Drinking the Kool-Aid

Well, my fellow Americans, tomorrow is the much-ballyhooed "Super Tuesday", and if predictions are anything like near the mark, the Democratic and Repuglican presidential candidates could find their ranks sharply winnowed.

Or not. It could come to pass that the victories will be spread out over the 20 state primaries, with every candidate getting an inconclusive slice of the cake.

But before that happens, I wanted to address something that's been disturbing me for a while now, and that is the unqualified anointing of Senator Barack Obama as some sort of wizard of change.

NOT. I see him as the man behind the curtain. I find him substanceless, naive, arrogant and entitled. He's running on fumes of poetry and rhetoric, with a pretty empty tank.

Yeah, he opposed the war. Big whoop. His health care plan sucks (will cover far fewer people than Senator Clinton's will, at greater cost), he doesn't appear to have a real plan for getting out of Iraq, and all he does is bellow, in an unsettlingly preacherly manner, about "change."

Change would be great. We really need it. I just don't see where he's the one to bring it. His whole campaign seems to me like the Emperor's New Clothes, everybody praising the spiffy new outfit until the beady-eyed kid points out the fact that the Emperor is nekkid.

Plus the fact that St. Oprah the Self-Important has now muscled in again on the act. Maybe she's hoping for the second spot on the Barack ticket, an African-American twofer. I don't know, but I find her a pander at best, a hypocrite at worst. (Also she hates Pagans and won't have any on her TV show, how tolerant is that??) She's certainly entitled to support whom she will, but I get the feeling, and I could be utterly mistaken, that she went for the black man over the woman. Because that's what she does.

I'm no racist. I would have voted for Dr. King in a nanosecond, for Philosopher-Emperor if that was on. I'd absolutely love to see a black, a Hispanic, an Asian president. But I resent being bullied into supporting Obama JUST because he's black.

By the same token, I don't support Hillary JUST because she's a woman. I support her because, despite her flaws, and they are many, she's done a great job as my Senator and I absolutely believe she would do a great job as President.

If it comes down to Hillary vs. McCain, I really worry. McCain will keep us in the Middle East for the next hundred years and possibly precipitate the use of nukes. Ours or theirs. Or both. Certainly he won't be able to dial back terrorism here at home; he will instead, by his pigheaded policies, dial it up. To our cost.

And I'm very much afraid that he might win in spite of the unmitigated horror of the last eight years.

Getting back to Barack: I look at him and I do not see JFK, despite Teddy's and Caroline's endorsements. I see a stalk, a husk, propped up against the wind by people who don't know any better and who are desperate for a JFK of their own, like the wannabes who went to Woodstock II. Sorry, folks, it's not the same! (And I note that three of RFK's kids have endorsed Hillary.) I hear graceless and empty rhetoric (even his poetic flights suck). I see people drinking the Obama Kool-Aid and I fear.

Yes, it would indeed be change. But it wouldn't be the RIGHT change.