Death Of A Salesman

I was having a perfectly fine weekend, one of those clear, windswept spates of the Northern California year when a high yellow sun just makes up for the frigid energy sweeping down from Alaska and you can feel the hairs on your skin prickle in shirtsleeves. Then I heard Ronald Reagan died.

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Turn Out The Lights

George W. Bush must think no one in America remembers the presidency of Lyndon Baines Johnson. Or, what is more likely, our current Commander-in-Chief, given his predilections of that era, doesn’t remember much about LBJ’s time in office himself.

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Bill Clinton’s Fault

Asked to explain the events of September 11, 2001, Attorney General John Ashcroft stepped up to the microphones before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States this week to recite the Republican Party’s favorite mantra: “It was Bill Clinton’s fault.”

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Holding Back The Flood

Scanning the news these past few weeks, I’ve been thinking of the story of the little Dutch boy, who tried ever so valiantly to save his town by sticking his finger in the hole in the dike that stood between his townsfolk and their certain ruin. Except, George W. Bush, who plays the role of the little Dutch boy in my imagination, knows no valor, and the only thing he’s trying to save from ruin is the awful hegemony of his mendacious administration.

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Someone Has To Pay Retail

According to the secretary of defense, in an Op-Ed piece published in yesterday’s New York Times, the REAL reason for the United States’ “adventure” in Iraq (able now, finally, on the one-year anniversary of its onset, to be revealed): is that Baghdad might ­some fifty years hence- be like Seoul, Korea.

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Who You Gonna Call?

I am not a bitter man. Yet. I was only born in 1960. John F. Kennedy died when I was 3, his brother Robert and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., when I was 8. Richard Nixon delivered his resignation speech to the American people the night of my 14th birthday.

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Mr. Big Stuff

The hubris of George W. Bush knows no bounds. In the face of innumerable instances of his own overwhelming personal and professional defects, he knows no shame. Now he is proposing to codify the elements of marriage in the Constitution of the United States of America.

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