Friday night we stayed with friends on the shore of the lake eating veggies, dips and sipping beer and soda. The water, it seems, was explosively charged with methane, so we were warned not to let the water run too long into the sink if we were smoking. I knew a man who liked to light his farts when bored and once I saw his apartment lighting up with blue flashes. I wandered over and watched for awhile as he worked through his flatulence and matches. I wonder how long we could have lit the sinks at the sailing club?

Now the story of the day is how sitting in an oval office sending hundreds of thousands of people out to kill tens of thousands of people counts somehow to make up for the fact that the man at the desk has the fighting capability of a schoolyard bully and the intellect of a very young schoolyard bully. I think politicians are all right about one another in a couple of ways: they're all idiots who just want to have access to all that power and all that money. They want license to kill by proxy, mostly because they are, all of them, cowards. The war heroes will fight that label, but nobody said a war hero was a hero forever. Couple of fights under their belt, some amazing escapes or mere survivals and then they get more careful, even wary.

I used to be brave as hell when it came to eating pills and smoking things. Sure, I'd jump in a car, choke down some purple acid and drive off to LA to see someone I didn't know do something I wasn't sure of. Took my friends along. I suppose if I was a different guy in a different place I'd be tossing off grenades and shooting whoever ran out of the building. Then someday when I wanted all that power and all that money and no chance that anyone is going to ask me to actually lead the charge up that hill or into that city...Hell yes I'd be brave. Brave enough to send out the orders: "Yeah, kill them people we never met, shoot em all, even the kids. Yeah, bomb the babies, burn em up, like in those Life magazine pictures. Hit the bridges, too. Burning toppled bridges look great in coffee table books."

Easy enough to do, nobody will try to stop you. You can even act like you don't like the smell of burning flesh, but since it's not your kids burning it does sort of remind you of a barbecue. So on Thanksgiving, when everybody in America is thinking of big old feasts and the genocide of the native Americans, old George snuck off to pretend he was just one of the boys, serving a plastic turkey for the cameras and grinning wildly. But fact is, he actually went for the smell of battle and the "secret steaks" that presidents get to eat. It's a little known fact that most presidents like to start wars just before an election, not to win the election... because we all know that there is no REAL election, just a huge money laundering scheme....but they get to eat barbecued baby. Sometimes they even get a big old roast woman, but not often. But there's lots of babies out there and with a bit of garlic-lemon sauce they can be mighty tasty. There is the problem of the clean up, getting those grills all clean. That's why the Secretary of War, Donny Rumsfeld, describes war and democracy as "messy". All them pots and pans. But nothing's too good for the Man and if he wasn't a brilliant student, or a present-and-accounted-for Guardsman, or even an elected President, he does have a hearty appetite.

The trouble with many people who get into politics is that they are not terribly smart... or they'd have gone into business or science.... No, they are just plain dumb, and mean. They like to tell people what to do, and they like to hurt them if they refuse. That's why we have so many children in jail, children tend to refuse to obey and they like to play with guns. Politicians are just like kids, they like to disobey, get away with it and kill someone from time to time, but it's not "real" killing because they had their fingers crossed. Not being very smart, they just don't understand sarcasm, irony or satire. Those are way too hard to figure out, so when they read a Jonathan Swift essay saying the British could solve the problem of the poor in Ireland by eating the babies, American politicians thought it was a real suggestion!

So the idea stuck and we've been burning babies for, oh, at least a couple or so hundred years. Little do those visiting dignitaries know what that great roast ham really was at the White House dinner. The Pope does it too. That's why when they are picking a new one, all we get to see is the colored smoke coming out of the little hibachi. You never get to see the little altered boys coming in the back door. Kinda makes your mouth water, doesn't it?