Making a rare exception I decided to read today's paper, Wednesday's. Generally I Iet the delivered papers pile up, still in their plastic bags, and get to them only to separate the recyclable from the nonrecyclable components before trashing the lot. Maybe those blue bags are recyclable as well and I am wasting my effort. I think I may bother to find out today. I do confess to taking a peek at the sports section, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, but only if UCLA football or Piazza catching may be involved. Old habits I guess. I never went to UCLA and Piazza is definitely in his waning years but I have cheered them longet than any of my marriages. Oh, well!

So I read today's Union Tribune and exposed myself to a somewhat better than average selection of absurdities. A New Orleans High School (the?) is operating at a level expected in an Escape from New York movie (the Mayor himself has just about conceded the whole city is basically in a state of anarchy, so are we surprised?); Republicans are apparently the only ones really interested in voter ID cards (just try to cash a check or rent a car withour proper ID); promiscuity is not related to the prevelance of Aids in Africa (does raping a couple of hundred thousand women in a country constitute promiscuity or do we need a raper/rapee ratio?); etc. And then the "good stuff."

Kerry and Republicans get into a pissing match to whether his latest humanitarian (though elitist) critique implied that lack of a proper education made either our plebeian servicemen cannon fodder or our President an idiot. Though Kerry's intent is rather clear to me, after all the makeup of the grunts in the Iraqi war can hardly be compared to that of the Vietnamese. These are after all volunteers and not draftees and the percentage of ghetto-relocated underprivileged ethnic minorities involved is vastly lower. We're also talking about a lot of individuals drawn from National Guard units (remember Bush Jr. was National Guard?). What is the average education of the individual serving in Iraq compared to the national average for the same age group not in the military? I don't remember reading that statistic anywhere, so if Kerry were relating to them, he would be implying that enlisting in the Armed Forces in general was a sign of stupidity. Since I don't think HE could possibly have been that stupid, I must conclude that he was implying that Bush, our President is stupid. Actually, I may have less trouble with that, but it is worth exploring.

The acumen of an individual leader may never be really determined. More often than not, we tend to judge people over time by the results we associate with them. Ronald Reagan was quite possibly no genius, but even as Governor of California he surrounded himself with enough competent people to be judged successful enough to run for the highest office. Again, as President, though he may have been nodding off in front of a jar of jelly-beans, somehow he managed to take far from the worst advice when the time came to make important decisions. So what about the little Bush? Is he stupid or not?

The intelligence provided him (and Congressmen, and us) regarding Iraq was obviously faulty. Are these intelligence sources characteristically pre-Bush (Clintonesque?), Republican or Democrat? Who was primarily responsible for them; the Pentagon? the State Department? the CIA? the FBI? the National Security whatever? Whatever the sources, we must conclude that on very important matters they turned out to be either treasonous, or at the very least so highly incompetent as to qualify for idiocy. So it is really not a matter of choosing exclusively between our citizen soldiers and our President, is it?

The fact remains that a lot of unpleasant things have taken place on little Bush's shift, and after all the buck must stop somewhere. That is fine, but it doesn't really change anything does it? If the next President, even if it be San Francisco's looniest son, inherits the kind of almost comically substandard cast little Bush is saddled with, we could likely be at war with Bhutan four years from now and Americans may be held hostage in a dozen third world nations around the world.

In a previous article I raised the possibility that deserting Iraqi soldiery may be taking the new weaponry with them and we could be arming the insurgents ourselves. Since then I have read that out of hundreds of thousands of weapons issued Iraqis one way or the other, we seem to have registered only maybe 2% of them. Also I read that assault rifles and machine guns listed never even got where they were supposed to go in the first place.

But the almost unbelievable sloppiness is not limited to the distribution of military ordinance. The graft, corruption, or merely greedy nonsense involved in our Iraqi "reconstruction" effort seems almost impossible to imagine. In one of today's articles I read that state of the art generators were built at taxpayer's expense that ran on "natural gas." Problem is that Iraq HAS NO NATURAL GAS.

Methinks that at the very least little Bush has surrounded himself with a lot of idiots (if not economic criminals). So Kerry's point is not all that much of an issue. It is not a matter of whether it is our President or our fighting men who are idiots. In the final analysis, ask not who the idiots are, because in practice they are us. We who pay the taxes and risk our lives while our leaders, actual or would be, get into these pissing matches over semantics, implied racial slurs, social insensitivities, personal sex orientations and the like. Until we get rid of a whole lot of them, we are never going to get around to fixing the things that really matter.

I hope that the Democrats make overwhelming gains in the days to come. I hope they get to control everything possible imaginable. Then two years from now we will see it will have made no difference. Not in what is really important.