A Temporary Dip In Candlepower

Well duh. I'd say most folks of even average intelligence sorted this out in 1999. But that's not who we're concerned about, right? We're concerned about those people who worry, sometimes legitimately, that someone who is too sharp, too prone to reflection, might be a bad leader. I know several people who chose Bush in the past election for that reason, because Bush was more clearly a man of action while Kerry was a peripatetic milquetoast, and with that reductive fallacy firmly in place it's not an unreasonable position.

If you read the rest of the newspaper in which Robinson's column is published, you might notice that our president, the self-styled man of action, is currently splitting his time between 11th-hour attempts to pass a clumsy facsimile of his number one legislative priority from seven years ago and unsuccessfully trying to fend off the consequences of his rash actions from four years ago, with only his disturbing penchant for secrecy and the crass chutzpah of his cabinet to defend himself. THERE IS A LESSON TO BE LEARNED HERE, FOR ANYONE WITHOUT SUFFICIENT FORESIGHT TO HAVE SEEN THIS PATHETIC SET OF EVENTS LUMBERING DOWN THE PIKE.

I know, I shouldn't berate anyone whose mind I hope to change, but any of my fellow citizens who care so little about this country that they would let New Haven's most famous town drunk play at being president for two whole terms can go to hell. I know full well who I need to fight to defend the American ideal, and they're not carrying Korans or wearing suicide belts, because freedom and the equality of man do not fear violence or difference of opinion. Fair, open government and the pursuit of the realization of the unapproached limits of human potential are not threatened by bullets, shrapnel, or the contradictory dogma born of ancient fairy tales. Justice and peace are not antagonistic to oppression and war, they are different and superior animals that need to shake off the latter pair, not just be presented as alternatives. But the perversion of these ideas through Orwellian doublespeak and the secret and gradual erosion of legal protections by someone in whom the nation's trust has been misplaced, that's dangerous.

The presidential contest that is currently idling its engines on the editorial pages of the country's newspapers is a rare and readily seizable opportunity for this country to awake from the binary electoral nightmare that has gripped it for at least a decade now, a chance for the populace to cast off the learned helplessness so expertly exploited by our twin tormentors and to firmly place the word "representative" back in front of "government" instead of "Red" or "Blue." We can't do that by tossing the top job into a crowd of vultures and standing back to see which one is cutthroat enough to seize it, we need to, as one nation, indivisible, pick an exceptional person from among our ranks and send him or her to Washington armed with our hopes and needs and shackled to our highest expectations. It is un-American to do any less, no matter how much the Republican and Democratic political consultants have lowered the bar.