising and pandering. By the time he gets elected — if he does — he won’t be the same man who started out.

Obama should have said: (1) "I’m not responsible for anything somebody else says"; (2) "I don’t agree with everything Reverend Wright says"; and (3) "But I still respect him and consider him a friend. If that doesn’t suit you, then get out of my face and vote for someone else." Then he should have refused to ever again answer any questions about Reverend Wright.

Farrakhan deserves respect because the Nation of Islam’s message is as sound as a $20 gold piece: Get off drugs and alcohol, respect and take care of your wife and children, and get a job. The Million Man March that he organized did more to reduce crime during the crack wars than anything the Justice Department has done. He is, by the way, the only man in America who can get a million people to turn out for an event.

If he wishes to think that I’m a devil because of the color of my skin, it’s OK with me. I don’t want to be his buddy. I just want to give him credit for the good that he does.

As for Obama, he will learn the hard way that pressure never lets up, and the more he caves in, the more those who want to control his mind will be encouraged to try even harder. I’m reminded of the Biblical saying, "What good does it do to gain the whole world if you lose your soul?"

Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.

© 2008 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

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Let’s assume there are two lesbians living in Santa Monica, Calif. We don’t know them. We’ve never seen them. For all practical purposes, they don’t exist for us.

Now let’s assume that they decide to get married, and they tie the knot in California. We still don’t know them. We still have never seen them. So far as we know, they still don’t even exist. Whether they just live together or get married, neither their existence nor their marital status affects us.

That being the case, what the heck business is it of ours what they do? It is a confounded mystery to me why some people get all excited about homosexuals and lesbians getting married. As I’ve said before, if you are against gay marriage, then don’t marry a gay person. That strikes me as a simple solution to the problem some people seem to have.

You would think to hear some people complain about gay marriage that heterosexual couples would start dropping dead or become impotent as soon as some state approved a gay-marriage law. Whether gays get married or not, it has no effect on the rest of the population. Except for gays, it’s meaningless. It’s a non-issue.

In the meantime, there are plenty of issues that do affect all of us — the devalued dollar, high energy costs, loss of manufacturing jobs, wars overseas and ballooning debt, both public and private.

As a heterosexual, I personally don’t give a hoot one way or the other about gay marriage. If gays wish to provide more business for divorce lawyers, it’s no skin off my nose. If they think making the state a third party to their marriage is desirable, it OK with me. It’s one of those legal matters I don’t have to worry about, and I like those kinds of legal matters a lot.

What irritates me is busybodies who want to stick their nose in other people’s business. For God’s sake, let us all mind our own business. The world will be a better place if we do.

Most people believe that homophobes are in fact latent homosexuals and what they really hate are their own secret urges. So under no circumstances should any child be driven to despair and suicide because someone disapproves of his or her sexual preference. Whether homosexuality is a matter of nature or nurture, I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. It simply is not important enough to cost the life of any child.

Furthermore, if the state recognizes a contract — which is all marriage amounts to, in secular terms — it by no means sanctifies anything. No one accuses the state of sanctifying sales contracts.

The religious aspect of marriage is separate and apart from the state’s involvement. In fact, I don’t think the state should be involved, but it has involved itself. But whatever is holy and sacred about marriage is a matter of religion, not a state marriage license, which is no different from a plumber’s license.

If you wish to worry about marriage, it is better to worry about the all-too-many marriages that fail. It is better to worry about all the single mothers struggling to raise children without a father. It is better to worry about a sleazy culture that disdains the necessity of marriage and treats a relationship as nothing more than a sleepover.

There are a lot of legal and moral issues that need to be addressed in our society, but gay marriage isn’t one of them. It’s an issue only for a small minority of the population. If they wish to live together in a state-licensed relationship, it’s nobody’s business but their own.

Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.

© 2008 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

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During the recent meeting of the Democratic Party’s rules committee, television showed a woman blubbering uncontrollably, tears pouring down her face, as she moaned about the Florida-Michigan delegate settlement that caused her to lose her vote.

I was struck by a fantasy. Wouldn’t it be good if we had a few men dressed in SS uniforms who could burst into the room, grab this lady and heave her into a military truck?

The shock of this little charade, I thought to myself, might help her get her priorities in order. Politics is a game like baseball and basketball. The prizes are offices and patronage. There is no reason to cry — ever.

No one is being executed or tortured, no one is drowning in a flood, and no one is being gassed, shot or burned alive. Nothing of any real importance is occurring. It’s just a roomful of like-minded people quarreling over counting delegates. You get counted or you don’t get counted. It doesn’t matter in the long run.

I suppose it is OK that some people get emotional about elections and choose their champions based on feelings and illusions. If people made a cold, logical decision, "none of the above" would likely win by a landslide.

Despite all that, Americans should approach a political contest intellectually and analytically. They should carefully consider evidence of intelligence and honesty. They should carefully evaluate the candidates’ proposals.

In short, they should act like serious citizens instead of like a mob of Hannah Montana fans. I don’t see anything lovable about any of the candidates. They are all flawed. Underneath their public congeniality, they all have a hard edge and a ruthless ambition that has nothing to do with the public welfare or the good of the country. They want to win. Right now, that’s their obsession.

It isn’t necessary to fall in love with a candidate. It isn’t necessary to imagine that he or she is your friend. All people have to do is make a calculated decision that this particular candidate is more likely to make a better president than the others.

Then, having cast your vote, you go about your business, because the American people have virtually no control of their government once Election Day passes. Our republican form of government gives complete power to the officeholders for their full terms. Unless you contributed big, big bucks, you aren’t likely to receive any personal attention from any of them except on his or her terms.

Another point to keep in mind is that all of the problems the candidates are now afield promising to solve are problems they themselves created.

Who failed to seal our borders? Congress. Who voted for ruinous deficits, now totaling $9 trillion? Congress. Who voted to forbid the government from negotiating lower prices for the Medicare drugs? Congress. Who authorized a war on false pretenses? Congress. Who set Medicare and Social Security on the road to bankruptcy? Congress. Who votes to give billions of your tax dollars away to foreign governments? Congress. Who voted for free-trade agreements that have virtually destroyed America’s manufacturing base? Congress.

I have an extremely low opinion of politicians because they took a once grand country full of good people and have run it into the ground to the point that it requires a lot of optimism to see even a bleak future.

I would like to see all incumbents except Virginia Sen. James Webb defeated. Actually, what I’d really like to see happen to them is probably against the law to say. At any rate, tar and feathers would be hard to find in most communities.

Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.

© 2008 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

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Presidential candidates are scurrying about like squirrels, promising the people lower taxes, health care, repaired Social Security and other sundry and wondrous miracles.

It would be helpful if they would tell the American people the truth for a change: They can’t do dog barf about any of those subjects. What they should be saying is, "I will ask Congress to (whatever)."

The Constitution does not give the president power over any of the topics the candidates like to talk about. The president can’t raise or lower taxes; can’t legislate on any matter, including Social Security and health care; can’t declare war; and can’t make treaties or appoint Supreme Court justices without the advice and consent of the Senate.

The authors of the Constitution had just finished a long and bitter war with Great Britain, whose king they saw as a tyrant. The last thing they were going to do is give kingly powers to their own chief executive.

The duties of the president are simple to state: He can require reports from department heads; he may grant pardons and reprieves; with the advice and consent of the Senate, he can make treaties and appoint ambassadors, consuls, ministers and judges; he can receive ambassadors and other public ministers; he must take care to faithfully execute the laws; and he commissions all U.S. officers. He is the commander in chief of the armed forces. From "time to time," he is to report to Congress on the state of the union.

The last duty to be listed says he may "recommend certain measures" to Congress. Congress, of course, is under no obligation, legal or otherwise, to accept his recommendations or, in fact, to do anything he asks Congress to do. The one exception is that under extraordinary circumstances, he can order Congress to convene.

Thus, in the case of presidential candidates, honesty really would be the best policy. Whatever the candidate hopes to accomplish, he will need the people to pressure Congress. Otherwise, Congress will listen to the lobbyists, who represent the selfish interests of their clients.

Even presidential candidates, however, seem to get a sniff of what they suppose is the power of the presidency and thus go around saying, "I will do this" and "I will do that." They should be saying, "I need your help, first to get elected, and second to pressure Congress to adopt my recommendations. Otherwise it will be business as usual in Washington."

Clearly, the framers of the Constitution intended for Congress to be the most powerful part of the government. The only influence, other than persuasion, the president has is to veto legislation, but here again Congress has the power to override a presidential veto.

Moreover, the president does not have the power to veto only a part of a bill (commonly referred to as the line-item veto). This was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

The concept of an imperial president took root in the post-Eisenhower years. Before that, Harry Truman was fond of taking walks in downtown Washington. Franklin Roosevelt, when he was in Warm Springs, Ga., would drive up into the Pine Mountains, pull over to the side and have a picnic on the ground with a few friends.

The Bush presidents, when they traveled, took an entourage that included at least 16 limousines and greatly inconvenienced whomever they were visiting.

Our president is not a king or an emperor. He’s a hired public servant working on a temporary basis. It was no accident when the Founding Fathers decided that the only title a president could claim or deserve was "Mr. President." He is a citizen just like you or me, he puts his pants on just as we do, and he answers the call of nature in the usual manner. As the French essayist Montaigne observed, "No matter how high the throne, the king still sits on his arse." So do all presidents.

Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.

© 2008 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

Charley Reese Archives

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Barack Obama may have secured the Democratic nomination for president, but I don’t think he will ever see the inside of the White House except as a visitor.

He has two things going against him. He’s African-American, and he’s way too liberal for most Americans. Barring a gargantuan blunder by the Republican candidate, John McCain, those two factors will put Obama on the short end of the vote count.

Race is a factor in America, though no one is going to admit to being prejudiced to a pollster or a journalist. Nevertheless, I believe there remains a substantial number of people who simply will not vote to put an African-American in the White House.

Presidential races are won by stitching together percentages of constituencies. Unlike the Democratic nomination process, the general election is a winner-take-all system. In close races, small constituencies can mean the difference between winning and losing a state’s electoral votes.

Obama has been very clever by holding rallies in places like Iowa, Minnesota and Oregon. What do these states have in common? They are white, liberal states with a very small percentage of black residents. Contrary to TV ads, which like to blame parents for teaching their children to be prejudiced, most people develop their prejudices based on their personal experiences.

A very liberal friend of mine confided one day that he was shocked when his middle-school son said to him, "Daddy, I hate (N-word)." When questioned, it turned out that a few African-American thugs were waylaying younger white kids in the restroom, beating them up and stealing their lunch money. The spineless school administrators had done nothing to stop it.

So this is a case in point. The boy had been taught from childhood not to be prejudiced. They had lived in California and had contact with few African-Americans. So the lesson was all theoretical. Moving into the South, however, gave this kid his first person-to-person experience with African-Americans, and it was, in his case, a bad one.

The point being, in states where blacks and whites interact, there is bound to be more friction. Don’t be fooled by the la-la land created on television. Some whites don’t like blacks. Some blacks don’t like whites. I would like to be wrong, but I don’t think we’ve yet reached the nirvana the TV pundits are proclaiming. Obama’s win was historic, but so was emancipation, and we all know what happened after that historic event.

I’ve been leery of Sen. McCain because he seems inclined to bomb Iran. However, now that Obama has sold out to the Israeli lobby, that’s a moot point. Furthermore, there is not a stupid idea about gun control that Obama hasn’t supported either verbally or with his vote.

The Second Amendment was not written for duck hunters. It was written for self-defense and for defense against tyranny. Obama ought to talk to some of the people who survived the civil-rights revolution about how they stayed up all night with their private firearms to protect their families. He ought to research the old Jim Crow laws, which banned blacks from owning certain kinds of firearms.

If my choice is between a guy who may bomb Iran and one who shows such contempt for the Constitution as to support gun control, then the Iranians need to start working on their bomb shelters. A man ignorant of or contemptuous of the Second Amendment cannot be trusted to obey any of the Bill of Rights. He cannot be trusted to appoint sensible judges. Americans need to send a clear message to all politicians that our rights are non-negotiable.

If people think the Second Amendment is archaic, then try to repeal it. Until then, it is as binding as the rest of the Constitution and must be respected.

Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.

© 2008 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

Charley Reese Archives