yesterday i heard a congressman call the other party intellectually dishonest.

it's not a charge you hear every day. it got my attention, tho i've already forgotten if the accuser was tom cole or john boehner or some other guy i may've heard interviewed on npr.

the context was that the party he criticized wanted to pass a nonbinding resolution against the iraq war. he said that if they're against the war they ought to cut off funding, not make a hypocritical symbolic gesture.

that from a man whose party led us to war with false evidence and scare tactics, a caucus whose recent leaders include a man under indictment for money laundering and another who, 4 months after the invasion, said

...we do know that Saddam Hussein possessed, even today, that it’s there, barrels, as a matter of fact tons, of plutonium, some of it this yellow cake plutonium from Niger....

now i don't expect everybody to see what's incongruous about that, but let's see if you can reconcile the charges of hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty with the fact that the accuser's leader until a week or so ago—a man "2 heartbeats from the presidency"—didn't know yellow cake plutonium doesn't exist!

what's so intellectually honest about choosing one leader so ignorant and another so unethical?

where's the integrity in building support thru a college organization that recruited members and raised funds by plagiarizing a general patton speech with the word "nazi" changed thruout to "democrat"?

how sincere is it to continually conceal an agenda behind shibboleths like "clear skies," "colorblindness," and "right to life," that imply something other than what they're really about?

i have this theory—well, not theory, actually, more conjecture, but, after all, don't billions of people follow faiths based largely on the mere supposition of a supernatural reality?—that the guys we see banging gavels and signing laws aren't always the ones making the real decisions that affect our lives, that the guys calling the shots often shield themselves from the enormous risks of power by putting essentially ignorant stooges up front to take the heat if something goes wrong.

and things did go wrong, didn't they?