Oh, Uncle Jed, they're doin' it again!

I’m So Confused!
By Joseph Walther



Once again, I will have to delay my interview with Herb, the extraterrestrial. Herb’s superiors called him back to his home galaxy—Lunatic Major—to take care of a personal problem. He didn’t go into a lot of detail, but from what I could determine, Earth is not the only planet inhabited with sexual weirdoes. My goal is to get the results of that interview to all of you next week or the week after. For those of you wondering what this is all about, let me explain it a bit.

Several months ago, a friend of mine looked me square in the eyes and said, “The Vatican has made contact with aliens and they believe in God.” He continued, “The Vatican Astronomical Observatory confirmed the contact.” There were two other people sitting at the table when my friend made the statement. One is a conspiracy theorist with white supremacists’ leanings who believes that the holocaust didn’t happen. He perked right up. The other one, a very nice, congenial, well-adjusted woman, suddenly remembered that she had forgotten to rotate her tires. She backed away cautiously and left. I, on the other hand, turned on my handy digital recorder and began asking questions.

Meanwhile, I thought I’d stick to some of the confusion and chaos going on right here on good ‘ole terra firma for this week’s column.

The War…

I don’t know about you folks, but I’m confused as all get out about this war in Iraq. The reviews are so mixed. If I listen to the LEFT fringe, we, as a nation, are no better than pond scum. If I listen to the RIGHT fringe, we, as a nation, are the glory of the coming of the Lord, the righteous bully stompers. I suspect that reality is somewhere in between.

I spend a lot of time talking to people and asking questions. Returning military people all say the same thing. The situation in Iraq is a lot more positive than negative, but all the folks back here in the USA ever hear about is the negative stuff. I also know a few civilians who have returned over the past two to three weeks and they say the same thing. Yet, the president’s approval rating relative to Iraq is lower than it has ever been.

Please, understand my position. I am no George Bush cheerleader. To me, George Bush is to reasonable debate what hyenas are to opera. He is a true Preconceptual Theorist who refutes opposing fact as something that just gets in his way. In other words, he just comes to conclusions before doing any research. Come on and admit it. The time and effort required to be precise is a waste of time for people who don’t know what they are talking about. George is an expert at this sort of thing. He should write or book or something.

He is not, however, the reincarnation of Hitler. He does care about people. He genuinely grieves over the human losses in Iraq. While he will never admit it publicly, the line of duty deaths is going to haunt him for the rest of his life. If we pull out of Iraq too soon, he knows, as do all of us, that these lives will have been lost in vain. So, take some advice, Mr. President.

First, understand that neither you nor any other president will succeed in quelling critics. I think that you know this. However, I am afraid that you confuse this impossibility with the necessity of reassuring a support base that is eroding by the minute. Get on television more. Give us facts and details, both pleasant and unpleasant. Get visibly passionate about it and give us a vision. So far all that we hear coming out of you are assertions and they are becoming less convincing every day.

The Right criticized the Clinton Policies in perpetuity. It did no good. He was still standing strong long after all of his critics had gone down in flames. He survived because he understood a few truths.

First, resolve alone has never won a single cause. In other words, talk is cheap if that’s all you have. Second, mediocre policies, even stupid ones, can last forever as long as their authors provide “effective” explanations. Conversely, the most solid of policies would be hard-pressed to survive a long weekend without “effective” explanations.

If we blow it in Iraq with a premature pull out, it will not be due to a lack of resolve on the part of the American people, it will be due to your own refusal to abandon preconceptual reasoning. Do you really understand the strength of insurgency? Here is a quote from Osama Bin Laden. “We have young people who are keen on death as much as Americans are keen on life.” Do you understand the impact of this statement, Mr. President? Oh, one last thing before I forget it, lose Rumsfeld!

Family Values and other matters of morality…

I recently heard Bill O’Reilly say, “People hate Rick Santorum because he is a conservative Christian.” I receive emails, daily, because I have openly criticized the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. People accuse me of hating these guys.

I don’t hate anyone. I especially don’t hate people for being Christians. I dislike hypocrites, though. When the likes of Newt Gingrich, Dan Burton, Henry Hyde, Rush Limbaugh, and Rick Santorum descend from Mt. Pontification to give us lowly sinners a lecture on morality, I’ll admit that I get a bit miffed. No, make that downright snotty!

Rick Santorum is a Dan Quayle wannabe. The only difference that I can see is that Santorum can spell p-o-t-a-t-o. Like Quayle, Santorum was absent the day his teachers covered the topic of common sense. I did not buy his book, “It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good” because I refuse to contribute to the welfare of a moron. I would like to thank, however, Steve Bessum, one of my readers. He sent me a copy because he thought that I could have some “fun” with it.

Thank you kindly, Steve. The book would have made a great satire. The problem is that the senator is deadly serious. I’ll just go right to some quotes from Santorum’s book and each of you can judge for yourselves.

He seems to have a problem with colleges and universities trying to attract student bodies that reflect the norm. “Sometime in the 1980s universities began to champion the importance of ‘diversity’ as a central education value.” Along the same lines, “The notion that college is a cost effective way to help poor, low-skill, unmarried mothers with high school diplomas…move up the economic ladder is just wrong.” On sending children to public schools, Santorum says, “Never before and never again after their years of mass education will any person live and work in such a radically narrow, age-segregated environment. It’s amazing that so many kids turn out to be fairly normal, considering the weird socialization they get in public schools.”

If I understand the Senator, I think that he is saying that socialization outside the home environment is the root of our social problems. It complicates things. This is laughable if not for the fact that it is so scary that he believes this stuff!

According to Santorum, working housewives are selfish. According to him, people only think they need all this money to live. This is amazing. Santorum’s annual salary is $165,000 plus incredible benefits, including a chauffeured car and two homes. He has no clue that many of those families working two and three jobs, still fall short of his annual salary. Not only can these families not participate in the small pleasures, many of them can’t even pay all of their bills.

People who truly believe that Rich Santorum has a grip on reality must also concede that falling off a roof is transportation.

Oh God! Bring back Dan Quayle. Even he was not this stupid. We can teach Quayle how to spell and keep his mouth shut. There is no hope for Santorum. He is a man bent on home schooling his children and indoctrinating them in the tenets of his own form of Christianity. Let me take a stab at this. God created the Earth and its inhabitants about 10,000 years ago over a period of seven days. Homosexuality is the moral equivalent to bestiality and women are to stay at home and be subservient to their husbands.

My parents raised me as a Roman Catholic. I learned early on in life, however, that there is no such thing as a problem so awful that the church could not add some guilt to it and make it monumentally worse. We had to memorize, verbatim, the Baltimore Catechism. We had to regurgitate the answers, word for word, in their original form. Ruler-armed, out of control, fire-breathing Nuns unleashed their fury at the slightest hint of subjective editorializing.

This indoctrination lasted twelve years, fourteen years if I include the preschool years. It was not until I arrived in the “secular” world, the one where all of the perverts awaited the opportunity to pounce on me, that I gained a true appreciation of just how intrusive most organized religions are. Can any of you imagine what this world would be like if we eliminated public school socialization? Think, folks, a world full of Santorums, Falwells, and Robertsons.

So, Mr. O’Reilly and others, I do not hate these people because of their Christianity. I am doubtful that many others do, too. I dislike it, however, when such people pontificate on matters of moral turpitude, inferring that they own the moral high ground. We all have a wart or two. We should all keep this in mind.

I will be working diligently on getting Herb back to this galaxy, hopefully this week or next. I promise all of you that the interview will be mind-blowing. In the meantime, go forth and have some fun. Watch out for Rick Santorum, though. He really is an idiot!

Joseph Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. Send email to: thetruefacts@comcast.net